Patrick Califia was born in 1954 in Texas. He is an essayist, an erotic novelist, a poet, and a leather activist. He is a bisexual trans man. Before he transitioned, in his forties, he lived and organized as a lesbian under the name Pat Califia, in lesbian circles and in gay men’s circles. The work he is known for made lesbian sadomasochism something people could read and argue about in public. He is usually placed in third-wave feminism, and he spent plenty of time arguing with feminists.
From Salt Lake City to San Francisco
He grew up in Utah in a Latter-day Saint household, the eldest of six. He has described an angry, violent father and a pious mother. One memory he has repeated: he wanted to be a train engineer and was told he could not, because he was a girl. He answered that he was not a girl. In the 1970s his parents had him admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He left the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in bad shape. In 1971, still in college, he came out as a lesbian and began using the surname Califia, taken from the mythical Amazon. In 1973 he moved to San Francisco. He brought a sex-education habit to the San Francisco Sex Information switchboard and joined women’s liberation and anti-war work. In 1975 he spoke for sadomasochism among lesbians. That cost him the replacement community he had found, and he went further into S/M. In 1978 he co-founded Samois, generally credited as the first lesbian BDSM organization in the United States. The name comes from the women’s house in Story of O.
The feminist sex wars
In the feminist sex wars of the 1970s and 1980s he stood with sex-positive feminism. He rejected the essentialist claim that women are naturally gentler and more nurturing. He argued for BDSM as the consensual bringing of power, pain, domination, and submission into sex. Coming to Power was a Samois collective book, issued by Alyson Publications, and he helped make it. Heather Findlay, later editor-in-chief of Girlfriends, called it the first articulate defense of lesbian S/M. With Robin Sweeney he co-edited The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader.
Guides, stories, columns
He wrote nonfiction guides, fiction, and essays. Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality (1980) is a nonfiction guide to butch-femme sex and to BDSM practice, without the scolding tone then common in lesbian print. The short-story collection Macho Sluts is still taught, and it is still seized. The novel Doc and Fluff: The Dystopian Tale of a Girl and Her Biker pushes the same heat into a longer story. The anthology he edited, Doing It for Daddy, treats a paternal fantasy as adult roleplay, not as anything to do with children. A long-running sex-advice column in The Advocate is what general LGBT readers were most likely to meet. Drummer is the gay men’s leather magazine where he also wrote a column. He has said that writing was a way to top a lot of people: in some sense he got to do a scene with everyone who read the books.
Awards
In 1989 he and Geoff Mains received the Steve Maidhof Award from the National Leather Association International. In 1992 the Pantheon of Leather Awards named him Woman of the Year, under the name and presentation he used then, and that same year he founded the leatherwomen’s quarterly Venus Infers. In 2000 the Pantheon gave him the Forebear Award, the prize that treats a living writer as already part of the ancestry. He is in the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. Equality Forum named him one of its 31 Icons of LGBT History Month.
Customs, MacKinnon, and a conference paper
Canadian customs officers repeatedly seized the pornographic titles when he tried to bring them into the country, until he went to court and won the right to carry them across. He noted, with some amusement, that the law’s line of what counts as acceptable erotica had moved: his own books were then treated as acceptable, while anti-porn feminist Catherine Itzin’s Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties was seized under the same regime. He fought anti-pornography legislation associated with Catharine MacKinnon. A law that treats SM writing as contraband will also eat the reformers’ library. In November 2009 he presented a paper at the American Academy of Religion conference in Montreal on the gay-marriage debate, and on how arguments about monogamy and S/M were being used to police the terms of that debate.
A position he later withdrew
This is a position he later took back. It is not a guide. In 1992 he published “Feminism, Paedophilia, and Children’s Rights” in a women’s issue of Paidika, a journal that treated pedophilia as a scholarly subject. In 1991 he had said he supported Paidika. By 2000 he had publicly changed his position. He said he had previously supported the North American Man/Boy Love Association, and then said he did not agree with NAMBLA. The organization’s line was repeal of age-of-consent law. Some members thought adult sex with prepubescent children was acceptable. He said he could not agree, and he called that developmentally inappropriate. He said he had been naive about why that sex is unacceptable. After he became a parent he was less idealistic about equal adult-child relationships. He tied the earlier writing to his family history: a violent father whose sexuality was an ongoing threat, his own history of child abuse, and an old habit of repressing that victimization until child-adult sex looked normal to him. He withdrew the position.
Transition, a child, later books
In his twenties he considered sex-reassignment surgery and held back. Surgery then carried more danger, and a career as a lesbian writer was already built. In 1999, at forty-five, he began hormone replacement therapy. He has said that being a man or a woman was never a good fit, and that reassignment seemed the most reasonable option among bad ones. The name now is Patrick. Pat remains on spines and on awards given under that name. Use Patrick for the person. Keep Pat when citing an old edition. His son, Blake Califia-Rice, was born in October 1999. The child’s other parent is Califia’s ex-partner Matt Rice, also a trans man, who gave birth. Califia has lived with fibromyalgia since the 1990s. He has talked about writing a book on FTM sexuality and a new set of BDSM essays. Other titles are Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism and Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex.
