Imogen Binnie is the author of Nevada, and is also a musician and popular blogger. Dan Fishback is a playwright and musician. In this interview, they discuss being “queer famous,” Barthes, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which character in the book is most like Imogen (spoiler alert: not Maria!) theory vs. praxis, and which book Imogen would like to gay-marry.
FISHBACK
I’m kind of obsessed with you, so let’s start there. How are you dealing with being queer famous? I mean, there is a Facebook page called “People Who Need To Talk About ‘Nevada’ By Imogen Binnie” — like, people who were so moved by your work that they had to create an Internet community to talk about it with strangers. And I’m one of them! So what’s that like? Is fame an emotion?
BINNIE
Haha. I certainly don’t feel queer famous, and I think it’s a thing I kind of avoid. I mean, the project of writing novels is to like, you hide out for a really long time working on this thing that you don’t show anybody. And my experience with putting *art* or whatever into the world has mostly been playing in bands that played, like, bars and basement shows, with no expectation of anything beyond making music with friends. I know that this is a predictable and boring Humble Artist thing to say but getting all famous or Having Fame haven’t really seemed that relevant to me? I mean, the reality of being queer famous as a trans woman for me has been that the last time I was at a place where there were a lot of other queer people, a cis woman who thought I was Bryn Kelly came up to me like “Hi Bryn!” Let the record show that I love Bryn but am a foot and a half taller than her.
That said, though, Topside Press sent me out on this amazing tour where I got to do these amazing readings with amazing geniuses, and the response to Nevada has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel really thankful about it – especially for the responses from trans women, who were the audience I had in mind while I was writing it. Like it seems like a lot of trans women had really intense emotional responses to it, which was my goal; the fact that other people (like you!) responded so strongly to it, too, is like… maybe a little bit surprising. But totally amazing.
But y’know. My girlfriend has been doing the practicum part of getting certified as a midwife and once tour ended I’ve been living with her at her mom’s house in rural New Hampshire. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to revel in my newfound queer fame.
FISHBACK
I’m really curious about the dynamic of art and solitude in your life, and what you say about writing for trans women. I mostly write plays, but I’m working on my first book now, and I keep being like, “Okay, when’s rehearsal?” Like: I’m so desperate to be in a room with people. And the thing that makes it bearable is my imagined relationship to my intended readers — in my case, mostly cis gay men. I have this, like, phantom relationship to this big messy idea of “them.” So even though you have a real community of trans women in your life, did you experience the process of hiding out to write Nevada as a form of, like, imagined community-building? Like – did you conjure, in your mind, a sense of trans woman community beyond what you experience IRL, and did your relationship with that community change as you wrote? Sorry if this is a really weird or projectiony question.
BINNIE
Haha I have done some tweeting about how writing is the worst. I mean, how do I get through the day-to-day process of making up words and putting them in order? Loud music and coffee, mostly. And like, I’m always pretty resentful about the fact that I’m sitting here writing stupid words, but it’s not really an audience that keeps me going, per se. I mean… I’m working on a degree in counseling psychology right now and this guy Aflred Adler, who was a contemporary of Freud, had this whole philosophy that neurosis is the product of feelings of inferiority, that we do stuff to compensate for feeling inferior. I know part of the impulse to write is classic boring queer overcompensation, like “I’ll fuckin show you I’m worth something, I will write a hundred novels!” (A much bigger part of it is just having been a reader for forever and having ideas about what would be cool to see in a novel, but the insecurity/inferiority thing is definitely there too.) But I think that extends to my relationship to an audience, and why I tend to bring pretty low expectations into a project? I’m like, Well, let’s see if I can make this work, instead of Well, let’s see how many minds I can blow or whatever. Y’know?
But with Nevada specifically I was thinking a lot about what kinds of stories we are told and therefore get to tell about trans women and how they almost never have much to do with the lived experiences of, like, myself, or most of my friends. So this project, for better or worse, was just to tell a different story. And also, to write a book I wish I could read. So while writing the book wasn’t for an audience in a specific way, I wrote it with an awareness of (and anger at) the boring tropes we see in trans narratives over and over.
But if I’d been thinking ‘Man, wait til the community sees this, this is really gonna shake shit up,’ I never would’ve been able to finish it. I would’ve sat in my basement garage bedroom in Oakland where I did most of the work on this book, listening to Converge albums and fantasizing about being smarter than I am and getting rewarded for it. That rules that thinking about an audience helps you get shit done! But it just makes me feel self-conscious and like somebody else could probably do a better job so maybe I should just be quiet and wait.
Blah blah blah whatever the actual answer to this question is “I thought it might do some work toward moving the ball forward in trans literature but not so much in real life.”
FISHBACK
Three of my plays revolve around this character Ian Fleishman, with whom I share a lot of biographical details. I started out performing as him, and he was clearly some kind of alter-ego, but the more I write him, the more he becomes this completely distinct character, to the point where I don’t even feel like we have very much in common anymore. And yet people continuously assume we are the same person. So while I was reading Nevada, I was really sensitive to, like, Semi-Autobiographical Syndrome or whatever, and I made a conscious effort not to conflate you and Maria Griffiths, to the point where I started imagining Maria as other trans women I know, like Red Durkin or Julie Blair. But at the end of the day, even though I hate getting this question myself, I still have to admit that I want to know: What’s your relationship with Maria like? How is she different from you? What would it be like if you hung out?
BINNIE
This is such an important question! Thanks for asking it. In earlier drafts of the book Maria was more of a transparent stand-in for me, but my I am kind of boring so there wasn’t much of a story there. It turned out that a lot of her is really similar to me but with, like, neuroses, and bad coping mechanisms, and self-obsession and stuff, all the salient parts of her personality that are based on me are really amplified to make her into somebody where the story could be about that stuff. Because ultimately it’s a story about a trans woman whose coping mechanisms and ways of being in the world are failing her, which is a place I’ve been in the past and where I’m sure I’ll be again in the future- just everybody else, right, we find out too late that this shit that used to work isn’t working any more. A central thing in the novel is that these are very common coping mechanisms and ways of being in the world specifically for trans women from certain kinds of backgrounds: how many of us blog our feelings without being to name them out loud in our lives? How many of us are desperate for a mentor, can’t find one, and so decide to be one instead?
I’ve spent the last tennish years working on creating community among trans women both for altruistic reasons and very selfish ones, and so I know a lot of trans women. And I know that Maria’s shit, which is based on my own shit, is also based on a lot of other trans women’s shit.
So my relationship to her is an affectionate, like, Maria, you idiot. In the same way that I’m often like, shut the fuck up, Imogen. I love Maria but ultimately it’s a novel about how her way of understanding and experiencing the world is failing her- and failing other people too- and so there is this element of, hey y’all, this theoretical edifice we’ve created to make sense of out experience IS NOT ENOUGH. And I think it’s a book about the process of Maria coming to realize that, if not her actual realization of that.
Also? Nobody ever asks how much Piranha is me, or how much James is me. Or even Steph or Nicole or Kieran! A thing about writing fiction, I think, is that I (and I think a lot of writers) have to feel like I at least sort of get a character in order to write them, and the best way for me to get a made-up character is to base them on myself. So yeah Maria is probably the closest to me but all these characters are like me. Especially Piranha, at least socially.
If Maria and I hung out we would have an awesome time for about an hour and then I would get exhausted by her but keep being nice to her. She would take my getting less chatty as a reason to get more chatty until I had to be like, look, I am going to bed.
FISHBACK
LOL, you going to bed would make her feel so bad about herself, right? So like, “This theoretical edifice we’ve created to make sense of our experience IS NOT ENOUGH” is a really fucking powerful statement. And this is a TERRIBLE question, and I’m sorry I’m asking it, but I really wanna know: If Maria’s theoretical edifice isn’t enough, then what would be better? Like: what does Maria need? Like: if you were her guardian angel, what would you give her?
BINNIE
Oh I don’t think the answer to that is that complicated, actually. I think she needs praxis, she needs to take this theory that she knows inside out and backwards and do something with it in her actual life: to stop explaining and start doing. I mean, that’s what she tries to do with James and it doesn’t work, but that’s because she has no idea how to talk to another person, much less mentor them. Like, the things she says to him are just, like, shouting dense theory at his face. That is not a good way to connect with a new friend. And she talks about not liking other trans women but she doesn’t have a good reason for it. The specifics of her sexuality are this question mark that has her faking orgasms instead of figuring out what she wants and asking for it- she just needs to start living in the world instead of her own head and on the internet. Which is really hard when the world doesn’t know what to do with you, but… I mean this is a common thing, trans women being a lot better at talking about our shit online than in real life. If I were her guardian angel I’d give her a friend who she can learn to share space in a room with, where the stakes are a little lower than they are with James. I would give her practice at relating to other human beings in meatspace.
FISHBACK
Maria keeps saying she’s over stuff, or bored of stuff, or that she doesn’t want to talk about stuff, but always ends up talking about that stuff over and over again, in fascinating detail. In what ways are you, proverbially, OVER IT? (“It” meaning basically everything/anything.)
BINNIE
I don’t know! That tension is another thing that’s important in Nevada (and in my life): the fact that you’re over something but you don’t get to be over it. Again, specific to trans women, there’s this thing where a lot of us want to explain trans stuff all the time because so many people so consistently do such a bad job of understanding trans people. But at the same time IT IS SO BORING to keep going over trans 101 all the time your whole life. But then also new people are coming out as trans all the time, and they’re always working through poisonous cisnormative stuff that they’ve internalized, right, and if you want for their lives to be better you want to help them through it, so you end up having 101 conversations again. Or 201 conversations or whatever.
And like… I am going to be a nerd for a second. There’s this trope that the interesting thing about being trans is the transition part: that you’re pretty much a cis person before you transition, and then you have this Fascinating, Brave Butterfly period where you’re in the middle, and then you’re a cis person again, just the other kind. This is a reason the middle-class white trans memoir is so popular: it almost always ends with “and now I’m a normal woman.” And I was like, well, that trope erases the reality that there are real differences between trans people and cis people outside the context of the exciting transition part. And the book is structured to reflect that: Maria’s transition is behind her, and- spoiler!- James’s is a few years in front of him. Each represents a part of the life of a trans woman who transitions that isn’t the transition, and how being trans is relevant there.
So the bulk of the things that Maria is over but can’t let go is trans stuff that is still relevant to her life. It’s about the dichotomy between “done with transition” and “still trans.”
But the question you asked is about me, and the answer is: I don’t know.
FISHBACK
The opening image of “Nevada” is of a cisgender queer woman choking a transgender woman, and neither is having a good time. Would it be a stretch to call this a snapshot of trans/cis dialogue amongst queer people today?
BINNIE
Haha. I do feel like that would be a stretch, yes. I mean that scene is consensual choking.
…
Nah I’m kidding, I think it’s more complicated than that. I date cis women and am close with a lot of cis women who Get It. Obviously there are a lot of female-assigned people who don’t, who are really invested in this narrative that being a female-assigned genderqueer person is the same- or a More Important Oppression- than the normative oppression experienced by (scare quotes) “binary-identified” trans women. And there’s no room for conversation there; look what happened with the Hey Queen thing, when some trans women tried to make performing at Michfest have ANY CONSEQUENCES AT ALL.
…Whatever I could talk hella shit about the Queer Community at large but it wouldn’t be anything new. That is a thing I’m over, for sure. I’ve talked about this before: I conceptualize my relationship with The Queer Community as “broken up with,” because it doesn’t feel worth it to me to try to exist in that space and get my heart broken by some young trans dude every time I try to go to a friend’s house. So while that stuff might feel like being choked to someone else, no, I didn’t conceptualize that opening scene as a metaphor for cis-dyke/trans-dyke relations. I thought it was a metaphor for a relationship that’s over but the two people in it don’t realize it yet; but I should point out that I am not the Boss of Metaphors.
FISHBACK
Boss of Metaphors would be a great game show! But no, that makes total sense. Can you imagine you and Queer Community ever getting back together, or at least, like, splitting a farm share? Like: I’m speaking from a stupid amount of privilege here, but I really want to believe that cis queers and trans guys can, independently, get our shit together and process our (and each other’s) transmisogyny to the point that queer public space can be a welcome environment for all different kinds of queer and trans folks. It’s a utopian ideal, but I have a hard time giving it up. I guess this isn’t a question, because none of the onus is on you. I guess the question version would be, “Would you wait for us?!” but that’s ridiculous, I would never ask that. Actually everything I just wrote is starting to really offend me, but I’m not going to delete it because it seems relevant, if narcissistic and misguided.
BINNIE
I don’t know, maybe? I mean, there are individuals who I trust and feel safe with, but with the whole community? I dunno, I’m not ruling it out, but I’m certainly not holding my breath. Which sounds so pessimistic! It sucks but it took a lot of getting hurt for a really long time for me to figure out that I needed to extricate myself from that situation; I don’t know what would have to happen for me to feel like that had changed. And I mean, I didn’t bail out of spite, I bailed out of self-preservation, and it would be a lot nicer to believe a community could have my back than it is not to.
Plus, y’know, you see your exes everywhere, it’s not like breaking up with the queer community means I never leave the house. It just means I… y’know. It means I go into the Lambda Literary Awards expecting Augusten Burroughs to tell me he invented me, instead of being surprised. But I still go. It means that when JD Samson tells me she wants to talk via email about Michfest and I email to ask, “Okay, how is it not hypocritical to say you care about trans women and also that you are going to Michfest,” it doesn’t surprise me not to get an answer. Despite my better judgment and despite being broken up with that shit, I still can’t help but ask.
And I’m a dyke or a queer or a lesbian or whatever, right? My friends are queers, my girlfriend of seven years and I scan as dykes in public. It’s not like we just live in a cave somewhere with nobody around; being broken up with the community is more about not beating myself up for not wanting to go to parties that I know are going to hurt my feelings than it is about choosing to be a hermit.
FISHBACK
Thank you for talking about this, and I’m sorry that my initial non-question was so stupid and ill-thought-out. Between reading your book, following the Michfest boycott online, and having some private conversations with people involved, I feel like I’ve only just recently approached any kind of elementary understanding of how fucked over trans women are in my own communities — and in queer spaces that I have always assumed were friendly and welcoming. It’s been such a wake-up call for me, and I hope that a lot of queers who aren’t trans women read what you wrote here and reflect on what they can do to fight transmisogyny in their own lives and social networks. I think I felt the need to turn my thought into a “question” because I’m supposed to be, like, “the interviewer,” but now I’m realizing you shouldn’t have to answer anything regarding this issue. It’s the job of people like me to “answer” for transmisogyny, and commit ourselves to fighting it. Which I guess is just to say: Thank you for writing a novel that helps instigate these conversations and awakenings! I know that wasn’t the intention of the book, but it’s definitely one of the consequences.
ANYWAY, I just read your short story I Met a Girl Named Bat Who Met Jeffrey Palmer in The Collection, and I was struck that this story, like Nevada, centers around an awkward inter-generational encounter between two trans women (or, in Nevada, presumably trans women). And, more broadly, both works are concerned with what the experiences of younger trans women will be like, in the future. Why do you think this keeps coming up?
BINNIE
Because I want so badly to have a trans woman to mentor me! To tell me, hey, here’s how you do it, here’s how not to get hurt all the time. And obviously it’s because shit is messed up for trans women right now and it’s nice to think about a time when it is less messed up; in Nevada, Maria is placing all her eggs in the “it’ll be better for this person than it was for me” basket. In I Met A Girl Named Bat I think it’s optimistic: one day, we idiots who are floundering around right now trying to figure out how to be trans in the world are going to be irrelevant because things are going to be better. With discourse around transsexuality evolving so quickly it’s cool to think about a time when shit can settle down and not be so hard all the time. And I mean, the girl from I Met A Girl Named Bat is straight. Who knows what it’s like to be a queer trans woman in her speculative fiction future time. I bet it is easy and fun.
FISHBACK
Ten pages from the end of “Nevada,” I was like “HOLY FUCK, HOW IS THIS BOOK GOING TO END,” and when it did I was like, “THAT WAS BRILLIANT AND I AM SO UNCOMFORTABLE.” First of all, I had no idea whether to take James at his own word. As a trans ally, my reflex is to always honor everyone’s gender self-determination, so when James “decides” that he’s not trans at the end, I felt that I had to take his word for it. And that made me really sad. But when I mentioned this in the Facebook Support Group For People Who Have Really Super Intense Feelings About Your Work, Imogen Binnie, the general response I got was like, “Oh it never occurred to me that James wasn’t trans.” Someone even suggested that my own fraught and inconclusive doubts about James’ gender are mirroring the kinds of doubts that trans people experience as they come out, which I thought was a really fascinating interpretation. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying: Please tell me ANYTHING about your thought-process for the end of this book, because I am still shattered by it, in a good way.
BINNIE
Who said the thing about mirroring the kinds of doubts trans people (again: specifically trans women) often have? That person is a genius, buy that person a soda. Because (and, I mean, this is not necessarily canon, because we all have read Barthes and I as the author am dead; it is just my interpretation) the sad thing at the center of the story of Maria and James, for me, is that Maria- by trying to hurry James along on starting to transition- sets him back. Probably years. When Maria shows up, James is slooowwwwly working through his stuff. He’s figuring out that the porn he’s drawn to, which to some extent scratches the needing-to-think-about-becoming-a-girl itch, is not scratching it hard enough. He’s realizing- sort of- that his relationship to his girlfriend is getting in the way of figuring out what he needs in order to feel okay. He might even be getting close to putting the two together. But then Maria shows up, makes everything all about herself, and kind of tells James to shut up when he brings up the things he needs to work through.
I mean, insofar as the story is about Maria, the thing she is learning is that everything is not about her. Which is a hard thing to learn! Especially when you’re a trans woman and you have had a lot of experiences where like you’re trying to read on the damn train and some stranger interrupts you to let you know that you’re a man, thereby making It About You. But it’s an important thing to learn, if you can. It can really help quiet your internal anxiety monologue. And if Maria realizes that James’s life is not actually about her when she realizes that he left without even telling her? That might lead to the overbearing self-obsessed internal monologue that is her whole problem for the entire book quieting down a little.
Maria is literally not in the last chapter, which I think makes this point- while at the same time showing clearly that James has chosen to reinvest in his relationship with Nicole instead of breaking up with her or coming out to her. Or himself. As anything. Also, if we consider James to be a trans woman, then the novel ends with kind of a mirror image of the one it opens with: a trans woman getting head instead of dealing with her shit. Which is a pretty brutal commentary on the difficult relationship a lot of trans women have to sex.
FISHBACK
That’s completely brilliant. You have just totally enhanced my already-amazing experience of your book.
BINNIE
Yessssssss
FISHBACK
I’m writing these questions on the day that the Supreme Court struck down DOMA. If you had to gay marry any book (aside from Nevada or The Collection) what book would you gay marry?
BINNIE
I want to say Don Quixote by Kathy Acker but it seems like that wouldn’t be a *fun* gay marriage so I pick Iron Council by China Miéville. Actually that would be a brutal gay marriage, too, but at least we would get to steal a train? No! I’ve got it, there is this novel called Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino about this like ancient Celtic elfy woman who finds herself at an Yngwie Malmsteen concert and realizes that the power of metal is exactly what she needs to beat the evil elf musician who is keeping her girlfriend captive in, like, the ancient evil elf time dimension. So she puts together this all-women band, they overcome some hardships, and I don’t want to spoil anything for you but even though it is kind of doofy I would gay marry that book.
FISHBACK
Who is your dream interviewer? Like, who do you want to just interview the shit out of you?
BINNIE
Roland Barthes! Or maybe Dennis Cooper.
FISHBACK
I once asked Susan Sontag (THIS IS A REAL STORY) if, based on her reading of Barthes, she thought that true love existed. Everyone in the room started laughing, and she snapped, “DON’T LAUGH. It’ll put me in a bad mood…” And then she sorta waxed poetically for a while and said that yes, she did believe in true love. But she didn’t really address Barthes’ shtick, about how we’re all so mired in love’s discourse that we can’t experience its reality. Or something. But what about you, do you believe in true love?
BINNIE
I agree with whatever Susan Sontag said.
No I dunno yeah probably. I am with Barthes’ schtick though. I mean, true love like violins little birds chirping and stuff? Probably not. But true love as in being excited to be with someone for as long as you’re both excited to be together, and that lasting a long time? Heck yes that is real. I think it can look like a lot of things, and a lot of those things are things that there aren’t a lot of novels about. There are hell of kinds of true love! I believe in hell of kinds of true love, not a single heterocisnormative version of true love. Which, of course, then begs the question: why use the phrase “true love” if you’re using it differently than everybody else does. To which I answer, man, I do not know.
FISHBACK
Imogen, what is NOT next for you?
BINNIE
God. Living somewhere for more than a couple months. I’ve been moving around without a bed or a place to take my books out of their boxes since last November and I don’t think I’ll be done til at least January. I’m trying to write my whole next novel while my emotional Mercury is still in its year-long retrograde.
FISHBACK
I can’t wait to read it! Thank you for talking to me Imogen!
BINNIE
No prob thanks for doing this interview!
