When I first told my friend I was going to the Bay for an extended period of time she was scared for me. “Be careful, willow! It is a BAY. Things sit, swirl, and stagnate—no one ever moves up or moves on, and the only activity is talking shit about one another!” I thought this was dramatic, and likely a stretch, but I also liked the conceit: one, the idea that the geography of a place psychically altered the social movement of the people living in it, and two, the prospect of an alternate urban scheme where instead of ascending a ladder of culture, people might be sitting, swirling, and secreting, seeing what came up and riding it out. That felt spiritually old school to me, whatever old school meant, it felt like local legend shit, it almost sounded like the approximation of a social fabric, even in the alienated 2020s. I wasn’t planning on relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area permanently, but then, I guess, I fell in.
Devour Me, Again, the new posthumous collection of Bambi Lake’s poetry from Nightboat unfolds like an argument in my friend’s favor but from a complementary angle. It feels impossible to talk about Bambi Lake’s writing without talking about the eddy of San Francisco, this foggy city on the hill and its surrounding towns, anchored by the primal cauldron of energy that is the Bay itself. The Bay seems constantly at risk of sliding off the face of the cultural map and yet its status as queer fantasia feels both historic and enduring. Learning about Bambi was less of a revelation and more of a homecoming, one where I quickly understood that she was the reference I was chasing, and had been, whether or not the sourcing was conscious or not. She was actually the archetype, the TS Punk Rock Chick, or as Brontez Purnell writes in his introduction, a representative “of the older, elemental gods.”
As Bambi herself characterizes it, the Bay feels like a fantasy, like the sought after “fairyland of [her] youth.” A Bay Area life is characterized by its cast of characters: witches, warlocks, starlets and punk rockers. Bambi Lake understood herself to be important because she chronicled two important laboratories of cultural production: one was herself, and the other was her scene and the world as it appeared to her. About herself and her then-boyfriend Baba, she wrote: “I like to think of us as having a real place / in rock history / in our Bambi’s dreamhouse apartment,” and so she does. So mote it be. Or, as she writes about her circle of barhopping friends: “these are the people who could have become junkies or killed themselves but didn’t. So have found a rare sort of happiness.” And through it all she “reach[es] for [her] pen / because someone has got to write this stuff down.”
Through her stories we encounter decades of San Francisco’s underground: Bambi’s hosts of lovers who end up disappointing her, her sisters in the Cockettes and Angels of Light theatre troupes, a portrait of Dead Kennedy Jello Biafra, a whole poem on meeting Sylvester through the years, names dropping all over the page. One of the few times we see Bambi leave San Francisco she goes to Provincetown and meets Marsha P. Johnson, Holly Woodlawn—who’s so sweet that she changes Bambi’s life—and Cookie Mueller. Mueller feels like an especially apt appearance: she’s arguably the cis Bambi Lake, and her famous line, “I’m not wild! I happen to stumble onto wildness,” echoes Bambi’s sentiment that “the Glamorous Life follows me around.”
Bambi Lake is a big deal, and she will tell you that in first and third person. Her writing is not formally ambitious, but it is dense with ideas that slosh up against their container. Her poetry is gripping, and her language plays along the page like a true conveyor of the ki, with the patter, pathos, and breadth of reference only a well-studied transsexual about town can really cinch. She is witty, resigned, excitable, somewhat disarming in her vulnerable “just a girl” sentimentality. You get the sense that she really knows what’s what, what matters and what does not. Bambi is the girl at the bar in the sunglasses with her notebook, and in her recollections she becomes a patron saint for fellow girls who are “always looking for under the table work,” who would like to “star in underground films,” who “speak in a kind of Royal Academy of Drama voice.” Girls who we might call “the wicked strong punk goth girls of nowadays,” who want a lot but will settle for the most elusive prize of all, “a permanent deep meaningful relationship with a cute guy with tattoos.”
Bambi Lake is not self-deprecating, but she does understand things are not totally fair about her situation. Even though her life is full of love, even though “everyone is talking about Miss Thing / regal everyday people!” even though she is this highly charismatic, mythic self construction, or perhaps precisely because of all these things—because she is a transsexual in precarity—her life is also lonely, and this emerges most significantly in how she narrates her relationship to men. A major theme in Devour Me, Again is not being appreciated publicly as one might be adored privately, and the friction therein. Bambi is a sex worker, she is a stripper, she is advised to never tell clients at the club about her situation, even though some obviously love the something extra. In the collection’s opening poem, “I,” she writes: “I am / sort of heroic / sort of legendary, / my lovers have always preferred / to love Me in private. / So the outside world / has always seemed / a bit unreal to Me.” It’s a recipe for heartbreak, and she rides her heartbreak into grand romanticism. “All love is suffering” for Bambi Lake, but the suffering is “old, eternal, and expensive.” In her epic screed against an ex-lover titled “You don’t love me so I’m ugly, and I’m going to kill myself, and it’s all your fault!!” her ultimate fantasy is to be told to be herself.
Being yourself is a trade with uneasy returns, even if the Bay rewards the sentiment more than anywhere I’ve encountered in the country outside of, like, New Orleans. Hard lives become easier to parse in memorandum, lives on the edge become easier to celebrate when they no longer provoke the discomfort of flesh. This is dazzlingly apparent in how August Bernadicou, the editor of the collection, frames his presumably beloved subject in the introduction. When he meets Bambi for the first time, homeless, on drugs, accosting him as a potential sex partner, he writes that—and despite him seeking her out—he is “shocked” by the person in front of him, so different from who he had read about, someone “more real, raw and terrifying.”
In Devour Me, Again, a new generation of people trying to live fiercely values-aligned and desire-driven lives get to see Bambi Lake as a role model for believing in yourself, taking things one day at a time, and always listening out for internal cum external alignment. In her 1996 memoir, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake, from which Devour Me, Again excerpts, Bambi discusses how important it is for girls to familiarize themselves with their history. She introduces three depictions of transvestites in culture, all by men (John Rechy, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Jean Genet) and then—ever prescient and self-aware—follows that her “persona is a creation with a specific agenda: to provide a positive archetype.” Reading this collection, I see a mission fulfilled. Devour Me, Again made me think less about the work of writing and more about the work of living. Bambi charts a destiny for the fab transsexual artist in the 21st century, in a collapsing timeline, where history comes to us as a balm. A path in which the most exalted course for the TS maverick might just be local legend status, and where the transfeminine bend towards iconography is sometimes revealed as an analogue for all sorts of other kinds of love and acceptance—the types we might find more fully on the micro: at the bar, at the collective house, at the strip club. Devour Me, Again, ultimately, is asking: Do you even know what it feels like for a girl?
When I think of Bambi Lake, in all her God-source, I think of a channel, I think of a sister. I look around at my life full of Bambi Lakes who make scrappy heartfelt work and always pull a look. I think of how different girls can tap into this endlessly iconic and locatable spirit at different moments, because it is always accessible if you know where to look and if you hear the heed of the call. The mists of San Francisco will clear for those with eyes to see. When you’re a classic, you’re a classic. A high priestess sits at the edge of a Bay, lets the water swirl at her feet.