A01=Bambi Lake
archive
Author_Bambi Lake
camp
Category=DC
Cockettes
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
forthcoming
hustlers
John Waters
LGBTQ+
performance
poems
poetry
political
posthumous
punk
queer
San Francisco
Trans
transgender
woman
Product details
- ISBN 9781643623061
- Dimensions: 133 x 209mm
- Publication Date: 03 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Nightboat Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A landmark collection of poems by Bambi Lake, the beloved (and bad-mouthed) icon of San Francisco’s counterculture.
Bambi Lake was a trans chanteuse performer, provocateur, and countercultural darling of the ‘70s, and subsequent decades. “The Glamorous Life follows me around,” she wrote, and sang about in her ballad “The Golden Age of Hustlers” (later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond). Her life in San Francisco—including being on the fringes of the Cockettes, and a member of the adjacent Angels of Light—was “sort of legendary,” sort of “sweet, sticky, nasty,” and always precarious, lived in spite of addiction, homelessness, and the horrors that came from chasing and surviving her own desires.
Here are her poems, long out of print, that wear “burgundy velvet jezebel bras” to seduce “fatally hetero” men, detailing the cabaret of desire amidst social, cultural, and political change. “I am Beauty,” she writes, “and the world dissolves.”
The collection includes a series of interviews by August Bernadicou, and a foreword by Brontez Purnell.
Bambi Lake was a trans chanteuse performer, provocateur, and countercultural darling of the ‘70s, and subsequent decades. “The Glamorous Life follows me around,” she wrote, and sang about in her ballad “The Golden Age of Hustlers” (later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond). Her life in San Francisco—including being on the fringes of the Cockettes, and a member of the adjacent Angels of Light—was “sort of legendary,” sort of “sweet, sticky, nasty,” and always precarious, lived in spite of addiction, homelessness, and the horrors that came from chasing and surviving her own desires.
Here are her poems, long out of print, that wear “burgundy velvet jezebel bras” to seduce “fatally hetero” men, detailing the cabaret of desire amidst social, cultural, and political change. “I am Beauty,” she writes, “and the world dissolves.”
The collection includes a series of interviews by August Bernadicou, and a foreword by Brontez Purnell.
Bambi Lake (1950-2020) was an author and chanteuse performer based in San Francisco, known for work that spoke to her experience as a transgender woman. She made her first appearance with The Cockettes, the avant-garde theater group, in the early 1970s, and has since been the subject of the documentary Sticks & Stones (2014) and a ballad revival, “The Golden Age of Hustlers,” written by Lake and later recorded by Justin Vivian Bond. She authored a memoir with Alvin Orloff, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake (1996).
