Catacombs (sex club)

The Catacombs was a gay and lesbian s/m fisting club in the South of Market area of San Francisco, which operated from 1975 to 1981, and reopened at another location from 1982 to 1984. The founder and owner was Steve McEachern. The location was semi-secret and admission was by referral only. Among the patrons was Patrick Califia.^[1] It has been exhaustively described by sexual anthropologist Gayle Rubin,^[2] who calls it "exemplary" in its attempts to deal with the AIDS crisis which would eventually lead to its closure.^[3] Patrick Moore devotes a chapter to it in his Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality.^[4] Sex educator Carol Queen called it "the place to be seen and to play at during the 1980s."^[5]

References

1. Pat Califia (who later changed his name to Patrick), "The Necessity of Excess", POZ, October 1998,retrieved September 30, 2014.
2. "The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole", in Mark Thompson, ed., Leatherfolk — Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, Boston, Alyson Publications, 1991, ISBN 1555831877, pp. 119-141, reprinted in Deviations. A Gayle Rubin Reader, Duke University Press, 2011, ISBN 0822349868, pp. 224-240, , retrieved September 30, 2014.
3. "Elegy for the Valley of Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San Francisco, 1981-1996, in In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS, ed. John H. Gagnon, Peter M. Nardi, and Martin P. Levine, University of Chicago Press, 1997, ISBN 0226278573, p. 116.
4. Beacon Press, 2004, ISBN 0807079561, pp. 27-33.
5. "An Interview with Carol, Queen of Sex," Spread, vol. 1, no. 1, spring 2005, pp. 35-38, quote on p. 36.