It’s the summer of 1996 and 18-year-old Hannah and her girlfriend Sam have just arrived in the queer promised land of San Francisco.
Leaving behind Hannah’s strict Orthodox Jewish mother and their sheltered lives of secrecy in Long Beach, New York, the pair are eager to finally live openly and be part of a queer community. But when the cash from Hannah’s beloved bubbe begins to run low, their prospects for making ends meet in the city dwindle. Going home isn’t an option, so they turn to sex work to survive.
That is the premise of Shoshana von Blanckensee’s “Girls Girls Girls,” released last summer, which offers an intimate look at being young, Jewish and lesbian in the tumult of 1990s San Francisco. It’s a world von Blanckensee knows well, because she lived it.
“I moved to San Francisco to be gay,” von Blanckensee told J. “You had to physically find queer culture and community. Being queer at that time was not what it is today, so it was necessary to find your people for survival.”
Her “people” included photographer Chloe Sherman, who was also queer, Jewish and looking for a roommate. Sherman arrived in San Francisco in 1991 and later earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. With camera in hand, she documented friends, lovers, community spaces and daily life on 35mm film.
Von Blanckensee moved into a Noe Valley apartment with Sherman in 1998 after touring with the queer spoken-word punk collective Sister Spit. The two quickly became inseparable, immersing themselves in the city’s queer underground. Bars such as the Lexington Club and cafes including the Bearded Lady served as regular gathering spots.
Von Blanckensee describes the era as messy and imperfect. Addiction, poverty and trauma were ever-present, but so was a deep sense of community, she said. Friends helped one another move, hosted fundraisers when someone couldn’t make rent and collaborated on zines, art projects and political actions.
“There was so much freedom,” von Blanckensee said. “We did whatever we wanted and didn’t care what anyone thought of us. We had each other.”
Sherman sees her photographs as a testament to that collective becoming.
“It was this really special experience of finding yourself as a young person in a city filled with others doing the same,” she said. “We left our birth families and invented ourselves.”
Her photography book, “Renegades,” released in 2023, features images that captured that period.
“I was photographing my environment, my surroundings,” Sherman said. “I just found such a dynamic, beautiful group of people that I was moved by and inspired by and befriended. It was natural for me to photograph them and offer an inside view to try to reveal the beauty that I saw.”
On March 5, the longtime friends will discuss their books at Womb House Books in a joint conversation, followed by an audience Q&A and signing. Though one book is fiction and the other photography, both document the same electric moment in queer Bay Area history.
“It’s a treat to get to share a talk with her because our work most certainly intersects in a huge way,” Sherman said. “My book is historical, all images shot 30 years ago and her book is referencing that particular time. It’s very sweet to come back together as adults to share our work that reflects our young lives.”
Von Blanckensee, now an oncology nurse living in Berkeley, had been writing bits and pieces of “Girls Girls Girls” for two decades. Working on the front lines during the pandemic ignited in her an urgency.
“I thought, ‘what if I die and never write this book?’” she said. She soon finished her debut novel.
Though fictionalized, “Girls Girls Girls” draws from von Blanckensee’s experiences navigating queerness, family estrangement and survival in an expensive city. In an author’s note, she writes openly about the elements of the novel drawn from her own life, including her time working at a strip club.
“I had thought about just writing it as fiction and hiding behind that,” she said. “But then at the end of the day, I want to kind of model shamelessness for my children and for other young queer people — to just be authentic and respect the choices they made, even if they weren’t always the best ones.”