Patrick Califia (born 1954), published for years as Pat Califia and for a stretch as Califia-Rice, is an American essayist, erotic novelist, poet, and leather activist whose work made lesbian sadomasochism readable in public. He is a bisexual trans man. Before transition he lived and organized as a lesbian, and for a long run he wrote a sex-advice column for the gay men’s leather magazine Drummer—a crossing of scenes that still tells you how he works. The books move through sexuality, gender, power exchange, and the fights those subjects start. He is usually placed in third-wave feminism, though he spent as much time arguing with feminists as speaking for them.
On a BDSM site the reason to keep the page long is simple. Califia is one of the people who taught English-language leather that lesbian SM was not a rumor, that consent could be argued in print, and that erotic fiction could do political work a pamphlet could not. Readers who only know the current byline should also know the older one: library catalogs, Drummer mastheads, and the first editions of Macho Sluts still say Pat. That is historical packaging, not a request to misgender the living writer.
Utah Childhood and the Break Toward San Francisco
Califia was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1954 and assigned female at birth. He grew up in Utah in a Latter-day Saint household, the eldest of six. His father worked construction; his mother kept house. He has said the childhood was not a good one: an angry, violent father and a pious mother. One memory he has repeated is wanting to be a train engineer and being 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. He had come out as a lesbian in 1971 while still in college and begun using the surname Califia, taken from the mythical Amazon warrior. He learned to keep clear of his parents and stepped into women’s liberation and anti-war work. Consciousness-raising in Utah was a start; San Francisco in 1973 was the move that stuck. He brought a sex-education habit to the San Francisco Sex Information switchboard, started writing for magazines, and for a time joined a lesbian separatist current.
In 1975 he spoke in favor of sadomasochism and found the lesbian-feminist door shut. Coming out as a lesbian had already cost him his family of origin. Speaking for SM cost him the replacement family. He did not retreat. He went further into S/M, with lesbians and with gay men, and in 1978 he co-founded Samois, generally credited as the first lesbian BDSM organization in the United States. The group’s name, taken from the women’s house in Story of O, is itself a map of how European literary SM entered American leatherdyke politics.
Schooling
He had started at the University of Utah in 1971. In 1981 he finished a bachelor of arts in psychology at San Francisco State University. He has also said he holds a master’s degree. The psychology training is not a trivia line. In 1979, still a student at SFSU, he published research in the Journal of Homosexuality. Decades later, from 2001 to 2011, he was licensed in California as a marriage and family therapist. The same person who wrote fisting fiction and fought Canadian customs also sat in a consulting room with a state license. That combination—clinic plus dungeon plus column—is part of why college syllabi kept assigning him when other leather writers stayed in the back room.
Samois, Coming to Power, and the Feminist Sex Wars
Samois existed in San Francisco from 1978 to 1983. Califia shifted energy toward the lesbian experience of BDSM and helped the collective produce Coming to Power, issued by Alyson Publications. Heather Findlay, later editor-in-chief of Girlfriends, called it one of the most transformative lesbian books of its period: it announced the end of a certain community puritanism. It was, she said, the first articulate defense of lesbian S/M, “and that was the end of it.” A later practical companion, the Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, won the 1990 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year—a joke prize that still indexed how visible the subject had become.
Observers have called Califia one of the earliest champions of lesbian sadomasochistic sex. The work has been taught on campuses in the United States and abroad. His biography is a stack of transgressions and expulsions: feminist, lesbian, transgender, and at various times rejected by those same communities for the “wrong” infractions. He played what some writers called a notable role in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1970s and 1980s. One side organized as anti-pornography feminism; the other as sex-positive feminism. The fights covered sexuality, pornography and other sexual representation, prostitution, the place of trans women in lesbian space, lesbian sexual practice, sadomasochism, and neighboring sexual politics.
Califia refused the essentialist claim that women are naturally more nurturing, peaceful, loving, relationship-minded, and less raunchy in bed. He argued instead for BDSM as the consensual integration of power, pain, domination, and submission into sex. The San Francisco Chronicle later suggested that many feminists were not argued into his camp so much as aroused into it: they read the S/M fiction, got turned on, and got over the taboo. That is a useful reminder for anyone who thinks leather politics is only theory. Califia’s essays made the case. The stories made the case in the body.
In 1996 he co-edited, with Robin Sweeney, The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, a sequel to Coming to Power. By then he was writing about queer studies and gender identity and working those questions out in his own life. At forty-five he transitioned and took the name Patrick. The two Samois-era books still function as a before-and-after of leatherdyke print: the first volume had to prove lesbian SM could be spoken; the second could assume a readership and argue about how to live it. That is a short run of years for a subculture to go from “unspeakable” to “we need a sequel.”
The Sex Wars were not a seminar with two polite teams. Anti-pornography feminists treated sadomasochism as rehearsed violence and treated porn as the instruction manual. Sex-positive feminists treated those claims as a moral panic that would hand the state a weapon against queer sex. Califia stood on the second side and then made it dirtier than some of his allies wanted: not only “women can like sex,” but women can like pain, ownership games, and the kind of porn that looks like a problem. The expulsion from lesbian-feminist space in 1975 is the origin scene. The books are what he built after the door shut.
First Books, Drummer, and the Advocate Column
The first book was Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality (1980), a non-fiction guide that described butch-femme sex and BDSM safety and practice without the scolding tone then common in lesbian print. After that he published across lesbian, gay, and feminist magazines. The long-running sex-advice column in The Advocate is the piece general LGBT readers were most likely to meet. The Drummer work is the piece leather men were most likely to meet. A woman-assigned lesbian writing how-to and fantasy for a gay male SM magazine was not a diversity hire. It was a claim that the techniques and the hunger crossed the usual census boxes.
The short-story collection Macho Sluts (first issued at the end of the 1980s; later reprints kept it in circulation) remains the fiction title most often taught and most often seized. The novel Doc and Fluff: The Dystopian Tale of a Girl and Her Biker (1990) pushed the same heat into a longer, meaner narrative. The Advocate Adviser (1991) collected the columns. All three were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Later fiction includes No Mercy and Melting Point (both 2000) and the edited anthology Doing It for Daddy (1994), which took a forbidden paternal fantasy and treated it as material rather than as a scandal to be hidden. He has also written vampire books. The through-line is not genre loyalty. It is the decision to put a human face on practices other writers would only denounce from outside.
In a 2000 interview with Rona Marech he said the erotic writing is sometimes just fun, sometimes satire, and sometimes an attempt to think through a hard sexuality problem—HIV-positive men barebacking with the intent to infect, for example—from the inside. He wanted the work to be thought-provoking, a little scary, maybe difficult to sit with. He also said, without blushing, that writing was a way to top a lot of people: in some sense he got to do a scene with everyone who read one of the books. Janet Hardy of Greenery Press, who published some of the later sex-education titles, praised the same trait in non-fiction language: a phenomenal mind, willing to grab a thought and follow it to the end even when the end was uncomfortable.
Awards, Customs, and the Anti-Porn Fight
Leather institutions marked the work early. In 1989 Califia and Geoff Mains received the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the National Leather Association International. In 1992 he received the Woman of the Year award in the Pantheon of Leather Awards—under the name and presentation he then used. The same year he founded the leatherwomen’s quarterly Venus Infers. In 2000 the Pantheon gave him the Forebear Award, the prize that says a living writer has already become ancestry. He is an inductee of the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. In 2013 Equality Forum named him one of its 31 Icons of LGBT History Month.
When he traveled into Canada, customs officers repeatedly seized the pornographic titles until he fought a court case and won the right to bring them across. Afterward he wrote, with some amusement, that anti-porn feminist Catherine Itzin’s Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties was seized under the same legal regime his case had helped define, while his own books were now recognized as acceptable. He also fought anti-pornography legislation associated with Catharine MacKinnon. The joke is bitter and precise: the law that treats SM writing as contraband will not stop at the authors the censors dislike. It will eat the reformers’ library too.
In November 2009 he presented a paper at the American Academy of Religion conference in Montréal on the gay-marriage debate and on how arguments about monogamy and S/M were being used to police the terms of that debate. The academic venue matters. By the late 2000s the same writer customs had treated as dirty paper was speaking in a religious-studies hall about how kink gets drafted into culture-war scripts.
Paidika, Age-of-Consent Politics, and the Recantation
Any honest page has to include the part later readers find hardest. In 1992 Califia published “Feminism, Paedophilia, and Children’s Rights” in a special women’s issue of Paidika, a journal devoted to scholarly work on pedophilia and specifically pederasty. In 1991 he had said he supported Paidika and had enjoyed working with the editors of that issue. In Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex he explained the older libertarian line: he had criticized age-of-consent statutes because they were inconsistent from state to state and applied disproportionately to gay men, and he had criticized the vague, far-reaching language of child-pornography law. He said he had argued that existing sexual-assault law should be used whenever a minor reported unwanted sexual attention or violence, and that if adults would listen, children could say what attention they wanted or when something harmful had happened.
By 2000 he had publicly revised that position. He said he had previously supported the North American Man/Boy Love Association, then clarified that he did not agree with NAMBLA: the organization’s line was repeal of age-of-consent law, and some members thought adult sex with prepubescent children was acceptable. He could not agree. He called that developmentally inappropriate. He said he had been naïve about the developmental reasons adult–prepubescent sex is unacceptable; that he had become much more cynical about adults’ ability to listen to children; and that becoming a parent had made him less idealistic about equal adult/child relationships.
He also described the personal weather behind the earlier essays. In the late 1970s, in his early-to-mid twenties, he had known gay men who proudly called themselves boy-lovers and had wished he could have relied on adults like them for guidance and erotic initiation as a teenager trying to come out. Later he said the libertarian stance sprang from a family history he had not been ready to face: a violent father whose sexuality was an ongoing threat. He described a history of child abuse and an unconscious need to repress his own victimization, which had led him to normalize child/adult sex. The fantasy that such experiences could be loving or healthy, he wrote, had protected him from feeling unloved, weak, or violated.
That sequence—publication, defense, then a detailed recantation tied to parenthood and to rereading his own abuse—belongs in the record. It is not a how-to, and it is not a reason to memory-hole the SM writing. It is the cost of taking Califia at his own word: he follows a thought to the end, including the thought that he was wrong.
Transition, Family, Faith, and Health
Califia had considered sex reassignment in his twenties and held back. Surgery then carried more danger, and a career had already been built as a lesbian writer and activist. In 1999, at forty-five, he began hormone replacement therapy. He had entered age-related perimenopause when transition started. 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 options. The current name is Patrick. The older byline Pat Califia remains on spines, contest citations, and the first wave of academic footnotes. Use Patrick for the person; keep Pat when you are citing a specific historical edition or award given under that name.
He has a son, Blake Califia-Rice, born October 1999; the child’s other parent is Califia’s ex-partner Matt Rice, also a trans man, who gave birth. Since the 1990s Califia has lived with fibromyalgia. He has said he still carries pieces of Mormonism into adult ethics. One tenet he keeps is the duty to speak: if the truth has been revealed to you and you stay silent, you are culpable for wrongs committed in that part of life. Read against the SM essays, the customs cases, and the later recantation, that sentence is less folksy religion than a working method.
He has spoken of working on a book about FTM sexuality and on a new set of BDSM essays. Whether every announced project reached a finished spine is less important than the agenda: he kept treating transgender embodiment and power exchange as subjects that deserved argument, not slogans. The MFT license, held for a decade in California, is part of that same stubbornness. He did not only tell other people to take sex seriously. He sat in a regulated chair and did the unglamorous version of the work: couples, families, the wreckage that shows up after a scene or a coming-out or a transition.
Fibromyalgia since the 1990s is not a footnote for a writer whose reputation was built on stamina—political, erotic, and argumentative. Pain that does not come with a scene negotiator changes what a body can promise. He has not made a brand of illness. He has also not pretended the later decades were the same body that co-founded Samois. Readers who want a mascot will be disappointed either way. Readers who want a person who kept publishing through hormone change, chronic pain, parenthood, and a public recantation will find the stack still in print.
The Shelf, and Why Leather Still Reads Him
The non-fiction stack is a curriculum if you line it up. Sapphistry (1980) is the early lesbian sex manual that refused to treat SM as unspeakable. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (1994) collects the culture-war pieces, including the age-of-consent arguments he later revised. “Feminism and Sadomasochism,” reprinted in the 1996 reader Feminism and Sexuality, is the essay form of the Sex Wars position. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (1997) turns the same stubborn method on gender medicine and identity. Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex (2001) continues the political essays after transition. Sensuous Magic: A Guide to S/M for Adventurous Couples (first edition 1993, second 2001) is the couples-facing how-to: less manifesto, more bedroom, still written by someone who had already survived the pamphlet wars.
The fiction stack is the other half of the argument. Macho Sluts is still the book people hide, assign, or seize. Doc and Fluff is the longer dystopia. No Mercy and Melting Point keep the short form mean. Doing It for Daddy, as editor, shows he was willing to curate other people’s dirt, not only his own. Together they are why Greenery Press, Alyson, and the campus queer-studies list could not treat lesbian SM as a rumor from San Francisco bars.
For readers who come to this site for rope, protocol, and porn rather than for feminist historiography, the usable inheritance is concrete. Califia helped build the first U.S. lesbian BDSM organization. He helped put safety language and power-exchange ethics into lesbian print when the surrounding movement called those things violence. He wrote for gay male leather without asking permission from either census. He fought a border so that SM books could move. He also left a paper trail of a position on adult/child sex that he later named as wrong and as a defense against his own history. That is a full life in leather letters, not a saint’s card.
If you read only one title for the dungeon, Sensuous Magic is the practical door. If you read only one title for the politics, Public Sex is the fight record—including the pages he outgrew. If you read only one title for the heat, Macho Sluts is still the book that made opponents admit they were wet. The name on the new work is Patrick Califia. The name on the old Drummer column and the first Samois generation is Pat. Both belong on a leather bookshelf. Only one is the name of the writer still living in the argument.
