A landmark collection of poems by Bambi Lake, the beloved (and bad-mouthed) icon of San Francisco’s counterculture.

Bambi Lake was a trans chanteuse performer, provocateur, and countercultural darling of the ‘70s, and subsequent decades. “The Glamorous Life follows me around,” she wrote, and sang about in her ballad “The Golden Age of Hustlers” (later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond). Her life in San Francisco—including a stint in the Cockettes, and one adjacent to the Angels of Light—was “sort of legendary,” sort of “sweet, sticky, nasty,” and always precarious, lived in spite of addiction, homelessness, and the horrors that came from chasing and surviving her own desires.

Here are her poems, long out of print, that wear “burgundy velvet jezebel bras” to seduce “fatally hetero” men, detailing the cabaret of desire amidst social, cultural, and political change. “I am Beauty,” she writes, “and the world dissolves.”

The collection includes a series of interviews by August Bernadicou, and a foreword by Brontez Purnell.

“A trailblazer.”

—Birdie Bob Watt 

“She has inspired so many in the queer and trans community; a fabulous songwriter and chanteuse. I have been a fan since I met her back in the '80s, when San Francisco was a very different place.”

—D’arcy Drollinger

Bambi Lake (1950-2020) was an author and chanteuse performer based in San Francisco, known for work that spoke to her experience as a transgender woman. She made her first appearance with The Cockettes, the avant-garde theater group, in the early 1970s, and has since been the subject of the documentary Sticks & Stones (2014) and a ballad revival, “The Golden Age of Hustlers,” written by Lake and later recorded by Justin Vivian Bond. She authored a memoir with Alvin Orloff, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake (1996).