Just our curt of tea: the new anthology Baby Remember My Name pays homage to Michelle Tea, the queen of queer girl writing, just as she's relinquishing the crown.

Michelle Tea slips past me like an undercover agent. She's wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a camel-colored trench coat tightly belted around her tiny waist. Her hair is pulled back and pinned up.

We'd agreed to meet at Caffe Roma in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. I was expecting the girl from the photographs I'd seen, a grinning rag doll in a slip or a leopard-print cocktail gown, not this elegant imposter. She had entered the cafe with a wholesome-looking, dark-haired woman whom she later introduces as her younger sister. Tea helps set her sister up with her laptop across the room, then turns to look for me. When I return to the table after buying her coffee, she's taken off the coat, baring her pale, tattooed arms. She flashes me the sweet, giddy smile I recognize from her book jackets.

"I haven't got one of these yet," she says, pointing to the galley I've brought of her new book, Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing, just out from Carroll & Graf. Tea's editor for the project, Don Weise, told me about an early meeting he had with the author in which he had suggested a gorgeous girl with tattoos for the cover. She countered, "Don, that's so '90s."

"I hope that didn't sound shaming," Tea says to me. "It just, yeah, it's really over."

A confessional writer, Tea is used to being mistaken for the 20-something narrator of her raucous, funny, fast-paced memoirs--someone who might drink a 40 with you and burst into tears, or get high and start an orgy at a party. (From Valencia: "Stella left to get some water and came back with a third girl, and we had sex with her too. We were like a pair of deranged lawn mowers.") She is that girl, of course, and prides herself on the honesty of her writing, but by the time one of her books lands on the new releases shelf, she's often very different from the person who wrote those stories.

Publishers Weekly called Tea "a kind of pop ambassador to the world of tattooed, pierced, politicized, and sex-radical queer grrrls in San Francisco." I ask her if "pop ambassador" is an accurate moniker.

"I don't think so," she says, laughing. "You know, it's really nice to have anybody write anything nice about you in the press, but a lot of that--it's marketing. And I totally get it, and I respect the marketer's job to explain you, define you, encapsulate you, make you sound really important. But what they're talking about when they talk about a larger culture [of queers] is a culture that's too large and too vast to be represented by any one person--a generation, basically, of queer girls of a certain sensibility, of which there are many. And I'm not even of that generation anymore. There's a whole new generation of younger girls who are doing their own thing, and I'm probably not privy to their esoteric secrets."

At 36, Tea says she "doesn't leave the house that often." She's in a long-term relationship with hip-hop artist Rocco Kayiatos, who describes Tea as a "workaholic." She admits she hates to miss deadlines: "It's just my weird working-class work ethic, where I'm always afraid of getting fired."

Although she's been a fixture of San Francisco's Mission literary scene since before her best-known book, Valencia (2000)--named for the street and district that is to San Francisco dykes what Castro Street is to gay men--high rents drove her to tourist-heavy North Beach two years ago. "I had, like, a 20-minute identity crisis," she recalls. "I thought, we're living here? There's no queer people." But Tea found she enjoys the relative anonymity of North Beach. In the Mission she's so recognizable a cafe can feel like a nightclub to her.

Tea's first novel, Rose of No Man's Land (2005), is now out in paperback. Her graphic novel Rent Girl, illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin, is being optioned by Showtime. Tea cofounded the poetry and performance art group Sister Spit in 1994 with Sini Anderson and made it a road show in 1997. Her national reputation grew out of the tours but got a big boost from reviews like Sandra Tsing Loh's New York Times rave about 2002's The Chelsea Whistle.

"That was crazy," she recalls. Tea and some friends had gone on an independent tour to promote the book. Someone told her about the review on the very night she was reading in her hometown--Chelsea, Mass.--a place she unlovingly depicted in her memoir.

"First of all, I couldn't believe I was reading in Chelsea, which is, like, the least cultured place in the world, and that there was even a venue," Tea says. "The city had changed so much, had become gentrified. And that there was even anyone in Chelsea who read The New York Times seemed crazy!"

Queer girl writing of the last five years is saturated with Tea's potent narrative voice, colored by her punk roots, her experiences in the San Francisco spoken-word scene of the early '90s, and the pokes and jabs of her fellow provocateurs in Sister Spit. After reading the stories in Baby Remember My Name, it's easy to see that this is the house Tea built. I mention "Laundry Day" by Robin Akimbo, a tightly focused story about a rough encounter at a Laundromat.

"That's an intense piece," she remarks. "I really like that. I feel that so much of my 20s was marked in some way by feeling unsafe and trying to find ways to feel safe in the street and assess the level of threat that you feel as a girl, so I really appreciated that piece."

There is a lot of working-class struggle in these stories. What happens to all that when a writer finally makes it?

"Well, I think that the real question is, What happens if you become over-identified with your struggle?" Tea says. "I think it's really easy when you're a very politicized person and you have felt the effects of the world's ills firsthand. For so many people, their 20s are at the very least an intellectual struggle. Even if you yourself are in a comfortable position, you're starting to understand that others aren't, and you're getting the full scope of the problems in the world. So you're probably struggling financially. You're probably struggling with your own identity. I think it's easy to identify with that struggle and wear that struggle as a badge, as a fashion accessory."

Tea has begun a new novel that, unlike much of her work, isn't about "a fucked-up teenage girl." She's determined not to keep writing Valencia. She brings up Joan Acocella's New Yorker article "Blocked." Most of the famous blocked writers were alcoholics, she says, "or their work was very much about expressing a certain identity, and they just grew as a person. They moved out of that identity, or the world stopped caring about that moment in time, but they didn't."

"Struggle and alienation were a part of my identity," she explains. But survival as a writer means letting herself grow out of her various selves, one after another. Tea sits back in her chair and smiles at her metaphor as it leaps from the cliched to the ridiculous: "Otherwise you'll still keep beating that same dead horse that was once a fresh, living horse--maybe even a unicorn--when you were younger."

By Regina Marler Photographed by Michael Sugrue for The Advocate

Marler is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press).