
Time Also Will Make It Interesting
Selected Journals
Red Jordan Arobateau(Author)
Cameron Awkward-Rich(Editor)
Nightboat Books (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 27. August 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
400 pages
978-1-64362-305-4 (ISBN)
Description
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 U.S. 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 forte-fiction! All under one binding & title!"
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 U.S. 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 forte-fiction! All under one binding & title!"
Reviews / Votes
"Bracing, funny as hell, genre-busting, and liberatory-Time Will Also Make It Interesting is exactly the book we need, and like nothing you've read before."-T Fleischmann
"Read Red for his critical contributions to histories of queer, trans, working class, black, disabled folk, and more. But also read him for his unrelenting will to write feelings, make art, and take up space-even when the establishment said otherwise."
-Naomi Extra
"[Red] lived to see and become part of a true trans revolution, gaining a crucial-life-saving?-context for himself."-Michelle Tea
"Time Also Will Make It Interesting reintroduces the work of Red Jordan Arobateau-a major gift in a time where there are still so few Black trans people in print."
-Cyree Jarelle Johnson
"Cameron's selection reveals Red's range while preserving what made him essential: his refusal to separate the erotic from the sacred."
-Diana Cage
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
paintings by the author
Dimensions
Height: 209 mm
Width: 133 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-64362-305-4 (9781643623054)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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.