pat califa, from public sex: the culture of radical sex, 1994
The history of the ’50s and McCarthyism made it clear that you cannot save yourself by keeping your head down and hoping the people who made you a member of a proscribed class will not ferret you out. If I was going to be called all those bad names anyway, I might as well be the first one to spread the good news. When you come out, you make yourself vulnerable to disapproval, criticism, and discrimination. But you also get to define your own terms. You get to go first and be the one to say who you are and what that means. And after you’ve already admitted in public that you’re a hopelessly twisted slut, what are your detractors going to do? A whisper campaign of slurs and innuendoes doesn’t have much power if the object of the campaign has already given the general public abundant details about her sexual practices.
The immediate consequences of publishing “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” could hardly have been more dire. I got a call at two o’clock in the morning from Barbara Grier of Naiad Press, threatening to cancel the publication of my first book, Sapphistry, a lesbian sex-education manual. It was hard to tell which upset her more: the fact that I had publicly revealed my identity as a leather person (“You might as well tell people you are a murderer!”) or my statement that S/M was so important to me I would rather be marooned on desert island with a male masochist than a vanilla dyke (“We do not publish books by bisexual women!”).
Sapphistry did hit print, and it went on to garner wheelbarrows full of vicious reviews. (“Sapphistry: Striking Out At Feminism ’Til It Hurts,” read the headline in Big Mama Rag.) The feminist press was incensed because I focused on lesbianism as a way that two women could give pleasure to one another rather than as the paradigm for a feminist relationship. Not only did the book defend S/M, it also talked about butch/femme as a viable language of lesbian passion instead of as an embarrassing anachronism eschewed by enlightened modern lesbians. And casual sex! And dildos! And…well, there was also all that stuff about disabled women…and how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases…and it was pretty hard to bitch about that. Nevertheless, Sapphistry got maybe two positive reviews.
But real dykes, both feminist and nonfeminist, didn’t care what their self-appointed leaders thought. They bought Sapphistry. If their local women’s bookstores wouldn’t carry it, they mail-ordered it. In 1992 this book was still one of Naiad Press’s top thirty sellers.
These early publishing experiences taught me several things. First of all, I found out that the dyke on the street wanted to talk about sex. She might have a lot of questions, she might want to argue about whether or not it was okay for women to use pornography or tie each other up or strap it on. But she was willing to talk about it. And she most definitely did not want feminist newspaper editors or bookstore owners telling her what she could and could not read, think about, talk about, or perform as a sexual experiment. Women did not want to be protected from controversy or from new ideas. Most lesbians were really clear that sex was an important part of their lives, and they were happy to hear anything that would make sex easier, more fun, more available, and less terrifying.
