A Candid Portrait of the 1990s New Wave of Queer Culture In the 1990s, queer youth, outcasts and artists, flocked to San Francisco to find one another and to experiment with art, self-expression, style, and gender. Rent was affordable, paving the way for queer bars, clubs, tattoo shops, galleries, cafes, bookstores, and women-owned businesses to emerge. A new wave of feminism embraced gender bending, and butch/femme culture flourished. The Mission District was the center of this queer cultural renaissance, and the feeling of community was palpable. Chloe Sherman was both a member of this community and an ardent visual chronicler. Her documentary photographic work on 35mm film stems from a commitment to capturing the vibrancy, tenderness, individuality, resilience, and joy within this subculture that was derided by mainstream society. Distilling the spirit of the time, her debut monograph is a candid portrait of a vibrant era that connects current and future generations to the pulse of San Francisco at a pivotal chapter in queer history.

FULL COLOR EDITION "Best LGBT Book of 2012" -Laurie Weeks "A page turner...electric" -Alice Notley, author of The Descent of Alette and Culture of One "Anna Joy Springer fabulates a trauma memoir of losing her bipolar lover to AIDS and, in so doing, creates a unique literary form, one that ignores the often fraught line between truth and fiction in pursuit of something more elusive" -American Book Review "A powerful book of love, trauma, loss, and forgiveness." -Lambda Literary "There is only one Anna Joy Springer. Only one. Her words take me from kitten to monster and back again in a way only she can do. I love this book." -Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre "Anna Joy Springer's The Vicious Red Relic, Love is a gnarly siren song of a book.... O]nce read, it will live perfectly inside you forever." -HTMLGiant "This writing just turns me on. The blatantness. The naming. The pain of becoming and being revealed by way of the prurient requirements of our relations." - The Lit Pub "With intelligence and heart she enlarges the things of which a novel is capable. How very lucky I am to have read it " -Carole Maso, author of AVA and Break Every Rule "My god, this book is beautiful... Each sentence is a journey." -Doug Rice, author of Between Appear and Disappear and Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest "She writes about sex, lust, passion, power so damn well, too damn well. She doesn't separate any of it. She keeps it close. Tight and scary.... I highly recommend this book." -The Collagist

"A page-turner, fast and muscular, electric." - poet Alice Notley "There is only one Anna Joy Springer. Only one. Her words take me from kitten to monster and back again in a way only she can do." - Kathleen Hanna, leader singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre "How to describe the charm, wit, innocence and energy in Anna Joy Springer's Red Relic? ... How very lucky I am to have read it " - novelist Carole Maso Anna Joy Springer was lead singer and songwriter for the influential punk band Blatz that came out of The 924 Gilman Street Project and Lookout Records, alongside bands like The Yeastie Girlz and Green Day. She later sang with The Gr'ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea. The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer's relationship with Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.