The Beatrice Interview


Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan

Gender Fucking by the Side of the Information Superhighway


interviewed by Ron Hogan



P L A N E T O U T

In Nearly Roadkill , performance artist and writer Kate Bornstein and journalist Caitlin Sullivan have teamed up to create a postmodern tale of online romance and intrigue. The story follows two characters, virtually uncategorizable by gender or any other means, whose cybersexual antics force a standoff with the Big Brotherish establishment. Although the bulk of the novel was written in 1995 -- based on chats the authors initiated on AOL -- it eerily mirrors the last few months of conflict between the government and online users.

Kate Bornstein is best known as the author ofGender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, which tracks her lifelong odyssey as a man who became a woman who became . . . Other. Caitlin Sullivan is a playwright and the former editor of Seattle Gay News .

RH: How long have you two known each other?

CS: We met at an OutWrite conference in 1989 and exchanged snail mail addresses. Kate was already on AOL then, but I wasn't. I soon got online, freaked out, and got offline. But eventually we got into doing e-mail together.

RH: How did you arrive at the idea for the book?

KB: We started talking about issues of gender and otherness. I'd always had the idea of writing a love story between two people who had no [fixed] identity, so we started surfing chat rooms and thinking about ways that we could chat online without any identity. We would surf and save our chats until we had a huge file.

CS: I always went online with handles that weren't obviously female, so I wouldn't get bombarded with private messages. I was surfing one night with a name that had "Bear" in it, and I went into a gay male room where someone thought that I was a hairy gay man and approached me for sex. So I had cybersex as a gay man with somebody claiming to be a gay man. I forgot to save the session, flipped out, and called Kate. That cemented the idea of having two fictional characters meet online with different personas. We thought when we started that it would be like "Samurai novel" -- *whoosh* and we'd be done. But it didn't work out like that -- we had to come up with a plot and everything.

KB (sarcastically): Books still have plots .

CS: At first we wanted to do it as a nonlinear CD-ROM, but we couldn't get access to the technology, and we were so excited by the idea that we just started to write.

RH: To what extent are the chats in the book based on your online research? Did you monkey around with your logged sessions?

CS: We didn't have to monkey much, but so many chats that we saved are missing from the book because they just didn't apply to the story. We did merge some of our chats, but we really didn't have to edit much. All the erotic scenes, for example, are almost completely intact.

KB: While we were writing, we'd find that we needed a particular kind of chat -- such as one case where we needed to show how easy it is to unmask a straight guy pretending to be a lesbian online -- so we'd go online together, trolling in character, and within a minute or two, bing! we found one.

RH: How close is the correlation between you two and your characters?

KB: When you ask that, what are you looking for?

RH: Was there a parallel courtship between you and Caitlin?

CS: No, there's no parallel courtship. In any fiction writing, there's the question of "what if?"-- which we kept asking throughout. There are aspects in all of our characters that are extensions of our personalities, but there are also elements which draw upon our friends. Sure, we settled into certain characters, but we basically let whichever of us was most capable of the necessary task write that section.

RH: Kate, you were online for a long time before this project started. Had you been playing around like this online before you hooked up with Caitlin?

KB: I used to surf in a lot of different identities . . . I should point out that we didn't write this on the Internet per se, but on a large commercial service where we could change our screen names in a flash, and I used to enjoy doing that, taking on different names just to see what would happen. I love playing with identity in real life and playing with identity on the Net is so much easier. I did find that people insisted on nailing my identity down before they spoke to me, and I went from my initial "How dare you try to nail me down?" phase to a very playful stage: "Isn't it more fun not to know?" or "What do you want me to be?" A lot of people have been talking with us about how terrible it is that people go online and deceive each other, but are there only two options -- deception and total honesty? What about agreed non-disclosure? What about two people who agree to play with each other?

RH: You were one of the first authors to include an e-mail address in a book in Gender Outlaw. Do you still get a lot of e-mail from your readers?

KB: I used to get as many as 10 to 20 messages a day; that's now trickled down to 10 or 20 a week. People wanted to tell me their stories, and I made a conscious decision to treat those letters as private and not use any of them in my books, but simply to reply to them. Caitlin and I also decided not to include our personal addresses in this book, so that we wouldn't be overwhelmed. But we do want readers to write to us through the book's web site.

RH: How actively involved are you in the web site's development?

CS: We have a designer -- a young, hip girl who was doing stupid corporate sites for hire and was delighted at the opportunity to go wild and do whatever she wanted. In fact, it took us a while to convince her that she could try out whatever new features she wanted to put on the site. I write text and then send it to her. We want the site to become very interactive, so we're having people send letters, which we can answer as ourselves or in character. Ultimately, we want the site to grow from the book, to become a separate creation.

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All materials copyright © 1997 Ron Hogan