Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik, 1971) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics.

She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and has identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years.

She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.

Tea grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts in a working-class family.

Her father was a Polish Catholic and her mother was Irish and French Canadian.

She felt different from other children, and she took comfort in music.

In high school, Tea identified with the goth subculture and artists such as Siouxsie Sioux.

She was also drawn to literary work, including The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and the beat movement.

When she was twenty years old, Tea read Angry Women from RE/Search Publications, which included interviews with radical female performers, writers, and thinkers.

The book was highly influential.

"That really made me see that there is a lineage [of female writers], and a path, and I could really put myself on that," she explained in an interview.

During her childhood, Tea's stepfather spied on her through a drilled hole in the wall of her bedroom.

She struggled with this abuse, and she was in denial for many years.

Tea began drinking alcohol as a teenager.

When she was 19 years old, her stepfather admitted to the abuse, but Tea's mother chose to stay with him.

It was at this time that Tea decided to move out of her home and relocate to the home of her girlfriend at the time in Boston.

During this period, Tea supported herself with two minimum wage jobs as a hair salon receptionist and deli shop employee.

Her girlfriend, a sex worker, was earning significantly more money than she did.

She decided to go into sex work as well.

In the early 1990s, Tea broke up with her girlfriend and moved to San Francisco.

In San Francisco, Tea immersed herself in the literary and spoken word scene.

It was "...very democratic. There were open mics every night. The poetry was self-taught – punk and hip-hop inspired street poetry. It was perfect for me. I felt I could be my whole self, which at that point was queer, feminist, punk and working-class.”

In 1994, Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson formed Sister Spit, a queer feminist collective.

The group hosted weekly open mic nights in San Francisco, which attracted local and underground talent, as well as more established writers such as Mary Gaitskill, Eileen Myles, and Beth Lisick.

In 1997, Sister Spit launched Ramblin’ Road Show, a spoken word tour that performed in bars, galleries, bookstores, community centers, and other venues in the United States and Canada.

In 1998, her first book, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, was published by Semiotexte/Smart Art Press.

The book provided short stories in memoir form, exploring topics such as Tea's childhood in Massachusetts, her teenage interest in the goth subculture, and sex work.

In 2000, the memoir Valencia was published.

The book chronicled the life of Michelle, a young lesbian poet, in the Mission district of San Francisco.

The plot primarily focused on the love life of the main character, as she dated multiple women over the course of a year.

She explained in an interview, "The 'Michelle' in the book is definitely me, though if it makes a reader more comfortable to imagine it’s all a giant work of fiction, that’s fine too."

The book launched Tea into local and literary fame, especially after winning the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Tea is known for her work as an organizer and advocate for local artists and writers.

In 2003, Tea founded Radar Productions, a nonprofit organization that produces events to showcase the work of queer writers and artists.

The tour was briefly revitalized in 2007 with Sister Spit: The Next Generation, which featured artists such as Ariel Schrag, Justin Vivian Bond, Blake Nelson, Nicole J. Georges, Cristy Road, Eileen Myles, and Beth Lisick.

She served as the Creative Director for twelve years before stepping down in 2015, so that she could focus on other pursuits.

Juliana Delgado Lopera, a creative writing instructor at San Francisco State University, took her place.

In 2015, Radar created Drag Queen Story Hour in San Francisco.

The event, at which drag queens read books to kids, now happens in several cities around the United States and in Tokyo, Japan.