Red Jordan Arobateau

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Red Jordan Arobateau (November 15, 1943 – November 25, 2021) was an American author and playwright best known for being one of earliest writers of street lit and proponents of lesbian erotica and transgender erotica. He published 40 books, six collections of short stories and three books of poetry, and was a member of the FTM International.

Early life

Arobateau was an only child born to a Christian father from Honduras and a mother from Chicago . When he was fifteen, he read a pulp magazine that had a brief mention of a lesbian character. Feeling seen for the first time, he began to identify as a lesbian. Two years later, when he turned seventeen, Arobateau’s parents divorced. He lived with his father until he was old enough to live on his own. He moved briefly to New York then again to San Francisco where he spent the rest of his life. It wasn't until adult life that he transitioned his gender and began to identify as a “female-to-male transsexual”.

Career

History books tell us a lot about the lives of upper-class women such as Gertie Stein and Alice B. but very little of the underprivileged lesbian factory workers, queer servants, and tranny seamstresses. There’s a whole group of dikes to whom these characters, these books may appeal.

— Red Jordan Arobateau
The Lesbian Review of Books, 1996.

Red Jordan Arobateau began writing at the age of 13 to escape a turbulent home life. He was entirely self-published and worked many different jobs to fund each publication. He had experience working as an office assistant, factory worker, karate teacher, nurse’s aide, cashier, and cook. By and large, he spent his life in poverty. His work is cited as an inspiration by influential writers such as Ann Allen Shockly.

Arobateau’s prose focused primarily on subjects such as sex work, lesbian issues, transsexuality, and drug use. His stories feature butch lesbians and transgender men as they fall in love with sex workers, come out as transgender, or serve their sentences in prison. He explored the challenges of these lives as well as the joy found in them.

Arobateau also wrote three volumes of poetry. The focus of his poems was largely on his spiritual beliefs. Arobateau was Christian, a religion he converted to after the death of his father. Before his conversion, he identified as an atheist.

For a while, his books were not circulated in Canada due to the tight pornography laws in Canada that allows the country to bar the entry of "obscene material."

He lived with his partner Dalila Jasmin. Arobateau died on November 25, 2021 in San Francisco.

Origins of name

Arobateau took the name Jordan from his grandmother's last name. Arobateau was based off of his given surname with an A added to the original form: Robateau. Arobateau was having his hair dyed red when he realized the color represented the sensuality and eroticism of his work and thus took it as his name.

Legacy

At a time when Black, explicitly queer artistic expression was virtually invisible in the mainstream, Arobateau’s work was more than just homoerotic. It challenged the heterosexual, male-centric vision of Black sexual pleasure and desire at the core of street lit’s popularity, expanding the genre into otherwise off-limits realms.

— Naomi Extra
Vice, 2018.

Arobateau was one of the earliest writers and proponents of street lit, transgender and lesbian erotica. A profile in Vice described his content as "writing that helped pave the way for inclusive depictions of Black sexuality". His works are frequently cited and used for analysis of early cultural history of those genres and topics.

Selected publications

• Jailhouse Stud (1974)
• The Black Biker (1994)
• Doing it for the Mistress (1999)
• Street of Dream (2000)

References

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