“I had always wanted to meet a real writer, but none of them would ever hang out with me because of my overbite,” jokes transgender satirist Charlie Anders about the motivation behind her critically acclaimed, San Francisco spoken-word variety show, Writers With Drinks. “OK, I did occasionally wind up with my teeth in their lapels. But really, it’s just a sign of respect.”
In addition to organizing the highly praised literary event, Anders (charlieanders.com) is a prolific writer, authoring the 2002 non-fiction how-to guide The Lazy Crossdresser, and the 2006 Lambda award-winning novel Choir Boy, a genderqueer action-adventure novel about religion. Her work is represented in nearly a dozen anthologies including Pills Chills Thrills & Heartache, Pinned Down By Pronouns and The
Anti-Capitalism Reader.
“Most of my anthology contributions have been fiction,” Anders says. “And everybody knows that fiction is just your childhood trauma filtered through the prism of music videos.” Making light of her pension for anthologies, Anders teases, “I haven’t made it into Chicken Soup for the Soul or Best American Erotica yet. I tried writing one story that would make it into both volumes, a sort of spiritual journey where people find healing with kinky sex.”
Anders describes She’s Such A Geek (shessuchageek.com)—the just released anthology she co-edited with Annalee Newitz—as “first-person accounts by female geeks… of what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated field or subculture.” The anthology includes a “whole bunch of kick-ass biologists, computer scientists, physicists and other types of geeks.”
Anders is also the publisher and co-founder of Other magazine who explains, “We felt there was a giant underground ocean of alienation underneath America—and we wanted to cash in on it.” Other magazine (othermag.org) is aimed at “people who defy categories,” and “the new outcasts.” Other is an unusual magazine, Anders suggests, because, “We deliberately didn’t pick one focus or one subculture to represent. That way we could make money off as many different kinds of alienation as possible.”
“I’m pretty much an absurdist writer,” Anders says of her fondness for satire. “I believe everything human is ridiculous, especially constructs like religion, politics, gender, sexuality, etcetera.”
Anders says she started Writers With Drinks (writerswithdrinks .com) in order to bring together different scenes and communities, literary and otherwise, that wouldn’t normally intermingle. She does so by presenting an eclectic fusion of genres and approaches. “I found out that if you offer drink tickets, you can trick people into showing up and hanging out with you.”
Once an actual choir boy, Anders still sings in choirs and karaoke bars and runs the web site which has been lauded by London, England’s The Sunday Times and Yahoo.com, and which Anders insists is not “some sort of satire against crazy queer-bashing sites.”
“If you have to ask why God hates figs, then it’s already too late for you and your soul has been consigned to bathe in a hot paste of gritty torment for all eternity, with seeds pricking every inch of your skin.”
The queer transwoman says that in order for others to keep up-to-date on her current sexuality, she’s been experimenting with utilizing technology to alert anyone with a cell phone about her “current sexual orientation.” She insists she’s also started a website that lets people know “exactly how queer I am today—right now it’s hovering around 83.2 percent.”
“For a while, though,” says the ever amusing Anders, “I hacked my own genome so I would glow different colors depending on whether I was currently more attracted to men, women, or other genderqueers and transwomen like myself.”
Don’t miss Anders hosting the next Writers With Drinks, Feb. 10 at , 3225 22nd St., San Francisco, from 7:30-9:30pm. This month features Angie Krass, Marta Acosta, Eric Spitznagel and Frank Portman.
Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall can be reached at jake@trans-nation.org.
