Red Jordan Arobateau

Holy Communion, Self Portrait II: 2008, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 50 cm; Arobateau's expressionist self-portrait features symbolic motifs of spirituality, religion, social issues and pets — components typical of his paintings.

Red Jordan Arobateau (November 15, 1943 – November 25, 2021) was an American author, playwright, poet, and painter. Largely self-publishing over 80 literary works with autofictional elements, Arobateau was one of the earliest and most prolific writers of street lit, and a proponent of transgender and lesbian erotica. His prose contained themes of butch lesbians, transsexuality, sex work, poverty, drug use, implications of those lifestyles and social justice, while his poetry was primarily spiritual and religious.

Born and raised in Chicago, Arobateau moved to San Francisco in adulthood because of its LGBTQ+ friendly culture, where he transitioned and became a trans man. Most indie and LGBTQ+ publishing houses rejected his manuscripts. Arobateau sold his hand-stapled books in lesbian bars, feminist bookstores and on the streets. He appeared in documentaries such as Before Stonewall (1984), and his writings were occasionally published in anthologies, including Daughters of Africa (1992).

Reception of Arobateau's work was mixed; his progressive characters and storylines received praise, while criticism was directed at his style of writing. His life and works have been analyzed and discussed in various academic literature pertaining to transgender studies, identity, social change, sociology of literature and black feminism. A neoteric figure in the early history of street lit, Arobateau has been cited as an inspiration by writers Ann Allen Shockley and Michelle Tea.

Life

Red Jordan Arobateau was born on November 15, 1943 in Chicago. He was an only child of a Christian Honduran immigrant father and a mother of African American descent. He was raised as a female. Arobateau started writing when he was 13 to escape a turbulent home life; his mother was abusive towards him. When he was 15, he read a pulp magazine that had a brief mention of a lesbian character — feeling seen for the first time, he began to identify as a butch lesbian. Arobateau started spending time on the streets, in queer areas and dive bars, and developed alcoholism in adolescence.

Arobateau's parents divorced when he was 17, and he started living with his father. He enrolled in a college but left after a year stating that it was too much a "social affair". He took "Jordan" from his grandmother's last name for its religious connotations and relations to his African-American heritage. "Arobateau" was based off his given surname with an "A" added to the original form, "Robateau". After he got his hair dyed red, he conceived that the color represented sensuality and eroticism of his work; thus he adopted "Red" as his first name.

Citing persecutory policies of then-mayor Richard J. Daley, Arobateau decided to move out of Chicago. He shifted to New York City before moving to San Francisco in 1967 — where he spent the rest of his life — largely because of its LGBTQ+ friendly culture. Formerly an atheist, Arobateau became a Christian and joined the Metropolitan Community Church after the death of his father in 1973. He operated a storefront church where he would preach the gospel. His conversion alienated some of his friends who were concerned about social and political implications of a rise in Christian fundamentalism across the country.

Old Wives' Tales, a feminist bookstore in Mission Dolores, San Francisco, sold Arobateau's books.

Arobateau started self-publishing his work in the 1970s, with The Bars Across Heaven (1977) being his first self-published novel. He worked different jobs to fund each publication, and had experience working as an office assistant, factory worker, karate teacher, nurse's aide, cashier and cook. Arobateau could write a novel in a month; he would then make a few photocopies and staple the manuscript together with a book cover. Relying on the grapevine, Arobateau sold his works in off the record lesbian channels, and limited physical distribution of his copies to lesbian bars, feminist bookstores and the streets.

Prior to publication of short story "Suzie Q" in poet Judy Grahn's anthology True to Life Adventure Stories (1978), every indie and LGBTQ+ publisher Arobateau approached had refused to publish his work. Arobateau attributed those refusals to prominence of sexual content in his works, which he claimed were relatively unacceptable even for feminist and LGBTQ+ publishers at the time. His writings were occasionally published through publications such as On Our Backs, however he remained mostly self-published throughout his life. By and large, Arobateau lived his adult life in poverty and on unemployment benefits.

In 1984, Arobateau appeared in Greta Schiller's Before Stonewall, where they discussed his life and challenges before the Stonewall riots of 1969. He went on an 11-year hiatus before authoring Lucy & Mickey in the 1990s. During the 1990s, Arobateau transitioned his gender, underwent a sex reassignment surgery, and began to identify as a trans man. His "Nobody's People" — an essay about social alienation felt by people of mixed-race heritage, including himself — was a part of Daughters of Africa (1992), edited by Margaret Busby.

In Arobateau's revised folklore, the princesses would escape to fulfil their lesbian sexual desires (pictured Elenore Abbott's 1920 illustration)

Arobateau wrote an erotic lesbian retelling of "The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces" for Michael Thomas Ford's Once Upon a Time: Erotic Fairy Tales for Women in 1996. Excerpt of his writings have featured in several other anthologies: Cum With Me Lucy in Off the Rag: Lesbians Writing on Menopause (1996) by Lee Lynch and Akia Woods, Lay Lady Lay in Best Lesbian Erotica 1997 by Jewelle Gomez and Tristan Taormino, and The Nearness Of You/Sorrow Of The Madonna in Hot & Bothered: Short Short Fiction on Lesbian Desire (1998) by Karen X. Tulchinsky.

Arobateau's books were not circulated in Canada until at least 2004 due to tight pornography laws in the country that bar the entry of "obscene material". In 2007, he featured in Martin Rawlings-Fein's Clocked: An Oral History, where he gave personal anecdotes in context of the history of the transgender rights movement. By that year, he had published 80 novels, plays, collection of short stories and poetry. Tom Waddell Health Center in Tenderloin, San Francisco was the first primary care clinic in the US to offer transgender health care services; Arobateau was one of 12 patients to feature in its 2012 documentary — Transgender Tuesdays: A Clinic in the Tenderloin by Mark Freeman and Nathaniel Walters. He also presented the film at the 2012 Transgender Summit.

Arobateau taught self-defense and karate to Gay Women's Liberation members, and was a part of FTM International. He lived with his partner Dalila Jasmin, a belly dancer who often danced at Arobateau's book readings. He died on November 25, 2021 in San Francisco at the age of 78.

Themes

History books tell us a lot about the lives of upper-class women such as Gertie Stein and Alice B. but very little of the underprivileged lesbian factory workers, queer servants, and tranny seamstresses. There's a whole group of dikes to whom these characters, these books may appeal.

— Red Jordan Arobateau
The Lesbian Review of Books, 1996.

Arobateau often depicted his experiences through autofiction, and his prose focused on themes of street life, sex work, lesbian issues, transsexuality, poverty and drug use. His work feature butch lesbians and transgender men as they fall in love with sex workers, come out as transgender, or serve their sentences in prison. He explored the challenges of these lives as well as the joy found in them. Writings of Arobateau showcased realities of life in ghettos, which differed from works of other black women writers of the time who mostly wrote idealistic fiction and academic non-fiction.

Struggles Arobateau faced because of a mixed racial identity formed basis of his various short stories. His content reflected social isolation he endured because of growing up "poor, black, and gay", and how he developed maladaptive coping mechanisms as a result. Motifs of contemporary social justice topics such as black feminism, women's liberation movement and different LGBT movements would sometimes form foundation for storylines of his literature.

Arobateau's storylines as a whole incorporated subtle ideas of metaphysics and alchemy, and rendered gender transitioning inseverable from spiritual practice. The focus of his poems was largely on his spiritual beliefs. After Arobateau's conversion, his poetry increasingly incorporated Christian themes, which was particularly evident in his call and response poems. In contrast, his prose depicted intersection of religion with science as detrimental, especially with regards to transgender medicine; he offered arts and aesthetics as a device of achieving emobodiment in those scenarios.

The Pig: 1969, oil on canvas, 63 × 48 cm; the social painting depicts a surreal anthropoid squeezing blood from money, symbolizing capitalist exploitation of labor.

Arobateau painted in contemporary style, and his paintings were thematic of symbolism, surrealism and expressionism. His spiritual paintings were usually subtle and symbolic, while religious works were direct in conveying their message. In Night Candle (2010), the candle represents spirituality that washes out darkness of the night which is symbolic for negative things in life, whereas Blue Jesus (2008) depicts an androgynous Jesus delivering Holy Communion to a congregation.

Arobateau practiced social artistry through surrealist paintings; his portrayals include exploitation of labor in The Pig (1969), late capitalism in Along The Watchtower (2008), suicidal ideation in Via Appia (2008), climate change in Holy Communion, Self Portrait II (2008), social effects of Hurricane Katrina in Pieta At Sunset (2009) and sex addiction in Sparechange (2010). Arobateau's portraiture was generally expressionistic and animal paintings surrealistic — the latter almost exclusively featured pet animals such as dogs, cats, elephants, parrots and pigeons.

Reception

In 1982, writer Ann Allen Shockley wrote one of the earliest reviews of Arobateau's writing. She briefly reviewed several of his works and provided a collection of his biographical details for a Sinister Wisdom article. In her review of "Suzie Q", Shockley wrote that it "brought a new protagonist to black lesbian fiction, springing to life the black lesbian street woman in all her hard glaring reality." She further praised the storyline for its progressive portrayal of black prostitutes "in the personalized role of being human" — characters she said were otherwise cast in mainstream "as a piece of meat to be exploited in pornography".

Reviewing Lucy & Mickey, Heather Findley summarized that the novel was "deeply philosophical and powerfully erotic", and Lillian Faderman remarked that Arobateau was "the Thomas Wolfe of lesbian literature". Vince Larussa described Autumn Changes — considering it a representative of Arobateau's œuvre — as "figuratively an unorthodox fairytale, philosophically a manifesto, and literally, 'a testimony of his first transition years intermixed with remembrances of things past.'" Discussing the readability of The Bars Across Heaven in Gay Community News, Andrea Loewenstein said that its unconventional dialogue "works amazingly well within the context of the novel", but added that his writing style makes it apparent that Arobateau "did not attend the school where many of us learned 'how to write'".

LaMonda Horton-Stallings wrote in a 2003 CR: The New Centennial Review article that Arobateau and Iceberg Slim had mastered "the skill of transgressing gender and sexuality". While Horton-Stallings critiqued that his stories were of poor quality, she emphasized novelty of Arobateau's transgender and transsexual characters, elaborating that "their intersection, or lack thereof, with a more mainstream transgender movement should also garner some attention for the novels' historical importance, if not for their literary merits." Arobateau was self-critical of his works, noting that he "needs an editor to help refine [his] work"; to the point, noting the near-universal repudiation of Arobateau "as an erotic writer of street-class butch life" by publishing houses, Thyme S. Siegel praised him for staying the course by continuing to write and self-publish works in those genres.

Lynch assessed Arobateau's writing as "iconoclastic and idiosyncratic" in his 1995 review of contemporary LGBTQ+ literature for Lambda Book Report. He further opined that Arobateau "is the graffiti artist of lesbian literature, not respectable by a long shot, but chronicling for us the raw material of [his] world". Stephanie Byrd was critical of his unfiltered writing style — in particular, of his poetry — and stated that he "struggles to put [his] 'vision' on paper". Byrd said of Laughter Of The Witch that "the metamorphoses that Arobateau chronicles in these poems is not easily accessed due to an overabundance of metaphor and imagery". Nisa Donnelly defended Arobateau and said that his "raucous and raw and rough-hewn" writing was reflective of the qualities of her characters and storyline.

Scholarship

Rather than focus on Arobateau's fiction about transsubjects alone, it seems more useful to explicate how the author sustained and supported the fifty-year journey from woman to man through a writing life in which transworld identity was housed in a ghetto heaven important for black transfutures beyond necropolitics.

— LaMonda Horton-Stallings
Funk the Erotic, 2015.

In a literature review published in American Quarterly, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan found that content and themes of Arobateau and Toni Newman "offer narrative alternatives" to the practice of transmedicalism by positing sexual practice as a vital component of the concept of self. Horton-Stallings credits work of Arobateau and Newman for constructing a transgender theory of subjectivity which considers "race, culture, and pleasure" — aspects which were overlooked by contemporary models according to her.

Analyzing semantic shift of the word "cum" underlying social change in a Sexuality & Culture article, Sara Johnsdotter traced the first mention of "female cum" to Arobateau's Hobo Sex (1991). Julie R. Enszer discussed the issue of lesbian erasure within the transgender community in Journal of Lesbian Studies, citing experiences and works of Arobateua and others.

Doctoral dissertations of Ute Rupp (University of California, Berkeley, 2003) and Naomi Extra (Rutgers University, 2021) centered heavily on Arobateau's body of work for their analysis of Lacanian comparative literature and literary black feminist history, respectively. Focusing on writings of Arobateau, master's thesis of Patena Starlin Key (University of Texas at Austin, 2014) discussed sexual tricking "as a method of survival and resistance in a capitalist society".

For their doctoral dissertations, Holly Ann Larson (Florida Atlantic University, 2003) and Lauren Nicole Logan (Alliant International University, 2010) researched life experiences of Arobateau amongst others. The former was a feminist standpoint epistemological study of how financially weak women and individuals such as Arobateau tackle various forms of structural gender biases and exert their sexual capital through their writings; the latter was a psychological research into minority stress coping mechanisms of masculine African-American lesbians, especially people like Arobateau who identify as multiple minorities.

Legacy

At a time when Black, explicitly queer artistic expression was virtually invisible in the mainstream, Arobateau's work was more than just homoerotic. It challenged the heterosexual, male-centric vision of Black sexual pleasure and desire at the core of street lit's popularity, expanding the genre into otherwise off-limits realms.

— Naomi Extra
Vice, 2018.

Arobateau was one of the earliest writers and proponents of street lit, transgender and lesbian erotica. A 2018 profile in Vice described his content as "writing that helped pave the way for inclusive depictions of Black sexuality". For Arobateau's entry in Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States (2009), Emmanuel S. Nelson summarized that "arguably Red Jordan Arobateau is the first and probably most prolific female-to-male transsexual writer of African American descent."

Shockley stated that the kind of characters Arobateau depicted had been "largely ignored or glossed over in the whole of Afro-American literature by black female writers." In To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995), Joanna Russ characterizes works such as Arobateau's fiction to be "a few of the marvelous things that exists outside the pale of the dominators". Writers Shockley and Michelle Tea have mentioned Arobateau as one of their inspirations.

Bibliography

Novels

• A Blackman Is Not A Windup Doll
• A Hillbilly Girl Is Like A Butterfly
• A Small Retrospect Of My Art Paintings
• Acts Against The Power Of Authority
• Ashcan Betty
• At An Early Age
• Autumn Changes
• Barrio Blues
• Boogie Nights/Party Lights
• Boy Center
• Can't Go On Another Day
• China Girl
• Come With Me Lucy
• Compassion
• Daughters Of Courage
• Dirty Picture
• Electro Shock Doktor
• Empire!
• Ephemeris — The Book Of Time
• Flash! On The Hustler
• Fisherpeople
• Fleamarket Molly
• For Want Of The Horse The Rider Was Lost
• Garbage Can Sally
• Ho Stroll
• Hobo Sex
• How's Mars?
• In The Strange Embrace Of A Prodigal
• Jailhouse Stud
• Journey series
• Ladies' Axiliary Of The Left/Champagne, Firecrackers, Gunshots & The Smoke From The Death Factory
• Lamentations In The Cool Of The Evening
• Lay Lady Lay
• Leader Of The Pack
• Light At Dawn
• Lucy & Mickey
• Man Gone/Starvax
• My Continuing Journey Into Artistic, Spiritual, and Revolutionary Thoughts
• Outlaws!
• Passage series
• Prisoner Of Hearts
• Saints
• Satan's Best
• Stage Door
• Street Fighter
• The Bacchanalias Society Bash
• The Bars Across Heaven
• The Big Change
• The Black Biker
• The Blood Of Christ Against The Lies of Babylon
• The Clubfoot Ballerina/The Prima Dona
• The Great Heart Bank Robbery
• The Man From The Blax Galaxy
• The Nearness Of You/Sorrow Of The Madonna
• The Rich/The Poor In Spirit
• To The Man With His Hat In His Hand
• Tranny Biker
• Vengeance!
• Westpoint Of The Universe
• Where The World Is No
• White Girl

Short story collections

• Alexander D'oro
• Boys' Night Out
• Doing It For The Mistress
• Rough Trade
• Stories From The Dance Of Life series
• Street Of Dreams
• Suzie Q

Plays

• Carnivalla
• Daughters Of Courage
• Higher Ground
• How Don Juan Died
• In The Malestrom
• Inhabitants Of A Ghettoized Population
• Lavandarette Of My Solitude
• Our Dyke House
• The Love Lament Of Peter Pan
• The Maids

Poetry collections

• Laughter Of The Witch
• The Age of Om
• The Iron Woman