The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Gina Francesca Anna de Vries is a queer femme writer, rabble-rouser, sex worker, pervert, and Paisan. She grew up in San Francisco, where she cut her activist and artist teeth on the riot grrrl and queer youth movements in the 1990s. As a teenager, Gina organized queer youth conferences, published some earnestly radical grrrl zines, and read at many a teen poetry slam. She also wrote Curve magazine's "Hey! baby" column (in which she profiled young lesbian, bisexual, and trans women activists) from 1997-2004, and co-edited (with Diane Anderson-Minshall) the queer youth anthology [Becoming]: Young ideas on gender, identity, and sexuality.

Currently, Gina curates shows for long-running queer performance series San Francisco in Exile, blogs for national LGBT blog Bilerico right here ;), teaches workshops about intersex and transgender issues with Youth Trans & Intersex Education Services, and teaches a writing workshop for sex workers at San Francisco's Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on the Advisory Board).

Gina's fiction, journalism, memoir, and smut have appeared dozens of places, including Dirty Girls, TransForming Community, That's Revolting!, Bound to Struggle, Femmethology, The Revolution Starts at Home, make/shift magazine, Go magazine, and $pread magazine.

Gina has performed everywhere from bar backrooms to the Ivy League -- including Perverts Put Out, the National Queer Arts Festival, Yale University, Reed College, and Write Here Write Now. She's starting her MFA in Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University in the Fall of 2009, where she hopes to bring a healthy dose of perversity to the academy.

Gina enjoys dying her hair pink, fancy lipgloss, genderfuck, living a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean, Phil'z Coffee, pretty boys, tough girls, transfeminism, and hagiography. She tours wherever willing pupils and audiences will have her, and can be booked for workshops and performances and/or cruised online at ginadevries.com.