I’m a crossdresser who went to the same law school as Kamala

Girl, a Revolution is coming.

Kamala Harris and I both went to Hastings (before its name change years later). It is the oldest law school in California, located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Its epicenter of the drug-addled homeless.

Whereas Kamala began her ambitious journey towards becoming a future President of the United States by interning at the District Attorney’s office, my greatest achievement in law school was convincing a couple of my fellow gays to dress up with me in drag at the weekly school-sponsored booze social.

We performed Survivor and Independent Women by Destiny’s Child.

We killed.

I was Beyonce.

And, #shocker, I did not land a legal job when I graduated.

The only job I could find was as host at Zuni Cafe, a fancy restaurant just blocks away from the law school I just graduated from.

One day, a Hastings Dean came in for lunch. When she recognized me (Oh, you’re working at a fancy restaurant instead of a fancy law firm) she took pity on me. She asked if I had a business card.

The good news was that, I, had, indeed, made business cards.

The bad news was that I made *two* sets of business cards. (I was carried away with the executive realness fantasy of it all. Just imagine: I am what the card says.)

The first set was all attorney. It was serious without flash.

Edward Jen

Attorney at Law

Solid. Basic.

But that was not the card I handed Dean Marshall. I could tell from her huh? expression that I made a mistake. I gave her my fantasy card. It read:

Eddie Jen

Attorney. Writer. Dreamer.

It was my luck to graduate during the first dot-com crash. It took a full year before I finally scored a legal job. The firm was located above a karaoke bar, and their practice area was a step above ambulance chasing. Their writing standards?

Non-existent.

One Partner at the firm literally began every single sentence with the words Applicant this, or Applicant that. With zero transitions. Can you just imagine how terribly that reads?

The crappy salary; the ever-present drunken singing wafting from below; and the abysmal writing — subconsciously, I knew: this couldn’t be my life.

I have more talent than this. I’m a writer.

There was just one partner there whose writing garnered my respect. When I read her briefs, there were moments when she had me so howling with rage at California’s liberal complicity with blatant fraud that I momentarily turned into a Republican. (Which I think she was. But I don’t think she would’ve voted for Trump. There used to be reasonable Republicans.)

The problem was that she could tell I was a writer, too. And she was determined to make me prioritize billing over the poetry of my sentences. Because the firm operated on volume, attorneys can bill for more, and faster, when we dictate the words into a microphone for the secretaries to type up. So she forbade me from ever typing my own client correspondences or drafting motions.

She would take away from me my most prized possession as a writer — my keyboard — and insist I use a Dictaphone.

As a budding drag queen who lip-synched in front of a mirror any time a diva song came on, I was being challenged — with a real microphone in my hand! I convinced the office manager to buy me a folding mirror, which I secured next to my monitor. If I couldn’t type my words, I would perform the voice-over to my secretary as if I were Carrie Bradshaw herself, strutting down the hills of San Francisco. The theme would be life, in all its exalted ordinariness: the joys, the fears, the unexpected depths of human folly, and the legal twists and turns when a California worker is injured on the job. My silver-haired AARP secretary was in for a treat.

I clicked on the Dictaphone and began speaking:

Hi Phyllis. We’re writing a letter today. To the claims adjustor in the LaGrande case. Please pull the file. Do the standard greeting: Dear so and so, please allow this correspondence to serve as a case-status update in the above referenced case. Blah, blah, blah.

I released the record button on the Dictaphone. The expression on my face in the mirror said it all: I did not believe in my words. My imaginary audience was not amused.

I was not serving the children Executive Realness!

So I pressed record again.

Actually, Phyllis, scrap that boilerplate intro.

Start over.

Dear Claims Adjustor [insert name], comma, return.

At the deposition last Thursday (comma) I came face to face with an unabashed con artist (period)

She feigned complete ignorance to her multiple claims of prior injuries as I confronted her with the results of the claims index search you ran for me (period)

Thank you (period)

The applicant is only 19 years old (comma) with four prior claims of being injured on the job (period) Four (exclamation point)

None of which anyone was witness to (period)

When I asked her to rate her pain on a scale of one to ten she rated it ten (period)

And then she asked again for her hydrocodone prescription to be approved (period)

As you may know (comma) that’s generic Vicodin (period)

Miss LaGrande’s claim is clearly fraudulent (comma) but she stuck adamantly to her story despite my interrogation (period)

I was like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men (period)

I just want the truth (exclamation point)

Pause.

Actually, Phyllis, take out I just want the truth.

Instead, write, she couldn’t handle the truth (period)

The trick to using a Dictaphone when you have a very gay voice is to never rewind and listen to yourself. Every time I hear myself, I understand why I’m single.

After I was fired a few months later, I heard from former coworkers that Phyllis was admitted to a mental hospital.

Some nights, when I’m really stoned and introspective, I think to myself, My gosh, Eddie. You really do have a voice that drives people crazy.

When I got fired for the second time as an attorney a year later, I said fuck it. I couldn’t pretend to be interested in doing a job I wasn’t.

So I asked myself, Eddie, what do you really enjoy in life?

Food. I decided I was going to run my own restaurant. Surely, I would succeed. Because I love food. A lot.

I moved to Murray, Utah, and I opened up a taqueria.

America is so bizarre, isn’t it? Taiwanese drag queen attorney from San Francisco runs off in his stilettos to the whitest state in the union to sell Mexican food.

The next two years were undoubtedly the most miserable ones of my life thus far. I learned the hard way that owning a restaurant is about turning a profit. Period. It’s not a vehicle to share your munchies visions with the world.

When my business line of credit ran out and my relatives stopped returning my calls, I returned to San Francisco. I renewed my State Bar membership.

But it was different this time because I was no longer on a career path. Now, I worked as a “document reviewer.” We’re basically the filing clerks of attorneys. Practicing law this time, I didn’t bitch or moan about how boring the job was. Or the farce of dressing up to go to a low-paid hourly job that was temporary and without benefits.

Because every time I started hating my life as I stared at the document in front of me, I only had to remind myself:

Bitch, do you remember how many burritos you had to sell to net $40 an hour?

That was the going rate in 2008. You know what we’re paid now — in 2025?

I’ve seen document review jobs listed for as little as $22 an hour. To put this in perspective — the minimum in San Francisco is $17 an hour. That’s right: late stage capitalism pays attorneys at half the rate we got fifteen years ago. I make just five bucks above minimum wage.

I don’t even tell guys I’m interested in dating that I’m an attorney anymore. It leads to expectations I can’t meet.

There was a time when people like me went to law school because it was a finishing school for Humanities majors. After undergrad, we’d bounce around for a few years before realizing that being “an artist” doesn’t pay the bills. One day, you wake up. You realize it’s time to grow up. You have to find a way to pay your bills. Give up (or at least hit pause) on your dreams of living “a life as dangerous and exciting as literature itself.”

Find meaning in a work life that has none.

But even that indignity: the dimming of one’s lights, and all them struggles we endure for 40 hours a week in order to sleep in this security blanket called middle class — I don’t know if even that Faustian bargain will be available to me in a few years.

It is scary how much my lifeline — this legal gig economy job called “document review” — perfectly matches the skillset of A.I.

Will there even be Humanities majors in the future?

I grew up an immigrant child in my family’s Chinese restaurant. My mom waitressed, my dad cooked, and I bagged the carry-out orders. Thirty years later, after graduating from UC Berkeley, and the same law school as Kamala, I’ve come full circle.

I get the mindset of the waitress who voted Trump with hopes of bringing back better times. Who remembers her life easier under his presidency than Biden’s. Who thought to herself, Maybe Trump, as vulgar and despicable as he is, will leave a little left over for me after he and his fellow billionaires gorge themselves on the fattiest cuts of America,. Because right now, I don’t see a way out for me.

Kamala ran a flawless campaign. But when we’ve endured the kind of post-pandemic global inflation we’ve had, the people want change. It’s the natural ebb and flow of history. The better candidate doesn’t win, but conceding and respecting the election result is what makes us the longest living democracy in the world.

Except, this time, with our democracy on the line, the fence sitters broke for someone who tried to kill it. #Theyknew. After 248 years and 56 elections, America’s luck has run out.

Democracy is a lofty concept when you can’t make a living. We remember our financial struggles so much more vividly than a pandemic that killed our loved ones. Because money problems feel like personal failings. We feel like we did something wrong; that we only have ourselves to blame.

I have a gig economy job. I make just five bucks above minimum wage. Before the pandemic shutdown, I worked in a small room with attorneys who graduated from Columbia, Georgetown, and UC Berkeley. All that extra schooling, all that hefty debt — only to discover that the system left us behind, too.

The day after the election, my friend Panda Bear (a fellow document reviewer in New York City) texted me: The next stage is revolution. Like, a real one. With Bloodshed.

I didn’t ask to live in a literary world, one that begins with, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of of times…”

But here I am. Voila.

Life deals the cards, and we dance with them the best we can.

A revolution is coming.

I think it’s time to print out a new batch of business cards. This time, it will read:

Eddie Jen

Attorney. Writer. Dreamer.

Revolutionary.

I am not optimistic how this story will end.

But I know who I will become as it unfolds.

I will live a life as dangerous and exciting as literature itself.

After all, it says so on my business card.