Cynthia Slater: Gay Icon
Cynthia Slater (1945–1989) was, in Jack Fritscher’s words, the “Kink Queen of Folsom Street” — co-founder with Larry Olsen of the Society of Janus in 1974, and the first woman ever profiled in Drummer, in Fritscher’s 1979 feature “S&M The Last Taboo: The Society of Janus.” A close friend of Fritscher’s for two decades, Slater moved through the same San Francisco leather salons as Steve McEachern’s Catacombs, and in 1978 Fritscher arranged for his lover Robert Mapplethorpe to photograph her, producing gelatin silver prints now held in museum collections including the Getty. Fritscher’s full memoir of Slater, “Cynthia Slater: Kink Queen of Folsom Street,” appears in his book Profiles in Gay Courage. In 2017, San Francisco’s Leather History Alley set her bootprint in cement in permanent tribute.