By Daniel Burton-Rose

KENNETH REXROTH, one of the most interesting of the poets who've lived in San Francisco, said in his autobiography, "I have spent my life striving to write the way I talk." Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, the prolific San Francisco editor, performer, and writer, has developed the skill of writing the way he thinks. His prose is a device implanted in the reader's brain, compelling accompaniment as he relates, in a voice that ranges from manic chatter to profound speechlessness, upward zips to euphoric pinnacles and vertiginous crashes to unplumbable depths. It's a door into the spirit of a young person committed to beauty in a world whose intimacies are instantly corroded. The work is calculated to cause indigestion in those raised on the junk-food confessionals of Oprah culture. However sensational the topics appear – prostitution, incest, insurrection – Mattilda matches immediacy with intelligence and rawness with poignancy.

Two anthologies compiled by Mattilda, both published this year, give voice to a new generation (collaborating with a couple of true-spirit old-timers) of gay activists who embrace the outside as the only proper perch from which to inflict injury upon the dominant society. Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving, gives voice to a previously ignored category of survivors of sexual assault and goes beyond the recovery narrative into nuanced investigations of childhood sexuality, the continuum between victim and abuser, and the complexities of memory itself. That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation is a passionate cacophony denouncing the gentrification of gay culture, authored by the gender queers, perverts, and other assorted visionaries excluded by the new Will and Grace banality. These collections reveal Mattilda not just as a litterateuse but also as an organizer. Which, of course, she is.

Bay Guardian: What do you include in your definition of "queer" besides sexual identity?

Mattilda: Political identity. I don't see the two as being separable. The mainstream has separated the two and created a false sense of community. I've fallen for this in the past. When I see gay people while I'm traveling outside of my comfort zone, I think "Oh, yay, gay people!" I get excited when I see a rainbow flag in some little town in the desert. But what's been shown to me over and over is that I'm not a part of that. For all intents and purposes, most people within a mainstream gay identity would rather any sort of radical queer perspective disappear. They don't see me as a part of their community.

These people subscribe to simplistic identity politics, which see queer identity as an end rather than a beginning. Gay marriage or military service or adoption can be seen as queer issues, when [in fact] what could be more symbolic of straight conformity?

What I am interested in is a radical outsider perspective, a queer identity that's about transforming sexuality and revolutionizing gender and taking apart capitalist tyranny, one that's about building community and family outside of traditional models; something that's challenging and seeking to dismantle the larger systems that are oppressing us in the first place.

BG: What are the common prejudices within the queer canon?

M: The main problem with the gay canon is the way that the white, upper-class, male-fetishizing perspective dominates everything else. It's normalized as a center around which everything else revolves. You have the coming-out narrative and a "high art" language that talks about country clubs and parties on Fire Island. These are about boring, conventional people who happen to be gay! It's something I've never been particularly interested in.

BG: The contributors to Dangerous Families, That's Revolting!, and your first anthology, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write about Their Clients, are a diverse collection. How did you develop this inclusive consciousness?

M: My politics come from radical queer organizing. I came of age politically within early-'90s ACT UP. The militance and the focus on race, class, gender, and sexuality in any sort of analysis of the AIDS crisis had a strong effect on me. I also met all these activists who had been developing complex political critiques of almost everything, some of them for almost four decades. Everything became politicized for them, and then for me as well.

Gay Shame started as an attempt to create a radical alternative to the consumerist Pride celebration. Instead of giving people endless opportunities to buy crap, we wanted to provide a space to create an outside culture on our own terms. From a once-a-year alternative to Pride, it became a direct-action extravaganza that fused the theatricality of the '70s drag troupe the Cockettes with the militance of ACT UP and the focus on public space and anticapitalist organizing of Reclaim the Streets.

BG: You're scornful of single-issue organizing, such as that around gay marriage and the legalization of sex work. Can you describe a way of organizing that encompasses every issue at once?

M: One thing I've found very effective in recent years is creating a spectacle that is so alluring one can only look at it.

BG: A full turn from Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle. Instead of calling for the destruction of the spectacle to encourage direct contact between people, activists are creating spectacle to draw others in.

M: We encourage people to participate in every way we can: by dressing up, bringing things to give away, or taking roles within the pageantry. We definitely struggle with spectatorship, but I do believe that spectacle is crucial – connecting the spectacle with the politics to an extent that they cannot be separated. Too many people fall into the trap of dividing the political and the cultural. We can have boring political debates and manifestos, and we can have boring bands playing and people drinking. I'm not interested in either of those. I want something that fuses politics and culture and makes it more.

BG: What's the relationship between public performance and the written word?

M: The most important thing when I'm writing prose is voice. I'm not interested in plot. It's all about making sure voice and character are strong, because that's where everything else comes from. In the new novel I've been working on, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, I've taken everything one step further. It's all voice, multiple voices. Someone will call me on the phone, and I'll be like, "Oh, that's hilarious, let me write that down." What's amazing is there is a plot! It came from the characters.

BG: It's physically painful for you to write. How did you develop your injury?

M: Four years ago I began biking a lot and started to get this pain in my wrist. I just thought, "It must be some muscle I'm not used to using, and I'll just get stronger, and it'll be fine." That was about four years ago, and since that time the pain has developed into a disability I have to deal with constantly. It started as a repetitive stress injury and has become more all-encompassing. Now it's closer to fibromyalgia. I have chronic pain all over my body and difficulty getting restful sleep.

What I've realized is that this injury is rooted in sexual abuse I experienced as a kid. Before I started biking again, the only person I'd ever ridden a bike with was my father. Our time together was a constant struggle to make me into the masculine creature he wanted me to be. Riding a bike again triggered body memories of childhood hatred of myself and my body and my gender performance. Those ideas are stuck in my body, and I haven't figured out how to rid myself of their physical manifestations.

BG: It must be difficult for you as a prostitute to discuss incest without confirming stereotypes.

M: It's difficult to talk about sex work and sexual abuse without feeding people's stereotypical notions about cause and effect, identity and self-worth, and without relying on simplistic sex-positive rhetoric. I try to do neither of those two things. Most of my work, fiction and nonfiction, forces the reader to enter on the writer's terms. I'm not interested in explication or asking forgiveness, or justification or redemption.

BG: Hustler novels are a dark genre. David Wojnarowicz's Memories That Smell like Gasoline stands out in particular, but I've never encountered a light one. Your first novel, Pulling Taffy, which recounts your days as a call boy, has color. Where does this difference come from?

M: David Wojnarowicz speaks with a sense of hope in a world of loss. That's where his writing resonates. When I first discovered his writing, I thought, "Here is the kind of rage that I feel." I hadn't realized that others feel it too. His is a story of all-consuming rage and powerlessness and longing and desperation and hopelessness all combined together with something that maybe glitters at the end of it. Our shared hope lies in moments of intimacy and transformation, which create opportunities for continuing.

Mattilda reads Nov. 21, 4 p.m., Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia, S.F. (415) 282-9246.

Daniel Burton-Rose is a writer who lives in Oakland.