Macho Sluts Read online

  The success of this pamphlet led us to believe that there was a market for a book. So we formed an editorial committee, which I was specifically told I could not be on, and members loaned the group small amounts of money, which eventually amounted to enough for a first printing. By that time, I was exhausted from trying to finish my bachelor’s degree while being an activist whose own community objected to virtually everything I did. So I was happy to have somebody else put the book together, but I did contribute one of my own short stories, and was quite surprised when it was accepted, but not at all surprised when large sections of it focusing on a bisexual female character were censored.

  Unfortunately, Samois fell apart a few months after Coming to Power hit the streets and rapidly sold out. Our book was a success, but we couldn’t seem to work with one another amicably enough to do a second printing. Being new to the business of publishing, we hadn’t even budgeted money for distribution, so there was no surplus cash to do a second printing once we paid back the loans. My eulogy for Samois was to make sure the book got a second life with Alyson Publications. I thought it was fittingly ironic that its champion was a gay man, Sasha Alyson, who was incensed about Coming to Power being censored by women’s and even gay bookstores. He took the project on for that reason alone, not expecting to make a dime, and was pleasantly surprised when the book became one of his bestsellers. Despite the anti-porn movement’s censorious rhetoric, women wanted erotica that accurately depicted their sexuality, challenged their imaginations, and made them think. They wanted sexy, sweaty, dirty lesbian fiction written by other lesbians.

  I would have been insane to stick around if horizontal hostility and backstabbing were the only things that went on in Samois. Anybody who was in a women’s group during that time has a similar story about that group’s dynamic. This may be hard to understand now, but it was very difficult for women to learn how to work with other women. We had been kept apart for so long, conditioned to compete with one another, to never trust one another, to put men ahead of the women in our lives. No matter how irksome collective process was, I give us credit for believing in equality and searching for just ways to relate to one another. The women’s movement made a big dent in those ingrained habits, but I think women are still learning how to bond with, mentor, and really help one another.

  The dykes in Samois had other challenges as well. We were literally changing the definition of what it meant to be women. We were experimenting with new social forms—triads, nonmonogamy, sex parties, fetishes, role-playing. There was nobody else to give us advice, tell us how to do that, or patch us up when we got hurt. As pioneers out on the black-leather-and-silver-studs edge, we did some wild things, and I don’t regret a single episode of excess or misguided experimentation. For some reason, it’s easier to remember the frustrating business meetings than it is to remember all the great sex, but the latter definitely occupied more of my time than the former. You can’t expect things to go smoothly when you gather a group of self-professed deviants and outlaws together, can you, now? Our tumultuous process wasn’t solely due to the shortcomings of 1970s lesbian morés and culture. I was no great shakes at group participation. I was a self-centered kid, sure that my way was always the grandest and most glorious, and I got stoned way too often to be a reliable witness at a traffic accident. It’s just sad to think that we’ll never have a reunion where we swap reminiscences or congratulate each other for surviving. When you have only a handful of people who understand your way of life, their support becomes so important that no forgiveness for betrayal is ever possible. Or so it would seem thus far.

  It took five years after the publication of Sapphistry [in 1980] for me to have the time and the guts to try again with another book. I hoped—prayed—that it would get a slightly less overblown reception. By now, there were groups organizing in several cities to oppose the anti-porn movement’s lunatic idea to pass laws that defined pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights. Sex-positive feminism was a reality, thanks to the efforts of many courageous women who thought censorship was not the answer to the subjugation of women. I had been writing short stories steadily over the years, sometimes to court a woman I had a crush on, or to examine a conundrum that amused me, or to be shocking. I wanted to be able to write about kinky sex for fun, without constantly stopping the action to talk about whether you could really do that. Goddess knows I’ve made a fetish out of being a sex educator, but enough, already! After the success of Coming to Power, Alyson Publications was willing to do another book in that newly-coined genre, so I typed it all up on my KayPro computer and sent it in on about a dozen eight-inch floppy discs.

  The book was enormously popular, and even though there were still some of the same stereotypically hysterical reviews, there were also some good ones. See, I told you. Activism works. Some people were always going to think that S/M was pathological, violent, fascist, racist, anti-feminist, done only by women who’d been brainwashed by the patriarchy, and, oh yes, the Spawn of Satan. But there were other voices now, reviewers who could tell the difference between a sexual fantasy and an assault. The book got at least some of the credit that it deserved for being thought-provoking, well-written (says the person who revised every story till my eyes bled), unique, and arousing. It was especially wonderful to see reviews that recognized the worth of erotic literature as a form of writing that could challenge the status quo and take readers to a place of liberation as well as help them get horny for a little solo sex or an adventure with a partner (or two or three).

  But Canada Customs had no sense of humor, no respect for queer sexuality, and above all else, no feminist consciousness. Macho Sluts got confiscated at the border, and became one of the key books defended in a major censorship case. I have no idea how the folks at Little Sister’s Bookstore in Vancouver fought their federal government for so many years. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually agreed that customs officials had indeed overstepped their bounds and were systematically censoring gay literature. They had confiscated issues of The Advocate, gay sex manuals like The Joy of Gay Sex, fiction by Edmund White, John Preston, John Rechy, the books of anti-porn stalwart Andrea Dworkin, and a long list of other gay and lesbian authors. Little Sister’s is still defending queer literature from the bonfire-happy homophobes at the border. Next time you are having trouble buying gifts, consider giving them a donation on behalf of the Lipstick Lesbian or the Club Kid Who Has Everything.

  So there you are. You’re holding a bit of queer history in your hands. But does it still strike a raw nerve today and make it vibrate until you think you can’t stand it any more, and you just have to come? Why, yes, I think it does. Only you can be the final judge of that, of course, but it’s my hope that the twisted plots and carefully drawn characters in these stories can still take readers on a good, hard ride. It has always been important to me to give my readers stories that flow smoothly, so that they aren’t jolted by inconsistencies or bad grammar. I want to create a state of suspended disbelief that allows you to occupy bodies and desires that may be quite foreign to your own. And along the way, I want to sow some interesting seeds of new thoughts about our bodies, why we want the things that we do, what the line is between the permissible and the forbidden, and why the hell we don’t all have better sex lives. If Macho Sluts motivates you to buy a new toy, look for a new trick, or find more pleasure in the equipment and people you already know how to handle, I am satisfied … at least for today.

  I’ve kept the tranny controversy for the end of this foreword because I believe that any work of literature should stand on its own merits. This book deserves to be judged for its content rather than the shifts in identity that its author has undergone. All I ask is that you give it a chance, despite any reservations you might have, to see if its varied contents don’t spark your libido and make you think. After that, you can read what follows about how Pat Califia became Patrick Califia, and what effect that’s had on the work I produced when I identified, first as a lesbian, and then as a bisexual, woman.

  Many of my lesbian readers were angry and upset when I decided in my late forties to start taking testosterone and investigate transitioning from female to male. A lot of those women have stopped reading my books, so they may never see this response. Still, I think it’s important to reply, partly because I still believe in the transformative power of dialogue. As long as people keep talking to each other, some hope exists of coming to a better understanding of one another and some possibility of coexistence and political alliance. I don’t believe that lesbians and FTMs (female-to-male transgendered people, for those of you who have been living under a rock without a copy of Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaws) are automatic enemies or even mutually exclusive communities. At the very least, we are neighbors, and no good comes of having one sexual/gender minority be at another’s throats. There are too many people who hate all of us, who would gladly see all of us burned to a crisp—the kind of bigots who give straight people a bad name. Many people know they are different in some important ways and wrestle with the question of who they are and where they belong. If I can do anything to make this a less agonizing process, I should. Self-understanding and self-expression are much harder to accomplish when so many supposedly progressive people are saying hateful things about each other and demanding that everybody take sides.

  I chose to come out as a newly-transitioning FTM in the pages of Girlfriends magazine, in an advice column I wrote for most of that magazine’s history. I doubt any other topic created as much controversy. We were buried under an onslaught of mail—much of it supportive, and some of it virulently hostile. Granted, my place in the lesbian pantheon of elders was far from secure anyway, because of my earlier work opposing censorship, defending pornography, educating people about
butch/femme relationships, and speaking out on behalf of the BDSM community. Being a full-fledged transsexual was the last nail in the coffin that gender-essentialist, right-wing lesbian-feminists had been cobbling together for me for decades.

  But there was another element in the letters that demanded the editors of Girlfriends fire me immediately. They expressed deeply personal feelings of being abandoned, passed over, and kicked to the curb. There are a lot of reasons why that hurt exists. The hottest-running vein of emotion seems to be the feeling that transmen are betraying feminist principles and selling out the important work that dykes do combating sexism and homophobia. I’ve supposedly taken the easy way out and decided to bathe in the poisonous, overheated waters of male privilege and heteronormativity. You’d recognize the place in an instant. The hot tub is shaped like a penis.

  There’s a long-standing tradition among dykes of hating men. And I would be the last person to tell you that hatred doesn’t have a valid reason for existing. As the most powerful people in our society, men have been responsible for most of the lesbian-bashing that goes on. Not all of it, however, and that’s important to remember. Homophobic women are fully capable of rejecting their lesbian daughters and supporting moral panics that have done things like get lesbian professors fired from women’s colleges, kicked lesbians out of the armed forces, and caused other widespread forms of discrimination and misery. But when a man beats you up, fires you, or steals your girlfriend, it feels worse, because the playing field isn’t level. Lesbians don’t compete with straight women for a sense of sexual prowess or safety on the street and in their own bars and clubs. Men have attacked, hurt, defamed, violated, and murdered lesbians in the most cowardly and despicable ways it’s possible to imagine.

  Unfortunately, the most simplistic form of feminism encourages women to believe that sexism (and by extension, homophobia) are all men’s fault, and can only be fixed if men are utterly deprived of power. This has led to the dead-end alley of separatism in which fantasies of all-female societies are held out as alternatives where women can be strong, safe, and free. I think Joanna Russ, in her book The Female Man, is the only lesbian writer brave enough to spell out that the only way to get there from here is through the cultural catastrophe of a gender holocaust. Do we really want to support a form of feminism that tells us the only way to fix our admittedly broken, binary gender system is to kill all the men? Single-gender societies are not the answer, although they make great escapist fantasies that I continue to write and read and enjoy.

  This kind of feminism has another problem. It lets women off the hook. If we can attribute sexism to only one-half of the human race, we never have to answer troubling questions like, Why do some women hate other women? Why do some women hate lesbians? Why do women treat one another so badly? Why is it that a woman who acquires power is every bit as likely to misuse it as a man? How do we create nonexploitative forms of power that are linked to responsibility, so that we can still enjoy individual initiative and creativity without smothering everyone with tyrannical collectivity? As long as feminism is perceived as a politic that is for women only, its transformative and radical potential will be sharply limited. But I do not mean to imply that feminist women should change this. The men who don’t see the damage that a lopsided power dynamic does to them, who are not throwing their energy into looking for a better way to live, are culpable.

  Any inequitable system inflicts suffering on the haves as well as the have-nots. That pain is not equal, but it’s still important to understand. It’s not the underclass’s job to comfort or educate the overclass, either. But there is a price to be paid for material comfort and social acceptance that’s enjoyed while (and because) others suffer. It’s an ugly way of life that may look comfortable on the outside, but inside it’s stifling and rife with willful ignorance. The things that the haves do to distance themselves from the have-nots are scarring, even if your peers try to tell you they are beauty marks.

  So how do FTMs fit into the War between the Sexes? Or the War between Gays and Straights? Some people would tell you there’s no question. We are on the side of the men, and we are on the side of straight people. And some FTMs would agree with you. Unfortunately, I can’t claim that every other transman is a feminist, a fan of queer theory, or interested in social equality and justice—although many of us are.

  First of all, not every female-to-male transsexual spent a portion of his life identifying as a lesbian. This is one of the biggest myths about FTMs. Many of us tried to live as heterosexual women before we transitioned, and some of us could never get any more mainstream label to fit well enough to shoehorn ourselves into it. And not every FTM is straight. Many of us (like me) are gay or bisexual or queer. You can’t even claim that FTMs were once butch women who got tired of always being hassled and abandoned the struggle to make space for masculine women in our culture. Many of us tried our best to adopt a feminine persona. We believed that if we just tried hard enough to look the way we were told women should look and behave, all that gender weirdness would go away. The ability to “pass” as a “normal” woman doesn’t cure gender difference, although, sadly, it can make it hard for an FTM with this history to get others to take him seriously once he comes out about his need to live in a male identity.

  Of course, most lesbians don’t meet FTMs whose early lives were spent outside of their own world. Nor do they usually recognize former femmes who transition. I repeatedly hear the statement, “All the butches are going to turn into men.” And the truth is that butch identity will be changed by the growing visibility of the FTM community. That process is already in place and cannot be reversed by penalizing those who move from a female to a male identity, or getting paranoid about anybody who displays an interest in crossgender role-playing. Butch identity is, like all labels, much less simple than the term itself would lead you to believe. But my experience is that not all butches are transmen in denial. There are masculine (for lack of a better word) women who are happy to be women—or would be, if other people on the bus would quit calling them names and potential bosses would stop refusing to hire them because they aren’t trying to look like prom queens. Perhaps the changing times will lead to a new sense of pride or clarity among butch women about what makes them unique.

  Is the lesbian community any better off if a handful of transmen chicken out and abstain from testosterone shots or full-time male pronouns because they are afraid of losing their friends and hangout spots? I don’t think so. I’ve met some people in this predicament, and their lives are pretty harsh. Their partners feel confused and rebuffed, they feel miserable in their own skins, their lives get stalled in a variety of ways, and they are rarely enthusiastic about contributing to lesbian culture or politics. Butch women enjoy being butch. They’ve got their own lingo, fashion, style, and moves. I won’t claim that their relationship to being women is a simple one. It can be damn hard to claim your womanhood if a whole culture is telling you to stop “acting like a man.” But there’s a difference between the place of self-acceptance and sexiness that a butch woman gets to when she’s waded through the homophobic twaddle, and the perpetual, deep-seated sense of wrongness that a transman has in his body. We always want to take it too far. Strapping it on isn’t a simple matter of enjoying a sex toy for us. A dildo can be a prosthesis that temporarily makes us feel better, but it’s also a reminder of the gap between our physical and mental realities. As a consequence, many transmen can’t go near dildos or harnesses. It’s just too painful, not a fun sexual fantasy.