As she accumulates sessions, Ruth realizes that all of the men who visit her have secrets, which she keeps “like hickeys hidden under a scarf,” Newell writes. To the lonely, searching men of the Bay Area, she is a therapist, a part-time lover, “a cross between a booty call and a suicide hotline.”
Soft Core is a cross too, between a mystery and a love story. Though it reaches a satisfying resolution, the larger gift is the journey — through Ruth’s memories and through San Francisco. In this way, it is Newell’s love letter to the city that helped her become who she is today. At 19 years old, she and her now-wife fled the isolation they felt at Stanford for gay bars in San Francisco like Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the last queer bar in the Tenderloin. There she was exposed to “weird drag” that changed her life, and began performing as her alter ego, Britney Smearz.
“You’re still unjaded when you’re 19, so even a shitty performance to Celine Dion can really wow you,” she jokes, before getting serious and explaining that the venue “is where I started to feel like a real person and to learn a lot about the things that would later structure my art, my aesthetic [and] worldview.”
She, her wife and their friend Myles Cooper now host Angels, a monthly party at Aunt Charlie’s that is an offshoot of Cooper’s former High Fantasy parties there. Attendees, Newell notes, are “a very San Francisco mixture” of “street queens and art kids and ancient alcoholics and leather daddies from the bath house across the street.”
Like the San Francisco in her book, it’s a haven for kink.