“We were the beginning of the end and we didn’t know what to do because we’d just found the beginning.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore just began her Fall tour for her new memoir, The End of San Francisco. I reviewed the book for the Chicago Reader, and you can read that here.
Excerpt:
Sycamore no longer lives in San Francisco, but the kind of work she did there continues: activists highlighted in this book focus on housing and prison issues; Gay Shame is now in its 11th year, and still staging demonstrations against the corporate takeover of the city. This isn’t a nostalgic piece but that rare thing, a political memoir told with personal candor, and which makes it clear that the connection between fucking and political change is always palpable.
I also did this interview with her, for Windy City Times, about both the new book and her last one, the anthology Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? You can read that piece here.
Excerpt:
One of the things I wanted to show in this book is the potential for faggotry to be something that is chosen, negotiated, claimed, made and remade, so that does open the possibility for a faggotry outside those who were socialized as male, or designated male at birth, exhibiting a certain kind of flamboyance.