Doctors and Clinics, Arobateau, Revolutionary Art
Toward the end of Rechy’s City of Night, the narrator celebrates Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where he talks with an older straight woman, Sylvia, who runs a gay bar and mothers the patrons. One day, a queen named Kathy collapses on the street outside the bar while shoplifting with her friend Whorina, and the other queens run to get Sylvia to help. When Sylvia returns to the bar, the narrator asks after the queen who collapsed.
“Kathy? Shes okay now. They took her home. She gets those spells—more and more often. She hardly ever comes out any more, except during the carnival.”
“Has she seen a doctor?”
“Yes. I made her go. I wish I hadnt.” And that was all she said; but a dark look had brushed her face like a shadow.
I have been thinking about that I wish I hadnt, which contains within it entire stories and a political education. It came to mind when I saw the recent news that the Department of Justice and the Texas Attorney General are forcing the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston to open a detransition clinic. I’ve seen this described as the nation’s first detransition clinic, which it is, although like everything in the Trump era, the “firsts” are only “first” if you play a rhetorical game. In the history of this country, the most violent arms of the state, from psychiatric institutions and prisons to military academies and Native American boarding schools, have brutally eradicated gender variance. Today, so-called “conversion therapy” is a well-established practice with many devoted organizations, and in schools, churches, and family life, children regularly encounter adults who police, control, and correct their gender. So this clinic in Texas is indeed an alarming development that will perpetuate great harm and abuse against children, but it is another iteration of an ongoing atrocity and a particularly desperate attempt by the fascists in a war that they’ve already lost.
Trans people have been building our own clinics and modern medical networks for well over a century. In the United States, early gender clinics took shape in the sixties thanks to the work of Reed Erickson, although these clinics were formed through fraught relationships with abusive doctors and institutions. (Many gay health centers continue this tradition today, and Erickson's peer-led support networks and personal style might offer better legacies to remember him by.) Alongside our own troubled health networks, we're also subjected to the medical establishments of the straight world and forced to seek care there, where we are institutionalized, abused, and pressured to undergo damaging therapies and dangerous treatments. Hospitals deny care to trans patients and, when they don’t, often mistreat and over-medicalize, seeing a patient’s gender as the illness.
These are familiar problems. But still, we get dizzy—those spells—and what to do then?
The queer person has had a lot less than many people; it shapes you, it strengthens you, it crushes you, it kills you.
A lot of transsexuals are beginning to have gainful jobs, and as they get jobs, with it comes paid healthcare, so they are moving out of the public health system—thus disappearing from the Trans Sexual Health Clinic—you know the one dearie, the one over on Ivy, (Leche Wallsea Street), at the back of the Public Health building @Civic Center. Tonight did not see the Transman as he sat on his throne up the hill @ Babylon Falling. Red had found a new place to be himself.
I would be boastful, foolish to say money means nothing to me. We are hooked by the shorthairs to civilization. We must have medicine—that’s basic. It cannot be foraged for as can be food, or shelter. Modern medi-science has prolonged human life 3 times over what it was—and still pushing the outer limit.
It’s going to be hard to have a revolution—major change in our nation and in the world, because every citizen now is tied into this system by their heartstrings—literally… Change is going to have to come from some new direction.
That’s the incomparable Red Jordan Arobateau, a true giant of trans literature and art, writing in 2008 in My Continuing Journey Into Revolutionary Thoughts. Arobateau published countless books between the sixties and 2016, mainly through dyke and BDSM presses, feminist projects, and by self-publishing. He was also a prolific painter, spiritual revolutionary, and an icon of queer San Francisco. I have returned to his work in anticipation of the release of Time Also Will Make It Interesting, a selection of his life writing beautifully edited by Cameron Awkward-Rich. The book will be out next month, and I strongly encourage everyone to pre-order a copy now. It will be the read of the summer!
Arobateu’s bold, uncompromising writing is concerned with gay and trans life outside of straight society—namely, his life as a mixed-race dyke and trans man. This begins with the gay bars of the fifties and sixties, his “old world dike novels” that regularly contain graphic scenes of sexual assault, gay bashings, and grotesque imagery of life on the margins. Bracing and sometimes troubling, these books are most often erotic stories, horny tales about seeking human connection and orgasm under a violent police state. They’re written in Arobateau’s distinctive, lyric voice, and sometimes play complicated games with genre. The 1991 erotic novel Pleasure in the Glitter Gutter ends with the main character, Red, breaking the fictive barrier and addressing the reader directly. “I, Red Jordan Arobateau, take pen in hand to write about the face of things that have been—shape of gay worlds as the butch knew it… to testify to the great loneliness of the bulldagger.” It's an emotional, raw, and spiritual outpouring that goes on for pages after the novel's final orgasm—right out of the smut, change coming from a new direction.
This is one of the great gifts that Arobateau gave us, that he took his life and his circumstances and communities seriously and found from his imperfect world a philosophy of living and a politic of liberation. This remains true as he transitions to male in the nineties and begins his more explicitly autobiographical writing projects, which chronicle the daily challenges and triumphs of an artist living in poverty. As with the erotic novels, the life writing is both brilliant and sometimes confronting to read, not least because Arobateau gives us his bald personality, prejudices and personal grudges included. He gets sick from paint fumes, rants about the social conflicts in his trans support group, and pursues spiritual and sexual fulfillment.
All together, and even more so when taken with his paintings, Arobateau’s work is a singular accomplishment. The books are significant as literature, beautiful and revelatory on their own terms, which is true across the smut, sci-fi, poetry, biker novels, and life writing. It’s also incredible that Arobateau was able to live and continue creating art for decades from what he called “the abject bottom.” He made significant sacrifices in order to devote himself to gay and trans life and to art, and that devotion shapes everything that comes from his work. How do we live fully and freely as the state and straight society remain determined to destroy us? His books and his paintings try again and again to answer.
Dear Children! If we cannot personally throw Molotov cocktails into the infernal machinery grinding us down; the cogs and wheels of the mechanism set up by the rich & powerful thru their lawyers, consultants, & soldier-guards to enslave us—at profit to themselves; if I cannot restore a proper domicile for myself, and for you and every person—to wrest that one small unit, or tiny cottage out of the gargantuan corporations who have bought the titles to thousands of our homes—and to be able to give everyone a place on earth, with clean running water, safety, peace and quiet, and freedom of speech, then I will inspire all your children, and your children’s children, and your ancient mothers and fathers—to pick up the paintbrush, to begin their individual words on paper, to do the dance, to sing the song, to recite, to orate, to agitate thru the arts. We will do Revolutionary Art!
The transsexual’s revolutionary art—it is morbidly funny that the state now seems to recognize this explosive potential. At this pivotal moment, teetering on the edge of the new world, the fascists have turned their attention not only to transsexuals, but to transsexual anarchists! As a transsexual anarchist, I can attest this is a niche view. Yet the White House released this month a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that places the focus on anarchist and pro-transgender “ideologies,” equating our work with narco-trafficking and ISIL and opening the same set of tools to be used against us. This deepens the state’s commitment to targeting anarchist and transgender groups while explicitly shifting the criminal threshold from actions to belief and political speech (pre-crime). We’ve seen this targeting in practice already, as with the 2025 Prairieland case, a clash between protesters and federal agents at an ICE facility. In the legal aftermath, the state seized a box of anarchist zines from a defendant’s spouse who was not even at the ICE facility, yet prosecutors were still able to use his moving of the zines alone to secure a conviction, the charge being Corruptly Concealing a Document. Two defendants who were at the ICE facility and who operate a printshop similarly were found guilty of materially supporting terrorists through their printing activities. While many extreme cases of state prosecution against leftists have failed spectacularly in court, such as the recent case of the Broadview Six, the Prairieland case has tragically led to potential decades of incarceration.
The authoritarian crackdown on the Prairieland defendants is designed to chill anarchist organizing and silence resistance. Similarly, the state wildly attacks trans people at every turn, and win or lose the particular cases, hopes to terrorize our community, eat up our resources, and interrupt our organizing. An important part of the work of these times is to resist fear. They target us because they are weak, and we, powerful, are defeating them. They try everything they can to silence us because they know that if they don’t, we’ll win. All solidarity to Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, Des Estrada, and the other Prairieland defendants, to the Spokane 3, and to everyone who stands strong and free against these fascist losers.
So here amid global catastrophe, the clownish Trumpists try to criminalize zines and gender liberation. It only affirms what I have felt since the nineties, that being a gay punk was somehow a part of bringing this all down. We will do Revolutionary Art! They can’t stop us!
&c
I’ll be reading at the launch party for Time Also Will Make It Interesting on June 16th in Brooklyn, where I will share an excerpt of Arobateau's writing alongside Cameron Awkward-Rich, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, and McKenzie Wark. Please join us in celebrating Red Jordan Arobateau and this incredible book if you are in New York City, it will be a great time!
In other personal news, I’m delighted that the fine editors at the Anarchist Review of Books have republished my Claude Cahun piece from this writing project. It’s been so great to have the ARB over the past years. It can feel like we’re drowning in wrong all the time, the establishment delusional and brain-rotted, but in truth there are countless right-on publications like the ARB. My partner just got me into The Funambulist, also. I highly recommend you check both out.
Not that you need to read the radical underground press to know what’s up. Here in my rural mountain home, hundreds of angry people showed up to a recent township council meeting to express their outrage about data centers. As someone who loves a small township meeting, I can tell you the attendance was unprecedented, and I see through our local news that the same thing is happening in the counties around us. People are demagogued and worked to exhaustion, but they know they’re getting fucked, and everyone hates the billionaires.