Patrick Califia: Samois, Coming to Power and the Sex Wars

The feminist sex wars produced two writers whose work is still read. One was a theorist. The other wrote advice columns, pornographic short stories, practical manuals and polemics, often in the same year, and reached far more people. Patrick Califia was the movement’s public argument, conducted in whatever format was available.

Samois

Califia was among the founders of Samois in San Francisco in 1978, alongside Gayle Rubin and others. The group’s premise was that lesbian feminists who practised sadomasochism did not need to choose between the two halves of that description, and the reaction from the anti-pornography wing of the movement was immediate and severe.

The group’s answer was to publish. A pamphlet appeared in 1979 and Coming to Power followed in 1981, edited by Califia for Samois: essays, fiction, images and practical writing, assembled to demonstrate that the people being argued about had their own account of themselves. He had already published a guide to lesbian sexuality in 1980, which was among the first books on the subject written for a general lesbian readership. Samois dissolved in 1983. Its successor groups and the wider organisational history are covered in the history of BDSM organisations.

The argument

The position Califia set out through the 1980s was not a defence of sadomasochism as harmless fun. It was an argument about who gets to adjudicate.

He held that a movement which had won its authority by insisting that women’s accounts of their own experience were evidence could not then overrule those accounts when the experience was unfashionable. He held that the alliance between anti-pornography feminism and social conservatism was real rather than accidental, and that the laws it produced would be used first against sexual minorities and against lesbians in particular. And he held that the community’s own ethical work, the negotiation and limits and formulas discussed in SSC and RACK, was the appropriate place for these questions to be settled, rather than in legislation.

He made these arguments in The Advocate, where he wrote an advice column for years, in the gay and feminist press, and in fiction. The fiction was deliberate strategy as much as expression: he took the view that a movement which produced only position papers had conceded the imaginative ground.

The advice column deserves separate mention, because it reached an audience that read no theory at all. A weekly answer to a reader’s practical question does work that a conference paper cannot: it assumes the reader exists, treats the question as reasonable, and supplies information. For a great many people in the 1980s and 1990s that column was the only source of either.

Not all of it has aged the same way. Positions he took in the early 1980s on the reach of sexual law have been criticised since, from inside the communities he wrote for as well as from outside them, and any honest account of his influence records that alongside the rest. The period in which he was writing is set out in the era essay for 1970 to 1989.

The later books

Two books from the 1990s carried the work forward. Sensuous Magic, published in 1993, was written for a general readership and treated negotiation, roles and safety as skills to be learned rather than as pathology to be excused. Public Sex, a collection of essays published in 1994, gathered a decade and a half of argument about censorship, policing, the AIDS epidemic and the politics of sexual space, and remains the most compact statement of his position.

Sex Changes, published in 1997, moved to a different subject: the politics of transgender identity, its history and its uneasy relationship with both feminism and gay politics. It was written before his own transition and is one of the earlier book-length treatments of the field by a writer inside the broader sexual-minority movement.

Since

Califia transitioned around the turn of the century and has published as Patrick since. Work issued earlier appears under the name it was published with, which is a cataloguing fact rather than a complicated one.

He trained subsequently as a therapist and has practised as a counsellor, and he has continued to write essays and fiction. The through line across all of it is the one he started with: that people at the disreputable end of any sexual hierarchy will be defended by nobody else, and that the work of making an argument for them is worth doing badly rather than not at all.