Last Night at the Telegraph Club is out today!
Where does an idea come from? How far back does inspiration go?
In December 2016, I went to New York, where I met with literary agent Michael Bourret. I was looking for a new agent then, and I wanted to meet the ones who were interested in working with me in person if possible. (Such pre-covid times!) We met at City Bakery, where we found a table upstairs and talked about book ideas.
I had just finished writing a short story about a Chinese American girl in San Francisco in the 1950s for an anthology. Michael told me that he thought it could be a novel.
I wasn’t sure about that at the time. I had other ideas waiting in the wings, and I wanted to work on them. But his suggestion stuck with me, and after he officially became my agent a few weeks later, I kept thinking about what he’d said. By February 2017, I was writing a pitch and a synopsis for a novel that I titled Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Andrew Karre at Dutton bought the book a month later.
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Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, was an election day—a day that ended in the horrifying election of Donald Trump, but which began, for me, with work as usual. I sat down to plot out a short story in my writing journal.
The page reads:
Elements of Story
✳︎ Chinese American girl—1950s.
— How many generations in USA?
— lives in San Francisco within walking distance of Chinatown + the lesbian club (Mona’s?)✳︎ Girl is fascinated by 2 different things: the male impersonators working at Mona’s and the idea of space.
→ OR maybe learning that Aunt is working on space stuff inspires her to pursue the lesbians? Some connection here.→ GAZE // SEEING // POSSIBILITY
This was the story that would become “New Year,” published in the 2018 anthology All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Through the Ages, edited by Saundra Mitchell.
Looking back on those notes today, I’m struck by how closely I’ve hewed to the questions and ideas I wrote down then. Gaze. Seeing. Possibility. These have become major elements in the novel, which on election day in 2016 I had no idea I’d be writing.
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On May 18, 2016, I emailed my friend and fellow author Saundra Mitchell, who had invited me to contribute to an anthology of queer YA historical fiction. I told her I already had an idea for my story, and wrote:
I just read RISE OF THE ROCKET GIRLS, which is a nonfiction book about women who worked as “computers” at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the 1940s-70s, and one of these women was a Chinese American woman. I think I'd want to tell a story about a Chinese American girl in the 1950s who is inspired by her aunt who works at the lab. Also of course the girl would be queer so I can put in some of my research into '50s lesbian bars (I have already done this research!!).
In retrospect, “I have already done this research!!” is absolutely hilarious.
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In 2015, I read Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd. This is an academic history packed with footnotes, and I had bought it for myself years earlier when I was beginning to think about writing a different book. (I still haven’t written that book.) In 2015, I thought I would finally start writing it, so I cracked open Boyd’s history.
I made note of a very interesting sentence on page 79, in a section describing a Chinatown nightclub called The Forbidden City:
“In fact, San Francisco native Merle Woo remembers that lesbians of color often frequented Forbidden City in the 1950s.”
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In the early 2000s, I was living in San Francisco. I had become friends with a group of lesbians who were deeply involved in the queer scene there. Together, we worked at In Bed With Fairy Butch, a comedy-slash-burlesque show that moved between various nightclub venues in the city. The host was a comedian known as Fairy Butch, who was kind of a campy, fey drag king. The performers included sideburned drag kings, bewigged faux queens, and sultry femme dancers. The show was always followed by dancing.
In Bed With Fairy Butch had a pretty long run at a club on Mission Street a few blocks away from Taqueria Cancun, where we’d often grab late-night/early morning carne asada burritos, which would be seared on the hot grill until crispy. I still remember the Taqueria Cancun salsa, bright green and spicy, which I’d squeeze out of a bottle onto each bite of my burrito.
At the show, I helped run the “Tingle and Mingle” table, where people could sign up for a number that they’d wear on their shirt for the night. If another person was interested in them, they could leave them a note at the table. It was online dating in real life for shy queer women.
The club venue was a long rectangular room with a bar running down one side to about the midway point. Beyond that was an open space with a low stage outfitted with a catwalk for the performances. We set up folding chairs on the floor on either side of the catwalk for the audience, and when the show was over, we’d put the chairs away to make room for dancing.
Upstairs, a balcony encircled the ground floor, and people would lean over the railings to watch the show. Upstairs was also where the bathroom was. I remember standing in long lines to wait for my turn in the tiny room, which only had a couple of stalls. It was blindingly bright compared to the rest of the dark nightclub, and it smelled, of course, of cleaning fumes and humanity.
My friends and I would stay through the end of the show, when the lights would be abruptly turned on to urge everyone to leave. After cleanup, Fairy Butch would pay us cash from the cover charges. The club would be quiet, and we’d be used to the harsh overhead lights by then. The long room was painted a mucky shade of reddish brown, and it smelled of spilled cocktails and gave off a feeling of louche exhaustion.
When we stepped outside to go home, the sidewalk was always littered with cigarette butts. Harsh yellow streetlights cast deep, dirty shadows in the corners of the entryway beneath the marquee.
Outsiders might see it as a grimy hole in the wall—the kind of place you can’t quite believe is still open—but to me, the show and the people who came to it were a community. It was bawdy, often dramatic, and full of possibility.
*
Sometime in 2002 or 2003, a friend of mine handed me her copy of Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. “There are so many juicy bits,” she told me.
I was transfixed immediately by the opening scenes, when 18-year-old Nan Astley visits a music hall and sees the performance of Kitty Butler, a male impersonator. Kitty wears a tailored gentleman’s suit and a top hat, which she removes when she greets the audience, revealing her closely cropped hair.
“It was the hair, I think, which drew me most. ... It curled at her temple, slightly, and over her ears; and when she turned her head a little to put her hat back on, I saw a strip of pale flesh at the nape of her neck where the collar ended and the hairline began that—for all the fire of the hot, hot hall—made me shiver.”
— Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
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Where does an idea come from? How far back does inspiration go?
Last Night at the Telegraph Club was not a novel that I thought about for years before writing it. In some respects, there was a very short timeline from initial idea to book sale. In other respects, parts of this novel have been with me for decades, and writing Lily’s story gave me the opportunity to draw those threads out from my subconscious.
Finally, today, January 19, 2021, you can read Lily’s story yourself. I hope you enjoy it!
Virtual Book Launch
Because of the pandemic, I’m not able to do an in-person book launch event, so I made this video! Join me here virtually while I introduce the novel, read a short excerpt, and talk a bit about the the real-life historical examples that inspired me.
I also invite you to join me for some online events in honor of the book’s publication. You can find them all on my Events page!