Written by:
Catherine Plato
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
18#1
I, like every other writer dyke of my generation, have a mild Michelle Tea obsession. I credit Valencia with getting me through college and out of the closet—gay girls obviously have more fun. Rent Girl had me considering a career change, Rose of No Man’s Land helped me through a break-up, and every week I read my horoscope that she co-writes in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In addition to being one of the past decade’s hottest new writers, Tea’s also a staple of the local lit community: She’s a founder of the legendary, 1990s traveling poetry troupe Sister Spit (who recently re-banded with a new lineup) and curator of her own San Francisco reading series, Radar. She’s contributed to dozens of anthologies and edited a handful, most recently It’s So You: 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style, a collection of fashion musings from contributors as diverse as Jenny Shimizu, Kate Bornstein and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.
Naturally, I was pretty psyched to meet Tea in person, despite a late, rough previous night. As luck would have it, Tea was sort of in the same boat. We met around noon in a quiet café in North Beach, the San Francisco neighborhood that she calls home. I couldn’t help yawning as I introduced myself; she showed off her bruised arms from last night’s Marilyn Manson show. Injuries aside, Tea was surprisingly chatty, smiley and down-to-earth: all rare qualities for an ultra-hip San Francisco lit legend and queer feminist icon. A few espressos later, we were both feeling much better.
What was it like to go back to touring with Sister Spit after so long?
It was really strange and great. It was a wonderful tour. It was so different than the Sister Spit tours in the ’90s. I mean it was completely different. It was so much less debaucherous. It was so much less bottom of the barrel, just getting by, you know? We were able to do primarily colleges and we were able to actually make money, which meant I could pay the performers, which felt so cool, to pay the performers, you know? I mean in the ’90s I had lost money off Sister Spit. No one made money off Sister Spit. And so to be able to do a tour where everyone got paid, and I got paid and the performers got paid and our tour manager got paid. It was crazy. And we were staying in hotels and we were giving everyone a food per diem, and so it just felt like we were high rolling. It was crazy. And then the downside is … there’s a certain amount of experiencing the inside of a town when you do a tour that’s different than … when you’re being put up in people’s homes, you get to really experience the city you’re visiting differently, you know? And experience the people there differently. So we didn’t have a lot of that, it was more like we all experienced each other on the tour really intensely and didn’t necessarily experience people in the cities as much. And so there weren’t as many insane adventures, but I was cool with that. [Laughs.] I don’t know how the younger performers felt. The might have wanted more adventures. But that’s up to them to make their own adventures, I can’t do it for them.
Were there any adventures you can share?
Columbia, Mo., was crazy. Columbia, Mo., was off the hook. It was nuts. OK, this is what happened: our show in Denver, Colo., was really wonderful, and there were so many cute people at that show and they were so friendly and we wanted to hang out with and possibly hook up with many of the people in the audience. But we couldn’t stay. We had a long drive so we had to do our show and then split town, which was one of the only times we did that. And we were so filled with regret, and nobody was able to really put the moves on anyone. And our tour manager, Tara, shamed us all and said, “You’re tarnishing the name of Sister Spit! I can’t believe how you guys had all this opportunity to hit on people and no one did. You guys are losers.” So she made us feel really ashamed. So then our next stop was Columbia, Mo., and so we were all, you know, pent up with frustrated desire and shame. And so after our show there we went to the gay karaoke bar with a bunch of people from the audience. And it was like Girls Gone Wild. It was like suddenly girls on the tour were doing tequila shots off each other’s cleavages. … And it was fun because everyone was doing karaoke. Eileen Myles did this crazy old-time karaoke. It was really great. It was fun.
What’s your audience like at the shows?
Well because we were doing mostly colleges, yeah, lots and lots of college students and mostly girls, and mostly queer girls. But you know sometimes boys, and certainly straight girls too. We’re going to try [on the next tour] to do more shows off-campus because the only thing about doing on-campus shows is there’s no variety to the folks you’re performing to. You’re just kind of performing to kind of, you know, 19-year-old white girls every night. And I love them all. But it just is nice to hit the city, and you get people of different ages, you get people of different class backgrounds … you perform in cities and you get bigger crowds too. … So we try to do both. It’s really fun to go to colleges. It’s exciting in a different way than performing at bars, and then bars are exciting in a different way than schools.
Do you think your audience is pretty much the same as the ones that would show up in the ’90s?
Totally. In the ’90s? Yeah! It’s the same. It’s the next generation of the people who came, and then it’s plus the people who also came in the ’90s. When we’re able to do shows where they know we’re coming to town, if we’re hitting a city and it’s getting publicized in the city then we’re getting folks who came to see us in the ’90s. That’s why it’s really fun to do shows like that to mix it up. Yeah, it’s really cool.
How big is your average audience?
It really varied on this last tour. University of Delaware, we performed to like, six people. We were like, oh no. I don’t know what was happening. I guess at University of Delaware there’re only six people in that college interested … in Sister Spit. I don’t know. And then, when we did our show here in San Francisco, or in Brooklyn, or in Chicago, we had huge crowds, like packed as many people as you can into a venue. So it really just depends on who’s living in that town, who has heard that we’re coming to town, like, how did the word get out, where did the word get out.
You do a lot of community things in San Francisco don’t you? I mean, there’s Radar …
Yeah! I feel really lucky. I am the artistic director of Radar Productions. It’s a literary nonprofit, I actually got nonprofit status.
And you were the founder, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I had help. I had a mentor, Jeff Jones. He has his own nonprofit, the Queer Cultural Center, and they run the national Queer Arts Festival every year. And you know, I was doing my work, so alienated from the system, any system, for so long, and curating events in San Francisco, probably for 13 [years]—as long as I’ve lived here. I started curating events the first year I lived here. So I’ve been curating queer literary events in San Francisco for 14 years and Jeff was able to see the work I was doing and say, “You are a nonprofit. You don’t understand that, but the work you’re doing is the work a nonprofit does and you could get the funding that a nonprofit gets.” I had been working for free without getting any money, you know, putting on these events for free. Any money that did get in went to the performers, or benefits to fund Sister Spit. I never made money. I worked for probably 11 years doing community queer literary events without ever making money off of it, ever. And a few years ago he was able to work with me and start getting grant funding, so now I’m able to do the same work and make a living off of it and actually pay the authors, in some cases, like 100 times more than I would have paid them.
People are so cool and people will do things for free because people are community oriented. They want to get their work out there; they want to participate in the culture. It’s great to know that people will read for free, or for $20, but it’s awesome to be able to give people $1,000 and say, “Here, write something new and come read.” I was able to do that this past year, which is amazing. That’s rare. I’m not able to pay people that much often, you know, but even my Radar series, I’m able to pay $100 and that’s amazing for me and for a lot of the folks in the community who, there aren’t ton of paying reading events. So it’s been a really good deal for me to be able to make that switch. I never thought I would be in a position where I was paying other people. I was always just hoping that maybe one day I’d get paid. So it’s surpassed my wildest dreams. I can actually help pass money into my community. It’s amazing.
|
