Red Jordan Arobateau
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.
Arobateau worked odd jobs to finance his self-publications, and sold hand-stapled books in lesbian bars, feminist bookstores and on the streets.
An early figure in the history and development of street lit, Arobateau inspired writers Ann Allen Shockley and Michelle Tea.
[9] Arobateau attributed those refusals to the prominence of sexual content in his works, which he claimed was relatively unacceptable even for feminist and LGBTQ+ publishers of the time.
[29] 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.
They portrayed realities of those lives, which differed from works of other black women writers of the time who generally wrote idealistic fiction and academic non-fiction.
[1] Arobateau's content reflected the social isolation he endured because of growing up "poor, black, and gay", and how he developed maladaptive coping mechanisms as a result.
Shockley further praised the storyline for its progressive portrayal of black prostitutes "in the personalized role of being human", that she said were otherwise cast in mainstream "as a piece of meat to be exploited in pornography";[4] writing for the Gay Community News, Andrea Loewenstein said that "Suzie Q" does so with "a rare combination of respect, sympathy, and realism.
"[31] LaMonda Horton-Stallings wrote in a CR: The New Centennial Review article that Arobateau and Iceberg Slim had mastered "the skill of transgressing gender and sexuality".
[38] Reviewing Lucy & Mickey, Heather Findlay summarized that the novel was "deeply philosophical and powerfully erotic",[39] and Lillian Faderman remarked that Arobateau was "the Thomas Wolfe of lesbian literature".
[40] For a Maximum Rocknroll article, 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.
[4] In an article of The Lesbian Review of Books, 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".
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".
[45] Noting difficulties Arobateau faced in getting his books published "as an erotic writer of street-class butch life", Thyme S. Siegel commended him for continuing to write and self-publish works in his unique style.
[46] 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.
[47] Ute Rupp's (University of California, Berkeley, 2001) comparative literature doctorate discussed that writings of Daniel Paul Schreber, Djuna Barnes, Kathy Acker and Arobateau offer an unconventional reading of the Symbolic in the Name of the Father, which in turn develops "new types of subjects, laws, reals, imaginaries, and similar psycho-somatic fictions" within Lacanian frameworks.
[30] In a literature review published in American Quarterly, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan indicated that the content and themes of Arobateau and Newman demonstrate how sexual practice is a vital component of the concept of self, and that it provides "narrative alternatives" to transmedicalism.
[50] Holly Ann Larson's doctoral dissertation (Florida Atlantic University, 2003) was a feminist standpoint epistemological discourse on how financially weak women and individuals like Arobateau tackle structural gender biases.
Larson concluded that those experiences led to development of knowledge of resistance unique to them, and that individuals like Arobateau attempted to reclaim agency by exerting sexual capital in their writings.
[51] In her doctoral dissertation, Naomi Extra (Rutgers University, 2021) explored a more inclusive understanding of sex-positive feminism and the early sex-positive movement; noting that development and early history of those movements mainly credited works of white women, Extra advocated for literary recognition of writings of black writers Arobateau, SDiane Bogus and Shockley and their contributions.
[52] American studies doctorate of Moultry (University of Iowa, 2019) focused on influences a mixed-race identity had on writers and artists of 1960–89, and how they reconciled their racial hybridity when the one-drop rule (legal and social practice of classifying individuals under only one race) was still in effect.
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.
[2] For his 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.
"[4] In To Write Like a Woman (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".
