© 1989 Rich Grzesiak, all rights reserved.
"That guy really has brass balls!" So might patrons at a leather-levi bar compliment a particularly feisty sexual outlaw in their midst. In the case of that out front writer Pat Califia, the praise would be equally intense, were it not for the problems that gender might impose on such a peppery sexual metaphor.
Pat Califia has been at the forefront of the (lesbian) sexual revolution since the mid-nineteen seventies when she burst upon the scene with her radical and best selling foray into the world of lesbian S&M, Sapphistry. For most readers of gay publications, she is perhaps best known for her widely read column "The Adviser" for The ADVOCATE. She's also a prolific contributor to the gay press and an energetic producer of erotica for gay and non-gay publications, too.
Always, though, she has been a staunch defender of sexual freedom. Her new collection of short stories, Macho Sluts [Alyson; $8.95/softcover] is a red hot item in gay and women's bookstores these days, inspiring comment and criticism from virtually all quarters. And controversial her views certainly are.
When I caught up with Ms. Califia, she had forgotten our appointment, later apologizing that she was so busy working over her new "girl friend" in her basement playroom that she forgot the time. Later, through the intervention of MCI, we talked by phone as her "girl friend" worked on her car, Pat munched on a hoagie, and I posed some serious questions on sex, gender, promiscuous lesbians and? Read on, dear reader, read on.
Rich Grzesiak (RG): You don't have to be Andrea Dworkin to recite the standard rant from feminists: pornography is anti-female and sexist. How do you throw that back at your accusers, of whom I'm sure you've heard a great deal over the years?
Pat Califia (PC): These arguments are so well-rehearsed there's no real genuine dialogue about sexuality anymore. It's really sad that the response to the anti-porn movement has rested so often with S&M dykes.
I would really like to see a lot more explicit conversation about non-S&M sexuality, and more clear-cut literature and art about non-S&M lesbian sexuality especially. I keep on being told that S&M is male dominated, misogynistic, or exploitive, but I have not seen anybody really show/tell me how other forms of sexuality are better or just different.
In responding, I keep on repeating the same, basic information about S&M: that it's something that people do that they consent to do, that it has a lot more to do with acting out fantasies and sexual needs than it has any connection with loss of power in the world or with political repression. The people who hate S&M don't really care; that it is consensual in their eyes makes it even worse. The fact that women would consent to being tied up before they have sex is appalling. So the arguments go nowhere.
RG: The debate pro and con S&M becomes very emotional.
PC: What is at issue here is a basic, sexual, civil rights issue which is, do other people have a right to their own sexuality if you find it baffling, incomprehensible, disgusting or reprehensible? I feel the answer is yes, and there are a lot of women and gay men who would not agree with me.
RG: Some mental health professionals would claim that substance abuse is higher among people into the S&M scene than among other groups. Would you agree?
PC: I think it's possible. It would be helpful if you could be more specific about the research you're taking about.
It makes sense that substance abuse rates would be higher in the S&M community just as addiction is higher in the gay and lesbian community than in the straight population. It's probably correlated with the amount of stress in your life, how deviant you propose to be and what difficulty you experience in having your basic emotional needs met. It's tough if you are at all different from the sexual mainstream.
RG: Let's look at the sex business from the economic side of the equation: it's not an industry known for its female owned businesses or egalitarian standards or its rewarding of employees.
PC: If you're going to talk about the economic basis of the sex industry, you're going to have to put it in a larger context, namely Reagan's America. A lot of women turn to sex industry work because it looks like the best thing they can do to guarantee their survival. It's not the worst paying work you can get; sometimes it can pay very well, depending on who you are and what part of the industry you are hooked up with. It is an illegal industry, and that means that working conditions are not real great, but I don't think you can fix any of that by trying to wipe out the industry.
Feminists who support crackdowns on prostitution or exotic dancers or any aspect of the industry that employs women are being incredibly harsh because there is often no alternative for those people. If you're going to close down the sex industry without at the bare minimum trying to find some other way for those folks to make a living, you're being draconian. I personally do not think that the emphasis on the sleazier aspect of the sex industry is a very sophisticated critique of what's wrong with it.
That industry has the potential to provide people with a whole lot of joy. No one really talks about who the clients of the sex industry are. The clients often get demonized. If you read the anti-porn feminists, you wind up thinking that every man who reads a dirty book is a rapist. That obviously is not true. A lot of those folks are older, disabled, people who have difficulty finding partners - they're folks who actually are pretty ordinary - they work really hard, and they want some pleasure in their lives, and this is the easiest, best thing they can find to fulfill their curiosity about sex.
RG: What of the criticism that a lot of gay porno outlets are owned/controlled by non-gay people?
PC: Let's be real blunt and just say that a lot of gay businesses are owned and controlled by organized crime. That is the direct result of things like sodomy and porn being illegal, and our whole communities still facing a tremendous mount of state repression. The only way you can eliminate that is to repeal some of the laws against sexual expression that have made that possible. it's horrendous when our community is exploited by people owning businesses that aren't responsive to our community.
[I remember] the old argument that it's OK if they close the bathhouses because they are all owned by straight men anyway, and unresponsive to the community. Well, now that they're closed, how has that fixed that problem? It just means that you have fewer public institutions; it doesn't mean you have fixed the problem that gay people are not allowed to [run] institutions we need to make our community more diverse.
RG: Correct me if I'm wrong here: there seems to be a prudish fear of sex among lesbians in urban environments. Why?
PC: I think there's a new prudishness in both the gay male and the lesbian community. Among gay men, it's connected to scapegoating sexual perversions and sexual promiscuity for AIDS. People are confusing the virus with behaviors that they don't approve of for other reasons.
I think that among lesbians, anti-sex attitudes get drilled into your head from the time you're a little girl: if you behave appropriately, then you will not be threatened with rape or whips or sexual harassment on the job or any of other number of unpleasant social situations. It's very hard for women to be sexually adventurous in a society where there is a lot of violence against them, and much stigma attached to a sexually active and autonomous woman.
RG: So lesbians are less promiscuous due to the fear?
PC: And the lack of availability. I genuinely believe that there are fewer lesbians than gay men because repressing sexuality works. This society comes down very hard on women who are sexually active and I think that's been effective. It takes an enormous amount of courage and a certain amount of curiosity for a woman to come out as a lesbian or for her to even imagine that that might be a possibility.
RG: You set one of your stories in Macho Sluts in a bathhouse ("The Calyx of Isis"). Randy Shilts is now notorious for denouncing insane gay leaders for their support of bathhouses. What would a high minded lesbian like you be doing advocating a bathhouse for gay women? Isn't that dangerous these days?
PC: Well, readers who work through the story will find that the bathhouse sponsors a clinic dealing with STD's, etc.
The only thing I'm advocating in these stories is that it's OK for women to write and read about their fantasies. That's why there's a note about lesbians and AIDS at the end of Macho Sluts , because I know that a lot of those stories describe sexual practices that could in fact transmit disease. It's really important for women to realize that they need to change some of their sexual practices just like gay men have to. That's one reason why I edited the lesbian S&M safety manual; I've also added a note to Sapphistry about lesbians and AIDS.
But I think we get into a very sticky position when we start to require gay writers to eliminate unsafe sex - writing and reading about things does not transmit disease. It's a real shame that, in addition to giving up body fluids, we're going to have to give up fantasizing and reading about them. We can have a lot more writing that deals with sex in a safe way, but I don't want to be restricted to that.
RG: Why do lesbians appear to be more politically committed and involved than do gay men? It would seem that the percentage of lesbians involved in community groups is higher than their GM counterparts - they look as if they're more committed politically, too.
PC: We're dealing with a pragmatic issue here, namely that gay men and lesbians tend not to become aware of one another unless they're politically active because most of our social space is separated. So the lesbians who would be most visible would be the ones out doing political work.
As to whether lesbians appear to more of their shit together than gay men - well, they don't. It's interesting to hear that, however.
RG: Pat, I firmly believe that most lesbians are not political, and the majority of lesbians are not feminists. True or false?
PC: That's a really hard question to answer because most lesbians are closeted. It's difficult to generalize about a group of people when most of them remain pretty isolated.
Being homosexual does not in and of itself make you a political person. That's one of the problems we've had organizing lesbians and gay men. Just because you're sexually different does not give you any inherent insight or wisdom on why you're different, and what the consequences of that are going to be, or what you might want to do to make your life easier.
RG: But in saying those things, aren't you essentially rebutting that political aphorism that "the personal is political"?
PC: Well, when people come into activism I think that's the route they take to get "radicalized." You begin to realize that things in your life that look like just personal problems are in fact shared by a lot of other people, and there is a political reason why those problems arise, and there's a political response that's possible if you can organize.
A lot of people never reach that point. They isolate from the community and remain pretty hopeless about making any kind of change. What they attempt to do is reach some kind of private accommodation with the system that will just let them carry on their lives even if they are very marginal. That's really tragic! It impoverishes us culturally, emotionally and politically.
RG: What's the worst experience you've ever had with someone who dislikes you, and what you stand for?
PC: I feel very bad about lesbian women in England who hated Coming to Power enough that they came into a bookstore and burned copies of it several years ago. That is horrendous - it didn't happen to me personally, but it felt really quite crushing.
In the late seventies some right wing California legislators got wind of a women's studies professor using my book Sapphistry in one of her classes, and eventually managed to shut down the women's studies program at Long Beach University on the grounds that they were advocating lesbianism. Part of what was very painful about that was that my publisher declined to give them the book. None of the people who organized support for that program contacted me to give me information about how that fight was progressing or to ask me for help. In effect, I felt isolated from them.
RG: Do you ever wish you were born a man?
PC: Oh, sure, quite frequently!
RG: But isn't that an inherently sexist admission?
PC: Probably.
RG: Men aren't better than women, so why opt to be inferior?
PC: Yes, yes, I've often had fantasies about being a man and, in fact, there was a brief period in my life when I considered going through a possible sex change, and decided not to do that partly because that whole process does not produce a workable male body, and also because I decided I was not uncomfortable with my gender. I didn't want to be able to act out fantasies about changing my gender. That was such a bizarre thing for someone to want to do in the lesbian community then, and there wasn't very much support for wanting to fantasize about being a man.
It's really easy to understand why there are women who want to do that. Viewed from the outside, it does look like men have it easier - we grow up in a culture where sexuality is male If you're a woman who wants to be sexually aggressive and the actor instead of the acted upon, you have to somehow deal with that.
So I think a lot of butch or top lesbian sexuality is a dialectic with images of male sexuality.
RG: A lot of folk are going to be upset with your comments here.
PC: I think a lot of lesbians go through a phase in the formation of their lesbian identity where they think about a sex change, and I think a lot of gay men do, too. It's really a good thing for us to talk about that more - how we feel about gender. Gay liberation claims that we're all very secure with our gender and we're masculine gay men and feminine lesbians and we never feel awkward about that. This has led to marginalizing transsexuals and transvestites in our community and I don't think that's a positive thing.
RG: Across the country 12-step groups based on Alcoholics Anonymous have arisen that equate abuses of sexuality with an addiction to sex - Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, or SLAA for short. How do you feel about the rise of those groups, and do you think that one's sexuality can become an addiction much as, say, alcohol or drugs can be?
PC: Oh, dear What makes me uncomfortable about this movement and the use of the term "sexual compulsive" is that it doesn't seem to me to be very clearly defined. Often that term can include any behavior that the person who's doing the labeling does not approve of. Whether that's homosexuality or having multiple partners, it's all very value laden. It's very easy in this society for all of us to feel bad about our sexuality. If you want to, you can find an expert somewhere to tell you that there's something sick about what you're doing, and the cure is not for you to feel better about your behavior or to find different people to do it with or to have a different attitude, but stop that behavior.
Sure, I think there are people who act out their sexuality in ways that are self-destructive.
RG: Sex addicts?
PC: No, I don't want to use that term, because it's been thrown around so much that it can really mean just about anything The challenge for anybody who's deviant is to find a way to have their sexuality and not be self-destructive. I'm not sure the 12-step groups are always really helpful It depends so much on the group and who's in it, but in general you can't generalize about those groups either.
RG: A non-gay colleague is fond of telling me that "you homosexuals seem to spend so much time dealing with sex. Sex is OK, but it's something I don't obsess about".
PC: I don't know if I believe your buddy.
RG: I guess he just doesn't get horny. There are people like that, you know.
PC: Come on! If you watch the soap operas on TV, that's all they do The quantity of sexual imagery that straight people produce just to sell products having nothing to do with sex is tremendous.
I don't know if I believe that non-gays are less obsessed than we are. Sex for them tends to be less jarring because they tend to accept their sexuality as normal.
RG: You are perhaps best known to the public for your column "The Adviser" at The ADVOCATE. Have you ever given bad advice to anyone in your column?
PC: Oh, of course! I always try to correct mistakes publicly in the column. Sometimes I get angry letters about my advice or I'll come across a new piece of information I was unaware of, so I'll have to apologize and correct it. I am definitely not perfect.
I get between ten and thirty letters a week.
RG: So you understand why Doctor Ruth is so popular?
PC: The most frequent question asked is, "How can I find a lover?"
RG: Which reminds me of that equally famous question from Pontius Pilate, "What is truth?"
PC: Well, here's truth: those letters come from large cities and small towns It speaks to the fact that the primary concern among gays and lesbians is, how can I find somebody I can love who will love me and take care of me, who I can spend a life with?
It makes me very angry to realize that we are such oppressed gay people that that very fundamental right is the thing that most get fucked with.
RG: Does The ADVOCATE do its job in serving the lesbian community? How should it change?
PC: The ADVOCATE has always been very clear that it doesn't make any attempt to serve the lesbian community. That's its policy focus on the gay male community, not on lesbians.
I would like to see some kind of national publication that did include information about every aspect of our community. One thing that I will point out is that despite the fact that The ADVOCATE is basically a gay male publication, they include more interviews with lesbian activists, news about lesbian groups, and are in general a lot more supportive of lesbian culture than any women's newspaper is when it comes to coverage of the gay male community. If you compare The ADVOCATE to Off Our Backs, I think you will see that in fact that The ADVOCATE does a better job than its feminist equivalent.
Granted, I would love to see more of lesbian everything in The ADVOCATE, but I don't own or run the paper.
RG: I rented a porn tape tonight, one which was made before the onset of the health crisis - very unsafe sex. Has this new editorial insistence to create safe [video or print] porn made it more difficult for you to create erotica?
PC: I want to distinguish here between videos, movies and photography, on the one hand, and fiction on the other. When I sit down to watch a porn tape, if the actors don't use condoms I find that I get distracted just by worrying over what's happening to them. At the same time, I don't find videos erotic that are so self-conscious about safe sex that they wind up more like a Sex Ed film than they do a porn tape Maybe that's because I write fiction and don't create videos.
RG: There was one short story in Macho Sluts that bothered me, "The Surprise Party," where a lesbian woman is taken over by three other men and forced to perform sexual acts. God, Pat, that story ain't gonna endear you to a lot of loving lesbians. Did you write that to shock people or is it a sexual fantasy of your own?
PC: In the introduction to Macho Sluts, I explain that it's important for lesbian writers to be able to write about non-lesbian material. All sexual orientations have in common a tendency to fantasize about sexual acts that they would not perform Gay men fantasize about straight sex and so do lesbians.
I make it clear at the end of "The Surprise Party" that what is going on is not a rape but a surprise that somebody decides to give a friend of theirs I realize this story is controversial and will upset some people so I included a warning about it in the introduction.
RG: Is there a part of the personality of Pat Califia that likes to upset and outrage people?
PC: Yes! Sure, of course! People get way too complacent about the degree to which they assume that they are personally liberated. Just being gay is not enough. To simply assume that because you have same sex experiences, you are informed enough about sexuality - that that's all you need to grow - hell, it's impossible to get people to learn or grow unless you poke and jab at them to get off their butts and investigate things that are strange, foreign, new and scary.
RG: I hope you always do!