{"id":416160,"date":"2026-07-29T04:17:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T04:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/416160\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T04:17:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T04:17:13","slug":"devouring-the-indomitable-spirit-of-bambi-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/416160\/","title":{"rendered":"Devouring the indomitable spirit of Bambi Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco icon Bambi Lake\u2019s posthumous collection of poetry hit bookstore shelves a week after Trans March organizers demanded accountability from the city<\/a> over Pride Weekend police violence. <\/p>\n

Titled Devour Me, Again: Collected Poems, this revival of Lake\u2019s work couldn\u2019t have arrived at a better time. With a DA intent on prosecuting progressive Palestinian solidarity activists, dampening public political expressions of trans rage and joy, and targeting the queer underground nightlife\u2019s reclamation of public space, this verbal visitation by one of San Francisco\u2019s most controversial trans punk chanteuses<\/a> provides an escape into sincere yet delusional glamour bordered by the rough contours of Lake\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Fresh from Nightboat Books\u2014with a foreword<\/a> by local punk legend Brontez Purnell, recently republished in The Paris Review\u2014Devour Me, Again showcases Lakes wry playfulness, rhyme, and raw rage. It reprints Lake standard \u201cThe Golden Age of Hustlers\u201d as well as my personal favorite, \u201cYou Don\u2019t Love Me So I\u2019m Ugly, And I\u2019m Going to Kill Myself, And It\u2019s All Your Fault.\u201d The tone seems spat out by a sophisticated teenage Sylvia Plath who has seen and done it all. Lake\u2019s writing is here for us to devour, truly, again. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a compilation of everything that we know about,\u201d says collection editor\u00a0August Bernadicou. It\u2019s the poems from [2004 collection] Smash and Grab. It\u2019s the poetry from [1996 memoir] The Unsinkable Bambi Lake. It\u2019s her song lyrics. Someone sent me a bunch of demo tapes that she made in the \u201990s. So we pulled the lyrics from those songs. We include two interviews I did with her, one from a long-lost tape and then one I did in 2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bernadicou heads The LGBTQ History Project<\/a>, which conducts extensive amounts of interviews with queer elders who often sit at the margins of queer history, either because they are too punk, too thorny, or just too controversial. Bambi Lake was one of many of his interviews, and she and Bernadicou became intimately linked until her passing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Who was Bambi Lake? Bernadicou describes her lovingly as a chanteuse performer, a poet, a chameleon, a sex worker, an actress surfacing on the outer edges of the Cockettes. When he met her, she was homeless and on the outs with much of her community. While lake changed Bernadicou\u2019s life, their first meeting was traumatic and made a deep impression. Carrying a copy of Lake and Alvin Orloff\u2019s co-authored The Unsinkable Bambi Lake in his backpack, 18-year-old Bernadicou and his sister set out to find Lake\u2014and did so in Union Square. <\/p>\n

She was passed out there. When he woke her, she began screaming obscenities and tried to steal his phone. he reached out a year later when she was sober, and their relationship bloomed. While she began rebuilding her stage career, often to sold-out crowds, much of her relationship with her community had been damaged by substance misuse and mental health problems. Some local venues and bars had banned her, and she had burned many bridges. Bernadicou played a role in repairing all of that before her death in 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lake and Bernadicou. <\/p>\n

Devour Me, Again\u2019s publishing journey is as queer as a writer could hope it to be. Through happenstance, one of the original publishers of Unsinkable Bambi Lake reached out to Bernadicou for a different project. They realized they both were in deep with Bambi Lake\u2019s artistry. They agreed that it was time for her work to be reintroduced to a wider readership. Bernadicou made a move that was as every bit as go-getting as his entire approach to oral history and seeking out Bambi Lake.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cI messaged this guy on Grindr who I knew was involved with the Poetry Center in New York. I was like, OK, I have all this poetry by this trans, punk, speed freak, prostitute, rock and roll chanteuse. Can you help me get somewhere with it? Because I was just going to do it myself. Then I got introduced to Nightboat and they said yes. We\u2019ve been working on it for a couple of years.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lake\u2019s presence will manifest Thu\/30, 6pm, for a reading in the Tenderloin at The Compton\u2019s Cafeteria Riot! venue. Cheekily titled, \u201cDevour Me, Again, Again: Words of Wisdom from Bambi Lake,\u201d<\/a> which features an array of underground queer literary and nightlife talent, including Purnell, Brittany Snears, Fauxnique, Donna Personna, Stanley Frank, and more.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lineup of well-knowns is a fitting tribute to Lake\u2019s life and work. She often expressed to Bernadicou that she had failed\u2014she should have been more famous, with a wider audience spanning San Francisco, Berlin, and back to her hometown of New York. \u201cI told her, Bambi, you were too early,\u201d Bernadicou said. \u201cYou were too hardcore. The world wasn\u2019t ready for her, but she just had so much resentment that she wasn\u2019t famous. It\u2019s just sad because she was 68 years old, 69 years old, 70 years old talking about how she thought she was a failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe wasn\u2019t David Bowie like she wanted, but to people like me she changed the world and she changed my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

During our Zoom interview, Bernadicou drew my attention to items in his New York City apartment that his LGBTQ History Project interviewees had left him\u2014including artifacts of Lake\u2019s legacy on his \u201cBambi Wall.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite Bambi line is \u2018I find it hard to go to the beach or golden gate park\/ because nature is so beautiful it reminds me that I don\u2019t have a boyfriend,\u201d he said. \u201cI was like whoa I feel the same way. But maybe not that intense. I\u2019ve always liked underdogs. I like people who are fighters. I like people who are determined, who want to be famous at a young age. I always really relate to that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have her initials tattooed on my arm like a sailor. She was so unique. She was doing things at a time when other people weren\u2019t doing them. You know, she was trans. She was punk. She was a drug addict. She was a prostitute. These are all things that are like really in right now. But she was doing it in 1970. I want the world to know that she was a badass, that she was a sweetheart, that she cared, that she was depressed and bipolar and sad. I just want the world to know about her.\u201d <\/p>\n

With Devour Me, Again, the world certainly will know the unforgettable Bambi Lake.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco icon Bambi Lake\u2019s posthumous collection of poetry hit bookstore shelves a week after Trans March organizers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-416160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}