SCOTT TURNER SCHOFIELD: So. How would you say that your penchant for francophone country line dancing impacts your understanding of butch?

S. BEAR BERGMAN: [laughing] You see, this is the real problem with asking someone who knows you well to interview you. Ze knows all manner of things about you, and has just been waiting to get some mileage out of them.

STS: I wouldn't ask if I didn't feel it imperative to a reader's estimation and understanding of you. I can be more specific about that if you'd like, for our readers.

SBB: It is not quite a penchant. I was in Montréal, and my buddy Kieran--who does have a penchant, not that there's anything wrong with that--invited me to go with him to Bolo, which is Montréal's gay francophone country western line dancing club. It was...interesting. Lots and lots of gender, even in the gay space. I wished for my cowboy hat.

But dancing, in general, is one of the places where I first started to learn about butch. There's a whole set of rules and understandings, and you take your place depending on what part you want to be doing, and what part the rest of the people assembled are willing to have you do, and what your partner or partners want of you. And your job is to move through this space very precisely, and yet still make it look easy, and yet still (if you're leading, which I do) keep your partner safe from impacts. There are a lot of parallels. There's actually an essay in Butch is a Noun entitled "Dancing," about that very thing. It's a little bit romantic. I love to dance with a partner.

STS: See? You played right into my hands.

SBB: [dryly] You're a master of the interview. I am helpless in your thrall.

STS: Mwahahaha. You wrote much of this book at the Millay Colony, and you told me then that you were the only radical queer in the attending class. Isolation can be great for getting a book written, but did the kind of cultural isolation you experienced there affect the way you wrote the book (e.g., the audience you had in mind while writing)--positively or negatively or neither?

SBB: Hah. I was the only queer anything. The rest of the group was strictly hetero, and most of them were married besides. Not only that, but there was very little queer consciousness--which I found surprising among a group of artists. Don't get me wrong--they were cool people. But not queer. I actually wrote about half of the book at Millay, and yes, absolutely--the isolation had a big effect. Some of the darkest, most difficult, most tender parts of the book got written there, as I was trying to wrestle with big questions and reach out to my family and my community and...and find a way to feel connected. I was incredibly lonely there, absolutely starved for touch, and no amount of tipsy Scrabble with the other writers was enough to ease that. On the other hand, some of the conversations I ended up having about gender and sex and sexuality there, with well-intentioned and engaged people, helped me to clarify some things I wanted to include in the book but wasn't sure about. Wasn't sure if they'd be interesting; if I could make them interesting.

I am always amazed by your ability to write in the middle of everything in the world going on. I inevitably end up needing to go hide in a corner someplace and drink a lot of coffee and listen to the same song on repeat for a week on end to finish big pieces of work.

STS: Well it's a lot like dancing, you know? I've heard (I think from you, actually), that I'm a lot better on my own in the middle of everything than with a partner or a line.

Continuing on that theme, Butch Is a Noun feels a lot like dancing with you: being gently but firmly guided through a whole bunch of personal, political, and social identity stuff, feeling a little uncomfortable, but ultimately having fun. The question part of that is, who did you imagine as your partner(s) while writing the book? And also, who else do you hope will read it?

SBB: Whew. Well? I started the book for my friend Kate, with whom I have been close if not always well in touch for a lot of years--she was the one who started hocking me about when was I going to write my book, ten years ago. And she's a shapeshifter femme, this changeling angel child of dew and lightning. Dancing with her (actually or metaphorically) always stretched and challenged me to be every possible inch of the range of who I was in order to continue finding a character to go with hers.

Then Nicole, my now-ex wife, met the desire I had to write and the things I had to say like the ocean meets a new thing, full of invitation and teeming with life and the great vast possibility of nourishment or movement but also a slap of fear, y'know? Also this sense that I had better give it all my focus, and not try to do anything half-assed. Nicole also was my partner the entire time I was writing this book and for most of my adult life, so she is woven all through it in every possible way--there's hardly an observation anywhere that isn't colored by her. And I finished the book for my friend SJ, who is an upstart eaglet baby boy just coming into his own as a transmasculine thing, whom I met when he was seventeen and just really starting to walk upright, genderwise. He is the one to whom all of the handkerchief passages of the book are addressed, and he's the one who got me to get off the stump and give the thing the attention it really needed--I felt like I owed it to him. In fact, he may have even said such a thing.

But mostly, it's my love letter to butches and transmasculine folk. I will be deeply glad if whomever else reads it enjoys it or learns or grows or what-have-you, but I wrote it for my brothers and lovers, as a way to try and say some of what we have such difficulty saying, and as a way to offer back some of what I've been so generously given.

STS: At this point, I have questions about categories--femmes and butches and the rest of us, and how people who have embodied those categories worked on your thinking. I wonder if they are at all useful, given what you just said. I feel not. But I do have one related question I want to ask.

SBB: I am not very good at categories, I'm afraid. Or, I guess--I am, but only for about five minutes per. [grin]

STS: Which is pretty obvious in the book. Well here's this question, anyway: Not to get too Freudian here, but your father has a small significant presence in the narrative. You're pretty clear, in the book, about his relationship to your butch identity, so I won't get into it here. My question lies, rather, in the butches who raised you. How would you classify those folks? Father-figures? Daddies? Big-brothers? Feel free, also, to explain the term "Ex Post Papa," the title of your first solo performance piece, as part of your answer.

SBB: I would classify them as mentors, in a general way, and I tended to have mentors who where much older than me and who very purposefully "raised" me--they knew what they were doing. They knew they were trying to instill something in a youngster that would serve hir well over time. I had some amazing butch dyke mentors--most notably my Uncle Pam, who was a mentor for heaven-knows-how-many butches and boys of my age in Northampton. She was most serious about being a mentor; she really embraced it, really was thoughtful and thorough and extravagant in the amount of energy she gave as a mentor.

Also, there were a small corps of faggot leathermen and bathhouse sluts who were the first real sex-positive radical perverts I ever met and who shaped my attitudes about sexuality and intimacy in really careful, but radical ways. What I learned about being sexual with girls was mostly a product of my fabulous femme mentors, but what I learned about being sexual with masculine things--and, in fact, my overall set of sexual mores--were the product of these most sharp and tender fellows.

And then had a few good teachers--schoolteachers, I mean--along the way, and directors, and some other men from whose performances of masculinity I stole bits and bobs and ways of thinking and doing. They were less intentional about being mentors but they offered some great stuff, anyway. And my peers, too--some of the butches and boys I grew up and came out with are also my role models, as well as being my friends.

STS: Do you know that you're leading me, unconsciously, through my own interview?

SBB: [batting my eyelashes] Who, me? I don't know what you're talking about.

STS: It's cool. I'm still working out some things about my own identity: metrosexual as the new femme, for instance. So I'll lean into it. This is fun.

SBB: Metrosexual as the new femme? Is this like pink is the new black? Or are you just trying to disguise your innately pansypants nature?

STS: I couldn't disguise my pansypants if I wanted to, and you know it.

SBB: It's one of the things I love best about you, actually. Though I do also really enjoy it when you get all butched up.

STS: No, I just think metrosexual is a name for men who want to separate themselves from gays and women. Since I am a metrosexual, but am not that kind of man, I think my brand of masculinity is actually femme.

SBB: Is metrosexual a gender?

STS: I think so. Kind of like "dandy"--again, "oh, it's not gay, it's just an attention to cuticles" or whatever.

But I'm of the school of thought that places sexuality in the category of gender, and not the other way around. Not that metrosexual is even a sexuality, actually. That's just to say, honey, everything's a gender!

SBB: I don't know. I don't think of you as being a femme boy; I do think of you more as a dandy. I think because in terms of your ways of interacting with the world you are pretty masculine--in good and interesting ways, not boorish ones--and then you have this sort of nancy-boy icing on top, with your gay hair and your fashion shoes and what-have-you.

STS: What about gay hair and your fashion shoes is not femme?

I think my identity is very masculine, but on the spectrum, I'd call it a "femme masculinity." Which has all sorts of things to do with my relationship to power in ways that are not what we would call masculine. I'm still working on it, but it feels pretty good.

SBB: That makes sense to me. Even though, ironically, I tend to identify people who are masculine in considered ways, and who have a nonnormative relationship to the power that comes with masculinity, as butch.

But I also get that metrosexual is a problematic word because it has an implied homophobia and transphobia in it--we needed it in the lexicon in order to protect against queer.

STS: Totally! I love it for how many more gay-looking men it has made the world safer for, but on the conversational level there's a serious homophobia involved--in my experience.

And since I'll always be queer no matter how straight I look or act, I feel like Femme allows that, in a way that I would liken to what you call Butch. And we both know that things tend to explode when I get all butched up, so...

SBB: Huh. Wait. So it's a "sex not equal to gender thing" that ends up at queer? I'm female sexed, butch gendered, they're not congruent and therefore--queer. You are (these days) male sexed, or at least on your way to it, and femme gendered, which has the same result--queer!

STS: Yes, that's a great description. Though the way you just put it, "sex not equal to gender = queer" would upset a lot of the transfolks we know. For me, queer is much more about being an outsider--whether that's due to my sex/gender construct, or my gay appearance even as I date girls, or having been a middle-class person in an upper class world... I feel queer all the time, no matter how well I pass in whatever ways in whatever worlds.

SBB: I didn't mean it's the only equation that gets you to queer. Good grief. I just meant that it was one of the ways to get there and, perhaps more importantly, it explains part of why we have different labels for such similar behavior--because we are so queer-identified. So our queer identities and our queer sensibilities lend themselves to different identifications of similar behavior because they (the identifications) confirm rather than contradict our queerness. In this case.

STS: I knew what you meant, hon, and I think you're right. But I've started one too many an online firefight with just those words. I wanted us both to be clear for [nudging you, nodding in an outward direction] them.

SBB: [laughing] Right, thanks for looking out. I appreciate the reminder. Especially because I do think that there are people--not us, but some people--who really do believe that there's only one way to go about it. And who try to police or punish others with that. But I try not to do that, ever.

STS: I would also venture to say that Femmes understand invisibility, which can sometimes be called passing privilege (but is not always a privilege in any sense of the word), in a way that Butches aren't allowed. Since I get to pass so often now as sweet, possibly-gay (but in the Jack from Will & Grace way), cute whiteboy...just how radical I am gets subsumed in that. Just like for the femmes I know. I think you, and butches generally, don't get to hide as much. I felt that in the moments where (I and) others took me for butch.

What do you think about that?

SBB: I think that's really, incredibly true, and I think that queers of any stripe who get invisibilized by passing have an incredibly difficult time with it. Femmes, absolutely--femme invisibility, even within and among queers, and the way that femmes can get punished from within the queer community for passing as much they get punished outside it is extraordinary.

And I also hear it from transguys of butch experience--like you--particularly. My lover Bobby, who is a transman, has spoken about the grief of seeing visibly queer folk out in the world--in the supermarket, whatever--and giving them the "queer nod" out of habit before he realizes that he no longer reads as queer in the context. He's not visibly queer. Which, actually, is what my next book is about--not him, specifically, but the experience of being visibly queer.

And I believe that passing does have privilege, even sometimes when we choose not to exercise it--passing as a man, I have a much different interaction with strangers than I do as a visibly queer thing. Like we did all across the South on our roadtrip. Everyone down there in the red-states was so pleasant and friendly and kind to two white, masculine, ostensibly heterosexual young men.

STS: "Clearly Marked," if you will.

SBB: Yes, the books seem to be a couple steps behind the shows. [grin]

STS: Passing as a straight dude is one kinda privilege. Passing as a fag, or as an ultra-feminine woman... I wouldn't always call that privilege all the time. Maybe in the personal sense, but not always out there. Ha, or, for transfolks, even in here.

SBB: True that.

STS: I am really enjoying this.

SBB: Me too!

STS: Okay, so my question then: I'm gonna get all Judith Butler/Halberstam for a sec, thinking about the "gender as performance" theory, where gender expression is considered an actual social-theatrical performance, which is scripted by different social/cultural forces (race and class, and also capitalist beauty machine stuff). What would you say to the idea that your book could be considered a script, to some, on How to Be Butch?

SBB: Hmm. Well? I both do and don't want it to be. In some parts I would like it to act as a script; I think that in general I have gotten really incredible advice and teaching about how to be honorable in the world, some of which I have tried to pass on in the book. So in that way, I guess I hope it is a script. But in general, no, it's not a script, and I don't want anyone to take it as one or even imagine that I meant it as one. I chose to write down my own experience, entirely situated within my own positions on all of those axes (race, class, religion, gender, etc.) I am actually really afraid that people will think I meant it as a script, or an instruction manual. I am afraid people will read it and go "oh, shit, I'm doing it wrong." And I cannot even tell you how much I do not want that. I am also afraid that people will read it, and say "This asshole thinks that's how you're a Butch? Fuck that." And I really don't want that, either.

What I've written is my book about Butch. Fully aware that it isn't everyone's experience, and actually quite hopeful that other people will choose to add to the works available on butch in all the places where I can't speak to it. Well, and the places where I can, too, really--I would love to see all kinds of new work about butch. It's sort of my secret hope.

STS: You play right into my hands...

Would you be at all adverse to me stating that I think Butch Is a Noun is almost as much memoir as a gender studies reader? Knowing you personally throws the more "cultural philosophy" moments into relief against your personal life. The reason I'm bringing this up at all is because I treasure this about the text: your easy prose about socio-politically difficult topics, I think, is a measure of how much you've lived (and laughed at) what shows up in other texts as hard theory and criticism. Did you blur these academic and personal lines intentionally?

SBB: Yes, pretty much, in much the same way that I am always trying to blur those lines in my work. I know you've heard me say this before, but at the end of the day, I'm a storyteller. Everything I am ever able to accomplish is generally the result of telling stories. When I teach and lecture, even in the most hardcore academic settings, I make the choice to sample the theory into my own narrative and give it a place within--but no more importance than--my personal stories, the stories of other people, and the students' own stories. And like a DJ, I am trying to take all the pieces and make a new sound out of them, something partly familiar and partly fresh. That effort probably accounts for what people refer to as my "unique style," which I hope is a compliment and not a euphemism.

But--no, I am not averse to you identifying it as a memoir--it is, in parts, a memoir, absolutely. It's all of those things mushed together. And what I do is try to make it a lovely blend and not an unholy mess.

STS: Okay, let's talk performance. We have to. Did you conceive of any of Butch Is a Noun as performance text? In what way(s) was writing this book different, as a process, from writing your solo performances "Ex Post Papa" and "Clearly Marked"?

SBB: There are a few pieces that have a strong performative quality--"I Know What Butch Is," for example, is one that people love to hear read aloud. But no--this was always a book, in my head, and in that way was a lot more difficult to write than a show because the thing about a book is that it's static. As a storyteller, I am always making slight adjustments to a story for the benefit of the audience, and it gives me a lot of flexibility and freedom that a book doesn't. I remember distinctly whining to several people when they were trying to encourage me to write a book that I would rather just go door-to-door, thanks. So writing such a big chunk of text with so many pieces that I knew had to get "right" and then let go off into the world to stand on its own two stubby little feet was incredibly difficult, and I was monumentally resistant to it. Because what works for one reader, or one audience, won't always work for another. Eventually, I started envisioning each piece as a story told to one person--one specific person, someone I know--and wrote it just for them, hoping that if I couldn't have the flexibility I wanted I could at least count on a kind of specificity that might make it more accessible. I hope it worked, but I don't know that yet.

STS: You have a pretty vast taste in music. If you had to make a playlist to go with this book, what would be on it?

SBB: Oh, that's a great question. I love that. Can I do it as a take-home? I have to consider it.

STS: Indeed.

SBB: Hey, this was fun. Can we do it again when your book comes out? Except this time I can ask you all manner of questions.

STS: Sure thing!

BEAR'S BUTCH IS A NOUN PLAYLIST

[Note: Some of these tracks are included because of the lyrics, some because they remind me so strongly of certain qualities, or certain people, and "Mr. Brightside" because I played it on repeat the entire time I was at Millay writing the other half of this book. I had to set myself a 25-song limit, too, because I could have gone on choosing songs endlessly. But--here's the result. Enjoy.]

"Made Of Steel" - Our Lady Peace
"Me Against the World" - Tupac Shakur
"Fred Astaire" - Lucky Boys' Confusion
"State of Grace" - Pierce Pettis
"Heaven When We're Home" - The Wailin' Jennys
"I Wants to Be Loved" - Muddy Waters
"Man on the Side" - John Mayer
"You Can Sleep While I Drive" - Melissa Etheridge
"For Today I Am a Boy" - Antony & The Johnsons
"La Belle et le Bad Boy" - MC Solaar
"Golden" - Jill Scott
"Supernova" - Liz Phair
"Real Men" - Tori Amos
"Feeling Good" - Nina Simone
"Woman Like a Man" - Damien Rice
"Any Man of Mine" - Shania Twain
"Daylight" - Aesop Rock
"Can't Stop the Rock" - Apollo 440
"None of Us Are Free" - Solomon Burke/Blind Boys of Alabama
"Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" - U2
"God Is A DJ" - Pink
"Baby Get Lost" - Queen Latifah
"Beat the Drum" - Great Big Sea
"Mr. Brightside" - The Killers
"Mountains of Glory" - Amy Ray
(Bonus track: "Stand By Your Man" - Tammy Wynette)