10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
'90s San Francisco lives on with Berkeley author's debut
It's the summer of 1996 and Hannah and her girlfriend Sam are following their post-high school plans to drive from Long Beach, N.Y., to San Francisco, a place where you could hold hands with your girlfriend in public. Growing up in Long Beach with a strict and stressed Orthodox Jewish mother, Hannah has to keep her identity a painful secret.
Armed with extra cash from beloved Bubbe and little knowledge about how to make it in the world, Hannah and Sam scream when they see the Golden Gate Bridge. Hitting the pavement in the Castro is surreal. Everything is exciting until reality hits: Where will they live? How?
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At 18 and with no work experience, the girls turn to one of the only ways to make enough money to survive in an expensive city: stripping.
While the queer coming-of-age novel 'Girls Girls Girls' is fiction, the book, due out June 17, is also very much based on Berkeley writer Shoshana von Blanckensee's youth while living in San Francisco in the late 1990s. It was a time when a lot of people like her 'came out in a rage' and had a necessity to enmesh themselves in their queer community.
'I think at that time period, it was almost impossible to be gay and not have some amount of shame just from the culture, even if your family did accept you,' von Blanckensee reflects. 'There's a million ways to stifle a child and religion is one of them.'
Regarding stripping, she shares that when she's alone with herself or with her community, she has no shame around that experience. Still, sharing that part of her life feels like coming out in a different way, she says.
'Putting this book out has been really hard because I know how the world sees stripping,' she says. 'Now, I'm a nurse. I'm a parent … A lot of people that I know that are not queer have no idea of that history.'
While flunking out at UC Santa Cruz, the LGBT performance group Sister Spit invited von Blanckensee to join them on tour in the summer of 1998. ('It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me,' she says.) Soon after, she relocated to San Francisco, where her real coming-of-age began.
'I started all these prose poems in 2004, 2005 … many were about my grandmother; many about stripping and sex work, about being young and queer,' von Blanckensee says, noting that eventually, she began imagining those poems forming a book.
After several more years, she convinced herself to write it as a novel, and let herself off the hook by thinking, 'let yourself do a s—y job,' just for the sake of having a draft to work with. It didn't really take shape until she reached out to other queer writers she came up with in the vibrant queer community of '90s San Francisco. Von Blanckensee was surrounded by artists and writers like Eileen Myles ('Chelsea Girls') and Michelle Tea ('Valencia'), whom she remembers clanking away on a typewriter at house parties and handing out her work. 'Everyone's writing like maniacs; everyone's painting,' she recalls. 'It was make, make, make. Zines, zines, zines.'
Being surrounded by that level of creativity was immensely inspiring. 'It was like Paris in the '20s,' shares photographer Chloe Sherman, whom von Blanckensee lived with for a period in Noe Valley and with whom she remains close. Sherman's 2023 book ' Renedes: San Francisco, The 1990s ' features some of her thousands of photos that captured the nostalgia of that time and the importance of queer and artistic community.
'We encouraged each other, we were entertained by each other,' Sherman went on, 'and it allowed for this support network and freedom to be creative and express ourselves — and to feel loved and adored while doing it.'
In 'Girls,' Hannah is slower than her girlfriend at making new friends and finding her own community. Meanwhile, she's too afraid to call home and hear her mother's wrathful voice. The only person in her family she feels safe to talk with is her ever-so-encouraging grandmother.
'The Bubbe character was based on a combination of my own Bubbe and my first therapist — who I could only afford because I was stripping,' von Blanckensee shares, explaining that she was one of two therapists a lot of her queer friends saw. 'She was this older, Jewish femme lesbian and I felt so deeply connected to her. And actually, a lot of things that she literally said to me, the Bubbe character said.'
Both mentors have since passed away, but their guidance lives on in the book.
'Girls' tackles addiction and depression, loneliness and otherness; it's a teary-eyed love letter to the San Francisco that remains and to its establishments that are long-gone. But above all it tenderly tells the story of a vulnerable young queer person in an unfamiliar place, just trying to create a new version of home.
'The community was out of necessity … I mourn the loss of what it was,' von Blanckensee shares, referencing how many of the establishments and artists mentioned in the book are no longer in the city.
Sherman recalls people seeing the younger version of themselves on the walls of the Schlomer Haus Gallery in the Castro at her 2022 'Renegades' photography show. 'Being together in the same neighborhood all these years later, we were all so intensely reminded of the value of community,' she says. 'I think it highlighted what a big turning point (that '90s community was) for a lot of people.'
'Girls' is about to have a similar reunion. Rather than a bookstore interview, Von Blanckensee plans to debut her novel on Wednesday, June 18, at El Rio, a queer space in the Mission, where she can be surrounded by her community similar to the way it was in the '90s.
'One of my big fears with having a book come out is that somebody is going to try interview me in an extremely academic way that I'm gonna be totally lost with, because I'm not an academic-y person. I know I wrote a book but, I'm really regular,' she says with a laugh. 'I didn't want to do my book launch at a bookstore, I wanted to have a big party.'
