University (SFSU) with a bachelor of arts degree in psychology. He has also said he has a master's degree. Career and honors In 1980, Califia published his first book—Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality, a non-fiction work for lesbians which described, in a non-judgmental tone, butch-femme sexuality, and BDSM safety and practice. Subsequently, he published work in lesbian, gay and feminist magazines, including a long-running sex advice column in The Advocate. Califia is "one of [the] earliest champions of lesbian sadomasochistic sex" whose "work has been taught on college campuses across the country and abroad." He has a long history of transgression, identifying as a feminist, lesbian, and transgender while also at times finding rejection from those communities "for various infractions." He played what some observers termed a "notable role" in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1970s/1980s. The sides were characterized by anti-porn feminist and sex-positive feminist groups with disagreements regarding sexuality, pornography and other forms of sexual representation, prostitution, the role of trans women in the lesbian community, lesbian sexual practices, sadomasochism, and other sexual issues. Califia rejected the "essentialist, feminist ideology—that women are better, more nurturing, more peaceful, more loving, more relationship-oriented and less raunchy in bed," instead advocating for BDSM, "the consensual integration of power, pain, domination and submission into sex." According to the San Francisco Chronicle, many feminists were won over to Califia's views on S/M not from his arguments, but from his erotic fiction: "they read Califia-Rice's S/M fantasies, got turned on and got over it." In 1979, as a student in psychology at San Francisco State University, his research was published in the Journal of Homosexuality. Califia co-founded Samois, a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983, and shifted his focus to the lesbian experience of BDSM. The Samois Collective produced, with Califia's contributions, the book Coming to Power, published by Alyson Publications. Coming To Power, according to Heather Findlay, editor-in-chief of lesbian magazine Girlfriends, was "one of the most transformative lesbian books, [foretelling] the end of a certain puritanism that had dominated the community. It was the first articulate defense of lesbian S/M, and that was the end of it." Another book, the Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, won the 1990 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. In 1989, Califia and Geoff Mains received the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the