(Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore by Gina Carducci)  

Morty: Hello Mattilda, so happy to hear your voice.

Mattilda: Thank you. I’m excited to be here with you! 

Morty: Okay. Let’s begin from the beginning. I first wanted to ask you about your beginnings with art and writing. 

Mattilda: Okay. As a kid, I think the only person in my immediate family who inspired me was my grandmother, who was a visual artist. Going to her house and playing around in her studio was sort of the one opportunity I had to dream… you know, because I didn’t really have that in my life, unfortunately. I often felt trapped and annihilated growing up in an assimilated Jewish family where educational attainment and status were very important. And underneath the upward mobility of my parents was this other thing  because I was sexually abused by my father and the abuse was always hidden. And the way I dealt with it as a kid was to retreat in my head and to imagine somewhere else. Going to my grandmothers studio to make art, the dream that she evoked was about  living your creative life in the every day. I would later learn that she had the same vicious status obsession as the rest of them and that was sort of the genesis of it. But I didn’t see that when I was a little kid, I believed her kind of mythology. I started reading when I was really really young. Reading was a way to get away. I could just disappear into the world of the book and stay there. The first stories I wrote were probably in grade school. I wrote a lot of stereotypically girl stories. You know, I’d write about the fairy castle where like the walls were made of emeralds and the ceiling was made of diamonds! That kind of stuff. It was about escape and fantasy and building a world I could live in because the world I had was full of violence. So, yeah, that’s my beginning. 

Morty: So how did you handle the message from your family about status and achievement? 

Mattilda: Oh, I was an over achiever. It was ingrained in me that the most important thing was educational attainment and the second most important thing was class striving. I internalized that message entirely as a kid. As a third grader I would read these workbooks we had in school that went up to an 8th grade reading level, and I would just read them all and the teachers would not know what to do with me! I definitely thought I had to go to college and that I had to beat my parents on their terms. I thought I have to go to a more prestigious college than anyone had ever gone to in the family. I had to have the most prestigious job, make the most money, live in the suburbs,  and I thought as long as I beat them then I was successful! (intense laughter) And I felt totally trapped because none of this fit with what I wanted. And I did end up going to a more prestigious college than anyone in my family had gone to. And I think initially, when I got there, I thought that the only way I could really get away was to go to college. So, in the beginning being in college I did feel a sort of liberation being away from my parents. In college I started to think okay well now I’m queer and I can be vegetarian and I can find other people like me. And I did learn a lot from being there but what I really learned most from was from activism against the administration for racial and class justice. And I think after year I started to realize that if I was going to beat my parents on their terms that I was actually just going to become them. So, I realized I had to get even further away to learn more and that’s when I moved to San Francisco. I was really looking for direct action activists and freaks and queers and anarchists and vegans and incest survivors and runaways and dropouts and that’s what I found! I really found a culture of outsider queers trying to build something in the ruins of our own lives. Trying to challenge the balance of the status quo and also trying to build something we could live with. Something we could cherish.. ways of taking care of one another that was not based on status quo normalcy of the mainstream world or the vapid consumerism of the gay mainstream world. That was really my formation with coming to  San Francisco in the early 90s in a way..politically, culturally, socially, sexually, emotionally, ethically. 

Morty: How old were you?

Mattilda: 19. 

(Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore by Kevin Coleman) 

Morty: So, you just packed all your bags and just left?

Mattilda: Well, I had gone with a friend to San Francisco. In our heads we said we were just moving for the summer. I think we both knew we were leaving permanently but we didn’t say that. And within a few months we were already different people. I knew that I really couldn’t go back. Actually, I did go back three years later to make sure I made the right decision! When I went back it was really fascinating because the people that I met as a first year were now seniors and getting ready to graduate and I can really see how it had changed them, you know. In the first year they were just quirky, traumatized weirdos trying to figure things out and they had all assimilated, no matter of class background, into this East Coast elite kind of talking and behaving. So, I was just there for a semester and then I never went back. And I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I think leaving school and coming to San Francisco in particular really gave me my foundations and let me create myself based on my own terms and to find other people like me. San Francisco was outside of what I had ever known… it was where I could dream! Not that it wasn’t heartbreaking or difficult or traumatic but it was on my terms. I didn’t feel suffocated. I didn’t feel that I was living a lie to please my parents and beat them. I was rejecting their terms and really the terms of the larger world, of the upper middle-class status driven obsession, whether that be straight normalcy or academic attainment or even what it means to be smart or what it means to be successful or what it means to love or live with other people, take care of one another, you know, all of that. I was trying to create my own terms for all of these things. 

Morty: You felt like you plugged into a community or communities in San Francisco pretty quick? 

Mattilda: So, this was 1992 when I first got to San Francisco. When I first got there the first thing I found, for better or worse, was club culture. I had been going to clubs since I was 15 or 16 in DC and clubs had always been a kind of place to escape, a place to go and dance and get crazy. I found that world pretty easy and at the time finding a place to go dancing at 6am was really important to me! And then I started going to ACT UP pretty soon after I arrived. And I think, at that time in 1992, as a queer person coming into a queer world and trying to find others I could relate to it really felt like everyone was dying. Whether that be from AIDS or drug addiction or suicide it really just felt like it was surrounding me. So, going to ACT UP felt like a necessity. Finding a way to engage in direct action to challenge the AIDS crisis from a queer perspective. There were different politics with different chapters of ACT UP and I think the San Francisco chapter was really, at the time, centered around needle exchange, universal health care, women with HIV and AIDS and prisoners with HIV and AIDS. So, those were the four most important issues and that you couldn’t fight AIDS without fighting racism and classism and homophobia and misogyny. That those were all intrinsic in queer struggle and I think that was really formative for me. It was also really important for me to learn from the immediacy of engaging in common struggle. So, those two things I found really fast. I don’t know, it really felt like I very quickly was immersed into the Mission dyke, at that time, scene as well. I remember going to Junk after ACT UP meetings. It was a dyke club full of freaky outsider ragged styley punk dykes. It was one of the few clubs where the dancing and the politics and the socializing and the partying could happen together. At the time my ideals were the same as my practice so I thought I should be a slut.. so that means I should meet someone every week and go home and that’s what I did! I feel like there was a culture of people who were experimenting with sex and gender and politics. A lot of us of similar age who had fled from abusive families and most of us had dropped out of college or never went and we were actually kind of suspicious of the ones who had graduated! (laughter) And I think it was really messy. It was also heartbreaking to see how people could let each other down in the same ways that we were trying to get away from. But again, it really was the most formative time in my life. And in a way I was sort of living between worlds. The direct action activist world and then club culture and Mission dyke culture. And it felt really separate, with only a little overlap. For me, I always wanted the politics to come first and have everything sort of go through the politics. For most people it didn’t work like that. What would come first would be, you know, who they were loyal to or who had the best fashion or who was the best S/M top, you know whatever attracted you in that moment. 

Morty: When did you start thinking about your first anthology, Tricks and Treats, and publishing?

Mattilda: As a kid writing was a way to sort of process the world and place myself in it in some way. As a little kid I also wrote a lot of poetry and after a while my poetry became more and more spare. I was writing language poetry where you have 12 words on a page and it was really about the experience of the text not the actual text. I was really kind of obsessed about these really structural things. I wanted to change language. I wanted to put something on the page that expressed everything without actually telling the story. In the culture I was a part of in the Mission I met a lot of people who were whores or strippers or other kinds of sex workers. When I first started turning tricks I would tell these elaborate stories about the tricks and my friends would say oh my god you need to write that story down. I was skeptical because I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that kind of writing. I was worried that it was a story that had already been told. I was obsessed with this kind of idea of originality and shifting the parameters of the actual language. I identified as an experimental writer so I thought let me just try this. So, I started writing the stories down and then I thought oh, wait, these are good stories! So, a few years later I started sending my work off to publications and I was getting published in anthologies. I think what I learned from writing poetry is editing. Especially language poetry because you had to cut everything out and leave like 5 words on the page to mean everything. So, there are stories that hookers tell one another about a trick and the story would reveal all these layers of sex, love, intimacy, power, class, race, gender, you know, the interrelations of all these things but in an immediate way not in a necessarily super analytical way. So, my first anthology, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients came about, well…while I was living in Seattle. At the time, so around 96’ and 97’, I was meeting other published writers and I met this wacky and critical and engaged writer, Steve Zeeland, and he suggested to do a book about male hustlers and pitch it to Haworth Press. And I thought, well, I’m not interested in a book about male hustlers but I am interested in a book that shifts the gaze in terms of sex work. So, instead of having televangelists and social workers and talk show hosts endlessly talking about these dark and depraved and desperate and dangerous people that should be pitied and examined and pathologized, I thought no, lets put tricks under the microscope. And I really wanted sex workers of all genders, sexualities, backgrounds and people engaged in all kinds of sex work. Phone sex operator, street worker or sperm donor in one case. So, I proposed that idea instead and they rejected it. But I had already put it together in my head so I thought, well, I’m just going to do this anyway. So, I put the whole book together and then like a year later the same publisher contacted me again and just said we decided to do it! Ha hah! I never figured out what changed their minds. And, actually, it was a few years later when it was published. It was published in 2000. My next book with them, Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving, happened in a similar way. I wanted to talk about survivors of childhood abuse, to tell their own story but queer survivors of all genders side by side. I think so often in these books, that are mostly recovery books, they are really gender segregated and to be more specific they are basically for women. That’s how they are presented… and they are mostly about female survivors recovering from abuse by male abusers or parents. Some were for male survivors but those were about how to recover your masculinity and I thought the last thing I want to do is recover my masculinity! That’s what I’m trying to get rid of! And I wanted queer survivors of all kinds of abuse:  sexual, physical, emotional. And they rejected that one because they wanted it to be all male. I think a book about queer male survivors would not be a bad book it just wasn’t the book I was interested in doing. I felt, at that time, in terms of talking about abuse, the abuse is the commonality. Why does it have to rest on this basic idea… can’t it be across gender and across sexuality if we are going to discuss across different types of abuse? And with this book it was very similar. They rejected it but then came back to me and changed their mind and said yes. That one took a long time to come out because that came out after my first novel, Pulling Taffy, but Pulling Taffy was done later. 

Morty: Were you consciously deciding that you really liked to publish work and wanted to continue? 

Mattilda: I think what happened was, I grew up knowing I wanted to be a writer and was told that could never be possible. I was given the choices of being a doctor or a lawyer Hah! Right! It became clear to me I wasn’t going to be a doctor or a lawyer in high school because I knew I was…too edgy perhaps. So then it was well, maybe you should be a college professor! I think I always knew that my writing was good. I also knew that it was a very difficult way to support yourself but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. We’re taught that you can’t be creative because it’s not marketable. I knew that the best writers never get published and I was fine with that. I was writing really for myself. When I started to get published and do readings I thought oh, well, this is kinda fun. It didn’t make my writing more meaningful but it was another thing, another way to connect with people I might not know otherwise. And people could connect to my work who are not necessarily coming from the same place. And when I did the first two anthologies I started to see it as a kind of organizing. I can use my skills as an editor and as a political organizer to create a conversation and put it in the public domain that would not otherwise be taking place and that was exciting. 

Morty: How would you describe your first novel, Pulling Taffy?

Mattilda: Pulling Taffy I originally wrote as short stories. I really started to get into the form of short stories after poetry. What was always the most important thing was voice, the voice of the narrator. Everything else I wanted to get rid of. So, I had this collection of short stories and I would send it to friends for feedback and one person said the narrator in most of these stories are very similar, I think you should think about making it a novel. And I was thinking I don’t want to make a fucking novel but I figured I’ll try it out. I changed some things and moved some things around and then I looked at it again and I thought actually, it’s much stronger. It’s a non-linear novel, so it doesn’t go from point A to point B and so on. Pulling Taffy is about searching for home and not necessarily finding it in a tangle of cities just before the millennium. And I kind of wrote it in those years too - from 95’ to 2000. It came out in 2003, so it took awhile. I had a hard time finding a publisher! Oh my, did I! You know, I remember in high school I would send some writing out to these literary journals and there is this mythology about literary journals, that, you know, they are looking to discover new writers, right? Like The Paris Review, they are really interested in that undiscovered writer that no one knows about! Hah! It’s such bullshit! They don’t look at any undiscovered writer unless it’s someone sent by Michael Cunningham who says I found an undiscovered writer at Columbia! It took me a long time to figure that out. That’s what I love about anthologies, they are accessible for writers who are not entrenched in, you know, someone that went to the Iowa Writers Project or something. With Pulling Taffy, you know, the publishing industry makes these decisions and one of them is that non linear experimental writing is not marketable. So, they don’t want it. I was always told that writing is supposed to speak to the center. And the center in publishing is always this straight, white, hyper-educated East Coast elite. Sometimes it’ll be the middle America caucasian market. So, if you are something else you have to explicate, you know, justify your existence. You have to say this is how I got to this deep, dark, depraved place. This is how I ended up here. And I am not interested in that. I don’t want to speak to that center. It’s pointless. As soon as you try to speak to that center you’ve given up, it’s trash. I think people are interested in more challenging work but the publishing mythology of what is marketable keeps existing. There is no reason why all kinds of people wouldn’t think oh, this is fascinating! For me, I’m writing on my terms, and I’m writing on the narrators terms and someone reading it would have to enter on the terms of the writing. Or not. And sometimes people hate it for that reason. Especially my books Pulling Taffy and So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. People will say to me, this doesn’t even have a plot! And I say, you’re right! For me, that’s the only way I really want to write, and the reader can either accept those terms or not. Pulling Taffy was published by Suspect Thoughts, which was a new publisher at the time. I think it was the 2nd or 3rd book they published. I was really important to them. I was helping establish their name as a publishing house. So, it was a good relationship in that sense. We were all learning at the same time! And now, they’re gone. I think a lot of small publishing houses went away, especially the ones publishing really challenging work. I think a lot of publishing houses, including a lot of really small publishing houses, are not any more accessible than the big ones. Just a niche that they are accessible to. It’s fascinating because there was a moment, especially with queer work, where anthologies were the thing to do. In the early 90’s there were tons of gay fiction anthologies and even erotica was on big commercial presses. And now that moment is over and anthologies are no longer marketable. The books I’m most known for are anthologies. Especially That’s Revolting and Nobody Passes and now, Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots. There are still publishers who say, oh, your anthologies are not marketable. They need to be taking what they like and make it marketable! Take JT Leroy, this is a perfect example. Nobody would look at that and say it wasn’t marketable - it took writers like Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskill and their agents to say we like this, lets make this marketable. They should be doing this with all books that are interesting and challenging. But the one they do decide to market was a scam! 

Morty: Even though it’s “not marketable” you still have love for the anthology. And so do I. 

Mattilda: Yeah, I really believe in the anthology as a social, political, cultural and even emotional intervention. I think my skills as an editor really just get better and better! My most recent anthologies are really in conversation with each other. First there was That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, which was an intervention in the morass of gay culture and the dead end of the media frenzy about what it means to be queer. Is it just marriage and military, adoption and ordination into the priesthood or are there radical alternatives that want to reject all of those options and create something else… I wanted to reflect on the worlds that actually mean something to me, queer life on the fringe and direct activism. And I also wanted to question the framework for all of those things. Because what’s the point of doing something if you can’t question it. I mean, I don’t want to glamorize something or glorify something without also talking about the mistakes we make. So, I want talk about racism in radical queer culture or misogyny or transphobia. That’s Revolting is talking about violence and assimilation. There is actual, palpable violence when gay people assimilate into the status quo. It’s not imaginary. There is a violence in pushing out anyone who doesn’t fit in. Whether that be trans people or people of color or people with multiple partners or queer kids or anyone who isn’t drinking the newest liquor and doesn’t have the right dog etc. With Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, I wanted to examine passing as a means through which assimilation takes place. I wanted to talk about passing across all kinds of lines like race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, body type or what it means to pass in cultures of resistance. Like what it means to pass as genderqueer. In my anthologies the things that really challenge me and surprise me… those are the ones I’m like bring it on, this is really exciting! And with Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots, my most recent anthology…you know, I didn’t first think of them as a trilogy of sorts but now I think that they are! I think Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots is asking a specific question but I wanted to use the analysis of the previous books. What does it mean to bring a queer and trans analysis into the intimate spaces of gay male sexual social culture? These books all come from really personal places and I think with Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots I get inspiration from queer, trans, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, gender defiant culture that I’m a part of but I also exist, especially sexually, in the gay male sexual culture which glorifies and is reverent of everything that I despise. So, the intervention is, if these desires that we hold dear only lead to this product driven sexual marketplace, then how do we imagine something else! Maybe desire isn’t just holy and beautiful - maybe it is that, but it’s also this other thing. I think for me, gay male culture is this place where the grossest aspects of straight craving normalcy are around and not questioned. So whether it’s unquestioning masculinity or a relentless drive to police the borders to keep the people with the wrong bodies, the wrong genders, the wrong sexualities out. All of these things are unquestioned. It’s an assimilationist trajectory. If you look at things now compared to the early 90’s. The kind of analysis around gender and sexuality that we have now - it is just so far ahead of the early 90’s.  I mean, there was gender transgression then but it was very binary. That’s really changed dramatically in certain cultures. But then we have this retrograde happy, patriotic, were-just-like-you, status crazed, clone kind of mentality that acts as if we are in the 1950’s! Not even the real 1950’s but the one shown on TV! That’s what gay people want! And even some queer freaks believe this! They swallow the whole package and say, “Oh, we should want marriage. It shouldn’t be the main focus but we should want it on some level”. No, we shouldn’t want it on any level. I mean just the idea of becoming part of the US military, being openly gay and dropping bombs. It’s abominable. I mean the cities in how ever many countries that the US dominates but, no, were talking about this wonderful progress that we can wear rainbow rings while we obliterate Pakistani villages. Oh, this incredible progress! It’s sad. And I think it’s even more sad when people know this is an atrocity and we need to be ending the US military and not becoming a part of it, when they say things like, “Well, it’s a starting point”. I mean really! It’s a starting point for a massacre! It’s a starting point for culture erasure. 

Morty: Your books are now being read by students in universities. Do you think your books can intervene in these spaces as well as in radical queer spaces to further the possibilities of what queer culture is? 

Mattilda: It’s interesting because on my last book tour for Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots more than ever before after talks at universities I’ll have students who say they’ve discovered my books in college and it changed their life and it enabled them to think differently or helped them to find others like them. That’s beautiful and very inspiring. These books help to find ourselves, to find one another and to stand out from all the shit that’s all around us! When I go on tour I can actually see how my work impacts people and then to have conversations and see how I can be impacted by that. I want it to be a mutual dynamic. So, yes, radical challenges to the status quo can exist both in the radical outsiders world which rejects those institutions as well as inside those institutions. But, I think the broader cultural picture is more bleak than in the early 90’s when I started to engage with the world as an avowedly queer person. I guess it’s a contradictory place where there are tons of possibilities but they are constantly being smashed, annihilated. We can create our own culture, we can create our own meanings, we can create our own lives and I don’t believe in doing that unless we are also challenging the violence, so doing both of those things simultaneously is what my work is about. It is speaking from the margins and to the margins and I think in some ways that changes the center but not in the ways I can see…except in the way things become commercialized and like wow now it’s trendy to fill in the blank. So, were in this really contradictory place of incredible possibilities and incredible failure and incredible violence. So, it means for me to keep creating more challenging and vibrant things. 

Morty: Lets talk about your newest book that isn’t out yet, The End of San Francisco. Please describe the book and what we can find in it. 

Mattilda: Sure. My most recent book, The End of San Francisco, is part memoir, part social history and elegy and in a way its about my formation politically, socially, emotionally, ethically, culturally and then the undoing. The book circles back in all these different ways to San Francisco as a place where freaks and queers and outsiders and druggies and anarchists and hookers and deviants can find a place to find one another and cope. The disappearance of that possibility. That’s what the book is circling around but it’s more personal. I’m really talking about my own history and at times it has nothing to do with San Francisco. So, the book starts with visiting my father before he died of cancer. I had told him I was never going to see him again after I confronted him about sexually abusing me unless he could come to terms with it, but he never did… but I decided to visit him anyway before he died. So, the book starts there and then continues with trying to regain a sense of hope and wanting to go dancing to find a place of escape and intimacy and not being able to dance due to chronic pain. There are all these different endings, and part of it was the end of my hope in that idea of San Francisco that I was very heavily invested in. Even if I didn’t believe in it I was still trying to create it! And whether that be in the 90’s or the early 2000’s with the beginning of Gay Shame and my hopes in creating relationships through activism. Intimacy through engagement. The kind of relationships where you keep revealing everything. I felt a failure of that for me personally. The book is an investigation of where I keeping finding myself. I still believe in the same dreams. But…they keep letting me down. On a personal level. I don’t think it means that I have to let go of these dreams but it does mean…something. And the book examines this place of being stuck, of imagining all these possibilities and enacting them and finding them but then also places where it’s a terrible failure. Where the people you’ve always believed in are also the people that let you down the most. With writing the book it’s interesting because in 1994 there was this ending for me, but then again in 2000 believing in something else there I am again in San Francisco.. and let down again. Then, there is this third big ending, with the closest relationship I’ve had for 15 years. This relationship was so much a part of my ideals. Like accountability and mutuality and intimacy and negotiation and trust..he was the one who stayed through all the different cities we’ve lived in and then coming back to San Francisco again. It was a relationship where I thought if I have nothing else I’ll always have this. Well, I don’t want to ruin it all for you! I’ll just say that it became really dramatic. That was really the end for me because when he was gone I said, well I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. All these things that meant so much to me no longer meant anything. Being surrounded by the overwhelm of the annihilation of my dreams…and relationships, culture and things became gross and violent and vicious.  It doesn’t mean the same possibilities may exist there, but they don’t exist for me. So, that’s why I had to leave, to find these possibilities. And that’s where I am now. 

Morty: I wanted to ask you a bit about trans and queer lit right now. How would you describe trans lit?

Mattilda: Well, I would say anything written by trans people is trans lit. It’s a question very similar to what has been asked in the past about gay literature. Some people are ready to disavow and say well, I don’t want to write trans literature or gay literature I want to write literature! 

Morty: What are your thoughts on what trans literature is at the moment?

Mattilda: I think trans lit is an emerging category and there are a lot of amazing people writing really interesting work… non fiction more than fiction. In terms of trans writers, I love Dean Spade’s work but, to me, it’s not literature. Another book that’s really interesting is Captive Genders edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith. I think anything about the trans experience that challenges the boundaries of what it means to be trans is important. I think, you know, there is this LGBT thing, right. And the T is supposedly this fixed identity that is attached to 3 other fixed identities. For me, the potential of a trans identity is challenging all those categories and building something else. Having fluidity and experimentation and transformation and negotiation at the center of lived experience of gender and politics and sexuality and everything, it’s all of it. I think Captive Genders is presenting a lot of different works about the trans experience and the prison industrial complex but it goes to, like, there is a piece on the gay bathhouse raids in Toronto in the 80’s and on the surface you wonder, this is about the policing of gay male sexual behavior, how does this relate to a trans experience? Making you ask that question is the kind of writing I’m looking for - writing that explodes the boundaries rather than accepting. I think one of the problems is the policing of the borders of identities and that has happened a lot in terms of my work. For example, with my anthology Nobody Passes, this book came about when an editor at Seal Press read an interview I did in Bitch Magazine and contacted me. Seal Press is a press with the tag line Books For Women by Women. I immediately thought oh, Nobody Passes, wouldn’t that be perfect..a book about challenging the parameters of passing on Seal Press edited by someone who is certainly not passing as a woman. I sent off a proposal to them and they were interested but the editorial board had some questions and the first question was how do you identify, what is your gender identity. I said, well I’m a genderqueer faggot and a queer on the trans continuum in the gender blurred gender bending section and I’m not particularly interested in conventional definitions of male or female I’m much more interested in identity that’s much more deviant and defiant. And they were like oh! That’s so interesting! Ha ha! They didn’t know exactly what to do with that, but they let it go further and they did accept the proposal… but then the whole time during the editorial process there were these dramatic arguments about what could be included. What literally was about “gender” in quotation marks, they were really fixated on this. So, something about racial profiling or anti-Arab hysteria they would ask me well, how was this related to gender. And it’s this interesting place - I think this is where there is potential for transgender as a category. The potential is not to have another fixed identity. Another narrative where people start in one place and all end up in another place. They’re all smiling and happy and have done the right things in their lives, right? No, it’s to end all of that! Also, with my novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, the first review was in Publishers Weekly, which comes out way before anything else - and this was the first time Publishers Weekly had reviewed any of my books - and their review had a sentence I was totally fascinated by which was “the narrator may or may not be genetically female”..Ha haaah!! Keep in mind this is a book that starts in a gay cruising park with the narrator on her knees waiting to suck cock and moves to a bathroom in a Bikram yoga studio where some guy walks out with a dick like a bowling pin. I think the writer of the review wasn’t talking about the narrator but the author of the book. It was this sort of snide attempt to police, you know, like who is this Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore! She calls herself she but how do we know!! In publishing this kind of thing happens a lot. This also plays out in the niche marketing of books where people say, well, I don’t consider my work trans literature or gay literature. I think they are taking the wrong tact. They are reacting to a illegitimate publishing industry that can only market things based on a consumer niche. It feels like they are rejecting the transness or gayness of their own experience. Or the queerness. We need more trans and queer lit, not less! So, for what is published and defined as trans I would say the vast majority is memoir because that is what is considered marketable. And most of the memoirs fit into this, you know, I was born in the wrong body and then I figured it out and then I had this surgical transition and now I’m fine! Ha! You know. That is what the publishing industry wants. I don’t know if there is a body of work out there in terms of what is published and accessible that I would —well, there is political work and there is memoir and aside from these two things there really isn’t that much that I would see as trans lit. I mean, there is a lot of work about gender transgression, so that’s another question, do we include that work? If the writer themselves don’t identify as trans. I’m interested in having more work about gender transgression that sort of annihilates the categories and destroys the parameters and creates something else. I think for me I want to see something that destroys literature, period. That’s what I think trans lit can do! End literature and create something else! 

Morty: I love the idea of getting rid of literature but we are still struggling with the idea of whether we can be canonized… like, for instance, how gay male lit has been. Many trans writers have told me how they are waiting for more trans books to be taught at universities…there is that desire to be seen at this level. 

Mattilda: Yeah, I think for me, as long as the work can be experienced on its own terms, then thats fine. For instance, Nobody Passes is taught at a lot of colleges and I think that’s exciting and it makes it so that when I do events at college campuses I encounter people who have actually read my work. And that’s wonderful because it makes the conversation we have so much more nuanced. But it’s tricky because for me any canon is defined by what it excludes just as much as what it includes. I’m not really interested in that particular methodology as much as I am in challenging the boundaries of what matters. Creating more space so that a wider variety of more challenging work can be experienced.  With my latest anthology Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots, I found a lot of reviews had a discomfort with the word faggot. So, they would describe me and sometimes say trans author but neglect to say that I was a faggot! It’s an interesting twist, you know. We need to be able to claim all the layers. 

Morty: I’m curious what you think about the language surrounding trans identity…

Mattilda: I think in the trans, genderqueer, gender defiant and gender non-conforming world our language is shifting and emerging on a daily basis. If you look back even two years ago and the vocabulary that we used it’s totally different. And we have to have space for all of it. And there are these little things like trans woman being two words and not one - five years ago nobody would have written it with two words. Now using two words is considered the most acceptable thing. Okay. But what about the person who doesn’t want it to be two words? You know, I’m not a trans…woman. I am not a woman who just happens to be trans, I am a transwoman. I think while we are finding new ways of expressing ourselves we need to keep the full range. Sometimes people get really caught up in what is and isn’t appropriate. Now, the word tranny. I think it’s a beautiful word…and currently there is this real policing. If anyone uses the word tranny it is this horrible transphobic slur and I think the only way to take away the power of a slur is to take it on! Not to disavow the viscousness and violence of transphobia that continues in almost every realm of the world right now. But it’s not because of the word tranny someone gets murdered because they are trans. It doesn’t matter if the murderer politely addresses them as a trans woman..I think there is this media rush towards a  political and even aesthetic kind of purity that is contrary to what a trans identity can offer. And we see that politically, socially, sexually, in the media and even within intimate conversations. I think I want to create more options, not fewer and that goes for literature, for politics, for fucking, for vocabulary, for all of it!! Here (in Seattle) there is a drag night called Hey Tranny Its Tranny and it was controversial and people wanted them to change the name to something else. I’ve never been to this drag night, so I can’t tell you what its like but I do know there are tons of drag nights that are incredibly and horrifyingly transphobic. As well as racist, misogynistic, fat phobic, body fascist, you know, on down the line but it has nothing to do with the word tranny. So, if they change nothing about it except the word then it’s still the same! Sometimes the words that are used against us become the most powerful for us to use ourselves. 

Morty: My last question is a generic one but I would really like to hear your words of wisdom, as they say, on writing and making art in general to those who are genderqueer, gender defiant, trans, gender non-conforming etc….

Mattilda: Haaaa! I would say bring it on! In all of its glorious complications and messiness and intimacy and… vulnerability is so important. I spent a lot of my childhood trying to appear invulnerable and I think that is how we survive when we are taught that we are evil and our desires are polluted and corrupt and twisted. And I think there is a place for invulnerability but I think most of the best work in whatever it is: art, film, writing, sex, activism, make up, runway, walking down the street - most of the best come from vulnerability. Also, just to not try and fit yourself into categories that don’t actually express the complications of your life. Forget about trying to explain to the supposed world around us that doesn’t understand anything - we don’t need to explain to them. They don’t need to get it. We need to express our lives and they can get it if they want to. It shouldn’t be about them, it should be about us. I think a lot of work really loses its potential when it’s about explicating. It should be just: Here. Take it. Take it or leave it but I’m going to make it! I’m gonna make it, I’m gonna break it and I’m going to make it again and bring something into the world that expresses my own realities. And no, not just vulnerability, but also invincibility, transformation and feeling trapped, unfulfilled, fulfilled, sadness, happiness, longing, disastrous, vibrant and expressive - all of it! We don’t need to get caught in one thing. And don’t get caught up in being a model trans person. You know, we didn’t have that 20 years ago because there was no such thing! Now I think there is! And sometimes that means a really strict gender identity and sometimes that means a particular gender performance or a specific narrative. I think, lets just get rid of all that. That’s what ruined our lives in the first place. We don’t need to create a new prison to inhabit. So, I say: flaunt it! 

Find out more about Mattilda here: http://www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com

(Drew Deveaux photo by Ellen Stagg) 

Morty: Hello, Drew! It is so nice to see you here in San Francisco.

Drew: Thank you!

Morty: So, lets get right into it shall we?

Drew: Yeah.

Morty: I’d love to start off talking about what you were like when you were younger.

Drew: What defines “younger”?

Morty: Well, good question! I suppose I’m asking: when did you first come to figure out that you were a creative person?

Drew: I think I’ve always been a person who has seen themselves as a creative person. I’ve been reluctant to use the term artist. Although I would now. At 32, I’ve come a long way. It’s interesting to see how we are first reluctant to adopt certain terms like artist, pornstar, trans, queer until all of a sudden we’re in it and start using those terms. I was organizing events from a young age. I think I’ve been a person ahead of their time in terms of ideas, in terms of identities. When I was 17 and 18 I would organize these creative events in Toronto that were a melange of art, music and dance, spoken word, drumming…coming out of 90’s rave culture. The shows were called Lipsafire. The tag line was to break down the barrier between performer and audience. There was always an open mic, people could come up and speak and do dub poetry or whatever. Or, you know, people would come up and drum. At the time I was this really genderqueer person before the term existed. I was figuring out my identity and a lot of that stuff about breaking down boundaries was kind of ahead of its time. It is certainly a theme of a lot of my creative work. The boundaries between performer and audience, between professional and ametuer, between trans and cis, queer and non-queer and all these ideas and categories. At the time I was kind of finding out about art and artists through my organizing. I dated artists. I mean, we are who we date. Well, I’m not sure about that but lets play with that a bit. Sometimes we are attracted to people who can help move us forward in life. People have things to teach us at particular times in our life and hopefully for the better. I have almost exclusively dated artists and it’s not been a conscious thing. I’m not an ‘art chaser’ if that term exists. But it inevitably happens. I’m attracted to creative people. In part because I am a creative person myself.  

Morty: What did you start out doing?

Drew: I was into visual art, for sure, from the start. It’s interesting to see how our creative work responds to where we are in our identities. Though not surprising. I was making photography, doing abstracted color work. I wouldn’t even use negatives. I was using projected light and my body to make shadows that went directly onto photo paper.  Expressionist photography. There was an element of the body and performance in that but it was in the dark room. My identity as a queer trans women and the relationship of that identity to the world we live in was not graspable to the world at that time. Shifting forward to today and the work that I do in relation to the identity I have…I see that so much of my work relates to the fact that I’ve had to figure out an identity that is one of obfuscation, marginalization, liminality….it’s one that I’ve had to fight for both in the world I live in as well as in myself. Now my work is visceral, now my work is embedded in my body.  

Morty: Was this conscious?

Drew: I think certainly by the time I ended up transitioning, about 8 years ago. I think there was a lot of anger and frustration at the fact that …I was outwardly trans at 15 and 16. I was quote unquote crossdressing in high school and was suspended for that. I was suspended for getting physically and verbally assaulted as the victim.

Morty: What!? How did that happen?

Drew: Well, it was seen as attention getting. This was 1996/1997. There was no trans awareness whatsoever at the time. So, the shit I was getting along with the fact that in a pre internet age I didn’t know that this made sense. Actually, I did know a trans female artist who was living in Toronto at the time, Mirha Soleil Ross, who is a Canadian groundbreaking trans woman artist…her work spans almost 20 years now. I knew her as a teenager. She was good friends with this artist I was dating at the time. It was like I was in this weird, queer, transsexual Toronto version of Warhol’s Factory. It was awesome but also very intimidating to recognize I was a male assigned birth person seeing myself as trans but I was attracted to women. I didn’t see myself as the high femme transsexual aesthetic that was, to me, the only image that was available at the time. So, I thought, well, since I can’t exist, I don’t exist.  Since I’ve come out in my academic work and my porn work and my activist work and my writing - a lot of it has been about making awareness and making bold leaps about  the reality and the validity of trans identities across the spectrum. Not stopping at where the movement is at but always trying to push the movement forward. I’ve always said that the bedroom is the last frontier of social justice. Sex and sexuality are often the last places of inclusion not only for trans people but for all minorities. This has been the big motivation for me to do a lot of the work in porn that I’ve done.

(Drew Deveaux photo by Morgan Weinert) 

Morty: What did your activism look like then?

Drew: My activism was very academic. Like writing academic articles, working on research  projects. At the time I coined the term ‘cisnormativity’ or ‘cisnormative’ as analogous to heteronormative. At the time I was a ferocious blogger on LiveJournal. I was working through a lot of things and probably making more enemies than friends within the community in part because I was seen as going too far. I would, for example, downplay the idea of a Trans 101 being an okay thing…I was always doing education work and began to feel like I was going to stab my eyeballs out if I had to do another Trans 101. Not because I wasn’t passionate about education or that I didn’t think it was an effective way to make change in the world, because it is. It was the way Trans 101’s were traditionally undertaken where it felt very othering. Creating distance between the unspoken cis audience and the trans people who they were being introduced to and studying. Learning about how difficult trans peoples lives were, learning about all the barriers of the experience without having to think about the way cis privilege
shapes the oppression experience of trans people. So, I started to do anti cis-sexism trainings. Basically, turning the idea of a Trans 101 on it’s head and turning the gaze inwards. Which is what anyone doing any sort of anti oppression training should be doing. So, that is one way of moving dialogue forward. And also bringing in concepts like cisnormativity - a word to describe the world we live which normalizes and expects everyone to be cisgendered. As that work continued, I realized that I could do class education, I could do all this academic intellectual work and people would be on board. People would listen, and it would change people. But there is a limit to this work having a visceral impact - people can often be intellectual allies without being physical allies. And I think you see where this is going…

Morty: Yes. Please keep going.

Drew: Really that was the genesis of some of my work. Starting in 2007/2008. I remember writing this one blog post that was basically calling people out - those who identify as a lesbian but who don’t consider trans women within your sphere of attraction, thats transphobic and cissexist. Which was like a thermonuclear explosion! And that was like 5 years ago, before the cotton ceiling ever came out. This was before making pornography. I was thinking, “how can I change these limitations of inclusion?” You can’t really educate people on sexuality without having images to draw on, without examples to grasp. In terms of images of trans women that I wanted to see in porn, as a queer trans woman, there was next to nothing at this time, about five years ago. My day job was in sexual health. Sexuality, even if one is asexual, is an important part of one’s identity and part of ones embodiment.  I think for trans people it is important to have positive, healthy sexual experiences, and a positive, healthy sexuality, which is still not accessible to a lot of people because there are a lot of people out there who will enforce the delegitimization of the experiences of trans people again and again and again. It happens in the street, it happens in the bars and at our jobs but it also happens when we are hooking up. When we are trying to have an intimate experience.

(Photo by Rae Threat) 

Morty: So, your entry into making porn was super conscious, not only of the why but also the image that you were going to make?

Drew: I’d say there was a very intentional awareness. I do want to say that not everything that I have done I am equally proud of. In terms of creative control and ownership, depending on who you are working with, you are going to have different levels of agency on how you look or what you say. There could be a script that is thrust upon you. Anyone who hires me knows who I am. So, they are still casting me as a post-op trans woman in their work. However they want to dress me up, whatever words they want to put in my mouth, they can’t take away that part of my identity. So, there is and always will be a radical quality to it, even in, say, like, the movie Lesbian Sorority that I’m in.

Morty: Do you feel like porn is artistic or has artistry to it?

Drew: Yeah, I think it goes without saying that porn, at least for me, is a creative process. It is an artform in itself. Just because there is a sexual element in it - I mean, if you look at the history of art, any art that has been sexually explicit in some way has had it’s artistic validity called into question. Porn is something that often is not even— calling yourself an artist isn’t necessarily isn’t going to make you more money in the porn world. But I think if you ask anyone making porn, is it art? I think most people would say yes.

Morty: Even those in the mainstream porn community?

Drew: I think they would call themselves creative individuals. Whether or not they consider themselves artists, I don’t know. Maybe it is internalized. Maybe the mainstream porn people are not immersed in a critical art community but I think directors like Nica Noelle and Jincey Lumpkin, who are working in and funded by mainstream companies…I know Nica takes a long time crafting her scripts, and I’ve seen her freak out over the set, making sure it’s just right. I mean, there is a lot of artistic passion. She has a vision she wants to get out there. The porn I do is definitely a part of my body of artwork and something I continue to do, even though I’m not shooting as much as I once was. Certain scenes I feel more strongly about saying, this is a work of art, because I’ve had creative control over it. But again, I’ve always had the privilege to have the complete freedom to choose what projects I want to be involved in, or not. Some of them I’ve done because of directors I’ve really wanted to work with, or costars. Other times it’s because I’ve wanted to break through to parts of the industry where trans women have not been able to work in.

Morty: What area of the industry are we speaking of?

Drew: I’m speaking about the work I’ve done with companies like Sweetheart Video and  Girlfriends Films, which are Los Angeles based production companies, girl on girl companies, meaning lesbian films often implicitly reaching out to the straight community as an audience, though those who watch these movies runs the gamut. There is a privilege I have as post-op trans woman. I have never loved the term post-op, though that’s what it is, a trans woman with a vagina. I am able to pass as a cis-gendered woman in settings where I am totally naked. Yet, I am also out, so if someone does want to find out more about my work they won’t have to search long to realize this pie has some hidden ingredients. But that’s the beauty of it. One thing I mentioned when I won the Heartthrob of the Year Award at the Feminist Porn Awards a year and a half ago was that I wouldn’t be there without directors taking risks. We are talking about me breaking through first in the queer porn world. I was one of the first trans women to receive acclaim in the queer porn industry and then into the mainstream lesbian porn industry, which wasn’t a goal because I thought it wasn’t accessible to me. I wouldn’t have been able to do this work without directors willing to take a risk and work with me. Nica Noelle for instance, cast me four different times in films and fought to get me cast in another film after Mile High Media found out I was trans and got really angry. I also had director Jincey Lumpkin, whose work was being distributed by Girlfriends Films, cast me in a film though Girlfriends had a policy saying no trans performers can be cast. They just have a no trans performer policy but Jincey basically cast me as long as I don’t talk explicitly about being trans on film.

Morty: Did Jincey explain why she chose to ignore the Girlfriends policy?

Drew: I really don’t know. Something also occurred with director Shine Louise Houston, where she was going to shoot a film for Mile High Media but when they found out Shine wanted to cast me they said we won’t back this movie if Drew is cast and Shine said well, you gave me creative control and I want Drew in the movie, so she turned her back on Mile High and, I’m sure, a lot of money.

Morty: So, none of these directors have explained to you why they are willing to fight for you to be in their work?

Drew: Well, the only explanation I got was that all of these directors really wanted to work with me. I hope that doesn’t sound conceited and it’s not a sufficient explanation…but I think with me…I’m thin, I’m white, I’m attractive in a fairly traditional sense and being post-op I have a lot of privilege and for them I would be an easy way in to cast a trans person without raising too many red flags and it’s something I recognized early on – where I saw that I was getting a lot of work but other trans women weren’t. And still aren’t. I think that things are moving forward though. I have put out over 20 movies, worked on several different films and websites and I think there is a body of work there that needs to be acknowledged. I think we need to figure out what’s stopping further work from happening. More trans women in queer porn but also in mainstream porn…I mean, will there be another trans woman to work for Girlfriends Films? Or will I be the only one. The exception to the rule because of my thin body, my white skin etc. etc. On one hand I feel like I’ve done all this work and broken through barriers and I think it’s great and it does change things. I mean, people can look at it and say, well you cast Drew and the sky didn’t fall in! I’d like to think that my work opens the door to even trans male inclusion in mainstream, if trans men want to be there.

(Photo by Dave Naz) 

Morty: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about the cotton ceiling and how this has changed your life….

Drew: The cotton ceiling, in my own words, is talking about the limitations of inclusion, the limitations of peoples spheres of desire – and spheres of desire are what we all have with who we would consider fuckable and not fuckable. Those spheres are not essentialist things, though for a lot of people they can feel that way. They are shaped by cultural representations on what is considered fuckable in a general society as well as subculture and microculture representations about what’s considered part of a particular community - the queer community or the lesbian community. Who is considered part of the community and who is considered fuckable and those aren’t necessarily the same things and thats where the cotton ceiling comes in. The disjoint - and this is what I’m speaking of specifically - a disjoint to who is considered part of a community and who is considered fuckable as part of that community. I first made this public at a conference in Toronto that was put together by Planned Parenthood Toronto to speak about issues of queer trans women within the queer women’s community. That was the explicit theme of the conference and the context to which I introduced the concept. It is a way to think about an issue that a lot of queer trans women experience - the limits of inclusion in the queer women’s cis-gendered dominated community. The cotton ceiling was a way to make visible, in a playful way, with the cotton signifying sheets or underwear, the issues surrounding intimacy and thats what it’s really trying to get at. There is a limit to solidarity and a limit to trans women getting full inclusion, which would include sexual inclusion. There might be queer women who accept trans women into their space but there are still prevailing notions that shape desire in the queer women’s community that trans women do not constitute fuckable people. I think we should strive for full inclusion and it behooves all of us to reconsider those boundaries and why we draw those boundaries.  Something that gets often ignored is that just because I raised this issue within the context of trans women doesn’t mean it doesn’t have utility for all trans people - I think it can have particular relevance to a lot of communities where visibility or identity, if found out, can impede on embodied experiences.

Morty: When I was doing research on you for this interview it was really…scary, to be honest, to see all the things being said about you in forums, blogs, twitter, etc just basically breaking you down for discussing the topic of the cotton ceiling. I know you are raising consciousness and this work is very meaningful…but you’re still human.

Drew: As a trans activist and as a pornstar I put myself out there. I certainly wasn’t expecting the thermonuclear maelstrom that the cotton ceiling unleashed. At the same time as this storm around cotton ceiling was happening there was a huge response to Lesbian Sorority coming out, tearing down my identity in a porn context… I mean, this is what I wanted to get people to talk about - this is what the cotton ceiling elucidates. The degrees of marginalization. In the way that people talk about the cotton ceiling, the way that it’s come out has been really revelatory. The people that are writing these things, the Pretendbians website for instance, are those who just don’t consider trans women to be women. As trans women have made more gains and asked for more levels of inclusion the hate ebbs and flows. It’s almost comical to watch the radical feminist community go bat shit crazy over a group of people asking to be seen for who they are and be treated as equals. The genesis of it is so easy to see, if you just scratch the surface. From a trans perspective, we see those who are cis-gendered as being in a place of privilege.  
From the radical feminist community they see trans women as male born people and ultimately as men who have privilege over them. I’m not going to be in a dialogue with someone who does not recognize my identity, all I can do is keep advocating for recognition and privilege within the community and to make visible the exclusion of the experience and I’m going to keep the struggle positive.

Morty: But you are human, and it’s great to keep moving things forward but you are also a person who feels and that’s also a part of it…

Drew: Yeah, there is pain. I touched on getting beaten up in high school and part of me is still there, in those moments. And sometimes reading the comments can trigger the pain and the fear and the shame that I carried…and part of me does still carry…but it’s a battle in me to combat that shame. So much of this work is about changing the world but it’s also about changing myself, to make myself believe that I am equal. And if I keep saying that, and knowing that, then it’s a part of me healing from the trauma that I experienced from being trans in the 90’s. And I know from my own experience as well as talking with other trans women that there is this hyper-attunement. One might even call it PTSD - a hyper awareness that the world we live in is not safe. If I’m not afraid to be who I am, if I’m resolute and certain in calling for full inclusion and not stopping until there is full inclusion and being seen as an equal, even in sexual ways, then part of that fear and shame starts to recede. I firmly believe art can be a form of activism and can change the world…and this is when I start to call myself an artist because a lot of my work is about me working through my shame and trauma from the past that still exists in the present.
A lot of work from trans artists is about liminality, gender bending and playing with gender and it’s interesting how that’s not really a big part of my work - compared to a lot of trans artists I know I couldn’t be more gender conforming, yet at the same time, through that conformity I’ve brought more attacks. And I love that. Certainly in the future there might be elements of my work that will explore the idea of fluidity in gender but it is fascinating to think when you are so close to being cis-gendered, yet you’re not, it’s somehow going deeper into the heart of what keeps peoples identities stable and in some ways gets bigger blowback.

Morty: How are you going forward with your work in porn?

Drew: That’s a really good question. I feel like I don’t know where to go forward from here. I just don’t know what’s left to do. I could continue to get hired but the whole reason to make porn was to put my image and my body out there and at what point am I putting my body out there at the expense of maybe cockblocking other trans women from doing porn. The shoot I am doing tomorrow for Doing It Again with director Tobi Hill-Meyer might be my last shoot, at least for a while. It’s been my first shoot in almost a year.    

Morty: Now might be a good time to write a book….

Drew: Yeah, maybe. I’m just struggling with what the format will be for how I can move my art and activism forward for myself and for the broader movement. Maybe it is writing a book, I don’t know. I’m at a point of reflection, and searching and grasping again. 

Morty: Do you call yourself a “trans writer/ performer/artist”? 

Drew: Yes, and I’m sure that’s not surprising given all we have discussed. Being out as a trans artist is a powerful, important act but there is a lot of complexity. I don’t want to say it’s better or not better… As a trans artist I want to be connected with myself fully and be communicative about who I am …I know that it’s complicated for people to be out so I can’t say it’s right for everybody but it is right for me. 

Morty: Drew, this has been a wonderful interview. Thank you for taking the time to sit with me and discuss your life and art. I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future, so please keep me posted! 

Drew: It was a total pleasure! Thank you so much, Morty!                                                                                                                            

Drew Deveaux on the web:

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/drewdeveaux

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/drew.deveaux

My third piece of advice is if you don’t see a place for you and your art, make your own space. And if you don’t feel like you can do that, maybe you don’t know enough people in your area, you should just try and guilt people! All the identity politics shit, drag it all out until someone gives you some opportunities. Guilt cis queers into giving you opportunities to be a part of their show! When you’ve done one then you can get so many more. It’s just getting the one or two first chances to do something that are hard. The main piece of advice is to create as much as you possibly can and don’t stop creating. 

TWAT/fest is next week and I’m working on a few film projects right now. I am definitely feeling inspired right now but I know what it’s like to not feel that way. It’s hard to feel inspired when you never have an image of someone like you doing the same thing you want to do. It’s hard to feel inspired when you’re getting doors slammed in your face all the time or when your work never gets featured when you do make stuff. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been quite celebrated in a lot of ways and thats helped me keep my momentum up. I think we need to celebrate more trans artists - all the time!! 

(Photo of Shawna Virago by Lydia Daniller) 

(Big thank you to Zack Marshall who helped with transcription.) 

Morty: Alright, great! Good to be here with you! 

Shawna: Great to see you, Morty. 

Morty: Alright, I like to start at the beginning, or close to it. When you were a kid, were you very artistic? 

Shawna: Yes. I did artsy stuff. As a child, I was into drawing. And from a very early age I wanted to be a musician, because I loved listening to music.

M: How young were you?

S: Like, maybe 5. 

M: Were you surrounded by music?

S: My parents were not into music. My father left us and so my mother ended up moving in with my grandmother. And I had my uncles and my aunt who were all teenagers…they were between, like, 12 and 15.

M: So, how old was your mother? 

S: Yeah, my mother was young. She had me when she was quite young.

M: Where were you born and raised?

S: I was born in Los Angeles. I grew up in several places throughout the country. It’s a long story, but I lived in the South, I lived throughout southern California. I lived in North Carolina, Atlanta, I lived in Honolulu for awhile, Indiana. Yeah. I was fortunate that I was suddenly surrounded by these teenagers who were listening to all this great music like The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. And then I got exposed to some pop country like Glenn Campbell stuff. Because of being there, I got turned on by music and it was all-encompassing for me.

M: When did you actually start saying, I need an instrument…

S: Well, I bought my first guitar when I was 15. So, I’ve been playing that for quite awhile. I bought a used guitar. I wanted to be a songwriter. So, here I am. It’s what I do.

M: It is what you do. You do this professionally, for a living?

S: It’s one of the things that I do for my living. I have to work in other ways, but it’s one of the ways I’ve survived. 

M: When did you move to San Francisco?

S: 20 years ago.

M: And you’re 51?

S: I’m 50. 

M: You’re 50. Sorry. Tell me about moving to San Francisco…

S: I moved here when I was 30, from LA. I had been visiting here throughout the 1980’s. I just really loved it. I love the city and I knew I didn’t need a car, which I thought was great. And the music was… at that time there was kind of a more vibrant music scene, in San Francisco from the 1980’s to the 1990’s, I think. More clubs. But it was very straight. In the 1990’s it was more of, kind of the Riot Grrl world. Which, you know, both of those worlds were, um, what they shared in common is that they were basically transphobic.

M: Can you tell me a little bit about how Riot Grrl was transphobic?

S: I think the Riot Grrl was a place where you could find allies, and people who were questioning and people who were coming out, but there really was, I think, a lot of strong feelings, overtly… overt transphobic feelings, over trans women who might be showing up at shows or trying to be in bands. There weren’t that many trans women.

M: Let’s do a little bit of a timeline here, so I can get this down properly. So, the Riot Grrl stuff started in the early 1990’s. You were already here. But I just want to back up a little bit. So, where were you mostly between ages 15 to 30? Were you writing music?

S: Yes, I was writing music. I was in a series of bands, like, classic garage bands. I was very serious about my music, so that was, like, my life. I was in Los Angeles. So, I played with a lot of the same guys in one form or another from about the age of 18 to like maybe 27. More or less. And we practiced as a band 3-4 days a week at our rehearsal studio. We were serious about our music. We were good. So, like, we kept getting more of a following and we played some pretty big clubs like The Roxy. But…it was never a perfect situation because I knew I was trans. And so at some point in there I actually came out to some of my band mates who were very…they were not happy. It was like an instant kind of block. The respect they had for me went down several points on the scale. So, that wasn’t necessarily very comforting, you know.

M: So you outed yourself to them…were you actively starting to transition at that point?

S: I wasn’t starting to actively transition until I got into my late 20’s. And here (in San Francisco) is where I got to bring it all together. So, but prior to here, I was already on my path. One of the things about playing music for me, was, I always feel a little bit, that I was, as a trans person, kind of at the end of this 20-25 year approach to what it meant to be trans, like, a trans woman. So, you would transition, and then you would…

M: Could you describe what that means?

S: So, the traditional roadmap was, after you convinced your therapist that you were trans, they could write you a note and you could go to the endocrinologist, that you were supposed to kind of blend in, and disappear. I had to think about that because of being a musician and a singer. I’m like, I don’t really see how… I can’t really blend in. The second I start singing it’s not going to really work for me. So that was kind of good because it kept me from going down the real kind of gender-normative path. I couldn’t have it both ways. Being a musician meant I had to keep going down more of a queer path, I guess you’d call it.

M: Did you have any connection at that point to queer community, at all?

R: In my 20’s it was kind of like living… in some ways, a dual life. I had several gay male friends and it’s interesting because I actually tried to make it work off and on in gay male communities. Like, it seemed that being a trans person… and this was like 1985… and transitioning seemed so overwhelming to me, that, “where can I fit in in the world?”. I didn’t see any other trans people. Occasionally…

M: Well, you were in LA, so… there were no trans clubs?

S: Yeah, there was a place called Queen Mary, somewhere in LA. And that felt more, like, kind of a cross-dresser environment. I think, a lot of those places that were that way, these spaces also transitioned to people living full-time and transitioning. For example, Transgender San Francisco, when I moved here, was called ETVC, “Educational Transvestite Channel”. Somebody said, you should go to one of their meetings, so I went and, you know, I had on some form of what I’m wearing now probably, and it was obvious to them and to me, oh, we’re very different. And I think it’s, one of the things…that the idea of queer, queer zones and queer community, is so different than hetero zones of any kind, or gender normative zones. Over here, the queer zone, you know, it’s so different. Whatever you want to call it. And for me it’s more liberating. For me it’s more nurturing. It’s more open.

M: You never really felt attracted to the heteronormative scene. You were saying as a musician you couldn’t but you weren’t trying to force yourself into that world anyhow… 

S: I had been… in some ways my thoughts had been greatly revolutionized in the late 1970’s by British punk rock. And bands that intersected with British punk rock. Like Sex Pistols or The Clash or the Buzzcocks, The Damned, The Jam, you know? I was crazy for that music. What I loved about that music, not only the music and the attitude and the consciousness, but also the fashion was really interesting. And if you appropriated any of their look, you were really instantly outside the margins. So, that always, I think, helped me later as a trans woman. It’s like I’m already used to people staring at me. Big deal. It’s not going to ruin my day.

Photo of Shawna Virago by Lydia Daniller

M: Yeah, right on. When you moved here (to San Francisco) what was there any kind of trans art scene? 

S: Yes, when I first moved here I was… probably for the first two, two and a half years I lived here, I was going out to clubs five to six nights a week. I was going out all the time and I was smoking Export A Ultra Light cigarettes and drinking vodka, mixed vodka drinks, and doing the drugs of the day…

M: What were the drugs of the day?

S: Crystal methedrine, or ecstasy, I would say. Lots of pot, and I… I hooked up, yeah, with little pockets of queer people. They were people who were gay male identified or a few dyke-identified friends. I was normally the only, at that time, transsexual person. That was the language. Transgender came later. I think transgender was getting solidified then as a spectrum term. And a smart one, too. Unite communities for political organizing. I identified a lot of times as a transsexual. So, I had little pockets of friends. We went out to clubs. You could really go days and days without seeing out trans people then. You’d have to go somewhere like the Mother Load to really have any kind of critical mass of trans people. And I would go to some events, like, there were a couple of events called Merkinfest. I believe that was…

M: It was called Merkinfest?

S: So, Mirkin, in Shakespearean plays is the genital covering…yeah, it was called that. Who knows why. It was largely a drag queen event.

M: Oh, okay. That makes sense. 

S: But it was interesting because…I remember being in cabs…taking cabs to clubs. And cab drivers would start talking to me as, like, these straight cab drivers hitting on me…Then they realized I was trans, mostly they would have this reaction of, like, they couldn’t believe it, that I was a transsexual. Then their comments were, “You know I’m a straight guy”, or “I’m not really into that sort of thing”. It was very weird. It was so different 20 years ago, just here in San Francisco.There just wasn’t a critical mass of trans people, especially trans queer people, or queer community. At the time I was playing at open mikes, I was putting some bands together, and I would play wherever I could. I would play North Beach clubs, or I played in The Haight, and I would play at dyke places. Sometimes I would get shows at The Coco club, or there’d be dyke parties and I’d get invited.

M: You were an out trans musician. What was it like getting gigs?

S: I think a lot of music scenes, typically, tend to be more open-minded. So, what would be the scary part was being on stage and…Because, again, there wasn’t a critical mass. Quite often I would be, as far as I know, the only trans person in the club.

M: What was that like?

S: Well, first of all, my band was very loud.

M: You were in a band. It wasn’t just you.

S: Yeah, sometimes I played my own acoustic shows. And then I had my band, which was really loud. So people couldn’t really hear me singing. And sometimes I appreciated that because it was easier  for dealing with people in the club. Like, if I was playing the Coco Club, the sound there was horrible, and the acoustics, but as I played there more, of course, people knew.

M: But that was a dyke bar.

S: Yeah, so it wasn’t like I was going to get killed. But there were times when I’d be afraid on stage…especially playing as somebody read as female in front of a group of straight guys in the audience. I think the tradition of women who play rock music on stage is one of what we call the male gaze. The leering is super-strong. What’s interesting is, if you look at the history of rock and roll, you have Debbie Harry happening at the same time Patti Smith is happening. And while I like both of those women, Patti Smith is really it… Madonna got so much praise for being this super-empowered woman that was somehow taking the idea of objectifying the female body and using it consciously. But I always found Patti Smith, in the scheme of things, much more interesting. And saying that, look I don’t shave my armpits. I’m not wearing any make-up. I’m going to wear a ripped up t-shirt on stage, and, work it out. I wasn’t fulfilling any of the male fantasies that Debbie Harry and Madonna were, really.

M: And you’re a completely different kind of musician.

S: Absolutely. Madonna isn’t much of a poet, yeah. And then the acoustic shows would be scary. I’d go to a lot of open mike clubs and perform… you could see the visible pain on the straight men in the crowd at these open mike events. Because prior to performing, they would just treat me in their usual short of limiting and condescending, sexist way. And then when I’d start to perform they were like, realizing, oh, I might have just been flirting with this human, this person, what does that mean for me. And I could see them, like, their body language, grimacing and closing up and stuff. So, that happened a lot. The need to play music was greater than giving in to the kind of fear and insecurity I may have had performing in front of a hostile audience. 

M: Was there any kind of trans music scene?

S: There were little pockets of a few trans women that I know of who fronted bands. There were a couple of those. There was a band called Glamazon. We did some shows together. That was always good. We’d play these clubs…who knows… I don’t even know the names of these clubs any more. It could have been the C&W Saloon, Coco Club. I’d play at this collective or co-op house down between Valencia and Mission. You know that little street between Community Thrift and Good Vibes, there’s murals on the walls there…

M: Clarion Alley?

S: Clarion Alley. There was a place over there that would have shows, so I would play there. I was usually more afraid of playing in front of dykes than straight guys.

M: Really?

S: Physically I wasn’t afraid. But like, emotionally, because they could come up and talk to me…and want to talk to me about my gender, which I didn’t really want to talk about. Or just letting me know, “Well, this is a women’s club”. “This is a women’s club. What are you doing here?”. That happened sometimes. 

M: So, you did get some kind of backlash.

S: Definitely. I think my experience isn’t as bad as some people’s. I think partly because I was putting myself out there. Also, I was trying to have a feminist analysis of gender. That was important to me. You know, I had been poisoned by the book, The Transsexual Empire, when I was eighteen. And I thought, “Oh my god, I’m going to set feminism back if I go ahead with this”. It was painful to read that book. 

M: I’ve never read it.

S: It’s crazy. And I’m like, did she fall in love with somebody that was trans, and they jilted her, or…? But at the same time I realize that when I’d hang out with my dyke friends…what’s interesting is that the gay guys that I was hanging out with, they could care less about my gender expression, you know. It was always more… it was just party time with them. It was going to bars, drinking, doing drugs. 

M: But you were entering gay male spaces, as a woman, so what was that like back then?

S: I remember going into The Edge bar in the Castro to have a drink with some friend. I was waiting in line for the restroom and some gay boy said, “This is a man’s bar”. I would think, “great – you’re affirming my gender identity!” So it was like nice. It’s like, one time Sean and I were walking down Castro Street and some older gay fellow said to Sean, “Loose the fish, honey!”, and we were like, instantly offended by him and, you know, also thought how nice that our gender identities have now both been affirmed by this asshole. It’s like holding multiple experiences. But I think trans people have so many stories like this. Like when I first moved here, I basically was fag-bashed by this guy in this bar in the Lower Haight. And then six months later I’m walking down the street with a woman friend and somebody drove by in a car and said “You fucking dykes, get out of San Francisco!”, something like that. And I thought, that’s the same person, you know?

M: It was the same person?

S: No, in my mind. I thought, that’s the same person. They just can’t get over it. You know? They’re just surrounded by queers. But it was like going through that, again…The short is that it was always an adventure as a performer – go on stage and perform, because there was, again, there was not a critical mass of trans… other trans people in the audience, or performers, or trans allies. 

M: Now we’re kind of reaching into the mid 1990’s?

S: Yeah. 1994, 1993-1995 maybe. I think people had a really hard time with what I would call – in dyke communities – with the idea of gender socialization. So, if you went through male socialization many decided they got to ask you a lot of questions about your gender, or your sexual orientation. And what steps are you going to take to, you know, work on your residual male privilege and things like this. So, again, with my gay male friends, it was like, I would go hang out with them in the Castro. It was fine. I’m with, you know, we’re all young and we’re drinking and partying – or maybe some of them actually lived in the Castro – and I’d be hanging out with an apartment full of gay boys or radical fairies, and just hanging out and just talking. Then I would have sex with some people, and it was always confusing to me. Like, what does this mean for me? What does it mean for them? I had to always… I was constantly trying to work it out. And then over here (in the Mission district), same period of time, I have dyke friends. And the conversations were, you know, like, in a place like this, a coffee house, or maybe somebody’s house for Sunday brunch. And it would be these serious conversations about, you know, gender, and what does it mean for an MTF to be in women’s space, like, is this a women’s space. These were philosophical discussions that were mostly very boring. And, people would slip on the pronouns sometimes, so I would just say, “Call me ‘it’. Please call me ‘it’”. And, usually, that would be the last time they would do that, that was all it took. You know? But there weren’t a lot of trans women, out trans women, that were artists, performers, that were intersecting with these various worlds. Also, there were very few of us. And I think that… this idea of kind of being a loner, of being isolated, not having a big, big community, was my experience. I was a tag-along to different communities. So, for example, in 1994 at eight-4-eight community space, on Divisidero, which the artist Keith Hennessey co-founded, they did all kinds of radical performances there. Like, stuff around body fluids and all kinds of stuff. And there was a show where Susan Stryker was going to read, Jamison Green was going to read. Loren Cameron was going to show his photographs. There was a line down the block to go to that show.

M: Amazing!

S: It was amazing. Because there were so few things like that. And it was a really mixed crowd, of radical queerness, of a spectrum of sexual orientations and gender. And that show was, I think, very important. I know for me it was important because, um, I hadn’t… there was never, as far as I know,  anything like that in San Francisco. And so, here was this show that was just packed, in this little room.

M: You said it was in 1994?

S: It was definitely 1994. Yeah. And there I was around these queers, and watching Susan read a poem…

M: It really had an impact on you. 

S: Yeah. And it was not very much, content-wise. Again, I think Susan read a poem. Jamison Green read a poem. Photos on the wall. Wine and cheese, you know? That was the show. But that was, um, that was a real coming together, I think, of people that were different kinds of artists or performers or sex-positive activists. So that was a big deal.

M: So, when did you start to feel a shift, an emerging scene of trans artists. Did that take a long time to bubble up?

S: Um, I think looking back now on those early 1990’s, there were things like Trans Sisters, the Journal of Transsexual Woman Feminism – I think is what it was called. I have a few issues here and there. And then there was Magazine Mondo 2000. That was short lived. But Kate Bornstein would be in there sometimes, or people doing kind of radical essays, philosophy essays, and they would talk about – they would equate cyborgs and science fiction with the transgender experience. And looking back on this stuff now, I am sure it would seem super-quaint in a sense. Both radical, and also the language would be a few generations old, the analysis of the transgender experience. I saw Kate Bornstein at Josie’s Juice Joint in San Francisco. She had a one-woman show. And she… I don’t remember exactly when I saw this show. She thinks it was 1992 or 1993. And, you know, it was just amazing to see Kate Bornstein on stage. She was like a hero. This radical thinker and performer. I think she’s a very important figure in transgender history. 

As a musician, I equate things to music history and pop music history. So, it would be kind of something like the breakthroughs of the early rock and roll pioneers. That, you kind of have this boring America, really straight-laced America, and then where did Little Richard and Elvis Presley come from?  My god. Like, overnight. There was a before and after with these crazy guys doing this crazy rock and roll music. 

M: So you equate Kate to…

S: Early rock and rollers in the sense of her instant impact. For example, I know, since I’ve talked about seeing her, and I went up and talked to her afterwards, that there were a few of us there, in the crowd, like…

M: Trans women.

S: Trans women. And it’s kind of, like, the Ramones.. it’s kind of like when the Ramones… they go to England and in 1975 they tour England, right? The next year it’s the Sex Pistols and The Clash. It’s just like, instant impact. People thought, I can get a leather jacket and learn three chords and be in a band. And they did. 

M: You think Kate had that kind of impact with those few trans women that were there to see her perform?

S: Absolutely! I do think so.  I would say that we were all doing our own thing already.  It’s just like now. The show Fully Functional Cabaret that I was recently in with Annie Danger and other trans artists, I would say that if you were to look at a demographic of who went to the show, probably people that we would identify, or who would self-identify as trans women, would probably be one of the smaller demographics at the show. Because, it’s definitely, it’s also a queer consciousness, the show. And, I would have loved more trans women to come out. But I think those of us in the show were already perceived as radical, and the people that are going to support our art are probably more radical. I don’t know what other word to use. So, there’s going to be a lot of people that don’t see themselves over here. So, it’s kind of like, those of us who saw Kate were already going down these paths. It was a reaffirmation to see somebody on stage like that. And I do think she was very generous with her time, and still is.

M: She certainly still is.

S: Very generous. So. Yeah, that show – I joke, but it was like eight of us and we all went on to, you know, do crazy things. 

M: What others were there that I should know?

S: Well, like, you know, even people who weren’t trans women, but trans people. I’m sure Susan Stryker was there, or Jordy Jones was there. I feel like that’s my generation of trans people, which doesn’t have to just be biological age. We don’t have to all be the same age, but we all came out within a year or two or three within each other, I would say. So, yeah, it was awesome to see Kate Bornstein. And Gender Outlaws was just incredible… to read that book. Because there had been a few autobiographies put out up to that point, but it was the same book. “I always knew I was a lady”.  “I was climbing Mount Everest and I realized, I’m a lady.” 

M: [laughter]

S: You know? And it’s like, the next thing they’re buying tea cosies and shopping in Harrods for tweed skirts. I’m like, what happened to you? Is it really so simple?

M: So, Bornstein is one of the grandmothers of radical trans feminism… of sorts? Again, to say, it’s hard to use the word feminism. It means very different things to many different people.

S: Yeah. Because you also have your political radical people, which probably Leslie Feinberg or Sylvia Rivera, over here on leftist political organizing. I’ve spent time in that world as well. But then over here with performance, I think…

M: So, when did it start to feel like a movement? Did it ever? Maybe it never did.

S: Right. Um, I don’t know. It’s so…

M: Maybe movement isn’t the right word. When did it start to feel like there was a more cohesive community of trans artists?

S: I think, um, I think really, for me, about 10 years ago. I started to notice a real difference in my lived experience. So, there were clubs that people were putting on, organized by trans people, where I would get invited to perform. And there would be young trans people in the audience that I didn’t know. Trans men and trans women. I remember… so, yeah, 10 years ago, my friend Christopher Lee and I were both nominated to be Pride Grand Marshals. 

M: What year were you nominated to be the Pride Grand Marshalls?

S: 2002.

M: When did you start working on the SF trans film festival?

S: So, the film festival’s first year was 1997. And I was a volunteer. I then became a presenter. I was representing… I was invited to just talk, some little speech, I forget what. So, I was there at the beginning. And I would do things every once in awhile like that. I would volunteer…

M: Who was the first director of the festival?

S: It was Al Austin and Christopher Lee. They were co-directors. And then they brought me in to be a co-director, um, in, maybe 2002, 2003. Something like that. Another interesting thing was when I moved to San Francisco, I also met through people this little click of these hipster straight artists. I would go hang out with them sometimes and they had parties… it was almost like a salon. They were really educated on the history of performance art, or the history of radical art in the United States. So they loved Joseph Cornell. And they loved his boxes with various brick-a-brack, and they had different themes. And they thought that I should definitely make sure that I’m journaling about my experience and I’m doing things like, maybe, clipping my hair to be a signifier of my own journey, my own physical journey, or… They were giving me all of this advice on what I was doing, because to them just being trans was considered so radical. 

And, you know, probably just like now. People would talk all the time about things. I knew someone who… they were Buddhist and they thought, all is an illusion, desire is suffering, and why even bother if this is all not happening anyways. So there’s so many types of questions that we get asked to answer. I mean it’s amazing, the breadth of knowledge most trans people end up having, in the sense of having to justify and defend yourself. You learn about Joseph Cornell. You learn about Buddhism. You learn about Marx. And you learn about the history of gayness and queerness as a bourgeois construct. And, you know, you have to have an answer for it all, literally. It’s crazy.

M: What was your answer?

S: I’m so surly. I don’t remember. I just… yeah. I think, also,  I’m probably a person that really doesn’t get messed with all too often, really. Face-to-face. If there was a movie and they needed to cast the transgender assassin, they’d probably cast me. You know, I wouldn’t play the housewife or… like Annie Danger in the show we did, she’s like, “You are the drill sargeant!” I’m like, really? Okay. Who else could do it? Probably nobody, in that cast. Because you have to just scream at this human being for eight minutes straight. And that’s all I think of now when I think of Bryn (Kelly) – in my mind it’s like, you stupid little bitch, every time. I’m sure she’d love that, because that’s my final words to her in the show. 

M: Let’s talk about the festival… you joined Christopher and Al in 2002, 2003?

S: Yeah, after I had kind of been in the orbit, earlier than that….

M: Were you making films?

S: I made a film, um, around maybe 2000, or 2001.

M: What was that film?

S: It’s called Almost Human. It’s a short film. 

M: How could somebody find that work?

S: Um, they can’t. I have maybe one VHS copy of it, that I have. Yeah. It will be the great missing film of my life. [laughter] Who knows.

M: Does it have to be your missing film? We could dub it and you could give me a copy and I would put it in my archive.

S: Did you ask for a movie awhile back, and I never got it to you? I can’t keep track. 

M: Yes, I am trying to build a film archive along with these oral histories… 

S: That’s so good. It’s awesome. Eventually we’ll have a transgender art history museum, won’t we?

M: Well, hopefully. We’re a ways off, I think, from a transgender art museum.

S: What’s interesting - and I’ll just go there a little bit – is having now been around for 20 years, is personally, um, I never would have believed there would be so much trans stuff at one time. I never would have believed there would be all these trans people, or trans people making art for each other, or people caring about us, people finding us attractive. All of it. I never would have believed it…

M: Yeah, it is pretty amazing. It’s a great moment to be trans or gender variant right now. 

S: It is.

M: A lot of trans and gender variant artists I interview say so.

S: It is good. And I was going to say, back to being Grand Marshal, we got nominated, and I got a call from Christopher, he called me up, and he said, we’re going to win. And I told him, you’re crazy. We’ll never win. Who would vote for us. And so, what we did, we started to… San Francisco Pride had voting areas and voting days and the very first voting day where you would select the nominees, and there were like ten or fifteen of us, was at 18^th and Castro. And we were standing out there and we couldn’t get anybody’s attention. They were all voting for whoever the popular gay men were, who were also out there with us. And there was us, you know, the little trannys, with our little “vote for us” badge. And Leslie Mah drove by from Tribe 8, who was our pal, and she was like the one vote we got that day. She drove up on her bike and she was like, “Hey, Shawna and Christopher, what are you doing here?” and we told her, you know, we’re trying to become Grand Marshal’s, would you vote for us. Sure. And that was the first vote that we got, was her. And we ended up winning, you know.

M: You’re saying how hard it was to find votes, then you won. So what did you do? 

S: Yeah, we realized we need to go away from where Pride is saying you can vote – it’s like all the gay bars in the Castro, or the Gay Men’s Chorus headquarters – wherever you could go. So, we started to go wherever we hung out. So, for example, our friend Jordy Jones organized a big party at the community centre – it was a transgender party. So we’re like hey, vote for us. Suddenly we had people in there voting for us. Or we went to queer women performing events, like Sini Anderson or Michelle Tea and their circle – “Hey, vote for us”. So, we just… we ended up actually going to queer community and we threw some parties. We threw a couple parties at the Lexington. We threw a party at Café du Nord. So we also made it fun. And we were on a mission. We were on a mission to show that this system, the voting system, was obsolete and inadequate for trans people to get elected. We’re going to show them by going to our people, and we ended up winning that year. 

M: I love that story! 

S: Yeah, we were the first, in the history of San Francisco Pride. We were the first elected Pride Grand Marshal’s. Yeah, it was cool. We took it very seriously. This opportunity to sort of broadcast trans issues. So Pride puts on events like pancake breakfasts and meeting the mayor and stuff, and we always had messages about, you know, trans political issues. We put it out in the room, like, around police abuse, or homelessness, or gender rights. We always did that, every time we were invited somewhere we put our words out there.

M: Where’s Christopher Lee now?

S: Christopher’s just, he’s doing his own thing. He lives in the Bay area. 

M: You did a lot of activism as part of your work as an artist. 

S: Absolutely. We took is seriously, but we also, we had fun doing it. We had parties. We dressed up, we dressed fabulously. I think there were people who had not paid attention ever to Pride or had given up on Pride for being too vanilla or too mainstream that had a little burst of interest. Yeah. So that also corresponded with these other clubs popping up. Just kind of this flowering, I think, of transgenderness in San Francisco. It was something that was going on. I don’t really understand it, but something had happened.

M: What was the film festival like at that point?

S: You know, it was not much different than now. It would be over a weekend. I would say the thing that’s true is you just see there’s more and more people making movies. And that’s continued to be true. We have just made the decision to show short films, like 20 minutes or less, now for several years, because there are so many trans film makers, and we want to show as many movies as we can. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s tricky because we don’t have the budget, we don’t have the financial resources…

M: Would you show movies that weren’t directed by a trans person, but had a trans person on screen?

S: Um, that has happened. But the real focus has always been work made by trans and queer people, definitely.

M: So right now, are you the only director?

S: Yes.

M: And how long have you been the only director?

S: For maybe like eight years or something. 

M: And so it’s just you? Or do you have a crew of people that work with you?

S: I have people that help. This year I’m trying to get some new people to be on a screening committee to help me watch movies. 

M: Great. Let’s get back to your own work. You’ve toured a lot, yes?

S: I’ve toured a fair amount.

M: I mean, you’ve toured with Fresh Meat, and with the Tranny Road Show and on your own. Did you ever feel a palpable difference with each tour in the way people responded to you? 

S: Yeah. Absolutely. Without question. Absolutely. Like, especially, um, at universities, where it… it’s pretty unbelievable. There’s all these students who come out for trans stuff who are really passionate about transgender issues. They’re trans themselves, or queer themselves, or they’re attached to trans communities in some way, they’re pretty supportive.

M: When did you start to really feel support from universities?

S: I would say, um, I mean for me personally, maybe around 2004, 2005. So, a friend of mine, a trans guy, we were invited to give a Trans 101 at San Francisco State. It was like, 1997. And it was this huge human sexuality class, in this huge room.  There were around 200 people there. And we were on stage, and there was like some baseball players or some jocks that were there. They started to think they were funny and made some transphobic comments. And, I just went with it. I think I was throwing the microphone around over my head and just entertaining the crowd. But my friend took it really personally and got really angry on stage, which, I understood where he was coming from with his emotions, but I felt, you know, don’t let them see you that way. It’s like 5 assholes. And people came up afterwards and were really apologetic to us. And I think about something like that to what it’s like now…it’s not a deal breaker being trans. In fact, people are curious about it. And people think it’s kind of… it’s good and bad. What’s good is people are going to come out and see you and support you as a performer. What’s bad is you can get complacent because it’s sometimes not about what you’re doing or your art, but being trans in their mind is cool. It’s, you know, you’re oppressed, therefore you have some kind of credibility that non-oppressed people have. And I think it’s important to, as a performer, to be aware of that, and to keep engaging people with compelling art that might even push their buttons a little bit. But, if you’d asked me 15 or 20 years ago that I’d even have this conversation, or that there would be places throughout the country that would want you to come and perform for them, I never would have believed it. 

M: This is the question I ask in every interview, do you call yourself/consider yourself a “trans artist”?

S: Um… [pause] it’s an interesting question because whether I consider myself a trans artist or not I’m perceived to be a trans artist. It’s like the playwright, Tony Kushner, who has said, I’m many things, I’m many labels to myself, I’m not just a gay playwright, but of course, you know, probably if we would look at his Wikipedia entry, the first thing that it would say is he’s a gay playwright. So, I think, on the one hand, we can identify however we want to, but we’re still going to have to make sense of how people perceive us and identify ourselves. I go back and forth all the time on how I identify as an artist or as a person, even in my own gender expression, so… um… I don’t really know if I identify as a trans artist, because the people I listen to, most of the music I listen to, or the artists that I’m interested in, they’re not trans people. And not all of my lyrics are about being trans. I’m well aware that, as a performer, I’m perceived as a trans performer. That’s just almost a given wherever I go. Am I a trans femme performer? Am I a trans Americana performer? Am I a trans folk performer? But the trans is always first…I believe strongly that we have a history of trans people trying to get to a place where they no longer have to be out about being trans. Success by our culture is to be a trans person not readily perceived to be trans, that means you’re a successful trans person. And I think, I’m like, trans is enough. I’m glad I’m trans. I’m proud that I’m trans. It’s good to be a trans person. It’s probably the best thing you can be, right now in our culture.

I think the most interesting stuff is going on now, you know? Interesting art. Interesting political work. Interesting battles are being fought. Things like, to change the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of us. People changing or challenging law enforcement agencies. People whose art is doing all kinds of… like my amazing partner, in the modern dance world. You know? Sean (Dorsey) is very brave. And he’s brilliant and beautiful, but his art is astounding. And, he, there’s no one like him, really, in this world. And I think that’s just true for all of us, that we’re carving a unique space, and I think, who knows where it will go. Success doesn’t mean assimilation. Success will be to keep opening up and shifting our culture, and we need all of us to do that. 

M: In what ways do you feel being a “trans artist” is limiting?

S: If that’s all people are interested in. And that was one of my concerns when I got into the Fully Functional Cabaret with Annie, was to make sure we were in charge of how we were perceived, because I told her, I said, you know, we could honestly sit around for the next month and read comic books and go into cafes and have coffee and then the day before the show decide we’re going to put on some interesting costumes and put sparklers over our ass, and guess what? People are going to like that show. And we could travel all across the country and people would love that show, just because it’s… right now, the trans piece, people find interesting. That is interesting in mainstream America. That is interesting in university settings. Just that alone. But as artists, we have to do more than that. We can’t… it might be fun to put sparklers up our ass, and who doesn’t want to do that once in awhile, but it’s not enough.

M: Are we doing a good job in supporting trans artists and writers?

S: I think we need to be supporting all of our artists more as a culture. We don’t create the conditions to be a sustainable living in the United States, whether you are an artist or not. Universal health care education opportunities, employment opportunities. Yes let’s pass ENDA – let’s sign it into law, but that’s not going to create even one job. There is no money for education or economic empowerment, so I don’t think we support any of our artists enough. I don’t pay attention to mainstream music and those who get selected by multinational corporations… I don’t care who the latest rockstar is because they are just a corporate creation. What is so good now is there is so much more going on, even if we’re all struggling more economically. 

M: The interview is winding down but I wanted to ask a little bit more about your music. You write about a lot of different feelings, people etc. in your music. Where do you usually find inspiration to write a song?

S: I would say my music and my songs are very noncommercial, so…I’m definitely into the folk realm now and I have been for several years. For really long time I was trying to figure out whether or not I would work with a band. Being an alternative folk artist seems to be the best for my music and the best thing that I should do. Without a band. Lyric based songs. That’s what I am interested in continuing to do. And, you know, there is a whole great tradition of people doing that. It’s another from of writing, taken just as seriously as a writer would be about writing a book. Sometimes I’ll want to write about something specific like police brutality, which I’ve done. I think writing about my relationship is important to me now but doing it in a way that makes it an interesting song. I think in the last few years I’ve started to write about some of the places I’ve lived and trying to make sense of some of my upbringing. I grew up around a lot of Christianity, so I’m writing about making sense of that as a trans person. One of my personal beliefs is that Christianity is one of the foundational problems in the United States with how it’s practiced around gender expression. I think we are a Christian culture, whether we want to be or not. And the gender binary is being strongly adhered to in the US according to the old and new testament - it’s one thing that, if we could shift that, then there would be less bullying. And less teen suicides. And I think we are afraid to call it out and say Christianity and the way it is practiced in the United States will necessarily lead to violence against people perceived as different. So, it’s important to me. 

M: Your album came out 2 years ago, yes?

S: Yeah. And I’m starting to record a new album, little by little. It’s going to be an acoustic record. I have to be okay with that because it’s going to be so stark and vulnerable - I think that is what the new songs need. Objectified, my last record, was very folk-punk. There was a very small drum set, my acoustic guitar, an acoustic piano…I had a couple of people I was working with on that album. The new album will be just me. The thing about my music is not many people who interview me want to know about it. For me, music is a nonverbal form, so the people who do music criticism are really focused on the performer or the lyrics and they don’t have the language to talk about the music itself. It’s very hard to talk about music… music is fascinating within the melody and sound and I am always trying to find a compelling melody, or a compelling guitar part. I really care about craft, it matters to me. 

M: Okay, last few questions. Where do you think trans/gender variant art is headed?

S: Oh, I have no idea. I do see that we are now in a moment where people are coming out as trans in many different stages of their lives, not just young people. So, that will surely change things. We seem to be having more trans academics, so that will be interesting as they publish and broadcast ideas - it may be good ideas or it may not…who knows. We may have transgender movie stars at some point which would be great!

M: What is next for you?

S: More music. Getting my album made is a priority. It’s been piece meal - Probably between now and the Spring of 2013 it’ll get finished. The film festival is coming up - the call for submissions is out there. 

M: It was such a pleasure to talk with you, Shawna!

S: It was a lot of fun. Thanks, Morty.

Please check out some of Shawna’s work in the links below: 

Her website: http://www.shawnavirago.com

Clips of Shawna playing music: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leh0ZH_nHg0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNjXNKxUYLI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ivMRpSd24

Shawna reading her piece “Jolly Jumper” from the anthology Trans/Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXbbPwcOqOo

(Joy Ladin) 

Joy Ladin, Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution.  Her poems and essays have been widely published, and she is the author of a recently published memoir, Through the Door of Life:  A Jewish Journey Between Genders (U. of Wisconsin P) and six books of poetry:  newly published The Definition of Joy; Forward Fives Award winner Coming to Life; Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration;Psalms; The Book of Anna; and Alternatives to History.  She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, and has taught writing and literature at Sarah Lawrence College, Princeton University, Tel Aviv University, Reed College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Joy: By the time I hit my senior year at SLC, I was quite sick of poetry workshops, which I’d attended since junior high school. The craft cliches that served as the foundations for most workshop discussions - show don’t tell, write what you know and so on - were completely out of tune with my gifts and interests as a poet. I think that my gender identity problems were part of that. I felt disconnected from my body, and so not very sensually aware; I lived what I lived from an abstracted distance, always aware that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be. As a result, my memories weren’t vivid, and most of them didn’t feel like my real life. Because I was in the closet, feelings and experiences that DID feel like real life were off-limits to me as a writer - and I had no idea how to write about trans experience, no words for it, no sense that anyone else could understand it. I stopped taking workshops in my senior year, and after graduation got an office job at The State Bar of California to support what I thought of as my real work, writing poetry. I didn’t feel I needed to become a poet - that was the one piece of my identity I felt sure about - and I was (wrongly) convinced that my poetic talent would be so clear that I didn’t need to be in the institutionalized poetry world. It was a great choice, actually. I read widely, deeply and completely idiosyncratically; I chose as my teachers the poets who blew me away, who reminded me of all that I could and should be doing in my poems. Without the workshop pressure to produce, and without the common denominator critical perspective workshop discussions tend to foster, I worked on poems as long as I wanted to. I learned, very slowly and with great difficulty, what kind of writing I wanted to do, and what sorts of craft I needed to master in order to do it. And in a way, the fact that I spent so many hours a week in a world where poetry meant nothing to anyone kept me grounded as a poet, kept me thinking about what relation I wanted to create between my poems and the life around them.

Morty: That is very moving. When did you then decide that your heart was leading you back to the ‘institutionalized poetry world’?
Joy: I’m afraid it wasn’t my heart doing the leading - and I’m not sure I ever made it back. After a decade of working in an office and writing - years in which I had 9 or 10 poems published - I realized that I needed more contact with that poetry world to have any hope of a career as a poet. I think I was lonely too - I had spent years thinking about poetry, but though I had a couple of correspondences (on real paper!) with poets about poetry, I longed for conversation. I wanted to see how what I was thinking sounded to others, to see if the poetry world had a place for me.
Morty: So, you entered an MFA program.
Joy: I would spend the years in my MFA program trying to figure out how to write poetry that was true but self-concealing, and alive even though I didn’t feel I would ever be.
Morty: Can you explain more about that? What was happening consciously?
Joy: I thought about transitioning all the time. I doubt I ever wrote a word without being aware of how far or close it was to my trans identity. As I explain in a recent Her Kind blog post, I had trained myself in both life and writing to avoid anything that might undermine the male identity I projected. I consciously chose ways of writing poetry that made that easier - persona poems, abstract meditations, poems where I avoided the pronoun “I” - and sometimes tried to explore the poetic potential of my gender identity issues, or to use poetry to explore my conception of being a woman. My second book, The Book of Anna, is written in the voice of a female concentration camp survivor - but she is so psychologically extreme that I didn’t feel she represented much in terms of gender identity. She also didn’t represent much in terms of who I felt I was - I realized early on in the project that she was a completely different, and much better, poet, so I needed to not do in “her” poems the things that were characteristic of mine. One of the strange things about my life as a poet is how little poetry I published while I lived as a man - two books - and how much I’ve published since transition: five books, including the just-published The Definition of Joy. I wrote all the time when I was living as a man - I used to even write in the office, hiding poems under stacks of budget reports I’d pretend to be working on - but because I was working so hard not to be myself either in my life or on the page, it was very hard to feel that I’d truly achieved anything in the poems. Once I started to transition, poetry shifted from being a way of feeling alive to being a way of staying alive - I was constantly battling suicidal depression as my life fell apart, and often writing poetry was a way of putting off suicide. But poetry also became a prophetic mode, a way of hearing the voice of my future calling me to become myself.
Morty: In the Herkind.org essay you write, “It was hard to see how I could write about my social and physical rites of passage—bar mitzvah? Losing my virginity? My first erection?—as a woman.” - Do you feel you’re still tackling this?
Joy: I’m just beginning to experiment with writing from the subject position of someone living as a woman who used to live as a man - in other words, from my actual subject position. It still feels new to me - that blog post was part of thinking about what it might mean.
Morty: So, I would like to ask my stock question: Do you consider yourself a “trans writer”?
Joy: I do some writing out of or toward my trans identity, and I’m very interested in “trans poetics” - the way trans experience affects poetic choices, and can be represented or reproduced or made visible as part of the spectrum of human experience through poetry. When I do that kind of work (the essay is an example) I’m definitely presenting myself as a trans writer. But I also do writing in which I don’t feel that trans identity is more than a biographical detail - my attempts at nature poetry (hard for someone who spent 45 years disconnected from my body) don’t seem inflected by trans experience to me.
Morty: The question about identifying as a trans writer has to do with what many trans writers feel - that once you write about being trans in your work you are labeled a “trans writer” by many and yet - there still isnt really a genre of trans literature that is coherent to many people. So, even if you write about other subjects your work on being trans always is what comes to the surface, because trans lit is still forming. And being a trans woman who writes is a rarity in the publishing world.
Joy: I feel energized by trying to extend poetic language into a relatively unspoken area of human experience, and of course marginalized, often even within the LGBT world. Because my transition was publicized by the NY Post, I’ve been accustomed to having my public identity defined by being trans - it isn’t comfortable, it’s not what I often would choose, but it has also created opportunities, like this interview, and given me a sense that precisely because of my marginality (and to many people, just plain weirdness) as a trans woman, my existence has a little extra meaning. I think that while “trans writing” is likely to become a demographically based category - writing by writers who are trans, or by cisgender writers who write about trans people - I’m mostly interested in it as a formal category, as I said in an essay in Lambda Literary, called “Ours for the Making: Trans Lit, Trans Poetics.” To me, every way of being human, every demographic quality or life situation, opens (or should open) new perspectives in literature, new ways of thinking about language and existence. That’s true even of more common demographic categories, because even after thousands of years of literature, and tens of thousands of oral poetry, most human experience remains beyond the pale of language. If human experience were an ocean, and writing were a ship, most literature would barely have made it beyond the point where bay opens into sea.
Morty: Wonderful answer. As a side note, when Cheryl Morgan wrote on the Lambda Literary website is there trans lit I was really irritated and felt it was Lambdas way of bashing trans lit. Why should they publish an article about whether something exists or not - when trans people have been writing for a long time!
Joy: Thanks for sharing that about Cheryl’s essay - it pushed my buttons too, as you can see, but I didn’t have any other trans writer to talk with about it. I don’t think Lambda Lit does a great job with trans literature yet, but I do think they are trying.
Morty: Many think they really aren’t trying - and by publishing that essay they ‘put us in our place’.
Joy: I think it’s fair to ask whether writers who share a demographic characteristic are constituting a form of literature - I think that’s really up to us, as trans writers, and I think that you are helping us think about who we are and what we are doing. Also, I’ve never been good at feeling put in my place!
Morty: Ha! Same here! I want an essay on Lambda that is exuberant about all the amazing trans lit that is coming out right now!
Joy: That’s because the world doesn’t have a place to put us - and that is both a painful and hard condition, and one that gives us great freedom and perhaps power, if we seize it. I don’t think we need to wait, honestly - I think that there is just enough political guilt and shame about trans exclusion in the gay world that we can muscle in - as long as we aren’t waiting for others to legitimize us. Frankly, in the queer world, marginality tends to be cool - and I know Lambda Lit wants to be cool, which is becoming harder as being gay becomes more mainstream. A lot of power is acting powerful. That’s more or less how Obama became president - by acting like someone who could be president, even though we all know that no African American, much less an unknown with little political experience, could possibly do that.
Morty: Yes… but as we know trans people have a rough time acting powerful. I love that you put it that way because I agree….trans women even less so - much less so…. and that is why a strong trans female voice in literature is mind blowing, it just is.
Joy: Point - sadly - taken, Morty. But as you show with Bodies of Work, we don’t need to change their minds - as my therapist told me during my divorce, “What other people think of you is none of your business.” We just need to be ourselves - the best selves we can be. Tremendous power flows from that. Thank you for providing this leadership, this space - and showing this courage in the face of a discouraging literary world.
Morty: Beyond my pleasure… so let us discuss your new book.
Joy: Great!
Morty: Your transition occurred fairly recently, yes?
Joy: I just passed my fifth anniversary of living as myself.
Morty: I asked that question because all of the things you write about in your new book seems still fresh in your mind.
Joy: Definitely. Though I have grown since the times I write about - transition is a very compressed kind of developmental time.

Morty: You are such a brave person to publish these vary harrowing experiences in your life.
Joy: Thank you. I’ve gotten a variety of responses from people, in and out of print. Non-Jews often seem to read past the Jewish parts, but everyone seems emotionally exhausted by the time they finish reading it. It’s hard stuff to talk about, to listen to - I’m grateful to you and everyone who has lived through it with me by reading the book.
Morty: What made you begin to write this book?
Joy: Jane Bowles wrote that most people spend their lives fleeing from their first fear toward their first hope. This book represents my literary attempt to complete that journey. My first fear was that being trans made me something other than human, irrevocably alien and unintelligible. My first hope was that if others could really understand my experience of body, soul and self, they would recognize that being trans was actually just a particularly intense form of being human - that the contradictions between body and soul and social identity that I experience due to gender are versions of what we all experience by virtue of being human, that the becoming represented by transition is a form of the becoming we all have to do.
Morty: So much of your book is so heart wrenching to read - like this quote - “choice between becoming myself and being loved. It was a horrible choice, but not a hard one, and with practice it got easier – almost as automatic as averting my eyes from girl-things when I was a child.” — How does it feel to write these things that many of us are taught to never disclose?
Joy: I think the hardest part of what I wrote was living through it - living with those feelings, and with the shame of choosing, over and over and over, to not be who I was and to present myself as someone else. Now I sound like Don Draper… Writing the words felt liberating, exhilarating - I was shattering the diving-bell of shame in which I’d been trapped my whole life, finding words for things I dared say to no one, even myself. It’s hard, though, to read them; it was awful doing the last three rounds of edits and proofs, living through the breakdown of my family over and over again. My daughters have read a little bit of the book; my eight-year-old made me discuss the part about her in the bathtub (in the last chapter) for about 4 hours straight. Up to that point, I had a vague wish that someday, when they were older, they’d read the book and understand. Suddenly I realized that could happen a lot sooner, and that was terrifying. But I was also grateful to see that my words had done something I never imagined - they’d given my daughter language for some of her experience of my transition.
Morty: When I read books like this I feel such a sense of astonishment that the person writing is still alive, still working, still being an active person in society.
Joy: It was a close call, honestly - I couldn’t have made it without a lot of love from friends, and support from trans women who had already gone through transition. I guess after years of hiding and lying, I feel that I have to be as present and honest, in writing and in life, as I can be.
Morty: This book speaks a lot about how the Yeshiva school, an Orthodox Jewish school - ends up fully accepting your transition - which really blew me away. Can you comment a little about that - do you feel there is more understanding about trans for those who are conservative Jews?
Joy: I think that there’s very little understanding about trans identity anywhere, and certainly not in any Orthodox communities I’ve heard of. Orthodox trans people live in hiding; when they transition, they often lose communities they grew up in, though many find they can pass in other communities if they keep a low profile. But what I discovered in my experience at Yeshiva is that there was another force in tradition that, for many of my Orthodox students and colleagues (though by no means all) was stronger than the traditional transphobia: the tradition that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that being Jewish means recognizing and respecting that image in the way we treat others. There were many factors at work in my acceptance at Yeshiva. Because I’m not Orthodox, I ignored the transphobic voices of rabbis and other communal authorities - they aren’t my community, and I don’t accept their authority. Yeshiva is a modern Orthodox institution, and I teach secular studies. I have colleagues who are non-practicing Jews, and colleagues who aren’t Jewish at all. If I were teaching Jewish studies, I’m not sure I would have been allowed to continue. Yeshiva accepts federal money, and so can’t define itself legally as a religious institution - and New York City has a human rights law that covers gender identity and expression. Also, I’d just received early tenure - which means there were piles of paper attesting to the quality of my work. A court case would have been bad publicity, and might have resulted in an embarrassing defeat. But that”s all about why I was allowed to return as a woman after getting tenure as a man. I think my acceptance by people also had to do with another circumstance - the fact that, because I was on the short side for a man (5’6”), it was relatively easy for people to “read” me as female after transition. If I hadn’t presented a gender coherent impression, I doubt that I could have been accepted.
Morty: So, being able to pass, looking like a woman in their eyes, meant acceptance to many of your co-workers.
Joy: It’s sad but true that in many cases trans acceptance comes down to whether you clearly “pass” as male or female. If our bodies don’t fit the norms - or if our mode of gender expression isn’t sufficiently conventional - we are subject to all kinds of abuse.
Morty: Why did you decide to call your book - Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders - where does Judaism and your gender coincide for you?
Joy: Judaism is my spiritual language, my way of understanding and expressing my relationship with God and my fellow creatures. Judaism’s emphasis on relationship, on ethics, on being true and responsible, on living in gratitude and joy, kept reminding me when I was living as a man of how far I was from living up to the image of God in which I was created. Judaism sees human beings as in constant conversation, often heated, with God - and that concept gave me someone to talk through during the long years of isolation. If I was created in God’s image, then God knew, and understood, who I truly was. And finally, I think that being Jewish in a non-Jewish world gave me practice at being a minority - and because I was never the target of anti-Semitism, it gave me the sense that one could be different and be part of a larger society.
Morty: Who published this book?
Joy: The book was published in March by University of Wisconsin Press.
Morty: Now that your book has been published have you had folks contact you who have perhaps had close to the same experiences as you?
Joy: I have been contacted by other trans people, mostly Jewish, and mostly trans women. But I’ve also heard from non-trans people who relate to the struggles to be true to oneself that I describe. I’ve been contacted by a couple of therapists who work with gender identity issues.
Morty: On the topic of Jewish trans women - is there an online hub or organization of any kind for Jewish trans women?
Joy: There are Jewish trans women, but we aren’t organized, and I seem to be one of relatively few who are publicly engaged as both trans and Jewish. I was actually invited to join a Jewish trans group because they needed a trans woman. Most trans Jewish leadership is coming from trans men. I’ve just started wondering why that might be - and how to change it. I think there are a lot of gender role conventions that would push things in that direction. I also think that trans women, Jewish and otherwise, tend to feel vulnerable, harassed and embattled. Overall, we tend to find it harder to pass as or find acceptance as women than trans men find it to pass as men. Also, as Julia Serano has explained in detail, trans women who adopt a feminine language of gender expression attract a lot of misogyny - hatred of femininity is very common in our culture, including in politically progressive areas. And one of the least powerful images in our culture is that of a man in a dress. So, I’m not sure if Jewish trans women are less visible in communities than trans women in general.

Morty: What would you like to see happen in the next few years with trans literature?
Joy: That’s a great question. I’m afraid I have two not very interesting wishes. The first is that trans writers produce a lot of compelling literature, literature that commands and rewards attention. Heck, I hope everyone produces a lot of compelling literature in the next few years - there’s never enough. But I also hope that we start seeing trans literary events at which trans authors could reflect together about who we are, what we have already done, and what we want to make together in terms of a place in literature and culture. I had a glimpse of how powerful that sort of event could be when I participated in the trans poetry panel at AWP with Samuel Ace, Stacey Waite and Ely Shipley. The room was packed with people and excitement - and the sense that there is a world that is hungry for trans literature. Whatever that may turn out to be.
Morty: Wonderful! Lastly, I’d like to know what you have coming up.
Joy: I’m currently preparing to send out to two poetry manuscripts - one a revision of a collection mostly written on the cusp of transition, called Impersonation, and a collection of recent poems called Fireworks in the Graveyard, which contains relatively few poems that address trans content. Impersonation was meant to be the first in a three-book sequence about transition, but the other two, Transmigration (my first book published under my true name) and Coming to Life, were published first. I still feel young, am still growing - hey, I’ve only been an oppressed minority for five years. And it’s only been five years since I began to feel alive.
Morty: Yes! I look forward to seeing your new work in the future! This has been a really personally satisfying interview, thank you for joining me.
Joy: Thank you, Morty!