She is most famous for her conversational piece "Racism and Sadomasochism: A Conversation with Two Black Lesbians" published in collaboration with Karen Sims and Rose Mason in a radical feminist anthology entitled Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, for which she is also credited as co-editor.
[1] Darlene Pagano was a collective member at "A Woman's Place" bookstore in Oakland, California in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Early on in the store and the collective's existence, Pagano took a firm stance against the display and sale of books that included the expression of sadomasochism, and the store's ensuing policy to discontinue such content became heavily criticized by the Samois, a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization primarily based out of San Francisco, California.
The other four members of the collective (Darlene Pagano, Elizabeth Summers, Keiko Kubo, and Jesse Meredith), exiled from the bookstore, responded in kind by branding themselves as the "Locked Out 4" and organized to reclaim the bookstore, which drew widespread attention from feminists across the nation.
The essays included are written by a number of notable radical feminists, namely Alice Walker, Robin Morgan, Kathleen Barry, Diana E. H. Russell, Susan Leigh Star, Ti-Grace Atkinson, John Stoltenberg, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Susan Griffin, Cheri Lesh, and Judith Butler.