Drag Queen Story Hour Founder Michelle Tea is Telling the Queer Stories We Need Now
Words: Marisa Crawford
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I first discovered Michelle Tea’s work when I moved to San Francisco in the early 2000s and attended her queer reading series at the SF Public Library, RADAR. Tea would host the smartest, coolest, most cutting edge writers from the Bay Area and beyond with a chatty, disarming style that put everyone at ease, then hand out cookies to audience members who braved to ask a question during the Q&A.
This commitment to uplifting queer stories and communities has been a constant in Tea’s world that’s shifted shapes over the past several decades. In addition to her own prolific writing career — which spans children’s, YA, and adult novels, an award-winning essay collection, tarot books, and, most recently, a queer pregnancy memoir — Tea founded the all-women, all-queer open mic night, Sister Spit, in the 90s, and later the traveling roadshow by the same name.
Tea also created the first ever Drag Queen Story Hour in 2015. The energy that she brings to her projects is infectious—so it’s fitting that Tea’s latest venture, a queer book publisher and literary organisation, is named DOPAMINE, after the brain chemical that makes us feel pleasure, motivation, and satisfaction. I had the joy of chatting with Tea over email about how—and why—she does all that she does, the impetus for starting DOPAMINE, and what she’s up to next.
Polyester: You are so prolific as a writer and creator. Can you share a peek into your creative process?
Michelle Tea: My creative process has changed a lot over time. Right now I am working on a project that is being guided by my agent, with the hope that it might be able to pay me something. I really like the ideas and premise of this work, but at the same time, if I am not able to sell it, I will probably let it go, let it maybe emerge in a different way. Because writing for the market feels really different for me, and I am so grateful I’ve managed to have the opportunity to, but it absolutely requires me to tweak my natural voice and concerns into something more salable. Which I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about, as you could imagine. To balance this, I have to have another project that has possibly no commercial appeal whatsoever, just a project that is in me and wants out. There are often a bunch - an astrologer I love, Larry Arrington, once told me that I will always have more ideas for projects than I have time to produce them, and I console myself a lot with that - I’m not doing anything wrong, it’s just not possible! So I get A LOT out of being told I’m prolific - it’s embarrassing - because I am so aware of all the shit I’m not ever going to do.
The nuts and bolts are, I just scramble once I have a deadline and make it all come together. It’s harder than it was when I was younger, because I have a kid, and I keep starting more fucking projects, like DOPAMINE. But at the very least I write once a week with the writer Brooke Palmieri, whose I’m publishing in 2025. We got to this wild diner in Glendale, California, Foxy’s - it looks like a medieval A-frame inside, with lots of fake antiques from various eras and toasters at all the tables. They eventually kick us out for taking up space but not before we have drunk many, many coffee refills.
Can you tell us about your new project DOPAMINE? What made you decide to start it, and why now in particular?
I have been missing curating literary events ever since I moved to Los Angeles in 2015, leaving behind my non-profit, RADAR Productions, as most of its funding was local. I finally was thinking about starting RADAR from scratch again, out here, with the help of Beth Pickens - I would not have done ANYTHING if she hadn’t agreed to come on board and help direct and manage. She’s a genius, in many arenas, and certainly in this one. She was Managing Director of RADAR when it was most successful, due to her work and abilities. Anyway, it turned out RADAR has been horribly mismanaged in recent years, with an Executive Director committing fraud - I only found this all out when I started looking into the possibility of an LA RADAR. It was impossible. Beth was confident about starting a fresh non-profit, and I mentioned I wanted to publish, because I have always, always wanted to do that, and the only thing holding me back has been fear, specifically economic fear. I figured I should do it now or else I really would never do it, and once I made that decision our non-profit became a publisher, because it is really hard to only publish a little!
DOPAMINE is dedicated to publishing “stories of unvarnished queer existence.” What does unvarnished queer existence mean to you, and why is it particularly important to highlight right now?
For me it just means stories of queer experience that aren’t cleaned up for mass consumption. I don’t think queer stories are the only stories this happens to -on some level I think it happens to everyone. Capitalism caters to the common denominators and it can sand the edges off of us all, especially marginalized people and their stories. Queers are in a weird place right now where in many ways we are not marginalized—or in many geographies we are not—but we are simultaneously seeing so many fascist attacks upon the most vulnerable of us: trans people, especially trans youth, trans women, trans POC, drag queens, etc. Queers have always felt a pressure to capitulate to the we’re just like you! Narrative in order to gain basic rights and safely enjoy the ways in which we may be just like everyone else. But we are also not like everyone else, and DOPAMINE is a place where both the trauma of that reality and the powerful ways queer difference can positively impact culture are celebrated and revered.
What are some DOPAMINE projects you're working on?
Our first book, an anthology called SLUTS, will be out in May, and my room is full of galleys wrapped up and ready to go. I’m looking forward to bringing them to the post office and moving on to the next task! We have some readings coming up, too - in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Madison, Chicago, New York City, Hudson, Boston and Provincetown. This feels like the really, really fun part of books, getting to go out into the world and have fun with them.
This morning I also sent our first authored book, Clement Goldberg’s New Mistakes, to the book designer, which feels triumphant and exciting. Clement’s book has inspired me so much, it is truly so smart and funny and queer and alive, I cannot WAIT for it to be in the world.
I’m also excited to complete my own edits of How to Fuck Like a Girl by Vera Blossom, which will come out after Clement’s. Vera is a fantastic thinker and writer and personality, she is the whole package and I am really excited to get to help her with her first of what I know will be many books.
I am so excited for all of these books! With SLUTS coming out so soon, can you share what drew you to the idea of the slut, the word “slut,” and all its history and baggage? What is a slut? Why is it important to do a deep-dive on sluttiness at this particular moment?
I feel like the word slut has been everywhere for a while now, in a manner I mostly think has been fun and silly - like, Eggslut??? It’s been enjoyable. And certainly liberating for me in the way it reclaims the stigma and owns being sexually voracious, or generally hedonistic - whatever the word means to you. Of course it is also still used as a way to control people, mostly women and femmes, and even for people happily splashing around in it there is likely a past relationship with that word that was more fraught. Seeing how complicated it is, and how it is a site of both conflict and sex - two things that create stories - I knew it would be a great prompt for writers, and I was very open to whatever direction a person wanted to go with it.
I'm so inspired by your commitment to your own writing along with literary activism through editing, curating, and otherwise supporting other artists and writers. How do you find the right balance for these two modes of creative work, or can you talk to these two impulses and how they complement each other or otherwise coexist?
I think they really do complement each other, in so many ways. Being part of a literary community - doing Sister Spit in the 90s, as a weekly open mic when I was just getting started, it literally helped me write, because I wanted to have something new each week, and I wanted to be part of the literary conversations that were happening all around me in the open mics and reading series and other events that really defined culture for me in that era, in San Francisco. Also, lifting up writers with the Sister Spit tours and with RADAR, it has always helped me as well. When they get attention, I get attention. I didn’t do it for this self-serving reason - it has always felt like throwing parties to me, or curating a dinner, that sort of fun bringing people together - but I recognized right away that it was good for me, too. And I think there is something about me, astrologically, that my way upward is through the lifting of other people. Which I really love. It also helps keep your - my! - ego in check. Like, my work isn’t always to get myself in a big magazine. Sometimes my work is to help get other writers into big magazines. That work is just as important as my own writing to me.
I was just revisiting your wonderful first book, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America—and I’m thinking about the through line in your work—both your work as a writer and an editor/curator—of mistakes, messy-ness, “unvarnished” life. Why is this important to you, and how is this political?
It has been important to me, personally, because it allows me a ton of freedom and possibility. If you are worried about fucking up you will of course take less chances, and perfectionism has always been very clearly a losing game to me. As a person who has identified with underdogs with my whole life, you see how culture can label a person and restrict their access, and how unjust that is, and so I have always questioned what society labels as failures and losers, and have found when those labelled individuals can speak through art of through a larger community it is always the most brilliant and righteous truths being shared. It is very political because the metrics of success and failure are almost entirely capitalistic, and that gets into our brains and even the way we (falsely) understand ourselves.
I came to know that the notions of success and failure are really just one, shallow way of reading a larger phenomenon, a life or an experiment, and they are not real. And even if they feel real, or have real-world consequences, they don’t mean what we think they mean. Life is a lot bigger and more interesting when we find other ways to understand things, and ourselves. And I think work that does allow for those narratives that embrace or reconceptualize ‘failure’ are really liberating for all of these reasons.