At twenty one, I retired from seven years of drag. I wasn’t a superstar, I had no pageant crowns, there weren’t any office parties or engraved keepsakes commemorating my years of service. Still, lip-synching in the sort of clubs that would book a fourteen-year-old runaway dropout had been my career, it was all I knew. I left Oklahoma with a purse full of dollar tips, coins for tolls, and some past-due bills. Two other delinquent queens came with me, and we rode a rickshaw of a rental van across the country to San Francisco, a golden city with diminishing patience for messes like us. S.F. in the early nineties was to me what S.F. of the seventies had been for our drag mothers. Gays owned the nightlife, with warehouse discotheques to the left of our hotel room, and a legendary underground drag scene to the right. We heard the sound of construction (something being built) amid the sounds of rebellion (something being protested), day and night. San Francisco was alive in all directions and churning with change, and sex was everywhere if your trousers were open to it. It should have been the best time of my life, not the nightmare of receptionists, adulterists, larcenists, and satanists that it was. SAN FRANSICKO is C.T. Madrigal’s second memoir. In the first, OKLAHOMO , he was a kid who was queer in all senses of the word, and unwanted by everyone but the neighborhood deviants. The young runaway was salvaged by elder drag queens, taught to tease wigs and to lip-synch songs in the highest of heels. And at the end of that memoir, he’d left that Oklahoma life in search of another. It’s a heavy story, but not just. It’s also funny because life’s absurdities can be comical when shaken through a writer’s sieve. And, amid the misery, OKLAHOMO can pan for comedy gold with the best of them. The same can be said for his follow up, SAN FRANSICKO. When Madrigal moves west for a kind of adventure, it quickly becomes a sort of torture. He's an adult now, with none of the skills that that implies. And, despite a motley crew of memorable characters, he’s as congenitally lonely an adult as he was a little boy ("a million people are stacked like Jenga blocks in buildings all around me, and I am violently alone.") As with all the world's great cities, San Francisco can be an irregular fit for anyone with Lip-Synching and Apartment Squatting at the top of his resume. And if you think love will save him, it probably won't. Sometimes it takes more than a move to reboot a faulty life. SAN FRANSICKO is a love letter to San Francisco of the nineties. And it’s hate mail for every heavy thing that can be hemmed into the lives of those queer youths who make it to the iconic city by the bay (the worst of which, the author may have stitched himself.) As with his childhood memoir, OKLAHOMO , Madrigal treats tourists to endoscopic peeks into a city’s gay underbelly. And he serves SF locals some hypnotically nostalgic nods to “hotels for men”, Trannyshack, pre-tech neighborhoods, and many of the golden city’s other lost treasures. This two-year trip down the uphill life of a recovering runaway is sickly sad and fiercely funny, from an author who’s astutely stumped by humankind.