Macho Sluts

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.