So, it seems like it was in Steve’s nature to create spaces that didn’t previously exist to address his own needs. His solution to feeling marginalized within a marginal community? He helped found a gay fathers’ organization in San Francisco. In his essay “My Kid,” which is composed as an interview to himself, Steve talks about this difficulty of being a single gay parent and the complex relationship he had with Alysia. As a working-class writer and a dad at the same time, Steve knew how to hustle. I think this added layer, being a young, single gay father, provided social difficulties, but perhaps gave his work a sense of urgency and perspective as well. Steve’s idiosyncrasy, in part, comes from this mélange of varied skill sets and lived experiences, but also from his position as the father of a young girl, living as an out gay man in the middle of a robust queer community where parenthood was not the norm. This work seemed both informed by his new locale and a natural extension of his previous experiences as a social justice advocate and conscientious objector during the Vietnam War (a position he was almost jailed for as a draft dodger), comic artist, writer and editor/publisher.
When he arrived he threw himself into a number of writing, art and organizing projects. Like a lot of queer young men in the 1970s he was a transplant to SF, but unlike many others he was a recent widow (his wife Barbara died in a car accident just months earlier) and a single parent, moving there from Atlanta with his young daughter Alysia in early 1974. Jamie Townsend: Steve is a pretty unique figure in the history of Bay Area writing. Joseph Bradshaw: I’d like to begin with you providing a little background on Abbott: Who was he? What was his place within the Bay Area literary world? What follows is an interview with poet Jamie Townsend, editor of Beautiful Aliens. Now, with Nightboat Books’ publication of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, Abbott is primed for a reappraisal by the initiated and discovery by a new generation of readers. Since his death, his work has been beloved by a devoted few.
Between the 1970s and his death from AIDS-related illness in 1992, he traveled widely across Bay Area literary and artistic circles. In his relatively brief life, Steve Abbott was many things: poet, novelist, theorist, community organizer, gay rights activist, single parent, and an originator of the New Narrative movement.
0 kommentar(er)
