Time Also Will Make It Interesting: Selected Journals

I couldn’t put this book down. Read Red for his critical contributions to histories of queer, trans, working class, black, disabled folk, and more. But also read him for his unrelenting will to write feelings, make art, and take up space—even when the establishment said otherwise.

Red Jordan Arobateau’s singular life writing is here presented in all its dissident glory, beautifully edited with love and a poet’s ear by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Bracing, funny as hell, genre-busting, and liberatory—Time Will Also Make It Interesting is exactly the book we need, and like nothing you’ve read before.

Time Also Will Make It Interesting reintroduces the work of Red Jordan Arobateau—a major gift in a time where there are still so few Black trans people in print. Arobateau is a literary ancestor who was criminally under-published while he was alive. Time Also Will Make It Interesting establishes his legacy.

Red Jordan-Arobateau was prolific the way Fassbinder was prolific: an outsider, tortured, relentlessly sexual, driven by what he called his “crazy energy,” unable to stop making work even while living on disability checks and 25 cent hot dogs . . . . Cameron’s selection reveals Red’s range while preserving what made him essential: his refusal to separate the erotic from the sacred.

Arobateau has mastered the art of transgressing gender and sexuality.