Writing Through the Middle: Dispatches from the Journals of Red Jordan Arobateau

Throughout the twentieth century, the genres in which transness was officially made to live produced “the transsexual” as an isolated, exceptional figure. One project of trans studies has been, therefore, surfacing and attending to the scenes and genres in which trans sociality has existed all along—the ballroom, the newsletter, the support group, etc.—which rarely live up to the promises we invest them with, perhaps cannot, as trans sociality is notoriously difficult to produce and sustain. Red Jordan Arobateau was, among other things, a theorist of this difficulty. Best known for his erotic dike/trans street lit, Arobateau was also a prolific diarist, having self-published over forty volumes between 1998 and 2016. Written from the middle of a potentially interminable project of studying Arobateau’s journals, this experimental essay is interested in what they might teach us—might teach me—about staying with the mess of the social nonetheless.