When it was first published in 1988, Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, a collection of S/M stories set in San Francisco's dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars, shocked the lesbian community and caused an upheaval in the field of queer publishing. Nobody had ever written so frankly about the kinky potential of woman-to-woman sex (and nobody has ever done it any better). If any book is responsible for the formation of the modern lesbian leather community, this one is it.

Despite its graceful language, imaginative scenarios, and abundant humour, the lesbian press trashed Macho Sluts, and it became a focal point for the infamous legal battles between Canada Customs and Little Sister's, the gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver. But readers loved it, and to this day Macho Sluts remains a vital and moving classic that still has the power to educate, radicalize, and expand our notions of the body's potential to provide us with pleasure, pain, and love.

This new edition, part of Arsenal's Little Sister's Classics series resurrecting classics of LGBT literature, includes a new foreword by the author, and an introduction by Wendy Chapkis, a Professor of Sociology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. There are also essays by Jim Deva, co-owner of Little Sister's, and Joseph Arvay, chief counsel for the bookstore during its trial against Canada Customs.

Patrick Califia's writing and activism have revolutionized the concept of queer sex. He has written over a dozen books, including Coming to Power, Melting Point, No Mercy, and Speaking Sex to Power.His work has been translated into six other languages.

Almost ten years ago, Califia transitioned from female to male; he now lives as a bisexual transman in San Francisco.

Photograph by Mark I. Chester.

Patrick Califia's profile page

Wendy Chapkis is a Professor of Sociology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. She is the author of two books, Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (South End Press 1986) and Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (Routledge 1997), and co-author of Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine (New York University Press, 2008).

Wendy Chapkis' profile page

Califia is in the tradition of philosophers Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, the gay pioneer Harry Hay, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the journalist Ellen Willis, and the novelist Dorothy Allison, who calls Califia's essays 'lucid, intelligent, brave, and true.'
?The Progressive

The Progressive

Macho Sluts became the focal point of the most famous censorship battles between Little Sister's bookstore in Vancouver and Canada Customs. Which is why this new edition is still such an important read. It has a magnificent new foreword by Califia.... Reading it again, I was reminded of how 20 years ago, the book was more than porn---it radicalized and appropriated pleasure and became a canon in the lesbian sex wars.... Dorothy Allison called Califia's work "lucid, intelligent, brave, and true." A more accurate assessment is hard to find.
?Curve

Curve

Macho Sluts breaks through the veils of silence that define, limit, and deny women's erotic possibilities. Califia is more than just an author. She is a political rebel as well.
?San Francisco Sentinel

San Francisco Sentinel

This new edition is worth the purchase if only for the incredible new foreword from Patrick Califia himself.... By itself, [the foreword] is a piece of biography vibrant with strength and colour, but it comes attached to a collection of erotic tales that to this day remain a fabulous portrait of the complex joys of sex.
?Ottawa XPress

Ottawa XPress

Califia's stories are intriguing, erotic, exhilarating, and unnerving. The sheer power of Macho Sluts in undeniable.
?Bay Area Reporter

Bay Area Reporter

Finally! The girl's version of Straight to Hell, the written equivalent of Tom of Finland. No more nights spent appropriating gay or straight male porn because you thought women would never write that way.
?The Village Voice

Village Voice

Califia, a champion of pornography as a key to adequately realized sexuality, is probably the most skilled writer of pornography working today if one measures talent by appeal across genders.
?Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation

Joseph W. Slade

No matter what your sexual orientation, fetishes or fantasies, the work offers important cultural and historical lessons that are still very much relevant in a post-Proposition 8 fight for human understanding and equality.
?EDGE Publications

EDGE Publications

Macho Sluts will make you rethink what you thought you knew about lesbian sex.
?Windy City Times

Windy City Times

If nothing else, in a world full of smirky poseurs, Patrick Califia is a genuinely challenging writer, and we just don't have enough of those these days.
?Liberty Press

Liberty Press