At the end of the world, I’d make sure to save Michelle Tea’s Valencia. For the uninitiated: It’s a lesbian cult classic, a joyful autofictional novel published in 2000. It’s “an exuberant, hilarious record,” as Maggie Nelson writes in the foreword to its new 25th anniversary edition, “of a truly unprecedented and mutinous time in lesbian/queer history – the San Francisco dyke scene of the 1990s.” It follows our narrator, Michelle, through a series of lovers and bad decisions, fueled by drink and drugs and the heady rush of being young, queer, and an artist at the epicenter of her world. When I first read Valencia at 19, I was living in San Francisco as the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the city beyond. Because I encountered Valencia during an unprecedented time of my own, it’s formed me as a lesbian and writer; I have quite literally grown up alongside it.
My first time reading Valencia, I seethed with envy. I’d always known I was gay, but before I could start really practicing it, the world had shut down, like a massive cock-block from the universe, and I was determined to salvage the plot of my life. I’d sometimes walk down Tea’s titular Valencia Street, double-masked against disease. SF had changed a lot since the block-rocking ‘90s dyke punk scene Tea captures in the novel. It had become techy, certainly, more gentrified, and soulless. Besides, in 2021, lesbian life — free-wheeling cruising, kissing queers at bars, snorting their drugs, and taking one or more home — was no longer safe, or allowed. Reading Tea’s Valencia during this isolating time, I felt profoundly robbed.
Except there were elements, even then, of Tea’s world that I was experiencing. That year, I had a massive unacknowledged crush on my best friend, with whom I lived in a Covid-19 pod — and, because of San Francisco’s astronomical costs of living, also shared a bed. She was not the only girl I weathered Covid with that I ended up falling for that year. I was so transformed by these experiences that I became a novelist. Why wouldn’t I? Tea, too, is a writer who’s driven by her own life. “I could write about my own life as if I were creating a character in a novel … just slamming a bunch of messy, crazy, fast life into my notebook,” Tea wrote in the 2008 foreword to Valencia. “And I found that in the process of transforming my world, my life, my self into literature, my world, life, and self became elevated … Everything I touched turned to story, and it was golden.”
Tea, in her words, stole this practice of autofictionalizing from her own queer artistic foremother: the inimitable Eileen Myles, whose 1994 novel Chelsea Girls “was an electrifying experience” for Tea. “I could do this,” she wrote. It is sweet of her, I think, to cite her artistic inspiration — I’d joke enabler — as a queer thief of life. To Tea, archiving her life was a radical practice. Those of us coming up now are fortunate to have other real-time broadcasts of queer life; there’s a few lesbian women I follow on TikTok who post dating updates filmed straight-to-camera, as if spilling over FaceTime with a friend. Across generations, some things never change.
This year, I reread Valencia‘s special 25th anniversary edition released by Serpent Tail Press. This time, I didn’t read it with envy: I read it like a look in the mirror. “It’s a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened, and how I felt about it happening,” Tea has said of the novel, and I thought, Oh.
I’m not spiritual, nor a practitioner of magic like Tea is, but I felt the alignment. I’m in my 24th year of life, living in Brooklyn, which feels like the epicenter of lesbian world. I can relate to Tea when she describes herself: “I was twenty-three years old, had just moved to San Francisco, and these poems had allowed me to plug myself into the roiling early-’90s street poetry scene … I was psyched; I had found my dream community, and all I had to do to be part of it was run my mouth about what and who pissed me off. Incredibly, no one told me to shut up. They clapped. The mixture of butch dykes, shy girls, ex-bikers …… and other intellectual miscreants was astounding.”
Valencia is a portrait of a community, Tea a voice of her generation, as the eye-roll-inducing saying goes. There’s a stacked cast of characters, all real women: Petra, the knife-wielding sicko who rocks Michelle’s world. Willa, then Iris, then Spacegirl and Fate. I recognized these characters. I feel like if I haven’t dated them, one of my friends has, plus totally new characters too, as queer life becomes more diverse. We, too, are embedded in a specific cultural moment: the Brooklyn dyke and doll scene of the ‘20s, I can imagine them calling it. It is perhaps too precocious to describe something as a “scene” when you are living inside of it, but that is how I feel — inside an explosion of culture and innovation, with community events every weekend, a renaissance of activity after the pandemic, which ushered in the queerest generation to date. Perhaps I am more primed to recognize this rarity, this specialness, because it all feels so fleeting. Fascism is on the rise in America, trans people are under attack, and alarm bells are already being sounded against gay marriage, which has been legal for as long as I can remember.
But also, Valencia permitted me to romanticize my world. Around the time I first read Valencia, there was a trending audio on TikTok, the new rolodex and informal town square of Gen Z queer culture. “You have to romanticize your life,” a woman’s voice called. Cue swelling music, montage. I found these videos genuinely moving, jumpcuts of the big and small moments of ordinary people’s lives. This trend contributed to the rise of “main character energy” — a tendency to self-identify as a protagonist, treating my life like a movie others are watching. Equal parts coping mechanism and pathology, probably, main character energy emerged as a meme during the Covid-19 pandemic — arguably a brutal, disillusioning, undeniably literary era in my friends’ lives — to give meaning to our experiences.
Michelle Tea had main character energy before it was cool. I can imagine her making questionable, potentially life-altering decisions based on whether they’ll be “good for the plot.” Her protagonist is often struck by the literary portent of everyday existence, searching for the detail that will later reveal itself as symbolism, the metaphor that will make it all make sense.
See the way she drags you on-scene in the opening passage of Valencia:
“I sloshed away from the bar with my drink … Don’t ask me what I was wearing. Something to impress What’s-Her-Name, the girl I wasn’t dating … Let me tell you right away, just so you understand the magnitude of my experience, that I was truly obsessed with this woman.” By the time she rolls into bed with Petra, who immediately pulls out her kinky knife, Michelle vows to “not enjoy it too much. I would be an observer. I’d observe Petra.” She’s young, inexperienced – “Put your fist up me. What? I had read about this once, in a lesbian book.” But within two paragraphs, when Michelle has started fisting Petra, really gotten her groove, the narrative changes – “I was afraid of breaking Petra,” she recounts, first bewildered, then smug. “It was pretty incredible. Knife-wielding Petra, more a force of nature than a girl like me, impaled upon my humble hand … It was the hand of god.”
This is not the only time — in the opening scene, even — that Michelle describes herself like a higher power. She masters her life twice: first as she experiences it, then afterwards in words. (Tea’s processing happens almost in real time — she wrote Valencia while still in her twenties, with a speed Nelson describes as a “missive sent straight from the mayhem.”) That is the author’s superpower — or villainry, depending on who you ask — to always have the last word.
But it’s a fleeting power, and a soft one at best. The truth is that times are getting hard. Even the main characters — those of us privileged to be born in the Global North, with access to healthcare and education and queer life — are starting to feel its effects. This is something Tea, a veteran of queer life and organizing, is aware of. One of the joys of being a fan of Tea is to witness her artistic evolution, a map of potential futures for myself. Tea, who currently publishes writers under her imprint Dopamine Press, speaks often about the importance of queer writers staying with the times.
“We are seeing history repeat itself again and again,” she said in an interview this year. “And at the same time, things are quantitatively better than they were in the 90s. Overall, I think queer people are safer, especially in progressive cities. I don’t know that we’ve had a government that [was so focused on] oppressing and obliterating queer and trans people before, but it’s a result of how much progress we’ve made.”
Of course, she continued, the “battleground has shifted,” and the stakes are higher because the very healthcare and “basic human rights” that trans people require are being threatened. “It’s wild. Trans people have never been so visible, and had so much public support, and also never been so demonised,” she noted.
If history is a cycle, I am returning to the original texts. Novels like Valencia offer a guidebook for navigating our times. Tea has spoken about her refusal to be nostalgic for the ‘90s — “When I was younger and saw nostalgia in older people, it really scared me. I never wanted to have that kind of relationship to my own history,” she said in that same interview. Gay people rarely peak in high school — it seems we age fantastically, like wine – but Valencia remains relevant. Wherever there are queer women, there are the ones who will run our mouths. We will live-stream and TikTok and Substack and autofictionalize our lives as we stand. In this way, we will live forever.
