10.13125/2039-6597/315
Cris Beam is a New York-based American writer, activist and scholar whose work displays a thorough engagement with questions related to gender, sexuality and family relationships, which she explores in their deep enmeshment with major social dynamics and issues, such as the collapse of the educational, correctional and foster care systems in the United States.
application/pdf
2039-6597
315
2
it
Rossella Carbotti
Between
Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
1
Conversation Pieces / Interviews: Ed. Massimo Fusillo
2011-11-27
2011-11-27
2011-11-23
2011-11-27
1
Rossella Carbotti
2011/11/27
10.13125/2039-6597/315
University California - Berkeley
2039-6597
2
it
Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/315/298
1
             Becoming Transparent:
          A Conversation with Cris Beam
                          Ed. by Rossella Carbotti

      Cris Beam is a New York-based American writer, activist and scholar
whose work displays a thorough engagement with questions related to gender,
sexuality and family relationships, which she explores in their deep
enmeshment with major social dynamics and issues, such as the collapse of
the educational, correctional and foster care systems in the United States. Her
debut work, Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender
Teenagers (Harcourt, 2007), is a social study-turned-memoir of the difficulties
encountered by four transgender girls who struggle to find a safe space and
opportunities for self-expression in Los Angeles over the course of seven
years. A volunteer teacher at Eagles (Emphasizing Adolescent Gay/ Lesbian
Education Services) – a high school program for gay and transgender kids at
risk of being harassed and bullied in their original classrooms –, Beam finds
herself getting more and more involved in the stories the girls tell her about
themselves and their environment. Throughout the book, the author embarks
on a transformative journey that enables her to find the true story of inner and
outer metamorphosis that lies at the heart of the girls’ life experiences, shifting
her own position from that of an outside observer to one of intense personal
involvement. The narrative takes a radical turn when the author decides to
become a foster mother to Christina, one of the girls. At that point, Beam’s
account moves from journalistic essay to the parable of a personal and
collective reflection on the impact of radical changes, and Transparent itself
becomes a hybrid book that witnesses to the forcefulness of the stories it
portrays in both form and content.
      In 2008, Transparent won the Lambda Literary Award for best
transgender fiction, and it also became a Stonewall Honor book. Since then,
Beam has written again on “gender troubles” and teenagers in her young adult
novel I am J (Little-Brown, 2011), which features a female-to-male
transgender protagonist. Running in the Family, her study of the foster care
system in the United States – partly inspired by the stories she witnessed while
writing Transparent – is due for publication in 2013. More information on



Between, vol. 1, n. 2 (Novembre/ November 2011)
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



Transparent and Cris Beam can be found at http://www.crisbeam.com/Home
and http://www.transparentthebook.com.
      The following interview was carried out in February 2011 in the context
of a research project on the recurrent theme of bodily metamorphosis in queer
literature from the 1990s to today. Here, the larger implications of
transformative fantasies in transgender fiction are investigated, together with
Beam, both in light of her own literary production and as entry points to a
deeper understanding of the dynamics at play within the literary world and in
contemporary society as a whole.

      Carbotti: As a project, Transparent merges together personal experience,
scholarly passion and activist commitment to create an original narrative of
personal transformation that involves both you as a first-person narrator and
the transgender teenagers you met in Los Angeles. When did you first realize
that your experience at Eagles and your relationships with Christina and the
other girls were going to become the subject of a book? Was the book
originally conceived this way, or was it only at a later stage that you realized
you had a true, original story to tell?

      Beam: At first, I had no idea that I was going to make a book out of my
experience. I had moved to LA to support my partner Robin, who was
completing her PhD, and I was working as a journalist for several different
publications. At some point, I heard about this high school that was run by a
group of volunteer teachers with the aim of protecting at-risk gay and
transgender kids who would be otherwise bullied by their schoolmates or
would just be out in the streets, exposed to all sorts of danger. I decided to join
the program as a volunteer English teacher, and found myself getting
gradually more and more involved in helping the kids. I started working at
Eagles in 1997. Back then there wasn’t the same kind of visible transgender
community that there is today—there were no talk shows about transgender
teenagers, no movies, no Oprah specials—so they had little outside reflection
of their lives—and when they did, it was pretty negative.

      Carbotti: Is the program at Eagles still running today? And are you aware
of other similar, official institutions running programs for gay and transgender
teenagers? Do you think there are adequate resources available to the teen
transgender community in US cities today?

    Beam: Things have really changed today, and queer teenagers
themselves have become more active and aware of their rights. Instead of



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having separate programs with the aim of protecting them from the outside
world, we have widespread student organizations, such as the Gay-Straight
Alliances, where queer kids find support in their straight schoolmates and
together they organize events such as the National Coming Out Day or local
campaigns against homophobia and transphobia.
      Eagles closed for a few years because of mismanagement, but I think it
reopened and it now has a different staff and team of volunteers. There is a
public school in the East Village in New York City, called the Harvey Milk
High School, which is run by the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an outreach
organization for at-risk teenagers with a specific emphasis on queer kids.
Today, the Harvey Milk School is a fully-accredited public high school that is
run by the local Department of Education. I was a volunteer teacher there for a
semester when I moved to New York to help them out and conduct some
comparative research after my experience at Eagles. I wanted to see how
things were being done there and in what way the New York scene was
different than the one in LA. I discovered that the Harvey Milk School is a
very different institution from Eagles. While the Harvey Milk School is state-
run, Eagles relied heavily on donations and on the dedication of volunteers.
There was no money, the school had a bad reputation, and I often had to pay
for pedagogical materials out of my own pocket or convince people to donate
their services, such as in the case of the Out & About magazine project.

     Carbotti: Can you describe the sort of environment you were confronted
with as a teacher? Were you able to design your own courses? For example,
did you follow a syllabus, or did you have to improvise and run your classes
on the basis of the spontaneous participation of the kids?

      Beam: It was all very badly organized, and teaching was for the most
part an impossible task. The kids had more immediate life needs than sitting in
class and learning, so designing fully-structured pedagogical projects for them
was not our primary concern. The coordinator of the program was getting
funding through the Department of Ed. He was only interested in keeping the
numbers high and having the kids attend school regardless of the actual
pedagogical offer. The kids would come to school on drugs, or tired from not
having slept at night, and they would get distracted very easily or start singing,
performing or fighting. As a teacher, you realized that being there involved
mainly keeping them off the streets, listening to them and winning their trust.
A lot of the kids were runaways, or had been thrown out and they may have
been interested in school at some level—but they had more pressing needs—
and they needed a lot of attention. They were like performers, competing with



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Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



each other to win the teachers' interest, yearning to be visible, to be seen.
Since they knew I was a journalist, the kids started pressing me to tell their
story. They would ask: "Why don't you write a book on us? Why don't you
make a movie about us?" and eventually we came up with a project and
created a magazine, called Out & About, where we published articles, reviews
and medical advice for queer kids. It was at that point that I had the idea of
making a book that would include a collection of photos and interviews of the
transgender kids I had come to know through the Eagles community. As a
trained journalist, I knew there was no such thing as objectivity, but still I
wanted to get as close to it as possible, and wanted to keep myself completely
out of the picture in order for the individual stories of the kids to emerge. So
originally, I completely refused the idea of being part of the book. I wrote a
proposal and passed it by some agents and editors, but they thought the format
had been done before—like “Look! My life has been hard, but now it’s
better!” Looking back, I have to agree with them: what were extraordinary
experiences to me as a direct observer would have appeared too flat and
clichéd in the book, along the lines of many other publications on lives in
desperate conditions, and this is certainly not what I was aiming at.
      And then, Christina had moved in with me and she was going through an
extremely hard moment in her life, so I really thought that the project had to
be abandoned, because I could not still remain objective as a narrator while
having her in my house and in my life. I thought she couldn’t be in the story—
and then suddenly I realized: she WAS the story. That's when I decided to step
in and become a presence in the book, and that is how the book came to take
its actual form.

      Carbotti: While researching on queer literature, I was constantly struck
by the recurrence of a sort of parallel, unexpected development of both form
and content in narratives that place center stage the theme of metamorphosis. I
call it “metamorphic storytelling,” the opening of an experimental space not
only in the narrative content, but also in the way it plays around the borders of
literary genres. Think for example of Stone Butch Blues, which is both a
memoir and a novel: where do you draw the line between narrator and
character, between fiction and lived reality? The same goes for The Gilda
Stories, which brings together the episodic form of a collection of short stories
with the project of writing a novel about the persistence of change through
time and space, confronting the history of African-American struggles with a
fantastic re-writing of lesbian mythography. Both a journalist's essay on
transgender teenagers and a personal memoir on a transformative experience
of motherhood, Transparent disrupts the artifice of objective narration to make



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space for a different positionality of both the author and the characters in the
book, whose roles often blur or overlap. Do you agree, and why do you think
that is?

       Beam: I completely agree, and I think that once you open that creative
possibility for stories to take control of the narrative form, the writing process
is going to be turned upside down at all levels. I had never imagined that I
would find myself going through such a major life change precisely because I
allowed myself to get closer to Christina and the other girls in order to write
their story. There was no way I could keep pretending to be an outside
narrator. With this book I found myself slowly letting go of all the rules that I
had learned in journalism school, where the first thing they tell you is: "Never
let your sources read what you are writing on them!" I felt that I had an ethical
responsibility towards these kids, who had shared so much of themselves with
me and who had been betrayed by the people in their lives so many times. I
could not publish the book without having them read the manuscript first and
give me their approval. We went through a whole phase when they revised the
first drafts, and reminded me of details and episodes that I had forgotten along
the way. All four of the girls helped me with the revision of the manuscript. I
initially thought that reading the book would generate some resentment on
their part, and I was afraid that they would feel hurt because of some particular
episodes that I chose to include in the book. It turned out that, on most
occasions, they were more concerned about some tiny details that I could not
even remember and that, on the contrary, seemed to really matter for them. So
I had to go back several times and rewrite some scenes because they wanted
me to include more specific details. In the end, the story I had in mind
interwove with their recollections of the events on even a further level, and
editing the manuscript together drew us closer and changed the book itself into
a different project overall. So we can certainly say that both form and content
of the book were shaped by our mutual influence in each other's lives.

     Carbotti: How did you address the problem of writing about transgender
teenagers from the perspective of a cisgender person? Were you worried about
misrepresenting the true experience of the kids, or making assumptions about
what being transgender means? Trans-activist and academic Jacob Hale
famously wrote a piece on this topic, laying out a set of “Suggested Rules for
Non-Transsexuals       Writing     about     Transsexuals,     Transsexuality,
Transsexualism, or Trans___”, where he advises cisgender writers against the
risk of Othering the subjects they describe, or taking for granted that




                                                                                      5
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



transgender is a stable category, whereas it defines a mode of gender
perception which is constantly under re-definition.

      Beam: Yes, I was perfectly aware of the problem and I was terrified of
ending up betraying my whole experience with the kids by writing a flat
portrait of what their lives were like. I had to confront all my fears of being an
unreliable narrator, and I was aware of how hard it is for non-trans people to
write about being trans without abstracting from the lived reality of
transpeople, at the risk of objectifying, romantizing or exoticizing their
experience. It was really a matter of finding a narrative voice that could
account for the complexities of my experience with the girls both during my
time at Eagles and when I became Christina's foster mother. Being honest and
accurate about their lives was a priority that I kept at the forefront of my mind
when writing. These girls were leading very intense lives, and I had to account
for the whole range of experiences and emotions that they were exposed to. I
could not do this by keeping myself at a distance, and I had to transform my
whole perspective on the story itself. Getting to know the girls really allowed
me to narrow the distance between my own life experience and theirs, whereas
I originally thought that we occupied very distinct positions, that I was the
outside observer and that my life had very little in common with theirs. It was
thanks to Christina and the other girls that I came to realize how many of their
problems were caused by a lack of attention and care on the part of the people
who should have guided them through life, and how that resonated with my
own past experience. Seeing them struggle to be visible, to get the adults to
pay attention to them, often in ways that were self-destructive, led me to open
my heart and my mind and see myself in them, and that changed my whole
perspective both as a writer and as a human. I could not have confronted my
past the way I did if I hadn't witnessed the girls' struggle to survive and
express themselves in a hostile society, against repressive families and
institutions. I am very grateful to them for teaching me that lesson and making
me see a part of myself, that I had till then neglected, in them.

      Carbotti: In fact, the whole second part of Transparent becomes the story
of your own transformation following your experience with Christina, and I
think you have found a very direct way of expressing a different political take
on transgender activism, one that accounts for the specific stories of the girls
without objectifying them, and on the other hand avoids making trite humanist
assumptions about the fundamental common “nature” of all human beings. By
stepping in and relating the story of your own metamorphosis, of how the
different experience of another person spoke to you, you found your own



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authorial voice and a new voice for committed political activism as well,
blending the personal and the political in new creative forms.

      Beam: Thank you. This is precisely how I see it, too. I still felt that I
wanted the book to address a wider audience than just the queer community,
but I was worried that my efforts would end up disappointing some
transgender readers, and that I would be accused of speaking from a privileged
outside position. I didn't want to account for the whole, immense range of
transgender experiences: how could I? At the same time, even when I realized
that this was going to be a story about my own change as well, it was also my
priority to include lots of research and statistical data and descriptions of the
factual realities and problems that transgender teens have to face, because I
wanted people to know, to understand and to become familiar with the specific
situation that I was surrounded by. I wanted to raise awareness regarding the
particular state of things I had become a witness of. At the same time, I
realized that there was much more to the story than just a journalistic account.

      Carbotti: In an interview with “Salon” magazine, you discuss the
problematic relationship between feminist and queer academic communities
and outreach activism to transkids and transpeople in general. Their political
agendas often differ considerably, and despite the obvious connections
between their aims and their concerns, many outreach activists and workers
lament the lack of dialogue between these two dimensions. In academic
discourse, transgender subjects have often become expendable bodies in the
arena of philosophy and theory, signifying tokens of a sophisticated political
strategy that aims at liberating and expanding our understanding of gender and
sexuality. Nevertheless, the risk is to lose track of the materiality of lived
experiences, with its risks, unfair living conditions and limited visibility. Your
book makes a considerable effort to tie together the two ends of this debate,
providing an extensive overview of theoretical positions and putting them side
by side with the practical description of everyday life in the streets, with kids
being exposed to HIV, abuse, prostitution and violence.

      Beam: It is exactly like that, and I would like to see a more organic
collaboration between the two sides of the queer and feminist community. I
think academia has done extremely important work in reaching that level of
intellectual articulation and designing courses and curricula that openly
address the issues of sexuality and gender, changing the people's perception of
these crucial concepts and discussions and shaping the way these ideas
circulate today. At the same time, the queer community outside of academia is



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Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



in constant evolution, and individual or group activists and artists are being so
creative and original in the way they address these issues that it would be
wonderful to create a more direct dialogue between the two dimensions. In
many ways, both the academic and the street communities are articulating the
same kind of anxieties. The problem is that they often speak two different
languages, although there is a subterranean, but constant flow of information
that circulates between the street and the academia. Things wouldn't have
changed so rapidly and on such a big scale over the last few decades if it had
been otherwise. Yet, I would like for street activism to acquire more visibility
on a wider level. Take, for example, the work of an artist like Foxxjazell , who
writes hip hop songs on her transgender condition and wants to change the
people's perception of transgender people through her art. She is unaware of
the intellectual debates that are going on in academia, yet she is rethinking
gender from her own perspective in ways that are absolutely fresh and
exciting. For example, she has a song, Boy Girl, Whateva, that goes:

      I'm playing with your mind, I'm fooling your eyes
      Straight up baby, I want you to slide
      If I say I'm a boy, you call me a she
      If I say I'm a girl, you call me a he.
      I am what I am; I love you forevah.
      So take me as a boy, a girl, whatevah.
      Yo: This is a lesson to be learned.
      Nothing is ever what it seems to be.

      In this song, I think she's really playing with the subject and object
positions. She's taking the objectified position that the transperson often
occupies and flipping it on its head. She's acknowledging that others will undo
what she asks of them—if she says she's a girl, they'll call her a boy. But
maybe she wants it this way. Maybe she's comfortable in this position of
“sliding”—and just when you think you've “gotten” her by undermining
her/mislabeling her, she slips away. Now you (we) are the ones who are
sliding. In this way, gender is relational, it is dynamic. It is always understood
and reborn in relation to another person or people. When she says, “I want you
to slide,” she's wanting you to slide in your own gender, your own
interpretations. She articulates gender as something that is unascribed to the
body, but is configured as a fluid relationship between the subject and the gaze
of the observer: I am no gender but the one you see in me each single time. In
Boy Girl, Whateva, Foxxjazell theorizes gender as a relational concept, not as
an essential quality or characteristic that is embedded in us. Ideally, she is



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prefiguring a world without genders, where gender is always up for new
connotations, and gets constituted and reconstituted through the practical
interactions between people.

      Carbotti: I think that this is a very cutting-edge take on gender, one that I
would like to see more represented in our culture. Foxxjazell is bringing to
Earth and to everyday life the utopian positions of science fiction writers such
as James Tiptree, Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ, who prefigured worlds
without genders, and yet where genders are attributes under constant
renegotiation. In my own personal experience with transgender people and in
their interactions with society, as well as in my academic research, I have
come to the conclusion that “gender is in the eye of the beholder.” We decide
what we want to see based on our past experiences and reflections on gender,
and our perceptions change as we think further into the idea of gender itself,
thanks to the people we meet and the changing images that society offers us
today.

      Beam: Yes. This is why in my own work I did not want to account for
the whole category of transgender, because I do not think that there is just one.
Like “queer”, “transgender” has become another protective, yet restrictive
umbrella-term that cannot circumscribe the whole picture. It helps you to pin
points on a map, but it cannot tell you what the journey is about, and how it is
constantly changing. I wanted to describe what I was seeing, and I felt the
urge to tell people about the medical, psychological and material conditions of
the kids I became close to. In the process, it became an attempt to grasp the
subtle ways in which, when we start questioning what gender and identity are
about, we come to a deeper understanding of how our perceptions of ourselves
are inscribed within a world of relations, and that we have both the possibility
and responsibility to change our ways of thinking and make space for the new
and the unexpected.

      Carbotti: I am glad that you mentioned the idea of the journey, because it
is a recurrent and indeed fitting metaphor in contemporary representations of
transgender lives. I am thinking of Transamerica as a film, but also of the
movements through time and space that constitute the symbolic and material
trajectories of many transgender novels and memoirs (such as Stone Butch
Blues or Il viaggio di Arnold, to cite an Italian example). Narratives of
transformation are stories that get shaped through the encounter between a
single individual and society at a particular place and time in history, and in
the case of transgender stories, the marks of the encounter literally get written



                                                                                      9
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



on the body of the protagonists. The position we occupy in the world shapes
our identity, and metamorphosis is about putting concepts and ideas in motion.
Being transgender is about taking that mobility as a permanent condition,
staying in the liminal space.
      In your book, transitional and metamorphic experiences are also
connected to the idea of changing spaces, both on a symbolic and material
level. The opening of the chapter “Arriving” is a celebration of big coastal
cities in the US. You write: “The coasts are where the people live, right at the
boundaries of where we cannot.” The coasts, with their watery, fluid quality,
are transformative places by definition. They represent both safe harbors for
transgender kids fleeing from more oppressive spaces, but they also hide many
threats, the challenge of losing themselves while seeking better life conditions.

      Beam: US coastal cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Miami attract all sorts of people in search of themselves. Those are
the places where things happen, where kids feel that they can blend in. On one
hand, big cities offer the privilege of anonymity, and this appeals to transkids
who are often targeted as freaks in their hometowns because of their gender
identity or non-conforming behavior. On the other hand, big cities provide the
comfort of a community of people who share your same experience. For
transkids, those are also the places where they can find hormones, clinics,
volunteer organizations, all sorts of things that are out of their reach
elsewhere. Coastal cities are the places where you are allowed to transform. In
a way you have to, because you are exposed to so many different coexisting
realities that you get caught in a transformative process regardless of the
reasons that originally brought you there. Transkids go to a place like Los
Angeles because they want to become stars, but also because they know that
hormones are easily available. They are illegally imported from Tijuana. So
traveling to the city means crossing that threshold that will allow them to
experiment with their bodies and their gender identities, but also meet like-
minded people, find an accepting community, exciting adventures, maybe a
job. So in this sense cities are often safer places for transkids, but they are also
a threat because many of them manage to escape from an abusive home, but
sooner or later they might end up experiencing street life, homelessness,
drugs, prostitution, violence, destructive medical treatments and surgeries.

     Carbotti: Your book shows how this situation often leads the kids to
establish spontaneous community networks, which often reinvent familial
bonds in original ways, queering our understanding of what family means.
Motherhood, for example, gets completely reinvented in Transparent, both in



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the case of “drag mothers” and in your own story of becoming a foster mother
to Christina and coming to terms with your dramatic experience of affective
deprivation in the relationship with your mother. In my own work, I traced the
parallel recurrence of stories of queer metamorphosis and the idea of a
different kind of motherhood and kinship that is not founded on biological
grounds, where roles and positions are more open and interchangeable. Why
do you think these two themes often appear to be intertwined?

      Beam: This was a very important lesson that I learned by getting to know
Christina and the other girls. Seeing these very young girls parenting each
other, forming strong bonds of solidarity and support based on the mutual
understanding of their needs opened up a completely new space of
possibilities, a different way of looking at family for me. Drag mothers are
older transgender teens who adopt and mentor their younger friends. They
often give them their new, transgender names and teach them what they need
to know about street life, as well as give them fashion tips, advice on how to
pass as biological women, suggestions on how to find a boyfriend. And there
was a whole lineage of drag mothers: Foxx, for example, who was a drag
mother to Lenora and Ariel but who in turn had found a mother in Tatiana,
with whom she switched roles often, going from mother to daughter and back.
In New York, drag mothers can become heads of household, leading figures in
the queer ball scene.
      Through Christina and the other girls I became familiar with other ways
of making family and community, and when Christina went through a difficult
time in her life it became impossible for me to detach myself from what she
was going through. I eventually became her foster mother, but it took me a
long time to realize that I had been unconsciously drawn to help these kids
because I had once been in their same position, and my life had been so hard
because of the horrible relationship I had with my mom. I realized it very late,
when I was already involved in my maternal relationship with Christina, and it
had never dawned on me before that my mother could have been the reason
behind my desire to protect and nurture these kids. For a long time I thought
that I had chosen to volunteer at Eagles and get to know them closely because,
as a queer person myself, I thought we were connected because we were all
queer. But in the end it was like duh: Here I am, bonding with all these
motherless kids. And I am a motherless kid. That was the heart connection. In
choosing to mother Christina at the most difficult time in her life, I chose to
come to terms with my own past and begin a healing process. As a result,
everything in my life went through a transformative process: Christina,




                                                                                    11
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



myself, my relationship with the past and my plans for the future, my idea of
family, and the book I was writing.

      Carbotti: The title of the book encapsulates your journey beautifully: in
experiencing change through and with Christina, in choosing to love her as a
mother, you went through a transformation that made you “transparent” to
yourself, allowing you to see through the shadows of the past. At the same
time, you became a “trans-parent”, which to me means more than just being
the mother of a transperson. It means embracing the idea that trans- is more
than a body in transition, it is a mode of perception, a philosophical
understanding of change and liminality as ways of being in and of the world
that involve society as a whole.

      Beam: I am glad you saw all this in the title, because it is precisely what
I wanted to express. Once we start to question the deeper reasons that guide us
through life, we embrace that awareness that allows us to make room for the
new, and at the same time to create a more conscious continuum with our past.
Transparent became my story as well as the story of the girls, and it
unexpectedly turned into this entirely new project I had never imagined it
could be. In inventing new practices of care and forms of affectivity with
Christina and making space in my life for her to feel protected and to heal, I
created a healing space for myself as well, and was able to come to terms with
the past and to answer the questions about motherhood and family that I had
kept within me throughout my whole life.

      Carbotti: The ending chapters of the book describe Christina as a body in
metamorphosis between theory and practice, on both a symbolic and material
level, in a play of images that resonates with ideas of rebirth, liberation and
coming-of-age. I am thinking in particular of the sparrow tattoo and of the
scene when she calls you from her new apartment, “perched like a bird” on the
kitchen sink. It was fascinating for me to find out that, like Stone Butch Blues
(the other book I worked on), Transparent ends with the image of the
transgender protagonist “putting on wings” and looking towards the future,
having found closure and yet a new sense of continuity with the past both in
body and in mind.

      Beam: That is true! I had never thought about this parallel image in the
ending of Stone Butch Blues, which is such an important book for transgender
history. As for Christina, the sparrow tattoo was an occasion to commemorate
her bond with me and Robin, who used to call her “sparrow” when she lived



12
                                          Between, vol. I, n. 2 (Novembre/November 2011)



with us. Sparrows are also community birds that symbolize familial love. She
decided to do it after she went to live on her own and found a job that she
liked, and so the sparrow came to signify her attachment to us, but also her
flight into a different life. She wanted my brother, who's an artist, to design the
image, and she asked for a really big tattoo that she loves to show to everyone.
A few years ago we stopped talking for a while, and the thought of that tattoo
on her body always made me feel good, like there was a sign of our bond that
could not be taken away.
       The night she called me from her kitchen sink she was hiding in there, in
her brand new apartment where she went to live on her own, afraid of the
responsibilities that came with the new life she had sought. Just like her new
life, the apartment felt too big, too full of promises and expectations, and she
wasn't sure she could handle all that. I stayed on the phone, determined to
show her that she was ready for her new life, that her adult life had in fact just
started already.

     Carbotti: Your interest for changes within the family structure seems to
be an ongoing concern in your work. I have read on your website that you are
also working on another book, Running in the Family, which will expand
some of the research that you have presented in Transparent.

      Beam: Yes, I have been doing research for this book for the last five
years, and it will probably come out in late 2012 or 2013. It will be focused on
foster care in New York City, where I have been following foster families,
pretty much in the same way that I did for Transparent, where I was partly
researching the lives of transgender foster kids. The experiences I recounted in
Transparent naturally led me to get more involved and interested in the foster
care system. In the new book, I look at foster kids, their biological and foster
families and track what happens to them. Through the narratives of the people
I met, I tried to understand what happens when these kids run away from their
families and their parents try to get them back, or what happens to biological
parents in this system. I also studied the problem of alcoholism and other
issues that are related to the foster care system. Half a million kids are in
foster care in the US, billions are spent on it and no one thinks that the system
is working. I wanted to know why, and I had to find out for myself, because
there are not many good books on this subject, just a few policy or interview
books, but no one is telling a story about how this monstrosity came to be.

       Carbotti: Another line that struck me from your book was “We all float a
little.” It appears when you discuss the girls’ ways of defining their gender



                                                                                     13
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



identities, which were constantly shifting and being redefined. There is a
constant interplay between performativity and “realness,” which contributes in
equal ways to defining what the “T” is about. As a result, it feels extremely
plausible that the girls would think of themselves as “a boy, a girl” at the same
time, being caught in the social artifice of gender and yet striving to express
their own authentic identities.

      Beam: The line between performativity and “realness” was very thin
among the girls. They could be really mean to each other, tease each other out
for not being feminine enough. I described a network of horizontal community
bonds among them that could be incredibly generous and inclusive, but in
terms of “realness” their social structure was often based on complex
hierarchies, and the more you could pass as biologically female, the more you
looked like one of their extremely feminine favorite divas, the higher up you
were placed on their social scale. But their own perceptions of what gender is
were constantly in progress, and so there was a lot of theatricality in this game
of “realness.” The girls were aware of that, and the same model is reproduced
within the drag ball culture in New York City, where queer fashion houses are
extremely competitive and structured, producing a variety of gender categories
and asking their models to adhere to them. But the paradox is that this is a
game of “realness,” a parody of the restrictions we put upon gender and upon
our identities in general. I think Foxxjazell's song really captured it well. And
if you take Judith Butler's ideas of gender and performativity, which were so
groundbreaking and influential for the whole queer community and for the
way we think about these issues today, you find them to be very liberating
theories, but very unsettling at the same time. In the end, we discover that
ideas like “realness” and performance, which we used to consider opposites,
can actually merge into one another and unsettle our assumptions and
perception of what identity means.

      Carbotti: And this is the great gift of transgender theory and political
practice, which is still partially misrepresented even within the GLBT
community, not to mention society as a whole, and yet it is by thinking
through the trans- prefix that we have come to imagine a wider, more varied
world when we talk about gender.

     Beam: Absolutely. It is thanks to the intellectual and material
contribution of transgenders that we do not think in terms of identity politics
anymore, and the queer space is so creative and open to constant redefinitions.




14
                                          Between, vol. I, n. 2 (Novembre/November 2011)



     Carbotti: As we speak, you are just about to come out with a new book, I
am J. This is your first novel, and it is the story of a transgender FTM
teenager. It is intended for a public of young adults, who have recently proved
to be a very interested audience for stories on transgender identity, like the
recent Luna, by Julie Anne Peters, and Parrotfish, by Ellen Wittlinger. How
do you feel about it?

      Beam: I am very excited about it, and I hope that the transgender
community will like it, as well as my young adult audience. Once again, I
have tried to be as honest as I could in telling the story I had in mind, drawing
from little episodes in the life of many people I know, and adapting them to
the character of a boy who is completely my invention. It is a story of self-
discovery, but being transgender is not the only key theme in this novel. It was
also an occasion for me to go back to my experience with female-to-male
transkids when I was in LA, which I had to leave out of Transparent in the
end.
      As for the audience, I hope the book will have a good, varied range of
readers. There is a number of young adult readers who are very active on the
Internet and who are very interested in this book. I am soon going to start a
blog tour where I will post as a guest on twenty different blogs. I didn't know
anything about blog tours until recently, but apparently it is becoming a
widespread phenomenon online. These blogs are run by teenagers, and almost
none of them are queer or trans. It is great to know that cisgender teenagers
today are open to a book such as I am J. They are reading it and reviewing it,
and they invited me to write for their blog community. It is surprising and fun
for me to be interacting with these young entrepreneurs who are running their
own little web empire.

      Carbotti: This is all very interesting for me, especially in relation to the
study of modes of production and reception of queer literature. When I
interviewed Jewelle Gomez on The Gilda Stories, she talked about how many
young queers today do not seem to be that interested in the history of queer
literature. They do not seem to look at older texts to trace a genealogy of queer
identities in the same way that the previous generation did. If we look at queer
literary scholarship in the Eighties and Nineties, much emphasis was put on
rediscovering the hidden history and legacy of gay, lesbian and trans
intellectuals. Rewriting the canon was a primary concern, and people turned to
books like Stone Butch Blues to find representation of their experiences and
connect the dots with the past. There seemed to be a need to reconcile the
present with the past and to find a queer philosophical and literary lineage.



                                                                                     15
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam



From what you describe, kids today seem to be more interested in other forms
of knowledge production, they are focused on new and interactive forms of
transmission, mainly thanks to the aid of the Internet. How do you see these
evolutions and changes in perspective?

       Beam: I see queer literature diversifying, and this is very exciting for me.
We're getting more books in a much wider range of perspectives, genres and
topics. I think that the form of the stories and even the way we think of stories
is going to change. It is hard to predict the future, but I agree with you that
people are not reading in the same way that we did, for example. In the college
classes that I teach now, I have so many students that are not reading books as
part of their work. I certainly do not think that the format of the book is dead,
but I do not feel that there is the same hunger that our generation had when we
turned to books, asking ourselves: “Where is the reflection of my own
experience? Where can I find myself?”, and then we found that one book that
spoke to us and we cherished it. Kids today can go online and see pictures and
videos and get that sense of relief that we looked for in the written page. There
isn't that same desperation that our generation experienced. This may change
storytelling, and I do not know how exactly, but it may allow for more kinds
of voices to find an avenue for expressing themselves. Let's take for example
the way the book tour for Transparent worked: the book comes out and you
go and present it in certain cities, wherever they can afford to invite you, and
you read from the book. So I went to the coasts, often with Christina, and
shared my experience and work with the people who came. With I am J, there
is a blog tour, which is partly due to negative contingencies, because people
do not have the money to invite you for a book tour anymore. But this also
brings about change and positive consequences. When they invite you, you
post as a guest for one of these literary blogs, which are all in communication
with each other. There is an ongoing dialogue that could never be initiated in
the past, when you went to one specific location and talked about the book.
The online interactive conversation today becomes its own kind of story, and
it is the feedback, comments, all the narrative interstices that make the
dialogue alive and interesting today. The communication between people and
books becomes the true book, the true story today. Reading is not anymore
about a person sitting and reading singularly, it has become a communal
practice that reinvents stories and circulates them in a new way.

      Carbotti: So we go back to our discussion about genres and forms of
literary production undergoing a metamorphosis. It looks like, again, the
subject makes the form change as well. Embracing this idea of transformation



16
                                         Between, vol. I, n. 2 (Novembre/November 2011)



allows you to enter a space where you deal with things differently on all
levels. How does the idea of bodily metamorphosis in queer narratives affect
our perception of a changing society and a revised history on a broader level
than just learning the story of a person taking hormones to make changes in
his or her body?

      Beam: Thinking of metamorphosis in this way is important because it is
a figuration that allows you to see social issues as dialectic. The point is not
telling the story of a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly, but opening your
eyes to the butterfly effect. Like in Edward Lorenz's theory of chaos, we detect
the changes that can happen when a butterfly flaps her wings in Brazil, setting
off a tornado in Texas. Any small change can have a dramatic impact on
society as a whole. Telling stories is about making these small changes
known. Sometimes these changes are subtle, but eventually we have to
account for them. Social changes affect policies, because as soon as we
register a transformation the world needs to adjust and make space for the
new, regardless of the different political positions that surround these
progresses. But society also transforms at the level of symbolic imagination as
new realities become visible and available. Imagining new possibilities in this
perspective can become a wider, more inclusive social practice. So thinking
metamorphosis becomes a method of seeing what's at stake in society today.




                                                                                    17
Rossella Carbotti, Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris Beam




                                       The author
Rossella Carbotti

       Rossella Carbotti holds a doctorate in Modern, Comparative and
Postcolonial Literature from the University of Bologna and is currently a
member of the PhD program in Italian Studies at University California -
Berkeley, where she researches on 1968 radical politics in Italy in light of
today’s historiography and cultural debates. At UC Berkeley, she is also part
of the DE program in Critical Theory and the coordinator for the Townsend
Center Working Group on Non-Fiction Film. Her research interests include
contemporary political theory and history, social activism, oral historiography,
film theory and historiography, documentary film, gender and queer studies.

        E-mail: r.carbotti@berkeley.edu



                                    The interview
Date submitted: 30/06/2011
Date accepted: 30/09/2011
Date published: 30/11/2011



                          How to quote this interview
Carbotti, Rossella, "Becoming Transparent: A Conversation with Cris
Beam", Between, I.2 (2011), http://www.between-journal.it




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