Slutty Detective: A Manifesto of Queer Revelation
Today I learned something that cracked open the cosmos a little wider: the phrase “Slutty Detective”—the name of my beloved character Kandy Fontaine, the lipstick-smeared, truth-sniffing, sex-positive sleuth—originates in the writing of Kathy Acker.
Yes, that Kathy Acker. The literary anarchist. The punk priestess of cut-up prose and radical identity. In Empire of the Senseless, she wrote:
“I was a slutty detective in a city of mirrors.” And just like that, the lineage snapped into place. I wasn’t just riffing—I was channeling.
This is more than coincidence. It’s a revelation. A reminder that queer art is a palimpsest of rebellion, a collage of voices screaming across time. My work, my characters, my obsessions—they’re part of a living archive of resistance.
I’ve been honored to share pages with Danielle Willis, Allen Ginsberg, Patrick Califia, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, Jan Steckel, Thomas S. Roche, Carol Queen, and Amelia G.—writers who didn’t just write queer stories, they rewrote reality. They made space for the freaks, the lovers, the gender outlaws, the sacred sluts. In the Foreword to my recent collection The Doom Hippies III: A Great Variety of Monsters, Weird Fiction legend Jeffrey Thomas compares me to the late, great Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. and William S. Burroughs himself.
And I’ve collaborated with Kari Lee Krome, the co-founder of The Runaways with Joan Jett, on songs and stories, some of which can be found in my recent collections. The songs were her and I-an absolutely surreal dream come true for someone who has admired Kari’s work for decades and spoke about it in class as a college comp instructor. The stories-Department of Youth, for example-are still being written; those were directly suggested by her when she would pop up on my Facebook message feed and call me “Mister.” If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin.
In my Queer Voices interview with Stephanie Magister, I spoke of the need for creative disruption. And now, in this age of Trump, where MAGA dreams of erasure and conformity, we must respond with radical queer anarchy. We must be slutty detectives in cities of mirrors, exposing hypocrisy, decoding oppression, and seducing truth out of hiding.
On The Smol Bear Show, I sat with cyberculture pioneer Ken Goffman (aka R.U. Sirius), a close associate of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, and with Marc Olmsted, the post-Beat poet whose friendship with Allen Ginsberg spanned decades. We spoke of memory, myth, and the power of art to mutate minds.
This is our moment.
We must write like our bodies are on fire. We must create like the world depends on it—because it does. We must be unapologetically queer, defiantly erotic, and intellectually feral.
Let the slutty detective rise. Let her lipstick be warpaint. Let her trench coat be armor. Let her questions be knives.
We are the resistance. We are the remix. We are the revelation.
