The lessons of the street are hard fought and hard earned, full of hard knocks, and very few know or describe them better than the butch narrator of this stunning, autobiographical first novel, A Crystal Diary.

Frankie Hucklenbroich's razor-edged, compelling, often wryly humorous story hustles us from the blood-and-beer-drenched corners of her St. Louis meat-packing district '50s youth, through the dark sex-soaked Hollywood alleys of her '60s baby butch years, into the druggy metropolis of '70s San Francisco. Moving relentlessly from one woman to another until faces and bodies blur, scamming her existence, Frankie learns what the street has to teach: how to make a buck, how to make it with a woman, how to survive.

These are working-class dykes who live by their wits and their guts - not their politics. Lesbians who pimp their girlfriends and court the dangers of crystal meth. Some, like Frankie, figure out how to shake its demons.

Not always a pretty story, but strong and handsomely written, A Crystal Diary exposes the author's precarious physical and emotional outlaw world.

Frankie Hucklenbroich pursued a wild and predominantly illegal life as a street butch for twenty years. Since 1980 she has "turned respectable," acquiring a college degree and writing passionately about the often invisible lesbian women she knows so well.

-Firebrand Books, Spring Catalog, 1997

$12.95 paper
$26.95 cloth
240 pages

Prologue-St. Louis, 1957 : About the Author : Links to Other Sites