Kate Bornstein - Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

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Table of Contents

To Stanley Safran Bergman,
the next generation

Introduction

Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman

AIM IM 3/9/10 11:01 AM

S. Bear Bergman: Good morning, cutepants.

Kate Bornstein: What a perfectly delightful way to open a conversation.

SBB: Its easy to be delightful when one is delighted, in my experience.

KB: Now see, this is like the old days.

SBB: ::laughing:: It is, in fact. I went digging through old files in preparation for this chat, and we evidently used to have a lot of spare time to spend flirting.

KB: Next generation, huh? I have a serious typing thing that I do: when I try to type generation, it ALWAYS comes out genderation. I did it just now.

SBB: Youre not alone in that, it seems. After I started forwarding the call for submissions for GO:TNG , a lot of the replies with submissions attached came to Gender Outlaws: The Next Genderation .

KB: Really? It just wants to come out my fingers like that.

SBB: Muscle memory?

KB: More like inner vaudevillian.

SBB: ::laughing:: Ive never really thought of your vaudevillian as inner, exactly, but okay.

SBB: If Id been a different sort of a being, I might have taken up burlesque.

KB: As would I, my darling. And wed do a double act and wow the crowds.

SBB: Yes, indeed.

KB: So what year did you and I meet?

SBB: I think 1993.

KB: Holy poop, 1993?

SBB: The oldest files of email I have are from 1994, and they seem clear that wed already met in person. And theyre from spring. So I think we met in person sometime in 1993. 17 years, give or take.

KB: ::shaking my head::

SBB: If our friendship were a person, it would be a college freshman by now.

KB: And you were how old? I shudder to re-ask.

SBB: In 1993? I would have been 18 or 19. But I was precocious.

KB: You were more than precocious.

SBB: I was looking for a kinder word than insufferable know-it-all.

KB: That too, but you made it charming.

SBB: ::laughing:: Well, thank g-d for that.

SBB: I think we got to be friends just as the original Gender Outlaw was kind of hitting its stride, though. I remember you were suddenly touring more, and that to some degree we bonded over being pervs and Macintosh enthusiasts.

KB: Days of Gwen Smiths Gazebo, and my twice-weekly Star Trek text-based games in AOL chatrooms.

KB: Thats right, cuz I was carrying my Mac Classic around with me on my back in the special convenient backpack Apple made for it.

SBB: Yep, and you logged on from everywherethe first person I knew who did. But it really is, actually... wait, how long is a generation, technically?

KB: Length of time between end of the original series and beginning of the next gen series. Hang on, Ill check.

SBB: ::laughing::

KB: TNG premiered 21 years after TOS.

KB: 1987, my first year of womanhood. A lot more happens to a generation of queers in much shorter time. The cultural version of epigenetics, where evolution of a species is proved to have noticeably jumped in just one generation.

SBB: I feel like, by the time I knew you, you were already saying a lot about how gender wasnt what most of us thought.

SBB: ::quietly googles epigenetics::

SBB: How do you feel about where this genderation is starting, as opposed to where you started?

KB: In a word, thrilled. In more than a word, awed by the heights from which this gen of gender outlaws has leapt off into their unexplored spaces. People today are STARTING from further than I got to when Id finished writing Gender Outlaw . Thats EXACTLY what I hoped to live to see.

SBB: And I think part of why is because you did write Gender Outlaw . I see a direct link. I feel like I can easily trace a line through from the people I know who are roughly your age, or roughly your age-queer, through my cohort, and to the place where people who are just moving into the fullness of themselves are now.

KB: A lot was going on when Gender Outlaw came out. GO was the piece that went furthest into the academy. But the politics of transfolk were jumping by leaps and bounds.

SBB: There was a... kickstart? I am not sure I was as aware of it at the time. But I definitely saw trans-identified people for the first time, starting then.

KB: And it was mostly trans women who were leading the cultural charge. Today, the sitch is reversed: the cultural icon for transgender is young FTM, evolved from middle-aged MTF. That bit of evolution in just one genderation.

SBB: I always wonder why that is.

KB: Kickstart was Stone Butch Blues .

SBB: Published in 1993.

KB: All the queens died in the 80s, and Kings took up their tiaras. Lou Sullivan wrote his words in the late 80s. When was Gender Outlaw first published?

SBB: I would have said the same year, but Wikipedia tells me a year later: Stone Butch Blues in spring of 1993, and then Gender Outlaw in spring of 1994.

SBB: Stone Butch Blues hit me like a truck. I probably read the entire book four times in a row before I could even consider picking up another book.

KB: I read it twice through on the first go, several times shortly afterwards. I know how deeply it spoke to FTMs and butches, but it spoke as deeply to femmes. At least it did to me. Stone Butch Blues taught me there would be butch women who would like freaky girly me. Id met some butch women before that, and yeah they were gallant and breath-taking. But until Stone Butch Blues , I thought they were the exceptions.

SBB: Sometimes I have this odd, split-brain thing about the impact of the AIDS pandemic. My visceral memory is of the second wave of deaths, the early 90s, when I was chaining myself to things with ACT UP and dying-in with Queer Nation. But then I dont think about or talk about it in relation to trans politics. I think theres some sort of sanitized corner of my brain that is afraid if I talk about it, people will carry on thinking all transpeople are MTF street-involved sex workers with AIDS.

KB: For a long time, when I was coming out, the MTFs were in fact street-involved sex workers with AIDS. Two of my dear friends died the year I stepped through the looking-glass.

KB: The butch-femme dance then was gallant and gracious. Thats the part of you that I responded to most quickly and deeply: the gallantry of you, the gentleman-ness.

SBB: The reverse thing was also happening for me. It was the perfect time to come out as a young butch. There were all these fantastic, hot, brilliant femmes who were so keen to help me refine and magnify my butch gallantry.

KB: Now see, I didnt meet femmes until later when I moved to Seattle. SF in those days was still Birkenstocks and plaid shirted lesbians who wanted nothing to do with men in dresses.

SBB: I learned how to do it, largely, by folding myself around the desires of the femmes I knew, like you, who loved the performativity of femme and taught me through it.

KB: You were SO attentive. Yes. Still are.

SBB: I felt seen for the first time. I felt... real, for the first time.

SBB: As though there was, fucking finally, a good reason I was like I was. It was the parable of the ugly ducking all over again. Though I wouldnt really compare myself to a swan, except for how noisy they are.

KB: and all that poop? ::ducking::

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