Michelle Tea
Michelle Tea
Michelle Teais an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, prostitution, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their views into the queercore community. In 2012 Tea partnered with City Lights Publishers to form the Sister Spit imprint...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
trying glamour illegal
i wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.
lots people queer
Lots of my writing can be accurately called lesbian, but I myself am queer and date people of all genders.
assume course hateful homophobic labeled limiting people per queer
Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.
coming hardly job otherwise
I think it's my job to make any question interesting by coming up with a jazzy answer, otherwise I hardly deserve the spotlight, right?
should
you are right where you should be / now act like it
girl sweet nice
You try to be good, to be good and loving and nice and not hard, not tough, a sweet nice girl, not ugly, not full of ugliness, but people make it impossible.
care take-care
Maybe we could all take care of each other, I dreamed.
girl heart men
it just breaks / a man's heart, watching / a girl so involved with her life, / without him like that.
book writing home
. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.
beautiful pain work-out
Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.
thinking two knowing
The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.
dream people forever
I've been dreaming about having a press forever, like the '90s. I've always known so many great writers who aren't as connected to the publishing world as they should be, and I have the energy and the enthusiasm to sort of gather and promote people, so I've always thought someday I might embark on a big project like that.
people phrases earth
...people like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped.
kissing talking drunk
Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.