Patrick Califia is a bisexual transman and prolific author of essays, fiction, and poetry. He is also a licensed marriage and family therapist in the state of California, the divorced father of a three-year old autistic little boy, and a pagan minister through the Fellowship of the Spiral Path. In no particular order, his hobbies are quilting, cosseting his cat, corsetry, fist-fucking, caning, and Japanese bondage. He lives with a chronic pain condition, fibromyalgia, which for several years has made it difficult for him to work or lead a normal life. So it's a good thing that he doesn't give a shit about being normal. He hopes to continue to deserve the title of the author most often seized by Canadian Customs when he is hauled off to a nursing home. He'll give up his handgun long before he'll give up his laptop, and that's saying something for a guy from the Wild West.

He was born near Corpus Christi, Texas, the oldest of six children in a Mormon family. His father was a coal miner and later worked underground digging tunnels for highways, reservoirs, etc. So the family moved frequently, setting up shop in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and South Carolina. His mother was a diligent and overworked housewife who also spent a lot of time at church. Can you say, "parentified child"? Growing up was a nightmare, trying to survive as a differently gendered, queer young person in public school, the fundamentalist Mormon community, and two abusive parents. His father was a dry drunk with anger management problems, and his mother was so straight-laced, she wouldn't drink Coca-Cola or say "darn."

Patrick's earliest preserved writing is a poem that begins, "Whirling, twirling, down they go/Little Children of the Snow." There is also a Christmas play that was produced at home. Patrick was the angel. (They have the best dresses.) As a teenager, he sporadically contributed to the Salt Lake City Tribune, pieces on such topics as the Vietnam War and the adolescent dilemma of how to evade parental authority.

He came out as a lesbian in 1971. (Yes, some people's lives are more confusing than yours.) Living in the women's dormitory at the University of Utah, he rapidly discovered that unrequited love is a potent inspiration for drug abuse, self-mutilation, and poetry. Once he dropped out of school with a nervous breakdown, he continued to write, publishing a few pieces in a feminist newsletter called Sisters Stand.

After a very lucky one-night-stand with a dyke who lived in San Francisco, Patrick visited and then relocated to that amazing city of visionary freaks, and worked at the Daughters of Bilitis, contributing poetry and editorial help to their magazine. But a few years later he was persona au gratin among lesbian separatists everywhere because he had come out as a sadomasochist and started writing political screeds that were an opening salvo in the Lesbian Sex Wars. Separatist and antiporn lesbian feminists were especially incensed by Sapphistry, a lesbian sex manual that described butch-femme sexuality and S/M safety and practice without condemning them. He became infamous for belittling the antiporn movement, organizing a leatherdyke group called Samois, and much fictional and actual whip-cracking. In his spare time, he got a bachelor's degree in psychology at San Francisco State University and worked with professor John DeCecco, Ph.D., on establishing a minor in human sexuality.

During his late twenties, Patrick was affiliated with the gay men's leather community (that means he was tying up, whipping, and fisting gay men) and had a hard time reconciling those interests with a lesbian identity. For more than ten years, he wrote a sex advice column for The Advocate's pink pages, where all the dirty sex ads were sequestered. He was also the adviser column for Advocate Men for more than five years. His work has appeared in the Coevolution Quarterly, Out magazine, POZ, the Village Voice, and many other magazines.

Three volumes of short fiction, Macho Sluts, Melting Point, and No Mercy, and a novel, Doc and Fluff: The Dystopian Tale of a Girl and Her Biker, came out of Patrick's identity as a leatherdyke. As "Pat Califia," his not-very-girly Girl Name, Patrick has also published Public Sex, a collection of essays on radical sex, Diesel Fuel, a poetry collection, and Sensuous Magic, an S/M manual for adventurous couples. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism appeared a few years, during a time in his life when Patrick assumed he would never transition. The appearance of this volume, penned by a known sexual deviant and non-transsexual, nonplussed and peeved many transpeople. Patrick can't do anything right, and identity politics prevail even in places where people dis them.

So sometime after Patrick had been clean-and-sober for a decade and had gotten his master's degree and therapy license and was dating yet another tranny boy, he started having hot flashes and went to see the doctor. The doctor said, "You are perimenopausal. Shall we start you on estrogen?" Patrick left the office in an agitated state, went home, and cried for three hours. Several things became clear. (1) Having once suffered through the alienating and revolting side effects of having active ovaries, Patrick could never again put estrogen in his body on purpose. (2) When he told his parents, as a four-year-old child, that he was not a girl and would grow up to be a boy, he really meant it. (3) Living as a strong feminist and a very different kind of woman had not made his gender issues go away. (4) The only thing left to try was testosterone.

Now Patrick is here to tell the world that if you have a choice between menopause and a second puberty, take the T and stick it in your bum like a real man. Oh, wait, real men don't shoot up male hormones. Oh, wait, yes, they do. Uh-let's move on.

Patrick began taking testosterone about five years ago. (He is 49 as of 2003.) He had chest surgery two years ago but remains fascinated by other people's tits. Today, he looks like a bearded, nearsighted daddy bear who has a lot of dirty thoughts and knows what to do about them. He's a sadistic but forgiving fag who also likes to have sex with girls of all genders. He is still a feminist and is quite comfortable with his lesbian past, if only because it is a loquacious elephant with a plaid flannel howdah, far too large to be covered up by the living room rug. Patrick has written about the difficulties involved in figuring out how to be an ethical and progressive man in a patriarchal society. He believes men have the ability to transform masculinity into a nurturing force for mutual support and appreciation, rather than homophobia and misogyny. Failing that, he will accept a hand job.

While he is pretty happy with all of the physical changes that making a gender transition have given him, he is also aware that 9,999 out of 10,000 men agree that they have penises, and he wants one too. Very pretty peepees are available from a nice doctor in Belgium. If 2,000 people send him $40 apiece via Paypal, he will go and get one, and show you all a picture of what you paid for on his Web site. No fooling.

Under the relatively new byline of Patrick Califia, he has published Speaking Sex to Power (another essay collection) and the second editions of Sensuous Magic and Sex Changes. He has a collection of sharp-edged gay male porn, Hard Men, coming out from Alyson Publications. Suspect Thoughts Press has kindly agreed to publish his vampire novel, Mortal Companion in May 2004. He is also working on a five-part pagan fantasy series, The Circle of Life, and has a column in Girlfriends magazine, Bound and Gagged, the Good Vibrations web site, and the Other Sex web site. You can't go two steps in a queer bookstore without tripping over the guy, and he's a pretty easy target for Google.

Yes, those handcuffs really work, and yes, the tattoo hurt. Your next question had better not be a stupid one.