Time Also Will Make It Interesting: Selected Journals

Synopsis

For decades, Red Jordan Arobateau chronicled a life lived on the margins of American society. Best known for his groundbreaking erotic fiction, Arobateau also kept extensive journals documenting his experiences as a mixed-race trans artist, painter, writer, and survivor of poverty. Spanning the criminalized queer bar culture of 1950s Chicago and New York, his transition in 1990s San Francisco, and his lifelong search for artistic and spiritual freedom, these journals offer an extraordinary firsthand account of a life that refused easy categorization.

Edited by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich and featuring paintings by Arobateau alongside a foreword by Michelle Tea, Time Also Will Make It Interesting restores an essential literary voice to contemporary readers. By turns funny, furious, intimate, and deeply reflective, the collection blends memoir, diary, fiction, dreams, political observation, and visual art into a singular work that expands the possibilities of autobiography while preserving the legacy of one of the most prolific yet overlooked figures in queer literature.

About the Author

Red Jordan Arobateau (1943–2021) was an American writer, painter, playwright, diarist, and one of the earliest openly trans authors to publish extensively in the United States. Over his lifetime he produced more than eighty books and dozens of paintings, drawing on his experiences as a mixed-race trans man living on the economic margins. This volume is edited by Cameron Awkward-Rich, with a foreword by Michelle Tea, bringing Arobateau's journals to a new generation of readers.

Publisher

Nightboat Books

Publication Date

July 14, 2026

Format

Paperback

Pages

384

Subjects

Memoir · Diaries & Journals · LGBTQ+ Studies · Black Studies · Literary Nonfiction · Art & Culture

ISBN

9781643623054