$16.95
ISBN 1573441325
available through Amazon

Reviewed by William Dean
(03/19/03)

Are you interested in sex? I want to ask. Not the whimpering, moaning grind until you think you're going to die erotic kind, but raw sex. The power of sex. The meaning of sex. The travails and obstacles and challenges and triumphs of sex. You are? Good. Because that's what we're talking about here.

I want to raise Patrick Califia to a small personal pantheon inhabited by writers such as Gore Vidal and Camille Paglia. To me, these three authors know about sex intimately and can write about its myriad influences in intelligent ways that surely transcend biological appurtenances and male-female mindsets. And we need such transcendence desperately.

Born female, Califia felt something awry in her deeper self that propelled her variously through lesbianism and the leather-dyke lifestyle until she was forty-five. That was when she took the physically-transforming path to becoming him.

Part of my issue with the campaign to erase me from lesbian herstory is that I don't think the changes I have experienced over the course of my life can be reduced to the simple explanation, "I thought I was a woman, but I was wrong, and now I am my true self, which is a man." I know that many female-to-male transsexuals do feel this way. For them, there is no such thing as a sex change or gender reassignment. They refer to the medical processes that masculinize their bodies as gender confirmation. I don't want to argue with this point of view, or supplant it, but merely set my own narrative next to it.

The tendency among society now is still bi-polar, of course, regarding female-to-male metamorphosis. The highly vocal evangelicals are predictably aghast at such acts "against the Will of God." The middle-of-the-roaders are merely confused. The few liberals are gushingly cheerful, but, I suspect, as secretly perplexed as the three-year-old who ordered vanilla ice cream and got Neopolitan instead.

What Califia experienced and continues to experience are defining moments about sex and gender roles spent among the sexually naïve.

There are days when it seems to me that I am tortured by my own perversity and willfulness, that if I had the right sort of subtle knife, I could sever the carping parts of my soul that will not shut up and could quit setting off the security alarms of normal people. It feels to me as if no one else has to suffer stomach-churning angst about turning over their driver's license to a cop, who will become belligerent because my whiskers, square jaw, and low voice do not prepare him for the check mark in the F box.

In the erotica world, in the sexuality world, some few talk blithely about gender-bends. Science-fiction authors change sexualities in their tales as if it were nothing more than a U-turning electrical blip. That, too, is rather naïve.

What's truer is that shifting one's physical, emotional, and mental gears into a gender-one-hundred-eighty-degree turn is not going from black to white without baggage. There are remaining artifacts that act as gravity. Missing pixels in the digitized picture of self. These are not wrong-things or anomalies. These are pieces of self as tormenting and unhomogenized as Kafka's man-self memories after becoming a cockroach. If they were only causes of pathos and suffering, the result would be Greek tragedy, but, too, these unfigured elements become reasons for celebration.

For the so-called incomplete, sex is a Nemesis, forever shadowing present life with doom. For those brave few who take hold of the reins of their gender identities and urge the chariot forward at a gallop, the shouts and accolades of the crowd ought to be loud and supportive.

This path, and the path of the writer of literotica, to use Ian Philip's phrase, requires keeping a fearless open mind about what at first may appear to be alien or absurd. One of the things I love most about describing passion is the chance to imagine or empathize with how it affects people who are very different from myself. There was such a need for sexy lesbian entertainment that I put most of my energy into this kind of work. But I live in the whole world, not a gay ghetto, and I wanted to to get inside the heads of straight people, straight women, gay men, people who were violent, people who were victimized, people who lived in different worlds.

Speaking Sex to Power is a large compilation of Califia's writings about sex and gender that were published between 1994 and the present. They span, unapologetically, the period when he was identified as a lesbian, a leather-dyke, and through his transsexuality. They are not -- be warned -- the sort of reading that will wet your panties or make a tent in your jeans. Instead -- hopefully -- these essays will make your mind a more sexually aware place, charge up the synapses with both questions and answers, and broaden your vision about sex altogether. We all need that at times when the focus seems to narrow down to when and with whom can I have my next orgasm.

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