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.
