Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik, 1971) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and was identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community. Early life Tea grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts in a working-class family. Her father was Polish and her mother was Irish and French Canadian. She felt different from other children, and she took comfort in music. In high school, Tea identified with the goth subculture and artists such as Siouxsie Sioux. She was also drawn to literary work, including The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and the beat movement. When she was twenty years old, Tea read Angry Women from RE/Search Publications, which included interviews with radical female performers, writers, and thinkers. The book was highly influential. "That really made me see that there is a lineage [of female writers], and a path, and I could really put myself on that," she explained in an interview. During her childhood, Tea's stepfather spied on her through a drilled hole in the wall of her bedroom. She struggled with this abuse, and she was in denial for many years. Tea began drinking alcohol as a teenager. When she was 19 years old, her stepfather admitted to the abuse, but Tea's mother chose to stay with him. It was at this time that Tea decided to move out of her home and relocate to the home of her girlfriend at the time in Boston. During this period, Tea supported herself with two minimum wage jobs as a hair salon receptionist and deli shop employee. Her girlfriend, a sex worker, was earning significantly more money than she did. She decided to go into sex work as well. In the early 1990s, Tea broke up with her girlfriend and moved to San Francisco. Spoken word and Sister Spit In San Francisco, Tea immersed herself in the literary and spoken word scene. It was "...very democratic. There were open mics every night. The poetry was self-taught – punk and hip-hop inspired street poetry. It was perfect for me. I felt I could be my whole self, which at that point was queer, feminist,