in honor of Crystal Jang and in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I’m thrilled to be giving away 10 copies of Last Night at the Telegraph Club — open internationally! I’ll be sending five copies to readers around the world and five to those within the U.S. The deadline to enter is May 31, 2022.
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If you follow me on Twitter or if you remember my National Book Award acceptance speech, you’ll know that for several months now, right-wing efforts to remove books about people of color and LGBTQ people from schools and libraries (including public libraries) have been ramping up across the U.S.
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When I began the research for Last Night at the Telegraph Club in earnest, I knew that I needed to know more about those lesbians of color. More specifically, I needed to know what it was like to be a Chinese American lesbian in San Francisco in the 1950s, but they were nearly invisible in the historical record.
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Today we no longer use the term “male impersonator” to describe a woman who performs onstage as a man; today we’d use the term “drag king.” But male impersonation was once a popular and mainstream entertainment, and some male impersonators were famous enough to tour nationally.
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A major part of the background research for Last Night at the Telegraph Club involved learning how Lily’s Chinese American identity would have been experienced by her and how it would have been perceived by others—not only her family and community, but by whites and other non-Chinese.
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In the following maps, I've marked significant locations in Last Night at the Telegraph Club with numbers, and below the maps you'll see additional information about each site. If you're in San Francisco now or sometime in the future, you can visit most of these locations, or see where my fictional landmarks are set.
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