From Free Life (the journal of the Libertarian Alliance, Editor - Sean Gabb), No. 24, December 1995:

Melting Point is Pat Calisia's latest collection of erotic fiction. It is as sexy, uncompromising and funny as usual. It is also, at times, both passionate and compassionate. She invites us to reconsider our assumptions about gender, and about sexuality in general.

Pat Calisia is a remarkable writer and an unusual person: she identifies as a lesbian sadomasochist feminist, yet she seems to understand all genders and sexualities, and her writing testifies to this.

She wrote an advice column for "The Advocate", advising, mainly, gay men about their sexual and emotional lives. A book of the correspondence, The Advocate Adviser, is available. Sensuous Magic is an SM primer for couples - heterosexual, gay, and lesbian. She is currently the editor of The Sandmutopia Guardian, America's leading SM periodical. Her famous - or notorious - book The Lesbian SM Safety Manual is consistently recommended for all types of sado-masochist as simply the best book on SM safety. Her recent book Public Sex is a series of highly challenging essays on the politics of sexuality, including pornography, unmonogamy, public sex; and controversially including her defence of intergenerational sex, and her analysis of the paedophile witch- hunts.

In fact, Pat Calisia has never been one to play it safe. Back in 1979, her first book Sapphistry (a lesbian sex- education manual) covered currently taboo issues such as sexually-transmitted diseases between women, butch-femme, dildos, casual sex, sex and disability, bestiality....

In Britain it was probably Macho Sluts which caused the greatest outrage in certain sections of the lesbian and feminist movement. Far from treating lesbianism as a more spiritual than sexual bond, far from guarding information about lesbian sex from men in the belief that exposure would lead to rape and abuse of women, Macho Sluts hits you in the face with a series of stories about strong women having raunchy, explosive and deeply transgressive sex with each other. It is loud, proud, and welcomed men to get off on it - and they did. This book was banned on the streets and along with Joan Nestle's A Restricted Country undoubtedly helped to give rise to and shape groups such as Feminists Against Censorship.

In Melting Point we have seven very different stories described starkly on the cover as "Melting Point: Short Stories". There is no introduction, no explanation, no justification. There is a great variety of subject matter, but the collection is held together by the fact that all the women portrayed are in control of their sexuality - they are never portrayed as victims, whatever role they are playing.

"What Girls Are Made Of" is the humorous story of a stroppy young dyke who wanders into a porn shop and ends up going to the back room for a strip show. The three strippers turn out to be a very tough group of lesbians who force her to service them sexually, "kidnap" her, and invite her to - well, that would be telling. "Big Girls" is about Jax, a tough dyke bar, and the women who frequent it. The story follows two bar dykes who get involved in a heavy scene involving electricity, bondage, poppers, whipping and fucking. "Fix Me Up" is set in the future where a woman entertains a man who has come to see her for heavy masochistic sex. The piece has a rather surprising ending. "The Bounty Hunter" is science fiction, and "Unsafe Sex" is about betrayal and the politics of assimilation when a respectable gay man seeks out some rough sex with another man. "Slipping" is not really fiction at all: it is thoughts on safe sex and AIDS in a series of 25 brief sections. It traces the author's belief in safer sex and how sometimes she slips:

...sex has always been a high risk activity.... When I slip I do things that endanger my life but I also find the hope I need to go on compromising, struggling, doing without and getting by.

"Daddy" is also written in the first person, and is probably the most personal of the stories. It covers the playing out in fantasy of incestuous relations between lesbians and their fathers. Here is a quote:

Every time I flirt with a waitress or buy a woman a drink, I am doing what my father taught me. Does this make me a rebel or a collaborator?.... I do not intend to let the desire I felt for him go unnamed or wasted. I deserve a daddy who will touch me until I come.

"Daddy" bends gender until it is almost unrecognisable. The story takes the form of scenarios between father and son, but acted out between two women who alternate the roles of father and son in two separate scenes.

Melting Point is not soft porn and is not an easy read. It is certainly not to everyone's taste, but it is very rewarding if it appeals to you, and if you can let go of your preconceptions and prejudice.

I think that Pat Calisia is the finest sexual fiction writer of her generation. Try this book and make up your own mind. See what it does to you.

Nettie Pollard