Preface
One of the San Francisco originals I was blessed to know was the infamous and fabulous Bambi Lake, a San Francisco Bay Area transsexual woman who transitioned in the 1970s, worked at a famous strip club unbeknownst to clients and management, sang, acted and ran with an impressible collection of artists and other celebrities. I was on the Spectator staff when her memoir came out, and I got it was assigned to me. With sadness but also with gratitude to have known her, I learned of her death in 2020 from cancer.
A Review: The Unsinkable Bambi Lake
by Christine Beatty (appeared in Spectator, early 1997)
From the early days of the San Francisco drag/performance art scene to the first wave of punk rock in the mid-70’s that continues on through to today, Bambi Lake has mingled with the stars and participated right along. And, oh yes, Bambi is a transsexual, a topic which practically deserves a book of its own.
Come witness the metamorphosis of little, suburban Johnny Purcell, an innocent and sensitive Irish boy from Woodside, California, to the awesomely glamorous Bambi Lake, singer, stripper, actress, prostitute, performance artist and much more. From San Francisco to New York to Berlin to London, Bambi made many different scenes, and made them fabulously. This is a story of feast and famine, of a gypsy lifestyle, of a life on the edge. A fairy tale of a time that was magical.
Bambi’s book is a pleasure to read. The conversational style of prose impeccably garnished with stories, both amusing and horrifying, keep the reader turning pages to find out what will happen to her *next*. Her stories are told as though you were sitting with her, perhaps enjoying a cocktail in a Tenderloin “drag” bar, while you listen to a fascinating past unfold. Unlike the autobiography of another transsexual that came out a few years ago (who also rubbed shoulders with famous people and had her own fame) Bambi’s book does not make light of everything, including the bad things that happened. At the same time the book is not dark and depressing. Think of it as a more uplifting, transsexualized version of *The Basketball Diaries* without the heavy drug overtones, and you start to get a better idea of what her autobiography is about. It is a snapshot, a period piece of the freewheeling good times, the sexual and gender revolution, and the explosion of art that rocked San Francisco in 70’s.
While a few envious people may consider the author’s dropping of names to be self-indulgent, I found it to be one of the main areas of interest in the book. *I* would like to meet these people: Exene Cervenka, Siouxsie Sioux, Jane County, Bowie and others. Bambi’s book is also replete with references to local celebrities, including Ginger Coyote, leader of the infamous San Francisco punk rock band, White Trash Debutantes, and poet/stripper/performance artist Danielle Willis, who was one of the prime motivaters to get Bambi to write her story.
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Bambi in my modest Tenderloin highrise, and she told me about her recent tour of Los Angeles to promote her book.
“The book tour of LA was a real scene. I met this boy who had some money who took me to LA to promote the book. We booked a room for a week at the Coral Sands, the scary gay hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. And I did a reading with Exene at A Different Light. I sang with Stone Fox… Joan Jett was in the audience, and the Circle Jerks opened up for me. And we went to the Viper Room, and I met Dennis Rodman, got invited up on stage to dance with him. Gave a copy of the book to Julian Lennon at the Sunset Marquee, and he bought me a drink. It was quite a week down there. It was fun.”
Spectator: Why write this book now?
Bambi: Around 1985 people starting saying “where’s the book?” because I had so many stories. There were so many people I had met, and I started giving little interviews to the paper. “Where’s the book” became sort of a catchphrase. Wide-eyed young kids, mainly. Like, “Oh, you did that… played with the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Butthole Surfers, and you know David Bowie and met Joni Mitchell. Constant stories that I had by the time I was thirty-five. It wasn’t until I was forty-five that I wrote the book, but by then it seemed essential to write it. My career was floundering, and I thought it would help to write this stuff down and let people know who I was, because my stories go back, all the way to Sylvester.
CB: What career needed jump starting?
BL: The cabaret and rock singing, which has been simultaneous. I started out with the Cockettes, so I have this kind of art deco, secondhand take on performing that I got from them, from Sylvester and Peter Minton and those people. Then I sort of invented punk cabaret where I would do these odd little elegant cabaret things right before [punk band] Black Flag went on. And it became a schtick, to be covered in beaded gowns and singing a Bowie song opening for Madness, stuff like that. Being *the* obvious transsexual, sideshow–almost. Playing off that bisexuality of rock and roll coming down from Lou Reed and David Bowie. Death rock was real androgynous.
CB: You’ve met many famous people. Did you feel accepted by them?
BL: Yeah. There was a time when I started to meet a lot of them, which was during punk. All these various people were making names for themselves, and the Mabuhay Gardens was a train station of about-to-be celebreties. The Clash, Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Jane County… the original punk scene… those people were very friendly because it was the beginnings of something. It was a family thing, but then there was a definite change. People like the Specials and Gary Numan and Echo and the Bunnymen and others like that, we were still running into them because we were on this same groove, like almost becoming groupies, but they were looking for the youngest girls with the biggest tits and so we played pranks on them.
CB: Your book says you started stripping and streetwalking in ’76. What got you into that?
BL: I had a safe niche in Berlin and I could have continued with that, but I’m an American, *and* I wanted to get out of that pantomining drag show thing. So I came back and that’s what I ended up with. As a stripper I had a safe place at the Galaxy, it was like a home and right next to the Mabuhay, which was nice. The streetwalking only lasted one year until I got hired at the Galaxy where I was for ten years, then I had an ad in a sex newspaper for another eight. To be on hormones and looking for work… [the ad] seemed to be the only way to go. The only real jobs I’d had at that point were dishwashing, so it seemed like I was slipping into something better.
CB: Aside from the obvious impact of AIDS, what has changed in the San Francisco transgender scene since the 70’s?
BL: People have grown up a lot more. It’s not quite as unified. We’ve all gotten older, and…
CB: Well, there’s no doubt what AIDS did to the scene. I got into sexwork right around the time Rock Hudson died and it went from making money hand over fist to near starving within a month. People got a lot more cautious.
BL: That’s definitely true. That’s where the ad came in. It still seems to be a steady market for women and transsexuals, and long as you give people a safe, clean, warm place to go it just doesn’t stop. Sometimes it can be a struggle to keep that space open, but it seems to be a business that will go on forever. Luckily I don’t show my age too much, thank God.
CB: What are you doing with your theatrical and music background at the moment?
BL: I think I’ve come to the point where I’ve auditioned it and gotten enough local acclaim. I’m trying to focus it on to demo tapes and make definite outreaches to Los Angeles and use every connection that I have with Howie Klein at Warner-Reprise, and with the help of Exene [Cervenka] and this book to get to the next level. Then you get to that marketing problem of what radio stations are going to play this, since my music is so blatant and honest and uncompromising. It seems that we might have to market it through gay catalogs like Pussy [Tourette] does.
CB: What kind of music market would you say it is?
BL: I still do my obscure art songs from the 30’s from the Ziegfield Follies. It’s my niche. I’m trying to get that packaged as well. I discovered that after writing it that songs came out of the book, so I became a singer/songwriter along the lines of the acoustic, unplugged wave. At the time of punk I was really intimidated by Siouxsie Sioux; I didn’t think I could ever write anything as good as this girl. I guess that was because I hadn’t come to the point where I had lived enough of my own identity. What happened with this book was that the poetry became songs. Folk singing is something I like. It goes with my whole impossibly plaintive, feminine side. I tend to make people cry. *I* like it when I’m moved in that way. I’m a torch singer.
CB: What other ambitions do you have? What causes are important to you?
BL: If I get somewhere, I would help the transsexual cause. Whatever little clinics and organizations that are out there that need to be helped, I would help. I’ve done a lot of benefits, but the more successful you are, the more you can help. AIDS and transgender problems, those are the important ones.
CB: Any final words for our studio audience?
BL: I hope that people who read it will realize that my book is about a real person. It’s not a huge happy ending, a celebrity rolling in dough. I always felt I would have to get to that point before I was able to write it. But I just wrote it. I tried to write it not worrying so much about what people locally would think about it, but for kids out in the middle of nowhere who are depressed and feel disconnected. And if we could help one of them, we would have done some good.
[ Here is Bambi singing her famous torch song, The Golden Age of Hustlers ]
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