Shoshana von Blanckensee on Her Glowing, Gay Gem of a Debut Novel, Girls Girls Girls

Vogue

19-06-2025

The sexy, slightly sinister promise of the pink, neon-lit GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS signs that so often hang in strip clubs is fulfilled—and then some—in writer and oncology nurse Shoshana von Blanckensee's debut novel of the same name (out now from Penguin Random House). The book follows a young, queer Jewish woman named Hannah as she and her clandestine high-school lover Sam drive their van from Long Beach, New York to San Francisco in search of a gay and lesbian scene that can match their high, high hopes for their post-high-school futures in the mid-1990s.
Photo: Chloe Sherman
What Hannah and Sam ultimately discover in the Tenderloin isn't exactly Disneyland; short on cash, both girls start stripping at a local institution called the Chez Paree (or, as its workers derisively call it, the 'Cheese Parade') and Hannah soon finds herself doing complex, nebulous escort work for an older butch patron she meets at the club. While her love story with Sam proves difficult to sustain amid the glitter and grime of San Francisco's queer world, the story that Hannah writes for herself as she grows up, finds work that fits her, and learns to value her relationships with family back home—including her loving, supportive Bubbe—is very much worth reading.
Vogue spoke to von Blanckensee about Bay Area nostalgia, drawing inspiration from a lifetime's worth of body work, the evolution of the word 'dyke,' her hope for young queer readers everywhere, and more.
Vogue: What drew you to set this book in the richly lesbian world of early-'90s San Francisco?
Shoshana von Blanckensee: Well, that's the only lesbian world I know. It's what I lived. The book became fictionalized over time, but it started from lived experience. It was really important to me to create the San Francisco I knew, so all the businesses and places that people congregated actually existed and were all there at the time. The opening night of the lesbian bar the Lexington is set accurately at the time that it opened. I really wanted it to be precisely that world.
What do you miss most about that era of San Francisco?
I actually just miss being in a bubble of queer art that was exploding. It was pre-cell phones, really, so we were all just in the streets. We weren't in our homes, scrolling. You'd just go somewhere, and people would be there, and there was an art event almost every night of some kind. I miss just wandering around the Mission, going to the Bearded Lady or the Lexington and knowing you were going to see people, and feeling that creative vibe of everybody making art like there was no tomorrow, even though the idea was that none of it was going to get out to the broader world. But that didn't matter.