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Introduction

BY ALEXANDER CHEE

THIS BOOK IN YOUR HANDS IS one you could say I’ve waited for, and I’m not alone. In the year since my own memoir of this time came out, I’ve heard from so many readers about how they have wanted what it had to offer—and more than that. The era in question, San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s, was an enormously important time, when the city’s culture was under attack by conservative politicians and we saw the birth of the ACT UP and Queer Nation movements.

And when I arrived in San Francisco in 1989, I found the queer punk scene I had not even dared dream of, and the Popstitutes were the hot funny center of that action. Alvin Orloff was their smiling butch. He had a smile that could reach you no matter the mood, and looked like he’d escaped from The Outsiders. He’s had more life than that, as you’ll read here, but it means so much to get the view from the stage, as it were, as well as the life past it. As I learned when I was a go-go dancer, there’s nothing like the view you get and with everyone looking at you, they aren’t hiding themselves from you. You can really see them, if you look. And he did.

It is ironic to find in these pages the city that has almost vanished under waves of Silicon Valley gentrifiers. I don’t know why so much of what happened in the late 80s and early 90s is not online, but it is gradually being written about and archived. It is not the same thing to go to Polk Street now. It is not the same thing to go to the Mission. The stories of those who lived here then and who fought and died for rights we’re in danger of losing again, the stories of the rights we still don’t have, returned to me as I read this, and I thought of the difference between stories written by those who lived through this and the stories written by those who can only imagine it.

There’s a strange love I have for these times that can be hard to explain. How can I love what I lived through from a time that was as “bad” as that? But as I read this, and those days came into view again, what I think of that love now is that there was a beauty to the beauty you found then that was made the more fierce by the horror of what was happening. If you could still find the worth of your life, still find sex, love, friendship, your own self-worth amid these attempts by the state at erasure and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, then it had the strength of something forged in fire. Queer punk is still with us, still alive, even assimilated by those who would never have dared to support it at the time. Which makes the stories here in Disasterama! the more vital. The stories here are not just a simple record but a record of how Alvin faced what he saw and still thrived. There’s lessons here if you want them.

So come to the source, as it were. Walk the vanished streets, learn about Go-Go, Harvey Milk, return to a time when neither national political party cared if we lived, much less if we could vote. Learn how making an outfit could be a revolution or at least a call to one. A dream of the future for one night that could become a gift to us all.

—Alexander Chee

JULY 2019