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The Real Red Jordan Arobateau
I'm Red Jordan Arobateau. Age 52. Butch. A former street dike. Of mixed-race heritage (black, Latin & white). Have been writing for some 35 years.
I was born in the racially segregated anti-gay city of Chicago in the 1940s. On fire from the depths of my soul as a troubled adolescent, I began writing poetry and creating stories at age 13, trying to express these things that bothered me. I had a mentally ill mother who abused me. Started getting out on my own at age 15, going to dike bars and after-hour dives at night, hanging out in the streets and queer sectors of town by day. I became in my teens an alcoholic (since reformed). I found it next to impossible to fit into a normal daylight straight world with an 8-hour-a-day job. I found myself out on the streets, and that's the kind of life I led and women I met in my early life. But I wasn't just living a fast life -- for today only -- like a lot of my acquaintances, for whom life seemed to be just a joke, but was serious about my life work.
As a teenager and young adult in my 20s I was shy and poor and thus not popular with women. Often surrounded by four decrepit walls of a hotel room with few women visitors. Since I was poor and anti-social, I had few places to go. One of these was the library, which I haunted.
I was very lonely during those days. Found it hard to get or keep women. My painful interior thoughts and red hot passions I pushed into my writings. Characters I invented were better than TV, which had no dikes. My books took the edge off my pain and made my long endless stretch of calendar days which led to...