by ANDREA ZANIN

Patrick Califia, one of the U.S.’s most outspoken writers and activists for issues of sexual freedom, will be speaking at Concordia tonight, Thursday, Jan. 26, as part of the university’s HIV/AIDS Lecture Series. Califia once described himself as “a feminist, a pornographer, a sadomasochist, a poet, a storyteller, an omnivore, a pagan, a social critic, a sex educator and an activist,” and is internationally known for his pointed commentary on sexuality issues.

Califia began his activist work over three decades ago as an SM lesbian and has long fought against censorship laws in both the U.S. and Canada. In the late ’90s, he made the gender transition from female to male, and continues to produce powerful work on behalf of sexual minorities despite suffering from fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disease. The Mirror caught up with him by telephone in San Francisco.

Mirror: Have you ever been to Montreal before?

Patrick Califia: No. I’m very excited! For an American citizen to travel in Canada is a very humbling experience. All the benefits you enjoy are totally alien in my country’s political vocabulary. And my audiences here are so much more well-read and political about these issues than in the U.S. My country is really depressing, so it really replenishes me to go to a place where this work is more possible!

M: What will you be talking about tonight?

PC: My lecture will be about how the stigmatization of sexual minorities has hampered HIV prevention work. HIV prevention materials are being treated as obscene. The same attitudes that make it possible for politicians to generate moral panic about obscenity have helped the Christian right to handicap HIV education. In the U.S., we cannot use federal funds to produce sexually explicit materials or to “advocate homosexuality.” But how do you produce something that says “use a condom when you have anal sex” if that’s considered obscene? HIV workers’ hands are tied.

Attitudes about sexuality have affected the way all states have approached STDs—not just HIV, but all of them. Public policy around HIV in the U.S. is completely crazy. It’s never been based on how the virus is actually transmitted. Instead, it’s been based on homophobia, and the repression of honest and explicit sexual speech.

The majority of new HIV infections are in people under the age of 25. Why is the prospect of a young person contracting HIV not obscene, but handing out a condom is?

Still stupid about AIDS

M: Can you describe your relationships to the transgender and the BDSM communities, which you’ll be discussing in your lecture?

PC: I’m a member of both communities, and so this personally affects me and the people I love and care about. I want to see research done with these communities in more effective ways so that people don’t die!

I’ve been involved with the formation of the modern SM community since the late 1970s. I saw it before the AIDS epidemic and I saw what the AIDS epidemic has done. It has been a terrifying and heartbreaking experience. I’m still angry about the hundreds of my friends who have died. I still feel that the federal government is responsible for it. This epidemic is 30 years old. How much longer are we going to continue to be stupid about this?

As for the transgender community, if anything trans people are the most marginalized and have access to fewer social services. This is very complex stuff. If you don’t understand how people live and form relationships, you can’t track their risk behaviours.

M: As an elder among activists, do you ever plan to retire?

PC: Oh God, no! For several reasons. The first being that the work isn’t done yet. I have seen a lot of social progress—you can’t win all of the time and you can’t win everywhere, but we do succeed in creating social change. The second reason is that activism is my antidote to depression and pain, my way of fighting the isolation of disability. Besides, how else am I gonna get laid? We can’t neglect the fact that a lot of us do this work for the social fringe benefits too!

The free lecture starts at 6 p.m. tonight, Thursday, Jan. 26, at Concordia’s Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W., room H-110)