[If you’ve ever polished off a jug of Carlo Rossi alone at 3 a.m., then decided the most obvious thing to do next is call in delivery for a bottle of champagne.]

Hmmmm. G stared at the black words on the white page blinking like thirsty flies. They were writing a conditional review on Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, a book that had become their lesbian literary bible, a symbol of what writing could be, a fever dream of how they wished the narrative of their life could blur with their writing—like a toilet flush churning with the residual brown scum from the bowl. G deleted the words. What about…

[If you’ve ever dreamt about the apocalypse as a drug-induced, lesbian house party where you finally get to fuck your childhood celebrity crush.]

OR

[If you’ve ever felt like Montgomery the puppet from Eileen Myles’ “THE TRIP,” having a “slow gaayyy revelation…very gay, very, very, gaaaaay”]

Getting warmer. One of G’s favorite aspects of Black Wave is the setting—a fictionalized version of 1999 San Francisco, one that is pre-apocalyptic, with natural gas running dry and giant centipedes roaming the streets. This near-end-of-the-world setting looms in the background, queering the temporal landscape of the narrative. But G also loved how much the queerness in the book spoke to their current revelations in identity. G was having a queer renaissance. They were studying fiction at an MFA program in rural Idaho, and surprisingly, amongst the bucolic hills of wheat was the queerest community G had ever been a part of. There was a small army of queer, non-binary, and trans cuties strutting about in their best butch blue-collar couture. All of them seemed to congregate at the same coffee shop, which reeked of 90s nostalgia—mismatched sofas and couches, shitty local art decorating the walls, and bulletin boards littered with fliers advertising community theater and contra dancing. And G was a part of it. They felt like their life was a sappy sitcom—like Friends meets The L Word meets Little House on the Prairie.

It was 2024.

Sitting at the 90s nostalgia café attempting to write, G glared at their now cold americano wobbling on the unbalanced table with the weight of their elbow. Thy let out a heavy sigh, and deleted the previous sentences.

[If you’ve ever thought of yourself as a total badass and simultaneously the absolute worst person ever that, to cope with the knotted ball of confliction in your chest, you write yourself as the main character in all your work, then Michelle Tea’s Black Wave is the narcissistic, meta-gay, punk rock party you’ve been waiting for!]

G paused, muttered the sentences to themselves quietly. Not bad. Maybe it’s time for a beer? It was almost happy hour at the cafe. They forced themselves to crank out a summary.

[Tea’s novel follows Michelle, a 27-year-old lesbian-punk, who is at a stuck point in her writing career: she has successfully published her first book and is struggling to come up with her next writing project. She works at a bookstore to pay the rent and squanders most of her money on alcohol and drugs while frequenting the same gentrified bars with her fellow lesbian, bohemian, burnout friends. When the San Francisco art scene begins to feel like the same old joke being told over and over and her writing muse is nowhere to be found, Michelle decides that maybe it’s time to move to Los Angeles, where her gay brother lives. But once she makes the move down south, an eschaton ensues, and the countdown to the literal end of the world becomes a matter of days.]

G was a sucker for a protagonist with the same name as the author. It’s a bold move—a Pathetic move—one you gotta have guts to do. Something that G aimed to do in their own fiction. They felt a hit and kept typing:

[Black Wave could be described as metafiction, but Tea contributes a cotton-candy-queer version of the genre. With unconventional formatting and a delightfully unreliable third-person narrator, the meta experience for the reader is deliciously indulgent, keeping you on your toes.

Tea portrays Michelle the character as self-involved, inconsiderate of others’ emotions, dubious to her own flaws, and comically self-pitying. The way the narrative unabashedly centers around Michelle adds to the attraction. Take, for instance, Tea’s manipulation of the dialogue:

This Is All I Know How To Do, Write These Glorified Diary Entries And Now I Can’t Even Do That Because Everyone Is So Fucking Sensitive.

There are no quotations, and when all the characters speak in the novel, their dialogue is in italics. But when Michelle speaks, every word is capitalized, causing her dialogue to visually blend in with the third-person narration, blurring the already fuzzy lines between the two. By omitting quotations and capitalizing her speech, Michelle’s words appear prioritized in the text. 

The third-person narrator often shifts into free-indirect-discourse, taking on Michelle’s biases and opinions. Like when Michelle and her friend Ziggy volunteer to be judges at a teen poetry contest. The narrator explains how they decided not to smuggle alcohol into the event as “proof they were, in fact, not alcoholics.” The narration goes on to justify Michelle and Ziggy’s typical drinking habits, saying “they were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally.” The “I mean” disrupts the narrator’s speech patterns thus far, signifying where Michelle’s influence comes through in the narration’s defensive tone and choice of words. The narrator is straight up unreliable, like a casual hook up where the sex is stupid good—you keep calling them even though they only hit you back at unpredictable hours of the night, usually inebriated. This elusive narration adds to the novel’s queer decadence.]

Look how much I wrote! Definitely beer time.

G went to the bar to buy a pilsner, flirted with the girl who has a boyfriend (but also might be down to fuck?), left a dollar for the bartender, and aggressively avoided eye contact with the person who ghosted them on Tinder now sitting at a table with their new partner.

What would Michelle do? G wondered, sipping the foam head off the pilsner. Something outrageous. Like in the scene when Michelle is having her going away party before moving to Los Angeles. Jealous that her current fuck buddy, Quinn, is eying another girl, Michelle attempts to embarrass this other girl by daring her to “stuff her ass crack full of leftover rice from a bowl in the fridge.” Michelle then “poured soy sauce onto it and dared Quinn to eat it.” And Quinn does eat the rice from this girl’s ass crack. Despite being the one that initiated this pornographic stir-fry scenario, Michelle gets more upset, crying at Quinn, “I Feel SO Emotional About Leaving San Francisco And I Look Over And You’re Giving The Poor Man’s Bettie Page A Rim Job.”

G imagined Michelle in their shoes, going right up to the Tinder ghost’s table, saying something snide like “Oh hi! Is This Your Partner? Were You Together Before Or After We Matched On Tinder?” then tossing the full glass of beer on their face before turning to their partner and asking “You Wanna Get Out Of Here?” G wished they had the guts to do that. Instead, G looked at their copy of Black Wave, then went back to their laptop.

[This unwieldy narration is just one aspect of the novel’s overall queerness. By setting the novel in 1999, Tea harkens back to a specific moment in American queer culture—after the big AIDs epidemic of the 80s and before gay marriage was legal. Tea satirizes archetypes of 90s lesbian culture with Michelle’s cast of friends. Like when Stitch is introduced, we learn all the older butches in the community donated their hand-me-downs when she recently switched from “femme to butch.” Or when Ziggy’s is described as wearing thick belts fitted with Leathermans and Buck knifes to deal with her “feminine hips.”

Each character is a trope of 90s lesbianism. Yet, by placing the novel in a fictionalized pre-apocalyptic version of San Francisco in 1999, Tea creates an alternate version of history, or rather, a performance of it. These aspects make Tea’s novel an example of “temporal drag,” a term coined by queer studies scholar, Elizabeth Freeman. The characters—their clothes, interests, and lifestyle choices—place us within a moment in queer history, which is countered by a fictionalized story of that time, almost “outside of” time. Existing simultaneously in queer history and outside of time, Tea creates space for imagining queer futurity.]

Bringing up Freeman—that’s pretty good! G gulped their beer and made sure to click “save” on their working draft. They flipped through their copy of Black Wave and landed on one of their favorite passages—more queer time stuff!

“It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult… They didn’t get married. They didn’t have children. They didn’t buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.”

G remembered how seen they felt when they first read this excerpt from Black Wave. It’s so true! G didn’t even really “come out” (whatever that means) as queer until their late 20s. And now, at 32, they were divorced, single with one dog, had changed career paths at least 5 times, and were finally going back to school for their masters. For so long they had struggled to bend and contort themselves to fit within heteronormative timelines; it was exhausting. Michelle and her friends follow a lifestyle trajectory that is non-linear and non-traditional, something G craved to see examples of in the world around them.

Sipping their beer, G continued flipping through the pages and landed on 65, where Michelle describes the bookshelf in her San Francisco living room and all the books it holds: Bastard out of Carolina, School of Fish, Macho Sluts, Lesbian Land, Girlfriend Number One, Hello World, The New Fuck You, Chelsea Girls, and so on for another eight lines. G had flagged this page as their new required reading list. But for G, Tea had already situated herself within the queer lineage that she is a descendant of. Black Wave felt like a classic, and one day, G imagined writing a book where Tea’s novel was referenced as the most influential on their bookshelf.

G zoned out a moment while staring at a residual coffee stain on the table. Then, they opened a new document, and began typing:

[G wasn’t sure when everyone started hanging out at the One World Cafe.]

“Hellooooo!!” came a sing-songy voice, interrupting G’s typing. It was their friend, Cam, another queer writer who frequented the café. They were arguably the most fashionable queer in town. Today their outfit served Diane Keaton from Annie Hall but with Bakelite statement jewelry and a pink and orange polka dot silk scarf knotted loosely around their neck.

“Whatcha working on?” they asked.

“This book review on Black Wave—”

“Oh! Michelle Tea, iconic.” See? Even Cam thought so. “Mind if I sit with you? You know, I actually have a copy of Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker with me.” They pulled a novel from their Mary Poppins bag, a black cover with dull pink breasts hovering above the title. “Have you read this?! I guarantee Michelle Tea was influenced by her.”

G recalled that Bellamy’s book is on the bookshelf in Tea’s novel. But they knew that if Cam sat down, they wouldn’t get anything done.

“I haven’t read that yet!” G said, moving their stuff out of the way. Fuck it. How much more was I going to write anyways? “What’s it about?”

“It’s so weird! You’ll love it. It’s like a queer sequel to Dracula…” Cam began, sitting down.

G watched their friend exude excitement about the Bellamy, closed their laptop, and listened as they finished their beer. Outside the windows, the sun was setting over the Palouse in tongues of rancid orange. And G was happy to be there, in that queer, rural space, outside and inside of time, feeling hopeful that one day, they too, would write a book starring themselves as the main character.