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 forté—fiction! All under one binding & title!”

“Iconoclastic."

—Lambda Book Report

—LaMonda Horton-Stallings

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.