Making herself heard: no longer drowned out by a wall of sound, Tribe 8 lead singer Lynn Breedlove scores with an adrenaline-pumped first novel.

There are only a few things in 43-year-old Lynn Breedlove's semi-autobiographical first novel, Godspeed (St. Martin's Press, $24.95), that the San Francisco-based, punk-rocking, self-described transgender dyke hasn't actually done: "I've never train-hopped," she says. "I've never cut anyone's dick off. I never ran around kickin' people's asses. But I did have my ass kicked, and I did piles of drugs."

Breedlove wrote the first chapter of Godspeed in 1993 in an underground writing workshop taught by the late Kathy Acker. This was just 3 1/2 years after Breedlove stopped using drugs, which included "pretty much everything but heroin." Godspeed, then, which took her nine years to finish, became a journal of her spiritual evolution: It chronicles the period when Breedlove lived in such a self-obsessed cloud of speed, sex, and selfishness that no one liked her. "I didn't have any friends, got kicked out of my house--the only person who would take me in was my grandma."

Though Jim, the main character of Godspeed, is happiest when she's riding her bicycle high and using no brakes, she does not, like Breedlove, get off drugs and start an all-girl bicycle courier service called Lickety Split. (In the 10 years Breedlove owned the company, it employed more than 100 women from all over the world.)

Nor does Jim get up onstage eight months after getting clean and make a name for herself as the topless strap-on penis-packing lead singer of the all-woman punk band Tribe 8. What Jim does discover, like Breedlove herself, is that what she was really looking for in the rush of too many drugs was the "rapture of being alive."

"Especially after 12 years of not using," Breedlove says, "my heart definitely opens up more and more every year. It's amazing the sensations that I get from emotion flowing through my body."

A massive rush of adrenaline is what bike messengering, punk-band fronting, and fiction writing all have in common for Breedlove. "They're all total shoot-your-wad kind of things," she says. "It's all about shooting my wad. Since I don't have an actual dick, I shoot my mental wad a lot."

Writing, for this only child of a legal secretary and a teacher, is also about recognition--of a certain kind. "Success," Breedlove says, "is you sit there and listen to the other person, and they listen to you. It's connection."

To the extent that Breedlove can't connect completely through her singing and songwriting--because Tribe 8 "doesn't realize that they have volume knobs on their guitars, and they're loud, wall-of-sound, no one can hear the words"--she hopes to connect, in a way that makes a difference politically and culturally, through this novel about a boyish girl who doesn't play by the rules--even the rules of the tranny world.

"I didn't take a typical F-to-M stance and be like, `OK, here's the story: All of you have to use the male pronoun.' Because there's as many gender identities as there are people. I wanted it to be ambiguous--I wanted it to inspire people to ask more questions.

"Most transgender dykes," she continues, "are always amazed that I'm running around onstage with my tits hanging out and my dick. And I'm like, Well, here's the body I got. Basically, I am who I am. I'm going to act the way I act and walk the way I walk. I happen to have tits and a twat, so there you go, pal. And I'm going to use `em: I'm not going to be hackin' `em up or being, `Don't touch me down there.' It's about acceptance." Breedlove laughs a large, clean, successful laugh. "Whether it's with Tribe 8 or whatever, my whole thing's like, Act like the revolution's already happened. And just be yourself. And stand as an example: This is how I live my life," she says. "This is what it looks like to be a transgender dyke."

Rohrer also writes for GQ and Elle.