Time Also Will Make It Interesting: Selected Journals

The selected journals of trans, mixed-race artist and dyke erotica writer Red Jordan Arobateau.

Best known for his erotic lesbian fiction, Red Jordan Arobateau was also a prolific painter who maintained and self-published a journal for roughly twenty years, documenting his life on the “abject bottom” of life in the US. Edited and introduced by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich with a foreword by Michelle Tea and paintings by Arobateau, Time Also Will Make It Interesting captures Arobateau’s life 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.

Queerly messy, ornery, and stuffed with Arobateau’s wisdom, this volume is what he 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!”

Red Jordan Arobateau (1943-2021) was a prolific fiction writer, poet, playwright, diarist, and visual artist. Over the course of his life, Arobateau produced over 60 paintings and 80 literary works, many of which reflect his experiences as a mixed-race, trans/dyke member of the underclass. Arobateau’s writing has been anthologized in Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends (1983), Daughters of Africa (1992), and Whores and Other Feminists (1997), among other publications, and at least seven of his books of erotic fiction were published by Richard Kasak Books in the 1990s. Born in Chicago, Arobateau lived the majority of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025), as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Presently, he is an associate professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Michelle Tea is the author of many books, including Valencia, Against Memoir, and Little F. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and founding editor of DOPAMINE Books.