My Schizo-Affective Queer Journey

What didn’t kill me made me solitary. I’ve learned that I must be alone. Typing into the void. Filming. Editing. Performing for YouTube or TikTok. Screens beaming information, media and validation in and out. Closed off from the political turmoil outside. Doors locked except for delivered groceries. Medicine. Weed. Amazon Prime. Drifting through the night as an impenetrable fortress. A spaceship fantasy. This is as good as it will ever get. Has ever been. Doing what I love. In grief. Mourning a dead domestic partner and a wife dead to me.

I’ve lost everything and everyone over and over. Until I finally know who I am: an idiot savant, riding the tormented mad genius trope off into the sunset of history. Striving for fame to fill this ravenous hole. The “mass love,” Patty Duke speaks of in Valley of the Dolls. I will never love again.

It’s a miracle I’ve lived to 43. A careening carousel. Mania. Depression. Psychosis. Anxiety. PTSD. Catastrophic exits from city after city in the west coast. Insomniac. Creative compulsion. Hopping zeitgeists and mediums as the century shifts. Slogging in the trenches for decades with debilitating illness. Driven by a force stronger than money. A fire stronger than lust. Kathy Acker’s ruthless will to be a legend.

My therapist says, “So you were dealt an unusual hand? Schizophrenia and bipolar on both sides of the family. Feral intelligence. Old money. Your grandma was from Mexico? So that’s why you and your mother are so beautiful.” That therapist was my paternal uncle’s first wife. Knew the Lambert/Garaventa pathology. Divorced it.

I anticipate the cruel comments section of this article. Same as my YouTube channel, Amazon author page, and Twitter. The abled, hate-mad, prideful parasites. I prefer my abuse online. Not fatal. I’ve taken enough real-life domestic violence from freeloading junkie fiancés. Glitterati social cruelty. People have strong reactions to my work. They love or hate it. A niche taste like Fernet. One shot. It’s a lot.

I’ve been putting it out there for 30 years. Bipolar bold. Sensationalizing my unstable life into multi-medium art, my mental illnesses intensifying concurrently. Taking psychiatric meds as prescribed. I’m on total and permanent Social Security disability now. Por Vida. The free time of no job, health insurance, and small stipends affords me the time to write, paint, and film. The equation of enough time and money enables my creative career. I cannot profit from my work without losing benefits. I give my work away freely, as so much was given to me.

There was something deeply wrong with me from the beginning. I saw a psychiatrist since early childhood. Learned how to read at the age of three. 1980. Never developed social skills. Hid in books from the bullying. The beatings. The cruelty of other children. Happiest when playing alone with dolls. Spinning epic narratives in notebooks.

I remember Montessori preschool. Private elementary school. Junior high and high school in the 1990s. Twinkies lobbed at my head at lunch with screams of, “Dyke!” Praise from AP teachers. Joy deep in books by Anais Nin and Marguerite Duras. Seeing a wizened Allen Ginsberg read in a small San Diego bookshop. Catty riot grrl friends, schooling me in Nico and the Velvet Underground. We competed for subcultural clout with zines and seven-inch records. I learned figurative oil painting from my first boyfriend. We painted each other nude in the San Diego twilight.

In high school, I wanted to escape suburbia. Did not drink, do drugs or have sex, to that goal. Left home at 17 for Reed College. Threw myself wantonly to the world, a pixie cut mynx in vinyl skirts. Thirsty to live like the bohemians I read. Drank Pabst Blue Ribbon until 4 a.m. Modeled scanty clothes made out of trash in the Student Union. Lived with 12 other misfits in a dilapidated mansion up the street from campus.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic symptoms my sophomore year. In the age of Prozac Nation, I tried many psych meds. I’ve been medicated consistently since I was 18.

For 10 grueling years I was employed and fired over and over. Lived in San Francisco in my late twenties. Frequented the Frisco Disco. Two coke dealers in my phone. Men used me as a Kleenex. Women wore me like a jewel. I wrote short stories, poetry, and novels frantically. Night after night, in dirty shared flats. Doing lines of cocaine or speed,  ice-cold vanilla vodka, neat, by my side.

I tried to rise from abjection. Got an MFA at CalArts in 2006–2008. Hallucinated my way through Stephen Barber, Matias Viegener, and Steve Erickson’s brilliant mentoring. Was critiqued. Workshopped. Spread my legs and networked. Upon graduation in 2009, I published two books in London and Stockholm.

My debut novel, Jet Set Desolate is a sex, drug, and electroclash period piece set in San Francisco’s Millenium. The Swedish poetry collaboration Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin speaks of alcoholic North Hollywood. I eschewed book tours for a schizophrenic break, tormented by near-constant auditory and visual hallucinations.

Disfiguring cold sores. Phone book as toilet paper. Drank two bottles of wine a day. Teaching was out of the question. Headshots needed to waitress in Los Angeles. I prostrated myself before the state for SSDI.

In 2008, I met a young lesbian entering her CalArts MFA. She loved me at my worst. We moved in together in Silver Lake. Parlayed our mutual writers Rolodex into the Featherless reading series. Made stuffed mushrooms and crostini bought with my food stamps.

In 2011, we were joined in a domestic partnership. Medicare doesn’t kick in until after two years on Disability. So I went to a local mental health clinic for Haldol injections. Pills with awful side effects. Drove back to Echo Park to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race with our Los Angeles artist coterie.

My domestic partner committed suicide in 2012. I awoke next to her corpse. In the bed of my ancestors. The bed of our madness. The bed I still sleep on today. Eight years a widow. I pined for love lost. 

In 2016, Airbnb eviction drove me out of the rent-controlled apartment. I left Hollywood with its Yves Saint Laurant stink still redolent. Moved into a brick house my great aunt and uncle built in Reno. Spent three years of solitary celibacy creating in the Biggest Little City. Held on to my Los Angeles psychiatrist through telemedicine.

In 2019, I cruised dating apps. Met a biker butch from Atlanta. Fell hard and fast. We married at the Washoe County clerk. A victory to get gay-married, instead of denied that right as I was with my domestic partner. We lived a doomed dream. Divorced in 2020. As my physical health declined.

The desire to make things right. Apocalyptic mania. Drove me to release my domestic partner’s Corpus Peculiarus. I released my own work on iBooks as well:  Bleed Almond: Poetry Before Trump, Scaffolding, Hollywood Hedgewitch, and Grieving Through “American Horror Story.”

I do not know how much longer I will survive. Knowing what I and others are capable of. In the late capitalist, apocalyptic 2020s. Executing my purpose as a specialized tool. Doing what I was born and trained to do. Creating media from a queer Schizaffective perspective. Acting as a thread, a force in the cultural fabric. May the books, paintings, and films I leave behind bear witness. To electrified meat moving through time.