Effluvium of the Ordinary Days : Selected Journals

The selected journals of trans, mixed-race artist and dyke erotica writer Red Jordan Arobateau, teeming with politics, sex, trans community, artmaking, and the minutia of living in gentrifying San Francisco. Best known for his erotic lesbian fiction, Red Jordan Arobateau also maintained and self-published a journal for roughly twenty years, documenting his life on—as he calls it—the “abject bottom” of life in the U.S.. Edited and introduced by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich with a foreword by Michelle Tea, Effluvium of the Ordinary Days captures Arobateau’s time as a young dyke in the criminalized cultures of 1950s-60s gay bars of Chicago and New York; his transition from dyke to trans man in late 1990s San Francisco; and his return to painting and an unfolding spirituality within that rapidly gentrifying city. Effluvium is what Arobateau might have called, “a novel combined with a journal—da novel/journal! Taking all the liberty in the world! A domain where verse can be inserted, dreams recorded, my everyday political rants printed out, combined with my forté—fiction! All under one binding & title!”