{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025059665871121718, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007159904534606206, 'mean_word_length': 5.098181818181819, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence by Christina B. Hanhardt (review)

I recently saw Bambi Lake on Market Street at the edge of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. She was stooped on a low wall yelling something unrecognizable as floods of tourists, techies, and business people poured by. Seeing her reminds me that the collapsing present of speculative capitalism has not yet swallowed us all. Bambi has remained mythological in many San Francisco subcultures for the past four decades. A marginally housed trans woman, punk performer, and cabaret singer often living on the frays of addiction, she has a way of spinning her alienation outward destroying most in her path. She resides against both the proper subject of mainstream trans inclusion and radical liberationist politics. As her autobiography suggests, she remains, at least for now, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake. Bambi’s song “Golden Age of Hustlers,” from where the epigraph was taken, narrates her life as a hooker on Polk Street in the 1970s and 1980s. The song, which has recently reached a wider audience through Justin Bond’s cover, summons a history of public trans/queer street life where violence was laid bare and communities of care were forged in the excesses of normative existence. The San Francisco of Bambi’s lyrics is the background from which I encountered Christina Hanhardt’s dazzling new book, and 2014 Lambda Literary Award winning, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. Hanhardt’s Safe Space offers an activist historiography of urban redevelopment and displacement, where biopolitical shifts have carved the social ((( BOOK REVIEW