#kitty tsui

From Dagger on Butch Women by Lily Burana & Roxxie Linnea Due

"A Butch in Femme Clothing: A Portrait of Kitty Tsui" by Jill Posener

Kitty Tsui, San Francisco. 1991. “Love my flattop. Love my leathers!” Photo credit: Richard Law.

Born in Hong Kong in 1952, Kitty spent her childhood there and in London before moving with her family to San Francisco in 1968.

Kitty got her first writing byline as a young teen in the South China Morning Post. Her activism also began young. At 17, she made the decision to attend San Francisco State instead of the more overtly prestigious UC Berkeley after watching students there go toe-to-toe with mounted cops in their battle for an ethnic studies department. While studying creative writing at SF State, Kitty established the Third World Poetry Series. It was around that time that Kitty came out as a lesbian.

In 1981, Kitty was a founding member of Unbound Feet, a female performance group challenging stereotypes about Asian women. It was widely recognized as a catalyst for the Asian-Pacific Islander feminist and lesbian movements in SF.

In 1983, Kitty published her first book of poetry and prose, The Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire, the first book ever published by a Chinese-American lesbian. Kitty’s second book, Breathless: Erotica came out in 1996 and won a Firecracker Alternative Book Award. Her third book, Sparks Fly, was written by her alter ego Eric Norton, a gay leatherman living in pre-AIDS San Francisco.

Kitty has also been a bodybuilder. In 1986, she won a bronze medal for women’s physique at the second Gay Games, held in SF. Four years later, at the Gay Games in Vancouver, she won the gold medal at the age of 38. Bringing together her physical and literary prowess, Kitty became the first Asian-American woman to appear on the cover of the lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs.

Through the years, Kitty’s poetry and prose has been collected in dozens of anthologies. In 2016, she received the Phoenix Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community.

Kitty Tsui. “Who says we don’t talk about sex?” The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle, 1992, p. 385, 337.