This article is part of Hyperallergic’s 2024 Pride Month series, featuring interviews with art-world queer and trans elders throughout June.
Kate Bornstein’s gender is 76. No, it’s not an option for your social media profile (not yet, anyway). It’s a way of considering gender in four dimensions — her gender is part of a space-time continuum that has been in flux throughout her 76 years. This idea is currently occupying the trans activist, writer, playwright, actor, performance artist, visual artist, and OG gender outlaw. For more than three decades, Bornstein has been reimagining gender. Before the term “nonbinary” existed, her trailblazing 1994 book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us advanced the idea of transcending the binary through an inviting mix of critical theory, intimate personal biography, entertaining asides, and the script of her play Hidden: A Gender, originally performed in 1989 with Sydney Erskine and Mx. Justin Vivian Bond.
Since then, Bornstein has devoted her life to helping people better understand themselves and live in a world that is hostile to any identity that transgresses social conventions and structures. In addition to Gender Outlaw, she has published numerous books, including an autobiography (A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir, 2012) and Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws (2006), an essential survival guide. She’s also written and performed in several theatrical works and mentored a host of young artists. Her most recent mentor-mentee collaboration, with performer Kelindah Bee Schuster, is featured in the current art exhibition Flagging the Circle at Sargent’s Daughters gallery in New York; an artwork by the two artists will be part of a silent auction by nonprofit Queer Art on Thursday, June 20.
On a personal level, reading Gender Outlaw for me was like emerging from Plato’s cave. As Kate said in our conversation, “Everybody’s got a different truth of gender, and that’s where the real interesting points of connection can occur.” I can think of no one who better embodies the wisdom, humor, resilience, and warmth of a great mentor than Kate Bornstein, and it was an honor to speak with this fabulous queer elder, self-proclaimed “little old lady,” and supportive “auntie” to all who need one.
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Hyperallergic: I think the first thing that I really connected with from Gender Outlaw is your idea of “neither/nor” in terms of gender. When you first put these ideas out, did people seem to understand what you were saying or did you get a lot of resistance?
Kate Bornstein: It made a lot of people laugh. It was comedy. It took me a long time. It took me actually until the second edition of Gender Outlaw to figure the right way of saying it. When I first started talking about not man, not woman, I framed it such that this way of looking at gender, what is now called nonbinary — I love whoever came up with that word — is much better than a binary approach. And that offended so many people and made so many trans people feel wrong. I’m so glad I had a chance to work that around in the second edition of Gender Outlaw.
[At the time of Gender Outlaw] I was hanging out mostly in the lesbian world and shifted over the years into the world of BDSM. And BDSM is interesting because there’s a whole lot of neither/nor there, and that’s where I found the most acceptance for what I was talking about.
H: You came out and started writing in the 1980s and ’90s, which was a fraught moment with AIDS and conservative politics. How was it coming out at that time?
KB: Lonely. Extremely. I found my community not so much in the gay and lesbian world as in the world of performance artists. My first touchstone in that was Holly Hughes, and from there it felt joyful.
H: Did you have any mentors growing up or anybody who was inspirational or helpful to you?
KB: Do I count L. Ron Hubbard?
H: You can.
KB: I had joined the Church of Scientology in 1970 and I was a member of that group for 12 years. And I’m really grateful because everything I learned in Scientology I now know is a way not to live my life. But that was my mentor. So when I left, there was a void and it wasn’t until I ran into a theater company called Split Britches and their writer, Holly Hughes. I went to a solo performance of hers and it blew me away. The honesty. Honey, I’m watching a solo performance of hers and she’s talking about a moment when she’s a child in the bathtub and it’s steamy and her mother is washing her in the tub and her mother’s naked and she can smell her mother’s pussy. And you go, “Oh my god, what are you talking about? I want to learn that. I want to learn how to talk like that.” I finally got to meet her and ever since, we’ve become good friends, but she’s the finest writer for the stage that I know personally.
H: Are there any artists now who are doing work that you really like or you feel is very important?
KB: I’m a big fan of Raja Feather Kelly. He’s a choreographer and writer and performer for stage. There’s a program called Queer Art in New York, and they run a mentorship program every year and a couple of years back, I was working with Raja as a mentee, he was a mentee of mine. And this man’s work is nothing short of brilliant. Similarly, drag queens and drag performers. Kelindah Bee Schuster is a mentee of mine in this year’s program. They were assigned female at birth and now their gender is kind of all over the place. And the drag work that they do, it’s smart, funny, and it’s going to scare a lot of people. I think it’s going to be good.
H: I read something you said about gender in four dimensions, but I didn’t know what you meant by that. I’m curious …
KB: Everything about gender starts with the body and the body is most simply viewed as male and female. … Now we know that everybody’s body is a gray area, but for thousands and thousands of years, there’s been male and there’s been female. So those are two dimensions of existence.
Then along come some people who go, “I don’t think so. That doesn’t make me feel good, and over there, that makes me feel better.” What they’re doing is thinking about it. Adding the process of the human mind. Mind, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it. That’s a whole other dimension.
There’s still another dimension, and that’s that gender has to be someplace. It has to exist at some point in time. And so a fourth dimension of gender is spacetime … I’m calling it a quantum self. It’s beyond bio sex, it’s beyond gender, it’s something else entirely. It’s always in motion. There’s nothing to hold onto except the ride itself. That’s just another way of living, and that’s the way I enjoy living now.
H: Can we expect a book or anything else talking about this?
KB: I finally got it into an essay form and next year a new edition of Hello Cruel World is coming out. The not-good news is what I wrote in 2006 isn’t sufficient for all the reasons people are killing themselves or want to kill themselves today, which is the terrible, terrible polarization that’s going on at every level of our lives. The idea of right and wrong has completely taken over our way of living. So this next edition of Hello Cruel World has 20 more alternatives to suicide that are more focused on how polarization [is] making your life miserable and how [to] deal with that … one way of dealing with the polarization of gender is that you extrude it into more dimensions than two. So that essay’s in the book.
H: What’s something that makes you happy?
KB: I cook … over COVID, I learned more than a few meals and what fun I’m having with that. That makes me very happy. Feeding people, inviting people over for a meal, feeding my partner. This gives me great joy.
H: Do you have preferred pronouns for me to use here?
KB: The cool thing about gender in four dimensions is if it’s a continuum, then my gender is in fact 76 years old. And at one point in my gender, I am a little boy. At another point in my gender, I am a young man. At another point in my gender, I’m a middle-aged man. At another point in my gender, I’m a woman. At this point in my gender, I’m calling myself neither of those. But they’re all on my continuum of gender. So the advantage is, you can’t misgender me. I don’t have a gender identity anymore, but I do have a favored gender expression. Girl is fun for me, girl is great. Girl doesn’t quite work when you’re 76 years old, though. If I were to name a gender that I enjoy these days, it would be little old lady.
