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The sexy, slightly sinister promise of the pink, neon-lit GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS signs that so often hang in strip clubs is fulfilled—and then some—in writer and oncology nurse Shoshana von Blanckensee’s debut novel of the same name (out now from Penguin Random House). The book follows a young, queer Jewish woman named Hannah as she and her clandestine high-school lover Sam drive their van from Long Beach, New York to San Francisco in search of a gay and lesbian scene that can match their high, high hopes for their post-high-school futures in the mid-1990s.
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What Hannah and Sam ultimately discover in the Tenderloin isn’t exactly Disneyland; short on cash, both girls start stripping at a local institution called the Chez Paree (or, as its workers derisively call it, the “Cheese Parade”) and Hannah soon finds herself doing complex, nebulous escort work for an older butch patron she meets at the club. While her love story with Sam proves difficult to sustain amid the glitter and grime of San Francisco’s queer world, the story that Hannah writes for herself as she grows up, finds work that fits her, and learns to value her relationships with family back home—including her loving, supportive Bubbe—is very much worth reading.
Vogue spoke to von Blanckensee about Bay Area nostalgia, drawing inspiration from a lifetime’s worth of body work, the evolution of the word “dyke,” her hope for young queer readers everywhere, and more.
Vogue: What drew you to set this book in the richly lesbian world of early-’90s San Francisco?
Shoshana von Blanckensee: Well, that’s the only lesbian world I know. It’s what I lived. The book became fictionalized over time, but it started from lived experience. It was really important to me to create the San Francisco I knew, so all the businesses and places that people congregated actually existed and were all there at the time. The opening night of the lesbian bar the Lexington is set accurately at the time that it opened. I really wanted it to be precisely that world.
What do you miss most about that era of San Francisco?
I actually just miss being in a bubble of queer art that was exploding. It was pre-cell phones, really, so we were all just in the streets. We weren’t in our homes, scrolling. You’d just go somewhere, and people would be there, and there was an art event almost every night of some kind. I miss just wandering around the Mission, going to the Bearded Lady or the Lexington and knowing you were going to see people, and feeling that creative vibe of everybody making art like there was no tomorrow, even though the idea was that none of it was going to get out to the broader world. But that didn’t matter.
Do you have other favorite narratives of queers running away from home to find themselves?
You know, I’ve been asked this a few times, and the closest thing I can think of in terms of finding yourself as a queer Jew is Stone Butch Blues.
God, I remember reading a PDF of Stone Butch Blues online for the first time and practically throwing up from crying.
Yes! That, and some of Dorothy Allison’s work was totally life-altering for me to read.
I’m so interested in the Jewish dichotomy of “frei” (free) and “frum” (observant) that you draw in the book. Is that something you still see at work in the world today?
Well, I guess I feel more of an attachment to the “frei” world and what it means to religious Jews or more secular Jews, and then what it means to queer Jews. We all have a different definition of it. For the Bubbe character in my book, it’s clearly just about, You don’t have to follow all this observant stuff, but for Hannah, there’s so much she feels chained down by, and some of it is actually just internalized stuff.
Hannah strips and does sex work in San Francisco, and later on, we see her really take to end-of-life care for her Bubbe. Where did you find the inspiration for giving your protagonist experience with these different kinds of care work?
Well, I’m an oncology nurse, and I think a lot about how every job I’ve had has been a little bit in service in certain ways. I was a massage therapist at Osento in San Francisco for a few years, so everything has been about the body, in some way.
What do you wish you saw more of within mainstream conversations about dyke identity today?
You know, I’m so fascinated by the way language has changed over time. I was just reading the biphobia article you wrote, and I was thinking about how the word “dyke” used to encompass so many things because we didn’t have names for everything. You know, you might call your person who uses she/her pronouns your “boyfriend,” right? We were just coming up with it as we went along, and the word “dyke” encompassed bisexual people, trans people; it encompassed so much. The term just felt like a big “fuck you” in a way that “lesbian” didn’t. I think getting into micro-labels is complicated, because it gives people a name for who they are, which is a wonderful thing, but it can also create all these tiny little walls between us that might not always be so useful.
Totally. I remember referring to myself as a “bisexual-ish dyke” at one point, and my friend was like, “You can’t be both!”
Of course you can! It’s so frustrating to me, because I know this young couple where one is a trans man and his girlfriend is a butch lesbian. They have an open relationship, and she’s dating all these femmes, and they were attacked online because the partner was calling herself a lesbian. There was all this, You can’t call yourself XYZ because you’re with a trans man. I was like, oh my God, what is this police state we are creating for ourselves now? It’s such a politic of exclusion. I mean, I think we’ll come out of it eventually, because in the ’70s lesbians were very much like, “Don’t use the word ‘dyke’,’’ and we came out of that. So we’ll come out of this moment.
Is there anyone or any group you really hope this book makes it to?
I just want it to go to every queer young person. I feel such big feelings for queer young people, especially in this moment in time. They probably saw more rights and more acceptance as they were coming out, and now they’re seeing less. And that’s a very different trajectory than the one that I’ve been on. I just want to say to all of them that we are us no matter what, and throughout the entire history of time, we’ve always been us and we’re always going to be us. What we make with each other is a beautiful, lovely thing, and we have to stay focused on community and not whether we have a stamp of approval on our foreheads for the broader public.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
