A sapphic noir thriller complete with mullets, murder and lashings of high dyke drama? Who wouldn’t love that?

Take the badass women in Natural Born Killers and Thelma & Louise, but make them gay(er). Hand them patriarchy-smashing plot lines, mix in a few drug-fuelled street fights reminiscent of Romper Stomper and Trainspotting, add a splash of John Waters’ cha-cha heels schlock and we have Love Lies Bleeding: a movie dykes have been waiting decades for.

I watched Love Lies Bleeding in the queer heartland of Coburg, Melbourne.

My hunch that the cinema was full of dykes was proved correct when the entire audience groaned with recognition after Jackie, played by Katy O’Brian, asks Lou, played by Kristen Stewart, if she can essentially live at her house, after their first night together.  

Later on, the whole audience erupted with laughter when a visiting FBI agent casually picks up Lou’s copy of Macho Sluts, eyes widening as he turns the pages. We had seen Lou lustily studying the dyke classic a few scenes earlier.

Love Lies Bleeding director Rose Glass really got a piece of 1980s lesbian history right when she decided to use Macho Sluts as a prop. Author Patrick Califia wrote on his Facebook page that he received a small allowance for its use in the film, saying it was “pretty awesome to see”.

I can confirm that every dyke worth their salt was reading Patrick Califia’s book of erotic lesbo-kink when it was first published in 1988.

A friend who worked at The Bookshop Darlinghurst in Sydney 1990 said that boxes and boxes of the short story collection would fly out the door.

Califia’s tales inspired many role-play fantasy sessions on stage at queer venues, and in the bedroom. So many people I know have a tale of sapphic romance that involves lovers reading chapters to each other.

In pre-internet times, a person’s bookshelf gave you a fast tracked insight into their passions and interests.

Before we could scroll through someone’s carefully curated Instagram account, we appraised each other via our dance moves, clothes, friends and the contents of our fridges and medicine cabinets.

Our record collections conveyed the most useful information about personal style, but our bookshelves revealed our secret longings.

I got my hands on Macho Sluts as a young dyke.

Reading my way through my lover’s collection of erotic literature was an initiation of sorts. It was the key to my sexual awakening.

Once I was able to embrace these new fantasies, my mind, body and heart all collided in exquisite freedom. The more I untethered my sexuality from the fastidious mind police acquired through childhood religious indoctrination, the more pleasure I was able to feel.

How many of us have Patrick Califia to thank for mind-blowing orgasms, deeper intimacy with lovers and self-knowledge gained through unleashing the imagination?

Before we launched the Wicked Women magazine of dyke decadence onto the gay streets of Sydney, Jasper Laybutt and I spent hours in the bedroom of our lesbian separatist household flicking through what he called his ‘pornographic library’.

I contributed copies of Anais Nin’s Little Birds and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O to Jasper’s collection, which included Patrick Califia’s Coming to Power and Macho Sluts.

In the late 1980s, pornography was not a term used by lesbians, except in anti-sexual exploitation rants. Jasper’s comfort in talking frankly about sex was refreshing. No shame, no judgement. No… dilemma.

Lesbians had so many rules. Jasper was not like the others.

Jasper & Tiger at Mardi Gras Fair Day, 1989. Courtesy of the personal archive of Jasper

The private intimacy shared between author and reader in erotic literature enabled a salacious inner life to unfurl within me.

By the time I got my hands on John Preston’s I Once Had a Master – its cover flaunting a homoerotic sketch of a muscly guy entwined in rope, writhing in ecstasy – Jasper and I were deep in the throes of a relationship that burned with a fierce intensity we needed to share with the world.

Thirty years ago, lesbians had a serious PR problem, and Jasper and I sought to rectify it. We had a message to share.

We were on a mission to let the world know that lesbians were not the hairy, man-hating, butts of the joke you saw on TV.

To be honest, it was true: we didn’t shave our armpits, and I could count my straight male friends on one finger, but that was not the point. The point was: we were smoking hot!

Until I read Macho Sluts, I had no idea lesbian sex was so much fun. Why did nobody tell me?! Didn’t my feminist foremothers realise this was very important information for a young dyke to know?

San Francisco was pumping with inspiration at the time of Macho Sluts’s publishing.

I recently chatted with trans activist and academic Susan Stryker about the thriving queer BDSM scene there in the late 1980s. With misty eyes, she recalled the back rooms of bars that were a wonderful place to ‘mingle’ with like-minded queers.

I was heartened to hear that dykes welcomed all trans people and gay men into their throngs.

Inspired by Patrick Califia’s Coming to Power and the writing of John Preston, Jasper and I were determined to create a similar scene in Sydney.

We held Ms Wicked and other cultural events, exhibitions, film nights, sex parties and soirees. We also held the GOD ‘auctions’.

I was very influenced by John Waters’ films; our sex-positive dyke scene was known for its irreverent, camp humour, compared to the more serious American and British counterparts.

Tiger Salmon on the cover ofWicked Women Magazine Vol 1 No 5, c.1989. Photo credit Jasper Laybutt. Photo courtesy Wicked Women collection at Australian Queer Archives

Macho Sluts was re-released for a second print run in 2009.

It has been available ever since, despite being detained by customs in Canada, and censored in many places including New Zealand. It’s a lot easier to get an e-book version these days, with original editions being very expensive and scarce across worldwide bookstores.

Curled up with a new lover, I recently re-read the dyke classic and am happy to report it stands the test of time.

Califia opens the new edition with a foreword that addresses his gender transition head-on.

“Why should anybody buy a book of lesbian S/M smut that was originally published in 1988, especially if the author is now using male pronouns and sporting a rather impressive beard, if I do say so myself?” he writes.

It is good to see he has retained a sense of humour. He later explains his decision to fully transition in generous, self-examining detail.

Califia suggests that the reason Macho Sluts has experienced continued success may be that it was born out of activism and grassroots community organising.

He provides the book’s historical context, with a brief account of the Feminist Sex Wars and the response by Samois – the collective of sex-radical lesbians to which he belonged. Samois focused on the power of education to de-shame lesbian sexual expression in all its guises.

“Women got discriminated against for having leather jackets then,” he writes.

“It was a heartbreaking struggle to see our world divided because some of us needed a different kind of sex in order to be satisfied. I never did get a clear description of what ‘good’ feminist sex would look like, by the way, and am still waiting for that information.”

The foreword is important reading for anyone interested in queer feminist history.

I should mention that the stories are hot.

Califia is good at creating exquisitely detailed scenes populated by characters who have nuanced emotional lives. Connection between lovers is fostered by relatable dialogue.

As in most porn, some characterisation is required to convey a degree of eroticism; this is balanced in Macho Sluts by a keen sense of the characters’ humanity. I feel like I know them, or could come across them in a dimly lit bar.

Califia was writing with a specific audience in mind.

“Women wanted erotica that accurately depicted their sexuality, challenged their imaginations, and made them think. They wanted sexy, sweaty, dirty lesbian fiction written by other lesbians,” he said.

What more could we ask of porn?

Nowadays, I grin whenever I hear Macho Sluts pop up in conversations.

Some texts remain alive and relevant, and it seems that new generations of queers are discovering Macho Sluts’ page-turning delights. Given her predilection for authentic queer representation, I reckon Kristen Stewart has actually read it. 

Seeing her thumb her way through the pages in Love Lies Bleeding gave me faith in the sheer force that can be found when we embrace our delectable queer history.