Time Also Will Make It Interesting
Selected Journals of Red Jordan Arobateau
Archival, Memoir | Nightboat | 2026
Best known for his erotic lesbian fiction, Red Jordan Arobateau was also a prolific painter who maintained and self-published a journal for roughly twenty years, documenting his experiences at the “abject bottom” of life in the U.S. Edited and introduced by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich with a foreword by Michelle Tea, and paintings by Arobateau, Time Also Will Make It Interesting captures Arobateau’s life as a young dyke in the criminalized cultures of 1950s-60s gay bars of Chicago and New York; his transition from dyke to trans man in late 1990s San Francisco; and his return to painting and an unfolding spirituality within that rapidly gentrifying city.
Queerly messy, ornery, and stuffed with Arobateau’s wisdom, this volume is what he might have called, “a novel combined with a journal—da novel/journal! Taking all the liberty in the world! A domain where verse can be inserted, dreams recorded, my everyday political rants printed out, combined with my forté—fiction! All under one binding & title!”
Time Also Will Make It Interesting reintroduces the work of Red Jordan Arobateau—a major gift in a time where there are still so few Black trans people in print. Arobateau is a literary ancestor who was criminally under-published while he was alive. Time Also Will Make It Interesting establishes his legacy.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
Red Jordan Arobateau’s singular life writing is here presented in all its dissident glory, beautifully edited with love and a poet’s ear by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Bracing, funny as hell, genre-busting, and liberatory—Time Will Also Make It Interesting is exactly the book we need, and like nothing you’ve read before.
T Fleischmann