Home Page

Search the site...

Alvin Orloff's latest book is now available for purchase!!!

Vulgarian Rhapsody
a novel

Click HERE for a review in the Bay Area Reporter

Even though its often hilarious and wickedly paced, Vulgarian Rhapsody isn't just a delicious romp. It’s a smart, gimlet-eyed portrayal of the drag queens, poets, artists, alcoholics and assorted legends in their own minds that have roamed up and down Market street for decades. A brilliant, scorched, vodka-soaked love letter to the San Francisco queer art scene. - Mike Albo, author of The Underminer, Hornito, and renowned performer

I laughed out loud! Vulgarian Rhapsody is an incisive portrait of a shiftless, hapless, uber-critical gay-bar-fly named Harris and the queer / trans / arty friends he torments, set against San Francisco's oppressive "Dot Com Boom" of the late 1990s. And the pansophical narrator is both saucy and wry. Brilliant! - Philip R. Ford, director of the cult classic film, "Vegas in Space" and honorary straight man in the legendary drag troupe, the Sluts A-Go-Go

I've been a fan of Alvin Orloff's work for 20years . . . I'm forever a disciple. - Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

Here's a book trailer for Vulgarian Rhapsody!

Who is this Alvin Orloff, anyway???

photo: Daniel Nicoletta

Alvin Orloff began writing in 1977 penning lyrics for The Blowdryers, an early San Francisco punk band. He spent the 1980s working as a telemarketer and exotic dancer while concurrently attending U.C. Berkeley and performing with The Popstitutes, a somewhat absurd performance art/homocore band. In 1990 he and his bandmates founded Klubstitute, a floating queer cabaret devoted to the ideal of cultural democracy that featured spoken word, theater, drag, and musical acts. In 1995 the club, whose staff and patrons had been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, closed its doors and Orloff suddenly remembered all he’d ever wanted to be was a writer. He subsequently published four whimsical novels, I Married an Earthling, Gutter Boys, Why Aren’t You Smiling? and Vulgarian Rhapsody, along with a memoir, Disasterama! He lives in San Francisco and is the proprietor of Fabulosa Books, a literary hot-spot in the the Castro District .

When San Francisco’s most annoying gay barfly, Harris, is thrown out of his apartment by Maxine, his long-suffering roommate, a crisis ensues. The year is 1999 and cheap rent has suddenly become a thing of the past thanks to a mysterious development people are calling the “dotcom boom”. Unable to rent a place of his own on a telemarketer’s salary, Harris tries to finagle one after another of his deeply bizarre and quasi-dysfunctional friends into letting him share their lodgings. Meanwhile Maxine needs to find a replacement for Harris, which would be a lot easier if she weren’t a frighteningly moody drag-cabaret singer with a small substance abuse problem. Can these marginalized misfits find a place for themselves in their newly hyper-gentrified city?

I'd be happy to hear from you, so feel free to send me a message.

You could also visit WEBSTITUTE, a tribute page for my old pal, the legendary underground queer performance artists and nightlife impresario, Diet Popstitute.

Here's an interview I did for Perfectly Queer with Wayne Goodman!