Mama Vi: Preserving Our Stories

Guest: Mama Vi/Viola Johnson (leatherwoman, founder of Carter-Johnson Library, Founding member Onyx Pearls)

Viola Johnson, author, activist, leatherwoman, joins Auntie Vice to chat about leather history, the importance of our history and stories, and the founding of the Johnson-Carter library. Mama Vi came out as a lesbian in the 1970s, when it was still illegal to be openly gay. She discovered leather and kink in college and married her college sweetheart.

Mama Vi holds multiple international leather titles and awards. She wrote To Love, To Obey, and to Serve, the first published novel of a consensual slave in a power exchange relationship. She began transporting magazines and event flyers from Los Angeles to Kansas in the 1980s during the first wave of AIDS. These materials would become the beginnings of the Carter-Johnson Library. After realizing she had won a queer book on eBay instead of a man who was looking to burn the book, she decided to start a formal library to save kinky, queer stories. The library recently expanded significantly after receiving the physical collection of the Center for Sex and Culture which lost its physical space in San Francisco, CA.

Sites and Socials

Carter Johnson Library

Fetlife

Facebook

Other sites and mentions on the show

Global Summit for Sexual Freedom Conference Feb 3-10 online

Eulenspeigel Society

Onyx Pearls