Some Places Have Warnings About Me

Celebrate the notorious Bambi Lake at DEAD WRITERS, a benefit for DOPAMINE

I was Googling the legendary writer and chanteuse Bambi Lake, and this was the first hit:

That’s just funny. I hope Bambi is laughing from the great beyond or, better yet, haunting the place. Why are there suddenly sequins everywhere? Also, that title is a quote from Bambi in possibly her last interview, at The LGBTQ History Project.

This was more along the lines of what I was looking for.

DOPAMINE is kicking off a new, quarterly fundraising series this month - DEAD WRITERS. It’s a little crass, but to paraphrase Eileen Myles on a Sister Spit tour, metaphors are bourgeois. This event celebrates the dead writers we love, and works to raise money for the living writers we love. We were really emptying our heads out trying to decide which beloved dead writer really captures the spirit of this new event, and landed on Bambi. Many of us knew her, so it’s personal. She’s a San Francisco legend, and though DOPAMINE is tres California, our roots are also very olde SF. Bambi was a trans woman, and she was punk-rock-n-roll. After being kicked out of the acid-flecked queer performance troupe The Cockettes, she became a member of the acid-flecked queer performance troupe The Angels of Light. Bambi is history - she’s my history, maybe yours. She’s queer history and art history.

Part of Bambi’s legend is how problematic she was. She could be really difficult - so difficult that her meaner and unhinged aspects of the defining features of her for some who knew her. I have a very beautiful friend who must have provoked some sort of crazed envy in her, because every time Bambi ran into her at some queer art event she’d say comically cruel things to her, like a villain out of The Simpsons. Too bizarre to take personally, in a way, it felt like a bit of a blessing to be noticed by Bambi, even if the attention was negative. Bambi had a pretty powerful addiction, and being an out trans woman from the 1970s onward brought trauma on the daily. Still, she was sober at the time of her passing, and in spite of how miserable she could be, I don’t know that she had a single enemy. She was a hard person to be against. I think everyone really wanted her to win.

I have my own stories about Bambi, but I’m saving them to share at our event. We’ll have copies of the above book for sale, from Manic D Press - The Unsinkable Bambi Lake, the memoir she wrote with the help of novelist Alvin Orloff. Multimedia artist Zackary Drucker is going to read from it - it was the first trans book she ever got her hands on, which I didn’t even know when I invited her to be part of the night. We’re going to see to films that Silas Howard made regarding Bambi - one is the video for Justin Vivian Bond’s cover of Bambi’s song The Golden Age of Hustlers, as well as Sticks and Stones, the documentary her made of her before she died from cancer, four years ago.

Photo by Dan Nicoletta

DEAD WRITERS Chapter 1: Bambi Lake will also feature a talk by archivist, writer and witch Brooke Palmieri (yes, there will be an altar for Bambi), as well as a reading from Bucky Sinister, who knew her so well he recently published the memoir To Love and Fear Bambi Lake. Bambi and Bucky’s memoirs will both be on sale at the event, as well as everything DOPAMINE has for sale. It’s all happening Saturday, September 28th at 7pm, at Junior High in Glendale, California. Please come if you’re in the neighborhood! It’s going to be a very cool and tender time, and you get to support DOPAMINE!