Patrick Califia > Quotes

“Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world
acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.”
― Pat Califia

“Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom. ”
― Pat Califia

“...my body has become
another country
and I feel like an unemployed
illegal alien
how will I survive
where I do not belong
I belong with you”
― Patrick Califia-Rice

“I am not so much fun
Anymore;
Couldn’t carry the role of ingenue
In a bucket, you say, laughing.

And I want to punch you.
I was never innocent, but
Thanks to you I know things
I wish I did not remember.

You don’t like it
When I talk to the man myself,
Specifying quantities and
Give him the money
Instead of giving it to you
And letting you take care of it.

You keep asking me,
Where’s the dope?
Until I finally say,
I hid it.
The look you give me is
Pure bile.

Well, fuck you.
This isn’t like Buying somebody a drink.
You don’t leave your stash out
Where I might find it.

Finally I think I’ve made you wait
Long enough,
So I get out the little paper envelope
And hand it to you.
You are still in charge of
This part, so you relax.
Performing your junky ritual with
Your favorite razor blade, until
I ask you how to calculate my dose
So I won’t O.D. when I do this
And you’re not around.

Then you really flip.
You tell me it’s a bad idea
For me to do this with other people.

**

Was it such a good idea
For me to do it with you?
Do you wait for me to turn up
Once every three months
So you can get high?
Is this our version of that famous
Lesbian fight about
Nonmonogamy?

Let me tell you what I don’t like.

I don’t like it when you
Take forever to cut up brown powder
And cook it down and
Suck it up into the needle
And measure it, then take
Three times as much for yourself
AS you give me.

I don’t like it when you
Fuck me
After you’ve taken the needle
Out of my arm.

You talk too much
And spoil my rush.
All I really want to do
Is listen to the tides of blood
Wash around inside my body
Telling me everything is
Fine, fine, fine._
And I certainly don’t want to
Eat you or fuck you
Because it will take forever
To make you come,
If you can come at all,
And by then the smack will have worn off
And there isn’t any more.

I’m trying to remember
What the part is that I do like.
I think this shit likes me
A lot more than I like it.

Now you’re hurt and angry because
I don’t want to see you again
And the truth is,
I would love to see you,
As long as I knew you were holding.

So you tell me
Is this what you want?
I bet it was what you wanted
All along.”
― Patrick Califia

“Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal.”
― Pat Califia, Some Women

“If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible.”
― Pat Califia, Macho Sluts: Erotic Fiction

“SM is an art. Doing it well requires more than a bag full of expensive whips and exotic electrical toys, a closet full of fetish clothes, or a basement filled with bondage furniture.”
― Pat Califia

“It should not be a crime to discuss any idea, however outrageous ”
― Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

“Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool”
― Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

“I’m very fond of the concept of choice as the basis for sexual preference. This point of view is unpopular in an era in which every claim for gay rights is bases on pseudoscientific sulking about how we can’t help being queer; we’re just born that way. Thanks, but I don’t want to receive my civil rights as a charity fuck bequeathed on me by my genetic superiors.”
― Patrick Califia

“There seems to be a psychological law of inertia that bogs down every hopeful activist and subverts every revolution. When compassion and empathy fail, backsliding begins. Or totalitarianism.”
― Pat Califia, Some Women

“If a young person is surviving by trading sex for the thing they need, what useful purpose is served by criminalizing that activity? Doesn't everybody have the right to try and survive? it might cost more to create shelters or group homes, drug treatment programs, schools for emancipated minors, counseling services, medical care and job training. But such programs can salvage human lives that are otherwise going to be cut short or wasted.
If we can afford massive kiddy porn stings, why can't we afford to do this? Is it because, as a society,we obtain more pleasure out of trying to control young people, and punishing the minors who escape our control, than we would out of taking good care of kids who are in trouble?”
― Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

“S/M flies in the face of every attempt the state makes to appropriate our bodies, our labor, our time, and our imaginations.…the state is deeply offended by any group of people who say, 'My body doesn't belong to you, it belongs to me, so fuck off'…”
― Pat Califia, Some Women

“Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anaïs Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong--all of these women used the money they made from writing about sexuality to make it possible for them to live as rebels, dykes, feminists, artists, or whatever deviant and defiant identities they assumed.”
― Pat Califia, Some Women

“She appreciated the fact that the wolf did not caper, bow down, yelp, or slaver on her, in the slavish and inconsiderate way of dogs. The wolf was no whore for man's approval. He fed himself.”
― Patrick Califia-Rice, No Mercy: Short Stories

“Being a sex radical means being defiant as well as deviant.”
― Patrick Califia-Rice, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex