Gina

1. Taking a lot of time with my outfit and listening to Antony & The Johnsons and making myself fancy coffee is, well, not studying or writing, but sometimes a girl needs a long lazy morning to recharge, no?

2. It is officially fall for me when I break out the bright monochromatic tights and the pink docs.

3. I read at Perverts Put Out on October 20th. Poll for folks who’ve read both pieces (or pieces of both pieces): Do I read an excerpt from “The Best Thing,” or excerpts from the novel in progress? I am all ears.

4a. I am going to go pleasantly shiver under my loquat tree with my coffee & quiche & tons of reading now.
4b. You know, this has been a hella stressful year, and it’s not like I don’t have any stressors in my life right now, but. All in all, I lead a very charmed life. :)

Wolf left for Alaska very early this morning, so I’ve got his lovely house to myself till I head to Seattle on August 10th. I’ve really loved being around so many wonderful people on this trip. But it is also nice to get an alone day to recharge. I’m no introvert, but I live alone, and I’m used to it. I sort of forgot how much I am a creature who needs a lot of alone time, you know?

Today was for sleeping in, coffee w/ cream & a bacon-heirloom tomato-avocado sandwich, watching Community on the couch w/ the sweet puppeh & kitteh nearby, and a skype date with a dear old friend. Soon there will be a sunny walk w/ the dog. Then perhaps some more CouchTime.

Tomorrow I dive back into The Record, but today is For Sloth.

It’s nice to feel like I’m finally hitting the marks I want to hit, writing-wise. It makes the time off feel that much more sweet, you know?

So, I’ve heard through the internet grapevine that Armistead Maupin is moving from San Francisco to Santa Fe, NM.

Armistead, maybe you will find this online. Maybe you won’t. On the off chance that you do come across this farewell, I’m writing this in the second-person. Consider this my love letter to you.

I wish you & your beloved Chris very well on your journey. I hope that you settle into your new home with comfort & ease.

But damn, I am also choked up something awful about your move. I’m taking it very personally for someone who’s only met you once.

Your work has meant so much to me over the years it is a little embarrassing. The BBC production of Tales of the City was the first queer thing I ever saw on television. I grew up in San Francisco, right on the border between The Ingleside and The Lakeview Districts. I was the child of white working-class hippies who loved your work. My parents had read your stories when they were first serialized in The Chronicle in the 70s, and they were beyond thrilled that Tales was being made into a TV show. They watched all six nights like clockwork. (They were especially excited that Country Joe McDonald had a cameo as Joaquin The North Beach Poet.)

It was 1993, so I was either 9 or 10 at the time. I was in the fourth grade at St. Emydius, the neighborhood Catholic school. My hippie parents were not practicing Catholics (though my mom had been raised Catholic). But the tuition at St. Emydius was very cheap, and the school had a generous financial aid program, and it was much safer and smaller than the neighborhood public school. Pretty much all of the neighborhood kids — the vast majority of whom were also not Catholic — went there for K-8. Most of our teachers were young, hip, New School Catholics with fairly progressive ideas about things like birth control and gay people. So we got a… lapsed parochial education, at best.

Maybe all of that contribues to how and why the Tales of The City mini-series became the talk of my fourth grade Catholic school class the week it debuted in The States. Pretty much all of our parents were watching it on KQED, excited or titillated or just plain curious about the San Francisco it captured and broadcast to the rest of the world. Me and my classmates discussed it excitedly over foursquare and fruit snacks: Whose parents let them watch it? Whose parents sent them out of the room, deemed the show forbidden because of the sex and drugs and gayness? Whose parents let them sit on the couch during showtime, but covered their eyes during the bathhouse and pot and poppers scenes?

I’d taken to sneaking into the living room to watch it with my parents, hoping they wouldn’t notice me lurking behind the couch. They actually wouldn’t have cared that I was watching with them, but something about Tales felt very adult and private to me. I wanted to pretend I was alone with it, at least for a minute. I saw parts of my queer and genderqueer self in the work, even at 10. It excited me, but it also made me very uncomfortable.

Pretty soon after watching the series, the Tales novels became some of the first queer literature I ever read. Like I said, my parents were hippies, so I grew up in the kind of household where anything the adults read was also up for grabs for me to read. Of course, a huge percentage of the work went over my 10 year-old head (most but not all of the sex & drug references; pretty much all the 70s cultural references). But that’s unimportant. What I did glean from your work, even as young as I was, was that it was possible to have a happy and fulfilled life as a queer person. And I learned from your very existence that it was possible to make a successful living as an out queer writer. That was no small thing to me, even as a fourth grader. I came out a couple years later, in 1995, and I became one of a few middle-schoolers to attend programs at LYRIC, the queer youth center in The Castro. Sometimes we’d watch Tales there, too, on movie nights, over pizza and popcorn.

I look back on all of this with incredible fondness. But of course, there is also a lot of stuff in your work that I wince at now. Language and story lines about race and gender and size and abuse that feel like they are ultimately well-intentioned, but that also miss the mark and don’t try hard enough. This is complicated by the fact that much of your work was written nearly 40 or 30 or 20 years ago. I’m willing to cut you a fair amount of slack with regards to your earlier stuff, because a lot of what you were doing then was still ground-breaking, even when it stumbled around. But there are also moments in your recent work that have bothered me. I loved much of Mary Ann in Autumn, for example, but, like, you really had to use the word “bio” to describe cis people? In 20-fucking-10? C’mon! And you had to focus on Jake Greenleaf’s gender-confirming surgeries as the Be All & End All of his existence and his manhood? And you had to use that clumsy “sexual abuse survivor unwittingly marries her perpetrator” storyline? For realsies? All of that was disappointing.

But that said? I still go back to your work as Comfort Books and Comfort Movies (kinda like Comfort Food, I guess). When I’m really exhausted, or sad, or in the midst of a bad fibromylagia flare, I pull out Tales of The City or Babycakes (Babycakes is probably my favorite), and I flip through them. I read them straight through, or I read the chapters out of order, hunting & pecking around for my favorite bits. Or I put on the BBC series, to watch it for the 700th time. I know the shows so well now I can recite entire scenes off the top of my head.

When I’m introducing new people to San Francisco, your work is there with me, too. My last boyfriend was an Oklahoma transplant, a queer country boy whom I nicknamed “The Oklahomo.” He landed in the Big Gay Bay all wide-eyed and excited and “Wow, this city is really like that?! I like it here.” He was not unlike many of your characters in that way, actually. And it was such a pleasure to introduce him to San Francisco, and especially, to introduce him to the San Francisco of your books. We watched all three of the Tales series together, dissecting them all the while, talking about San Francisco history & culture. I hadn’t realized till then that your work is an incredible history lesson.

All of which is to say: Armistead, you are a cornerstone and a keeper of this city’s history & culture. San Francisco will miss you. I’ll miss you, even though I don’t really know you. I honestly can’t imagine what the city will be like without you here to write about it. I actually wonder if you leaving will shake things up on some core molecular level.

Also? Thank you, profusely, for being so kind & generous to me that time we read together at Writers With Drinks. I was beyond thrilled to share the stage with you, and having you be so complimentary about my own work was an utter joy. It is a memory I will always treasure.

With love,
Gina

So, I’m ostensibly in Portland on Writing Retreat. I’ve been here since last Tuesday night. For the first days I was here, especially considering how hard the heartbreak was hitting me in SF and how badly I thumped the weekend before I left due to a fibro flare, I was willing to just let myself settle in and rest. And a lot of my sad around the break-up actually alleviated. A change of scenery has done me really good in a lot of ways.

But now it is the start of a new week, and it is really time to Get The Hell To Work. And the grief is starting to come back in waves (as grief does, I suppose). I’m feeling pretty flooded with emotions — which I guess is actually normal? But honestly, a large part of me is just like AAUGH I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS HEARTBROKEN SHIT, I HAVE A FUCKING BOOK TO WRITE! I am ON DEADLINE, and time is of the utmost essence here. I can’t actually afford to just fuck around moping while I’m in the Pacific Northwest, as much as my hurt heart might really WANT to.

This is also complicated by the fact that I am a perfectionist, and I have a tendency to put work before things like sleeping and eating. I know that I usually hold myself to hella unreasonable standards. But I also need some standards here, you know? I’m trying to strike a balance between being kind to myself but also not sliding so deep into The Intense Emo McDoomyface Sadness that I don’t actually get anything done.

Anyway. Have any of you ever had to deal with intense heartbreak plus A MAJOR FUCKING DEADLINE plus a tendency to be perfectionistic and overwork yourself? Dudes, how do you deal? Advice is very much appreciated here.

One idea I had is to set myself a goal of getting out X number of words/day of the novel, just for this week. So that even if I don’t write a whole chapter or story or whatnot this week, I’m at least getting little chunks written bit by bit. And then maybe as I feel more able to work on stuff, I can step my goals up.

Anyway. Thank you for listening, tumblrverse. <3

Yo, LAURIE ANDERSON FANS who might be reading this:

Do any of you have digital copies of her albums Home of the Brave, Bright Red, or The Ugly One With The Jewels? Would you be willing to put them into Dropbox for me? Or, if you live in Pdx, would you be willing to make me a cd?

I have (well-worn) copies of all these albums back home, but I stupidly forgot to import them into (onto? which preposition is it?) my computer before I left SF. PirateBay is not yielding any results. I actually HELLA NEED them to work on my book, because I’m writing about all three of those albums.

Thanks & <3, folks!

Oh also, p.s., in return, I have ALL MANNER of weird Laurie Anderson recordings, including her very rare split album with John Giorno & William S. Burroughs. Also I have tons of other music you might like. So I’m quite happy to trade music with you to say thanks!

So, I’m going to Portland, OR for five weeks starting on Tuesday. It’s a working vacation/writer’s retreat, as I’m finishing a draft of my novel. I’m also hoping the change of pace & scenery will help ease some of this heartache.

Some things:

1) I’m staying with friends and house-sitting, but I’m also keeping my eyes peeled for more house & pet-sitting gigs, so I don’t stress out the very generous friend who I’m staying with the longest. If any of you know of any Pdx house-sits or pet-sits from about July 25th-August 16th, please do let me know.

2) What are some fun & relaxing things to do in Portland?! I go to a lot of readings and performances for fun, and I’m a fan of concerts and shows and good dance parties. I love a good cafe where I can sit and write for hours. I love long pretty walks and bike rides.

3) Portland perverts, does Pdx have much of a queer kink scene? Are there play parties &/or other pervert functions I should know about?

ATTENTION, Portland, Seattle, and current & former PNW-Affiliated Peoples:

I’m thinking about subletting my San Francisco studio in July &/or August, and coming to either Portland or Seattle for anywhere from 2-6 weeks. This would be a working vacation for me. I want to spend a good chunk of time working on The Record (my novel) this summer. Doing the writing somewhere greener & sleepier than San Francisco sounds hella appealing right now.

I’m leaning towards going to Portland since it is the cheaper & quieter option of the two cities (and then doing a little visit to Seattle to see friends & have some fun). However, if you know of any available Seattle guest rooms or cheap Seattle sublets, please do let me know. I would certainly not knock living in Seattle for a few weeks. :)

Two questions:

1) Could any of you put me up for a period of time in July or August? Or do you have friends with guest rooms who would be down to host a sweet, respectful, big-Italian-meal-cooking, roamin’ queer writer? ;) Or do you have friends who need pet or house-sitters? As I said, my plan is to be writing a lot, so spaces with a desk where I can actually hang out alone & work would be fan-fucking-tastic.

2) Do you know of any cheap & furnished (again, bed + desk is ideal) summer sublets? I live alone and I love it, so I am especially interested in hearing about studios & one-bedrooms. For the purposes of this trip, a room in a (quiet, chill, clean, GROWN-UP, queer & trans & kink & fat-friendly) group house would also be fine. I would esp. love to rent from friends or friends of friends. I’m on a tight working artist/grad student budget, so I would ideally not want to pay more than $500/month (or however much that works out to, pro-rated).

Please feel free to pass this along to potentially interested friends, and do let me know if you have any resources to throw my way.

Many thanks,
Gina

Girl Talk audience members: Do you want me at my ranty bitchy scathing best, discussing Current Events? Or do you want some tenderheart memoir about late-90s queer & trans punk kids, one of my best friends in high school, all-night diners, and sneaking into the Anarchist Bookstore & Anubis Warpus to buy porn? I’d been planning on the former, but I’m kinda getting more excited about the latter. PLEASE TO ADVISE.