Joey Soloway: Hollywood Power Dynamics & Toppling the Patriarchy
Podcast Transcript Season 2 Episode 36
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
Joey Soloway is the creator, writer, and director of the groundbreaking Amazon series TRANSparent, I Love Dick, and more. They are also the author of the bestselling memoir She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy. Liz and Joey talked about Hollywood power dynamics, the importance of being awkward; navigating their own #MeToo moment on set—and, of course, toppling the patriarchy.
*In June of 2020, Soloway announced a preference to be referred to as Joey rather than Jill.*
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Liz:
Thank you, and Sheldon, for being here.
Jill:
This is so official. This is exactly what I want to be doing. Talking about the stuff that matters and making sure we're recording it so the whole world can hear.
Liz:
Yeah. So what's so amazing to me about your career, you know author, creator, writer, director, is you're ... all of your projects tend to be very personal and boundary pushing which is often hard to do in mainstream Hollywood projects. And I'm just curious if you ever played by the rules or you always were like, "fuck it, I'm going to write my own."
Jill:
I don't feel like I ever quote on quote "played by the rules", I definitely got distracted in my 30s by being part of the status quo. I wasn't trying to play by the rules I was trying to work, and so I was working on some shows that were like sort of classic regular television. A sitcom called Nicky, that Nicky Cox was in. What else did I do that was? I worked on the Steve Harvey Show.
So I took jobs, I probably worked for ten or so years on shows that felt like kind of regular work, but I never felt like, "Oh I'm making a concession." I just ... I generally have fun, so it's sort of like I was working in rooms with mostly men making comedy that appealed to a mostly straight crowd and it just kind of didn't occur to me. I always had feminist yearnings but, you know, I think of myself as a translator. I think of myself as somebody who can exist in a really radical world, or exist in a really queer world, and then also exist with suburban moms. And I feel really at home in both places and I like to be able to be the person who can kind of translate in between.
Liz:
But you always felt that way or was that something that happened post 30s?
Jill:
No I always felt that way. It was definitely less about .. I always thought about gender. So when I was in college I was thinking about women's studies and feminism. So I guess I wasn't thinking about gender, I was thinking about feminism. And so yeah, I was always trying to sort of translate some of the more radical feminist notions and then I think when sex-positive feminism happened I then found myself trying to translate those notions. And then recently it's been much more about gender then simply feminism.
Liz:
Right, so like transparent which is based on your real life Moppa. You have this incredible avenue to explore gender and non-gender identity outside of therapy. Literally of your own life and making it relatable. How did you get that opportunity?
Jill:
Yeah. You know I was working Six Feet Under and Grey's Anatomy and United States of Tara,
And just being like, "Oh, I wish I could direct. I wish I could direct. I wish I could direct." I could only get work as writer, work as a show runner, but I couldn't bust through that ceiling into directing. And kind of all around the same time, my parent came out, I made a movie called Afternoon Delight. I like kind of grabbed for that brass ring of director very consciously as my parent was saying, "I'm a woman." And I was so amazed and proud of her that at 70 she would say, "Hey, this is me", that I was like, "I can't believe I've been so lazy about saying I'm a director." I was kind of just going whatever way the wind would take me. But I wasn't planting my flag and saying, "I am a filmmaker. I am director. I am an artist." I was kind of like, "Everything happens for a reason so maybe I'm a showrunner writer who never gets to direct."
I became like a go with the flow kind of a person. So my parent coming out as trans made me like plant a flag and say, "I'm a director." And then I made Afternoon Delight and before long Afternoon Delight went to Sundance, I won the directing award, came back and then I was like, "Okay I'm ready to tell the story of my family and my parent."
The sniffing is my dog in case anybody can hear it. Probably not, right? People don't care.
Jill:
So yeah, after that I realized, okay, it's time for me to tell the story, and wrote a pilot and pitched it to all the usual suspects, HBO Showtime, FX, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass. And then my agent was like, Amazon's making television. And I was like, Amazon, shopping website? Yeah. They're making original content. So I was like, okay, I guess. And I went and pitched it there and they said, yes, and there it was, this opportunity for me to take this story that was so personal, and yeah, just like you said, it is kind of like therapy. You get to cast the people and you pull in actors and you create a family that then kind of lives out the storyline, which has been like the past five years
Liz:
Some of the stuff that was happening with your family and your personal life was unfolding as you're writing.
Jill:
Right. Yeah. Sometimes it'd be while I was writing, sometimes while I was shooting. I would think something, I would write it, because as writers we kind of express our unconscious through the fantasy of the page. So I would think something, I would write it, then I would do it because I had become comfortable with it by writing it. Then I would cast that and then I'd be doing it and casting at the same time. There'd be a real person and a fake person, and yeah, it got kind of clunky occasionally.
Liz:
You found yourself writing things before they would happen a lot of times?
Jill:
Yeah. Sometimes before, sometimes I was in a relationship and Ali was in a relationship, and there was a similar version. I was in a relationship in real life with Eileen Myles. Ali was in a relationship with Cherry Jones who was kind of based in Eileen Myles. We created the character of Leslie before I met Eileen. So yeah, when you're writing, you're kind of like, what would it be like to go out with somebody like this? I'm just going to write it, not do it. And then you're like, oh gosh, well, it's also happening. There were times where I think Eileen and I had just broken up but she was coming to visit the set and we were filming a scene that I'd written months before about us breaking up. And so we were watching these characters breakup and it was awkward. I kind of forgot that that's the scene we were shooting that day that she came.
Liz:
And then also you're a mom, you have two sons, and you were beginning to explore your identity as well more publicly as being non-binary while also being a leader in terms of speaking about these issues in mainstream media. That must have been quite a learning curve, especially with pronouns even.
Jill:
Yeah. Yeah. It happened so slowly for me that it didn't feel like that big kind of like coming out of the closet thing. People go like, how did you come out to your sons? It doesn't really work that way when you're in a family. I think people who are close to me slowly watched certain things happen in my life, and it went in a much more subtle order. For me it was I got breast reduction surgery, started dressing differently, started wearing less makeup, cut my hair, started dating women. These things happened slowly, not all the same day. And at the end of the journey, having the non-binary identity was less like a transition for me and more like an arrival at a place where I could kind of be free of gender.
And so when people are like, I don't know your pronouns. I don't get it. It feels like people are making it much more complex than it is for me. For me it's sort of about never having to fulfill any particular expectations around a gender. Like this is what a mom is like, but this is what a dad is like, this is womanly, this is manly. I'm opting out of all that stuff. So for me it feels like, okay, I'm free finally. If people can catch up with the right pronouns, great, if they can't, that's also fine.
Liz:
I mean we're lucky living in California as well, just in terms of the legality of changing your gender identity, which I know you recently did, right?
Jill:
Yeah, I just did it. And I just also saw that United Airlines will let you travel with an X instead of an M or an F, which is huge, because what's happening for trans people who travel is that there's this very weird system that a TSA person will gender you before you go through the x-ray. They gender you as you come through the line and they decide, that looks like a woman, I'm going to check F. And then if you go through and the x-ray shows that you have a penis, you get pulled aside, and that's of course incredibly traumatizing for trans people. So the simple idea that if you want to travel with an X mark instead of an M or an F, it's amazing actually.
Liz:
It's kind of interesting how we're in this time period where we're given more cultural permission to be fluid, particularly in places like California or New York as opposed to maybe the rest of Middle America or other countries. But there's still this great pressure, an invisible set of standards for the gender construct we're expected to meet. For example, if you say, I'm non-binary, but sometimes you're mom, sometimes you're they, maybe your son's call you a different pronoun, and there's this, you still have to fit within this box, right, even within this box of non-binary.
Jill:
Yeah. I don't really feel that too much. I actually feel like because it's such an awkward thing, being non-binary, people don't use the right pronouns and all that stuff. I actually feel like the point is the awkwardness and it's kind of like the unboxing. So when people are sort of like, I don't know, your gender isn't legible to me. I don't know what to say. It's sort of like, oh thank God. They're saying the thing that I always felt for many years, which is people look at me and they think I'm a woman but I don't feel like one. So now it's just all on the table, which is, oh, I'm neither. I'm both. I'm either. It's always changing. Forget it.
Liz:
I guess that's what I mean, that it is always changing.
Jill:
Yeah. But it feels like an unbox. It doesn't feel like a box.
Liz:
But it's a box that other people want to put you in maybe more than you put yourself in, where if you say one day, well, I was a wife to a man, I'm a mom, two sons, this is how I feel at the moment, but it almost like I feel that sometimes people don't get permission to evolve with their sexuality or their gender as we go through life. People want to claim, I'm a woman. This is how I identify. This is always how I'll identify. And also I think there's a very big difference between gender identity and sexual identity too.
Jill:
Of course yeah. They're two different things.
Liz:
Which we lump together.
Jill:
Yeah. Some people do lump that together with me, but I find that it was maybe more three or four years ago that people were getting confused about the difference, and also three or four years ago where people didn't get it. I feel like right now people get it and they're really happy to learn more if they don't get it. At least the people I encounter.
Liz:
Yeah. Do you feel like there's an expectation for you to have it all figured out being the showrunner and creator and director of a show like Transparent where you're supposed to have it all figured out?
Jill:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the awkward and uncomfortable ... Another uncomfortable part is the sort of trans community social media call out culture. I'm sure that a lot of people think, why is Jill a spokesperson for this movement? Because when I started working on the show, I was only the child of a trans person. I didn't identify as non-binary. And so I think a lot of trans people rightfully so get really tired of cis people speaking for trans people. And so, yeah, it's a good question. I was cis when I started making the show. I don't identify as cis anymore. Is it my place to speak? Some people think it is, some people think it isn't.
Liz:
What do you think?
Jill:
I have no choice. I have to. I'm an artist. This has always been what I do is make art, and part of making art is distributing it, and part of distributing it is doing publicity, so that comes with it.
Liz:
And it's also really hard to get things made within the existing power structure of Hollywood and media. It's not necessarily an easy process. And I think shows like yours ... You had a career. You knew people in the system, so it's not as easy to get that kind of Amazon streaming deal coming in the door as someone who already ... as you said, you're in the room in Hollywood for most of your career with all men who are saying things like, this is the year of the woman. We need more female projects. I mean that's quite a weight to carry, I would imagine. I think from what I've read, you handled it in a very vulnerable and honest way, which is a great strength to tap into that. Again, going to social media culture where everything is played out in these comments-
Jill:
Well, I got off Twitter, that helped a lot. I was talking to Lindy West and she's like, just get off Twitter. There's no reason to be on Twitter unless you like the feeling of rubbing dog shit on your face. It's like there's no good reason to be on Twitter. You can do all the same stuff on Instagram or Facebook, and if you're on Twitter, people who are on Twitter like to get in little spats with people. I don't like to get in little spats with people. It doesn't make me feel good to get in spats all day. Just leaving Twitter helped me really relax around that feeling of people are coming after me.
Liz:
Yeah. And I think that there's this whole new wave of social media activism, which happens entirely online but not offline. I mean there are great activists who are online and very vocal, but they're also offline in their communities and doing the real work. But then there's this other sense that these issues require longer conversation and in depth thinking and reading and researching, and it can't all be reduced to a soundbite.
Jill:
I get to really say what I want to say in my shows, in the characters, say the things in the movies and the TV shows. I get to write a book. I don't feel like I also need to say things on Twitter. I'm happy to just have them be in my books and my TV shows and movies.
Liz:
What was the process of writing your memoir like?
Jill:
It was almost like offgassing or sloughing off of all of the stress that was happening in my life, and I really didn't think I have to write a memoir. I thought there are some things that don't fit in the mouths of characters and my life is so crazy. Sometimes all I can do is write as a way to find my way through. And when I decided to write the memoir, it was when my marriage was ending and I was really trying to get a sense of, what is this feeling I've always been feeling my whole life of kind of not being in the right place and feeling kind of on the outside? Is it gender, is it sexuality, is it my parent? Is it this kind of house of mirrors where I grew up not really understanding that my dad was a woman? And so for me, writing the book was less like, I'm going to write a book and get out there with my platform, and more like writing a book is going to force me to go spelunking through my life with a flashlight to try to give some cohesiveness to this story so that I can understand what happened.
Liz:
How was that reaction when it came out?
Jill:
It was great. Yeah. I had an amazing experience. I feel so lucky. I was able to ... I feel like the luckiest person in the world right now as an artist to be able to write the things that interest me, to be able to make the shows that interest me and to have distribution. It's the kind of thing that I just have always dreamed about, that you want to do things and say things, and you want it to matter, and you want people to care. I can't believe that I have this privilege of being able to have ideas and share them with the public.
Liz:
Is it bittersweet that Transparent is ending?
Jill:
No. We made a musical, so it's the Transparent moving, I'm calling it the musicale finale. It has all of my sisters music in it, so there's 10 songs, dances, amazing musical, and we're hoping for it to become a Broadway musical. So as we say, Transparent's not ending. It's transitioning from a TV show into a musical.
Liz:
And it's all the original cast without Jeffrey Tambor?
Jill:
Yeah.
Liz:
What was that going through that situation publicly with him and at the same time, I know you're super involved with the Time's Up movement as well?
Jill:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're still going through it and it is really sensitive and mostly pretty private. We were a family at Transparent and obviously super connected with the trans women who were part of the story. So yeah, it was really painful. It was basically just like a family ... if you had a family and somebody in your family was going through this, people in your family were going through this reckoning, and because it was happening for the whole world at the same time, we were just kind of like, hold on. This tsunami is coming for everyone. When I yell something like, topple the patriarchy, on stage during the Emmy's, maybe I said it, you say it not even imagining that it could actually happen, that the world would start to change.
In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about, I think it was less than two years ago when ... maybe a year and a half ago when this stuff happened with Harvey Weinstein and just the world as we knew, it really just shifted. There was a moral shift. What was acceptable was no longer acceptable. And so each and every one of these people in places where certain men in power had to say, what of my personality is not consented to by the people around. When people would come up to me, they'd be like, well, did he do it? It's like every single man of power has benefited from having patriarchy at their back like the wind at the back of a sailboat where they can say and do things to women and younger women and newer women and less powerful women that make people uncomfortable, that nobody says anything about because power, because patriarchy, because access to job, to money.
People are like, it's not about sex, it's about power. And I used to kind of agree with that, but now I really get it, which is white supremacy and patriarchy run the world, mostly white men who have been in power. So if you're white or if you're a man, a lot of the things that people say to you and do with you are under the pressure of continuing to have access to power. So when white people behave a certain way around people of color, in particular people of color who might be new to their work, let's say a PA or a background artist, there's no way that person of color can say, hey, that makes me uncomfortable. Don't say that around me. And when men act the way men have been trained to act around women, let's say background artists, let's say actresses, let's say somebody who's at any less of a power level than them, which is everybody, if you're Jeffrey Tambor and you're number one on the call sheet, that means everybody has less power than him.
You can't actually treat all of the women in the world like you're allowed to openly delight in them and take them in and take on ... A lot of men of a certain generation walk around acting like the world is kind of a buffet for them. So they can be as angry as they want, they can delight in the bodies of the women around them, they can make sexual jokes. It's not the same as two people at the same level making a joke. If you're a white person, if you're a man, if you're a white man of power, nobody around you can say, Hey, don't do that, without losing their job.
And white men are starting to realize. They're going like, well, wait a minute, everything was a lie, all the ways in which women act around me were a lie? And it's like, yes. Yes, they were. There are so many ways in which women make these kind of tiny but constant concessions around men to center them and to allow men to center their egos and to center their conversations. I mean, even thinking about that dinner that you threw, for you to have created a dinner where there are so many queer people around, I'm sure you have memories of other dinner parties you've been at where they're surrounded by men and you're off to one side and the men are holding court talking to other men about things that men care about, that was our lives.
Liz:
That was my childhood.
Jill:
Yeah. That's our lives. So we have to work to not center heterosexual men. We have to work.
Liz:
Especially within the Hollywood, from my grandfather's time in Hollywood, this was acceptable. The casting couch, the offices where there's the back door for someone to go out. My first documentary, which was about Burlesque called Pretty Things, I was lucky and privileged enough to be able to have a cutting room at Paramount under this guy, Paul Haggar, who was the head of post production. He was very close with Elaine May and that was one of the only female directors that he had worked with, and I liked this guy, I liked this guy. It was the first time I think as my dad made more independent cinema and a lot of queer stories, marginalized stories. I hadn't really been in that kind of Hollywood before, and I hadn't seen behavior that I'd only seen in movies like The Player or Short Cuts. I hadn't seen people actually throwing a Beta deck out the window or throwing coffee at their assistant and saying, this is too cold. It was unbelievable.
Liz:
This is in, I don't know, must have been 2002, 2003, and I think there was no other female directors on the lot at that time. Penelope Spheeris had been there. And the way that the men spoke about women who are independent, confident directors or writers or producer was either a bitch or a dyke. And then I show up and I've got this cutting room with pictures of naked women all over and I wear red lipstick, it was like I didn't fit into those boxes. It was a very strange thing for me. It was a real realization of, I'll never be at the same level as these guys no matter what I do.
Jill:
And do you still feel that way?
Liz:
I think I said, fuck it. I don't care anymore. A lot of times I find the rules of Hollywood very hypocritical, and I think they are. A lot of things are changing now. I'd love to hear from your perspective where you're sitting out with Time's Up, but also I feel like some things are changing more on the surface because now there's a consequence to that reaction if you get found out. But how many other little small ways ... Is this like a bandaid, do you think from the industry or do you really feel like there's a lot of soul searching going on?
Jill:
I think there's a lot of soul searching going on. I think everybody is asking the question. I think many people are starting to ask some of the right questions. I'm in such a sort of bubble where I'm surrounded by women, queer people, trans people, non-binary people, feminists, people of color, surrounded by ... just like we all are in our own bubbles. I look at the world as like, wow, it's totally transformed. Then I'm like, leave my set and go to somebody else's set, and realize, oh wow, it's the status quo. Or walk around a place like Paramount and see, yeah, it's mostly men doing mostly stuff with mostly men. But I see things really changing and I just think things change a lot more slowly than we realize. They change quickly in a moment, something that happens, like Trump gets elected and Harvey Weinstein gets ...
I think there's something about Trump getting elected that caused all of the women to go like, Oh, hell no. Right? We can't take this guy down. We're trying in the meantime. None of us are going to stand for this kind of boorish, narcissistic, awful man in our lives. And the morality change. There's a book by a writer named Kwame Anthony Appiah and he talks about things like when foot binding was no longer okay. Like foot binding is okay then it's not okay. And many, many things are no longer okay in Hollywood and hopefully in other workplaces.
Liz:
But a lot of it is there's lawsuits that come up and then someone finds out about the lawsuit now, which would have happened, had been paid under the table for years and now all of a sudden you have these captains of industry and these corporations losing millions of dollars. So they're forced into a position where they have to have things like consent programs in-house. In Hollywood now, I think you have intimacy coaches.
Jill:
Is that right? On set.
Liz:
On set?
Jill:
Yeah. Sure. Why not?
Liz:
Do you have that on your shows?
Jill:
No. We haven't done any sex scenes since the reckoning.
Liz:
So there's a real for you it's like before and after the shift?
Jill:
Yeah. I think we were thinking a lot about things like consent and comfort, and I was really taking on that work. It's emotional labor, also known as unpaid emotional labor. If you're doing it in your household, you're doing a thing that a lot of women do, which is female people or feminine people from identified people do, which is kind of just like fluff up reality to make sure everybody's okay all the time. I was kind of doing that anyway on the set, trying to kind of constantly check in to make people were okay and talking about safe spaces. Of course things still happened because of Jeffery's position. He has talked about the fact that he had a bad temper and would kind of lose it on people. So it started this kind of feeling of like, yes, we all have really warm feelings of art and safety, but at the same time power in Hollywood belongs to the most important men and the most important man has a temper issue. And so we all went around making sure he doesn't lose his temper. That just became normalized.
Now, I would look at that and say, we have to stop it right now. I would talk to him afterwards and say, you can't treat that person that way. And he would say, I'm so sorry. But now people recognize that that kind of thing is a real risk to an entire project financially and morally and everything. The thing that's so interesting to me about consent and I think so cumbersome about consent is as I was doing research into my book, which is called, She Wants It, and it's really about consent in many ways, I read somewhere that somebody said, people treat consent as if it happens in a snapshot. It doesn't. You might meet a man, and you might go to a bar with him, and you might think he's fantastic, and then you guys are walking to your car and he says in a very beautiful way, can I kiss you? And you say, yes, you may. And you start making out. And the next thing you know, he sticks his hand down your pants. He didn't stop and say, can I stick my hand down your pants? And you did consent to the kiss. But the truth is he would have needed to recheck in about the next thing, and he didn't.
So what does this mean? It means that actually consent is an ongoing conversation and it's actually a spiritual conversation. It means I'm paying attention to you all the time and I'm hoping that the best things happen to you, so that every time I touch you or do something different than what you actually said yes to, it's still working for you. And hopefully any two sexual partners are doing that the entire time they're having sex. Even if they've decided they want to play with power, I want you to be the top, let's have a safe word, I'm going to say, no, I'm not going to mean it, fine. You could have a conversation about power and consent. But truthfully for people who aren't able to name that we're playing with power and we're doing BDSM right now, and they're living in that wave of, does this person want this? I don't know. It is an ongoing ethical, spiritual, time consuming, attention giving enterprise.
Liz:
We talk about this a lot on this podcast, about communication and sex are really separated, especially in this age of digital transactional nature of dating that it's not something ... People in more kink aware, queer, BDSM communities do have a lot of conversation about boundaries and safety before you get into that space where you play, whereas there's almost something like, oh, don't kill the mood. Let's not talk about it.
Jill:
Yeah. I mean I was saying, is it possible that after everything I've learned, what we're learning is that heterosexuality is dangerous for women in the United States, because the truth is the same thing we're talking about, about centering masculinity and centering maleness and centering heterosexual men so that they feel good, which is what we do in patriarchy was the same thing I was doing when I was having sex with them, which was I don't want to kill the mood. I want to make sure he has a hard on. I'm going to act like the women that I think I'm supposed to be acting like. I'm never going to articulate, let's change course, let's do this. It would kill the mood. So there is something about the power and consent that once you move into a queer world and you're able to have conversations about, I look back on my decades of heterosexuality and could see that I was trying to subvert literal, legible conversations about power and consent because it seemed sexier to play that game.
Liz:
I like what you said earlier, that you like the awkwardness of how you're defining yourself now. It's quite interesting when I think about it because it's not wrapping things up in a neat little bow, just like these conversations aren't easy, right? They're not easy for us to have. They're not easy. It's definitely not easy for men in positions of power to look at, and so there's all this uncomfortability and tension and anger and rage. I think a lot of times we want a neat resolution to things. I mean I have so much rage. I have a lot of rage about systems of power that have been in place for thousands of years that I see a little bit changing, but I'm not quite sure. I love men. I love my family. I date men, and it's hard for me to reconcile this all at once.
Jill:
Have you noticed a difference with men that you're dating where you feel them being more aware of your perspective?
Liz:
I'm with someone where it's the first time he's heard the words, dismantle the patriarchy or heteronormative or non-binary were with me. So he's not coming from the same place that I come from. He doesn't have the same tools, and I actually really enjoy having those conversations with him because it feels like I don't want to talk to people who've already drunk the Kool-Aid, right, because I feel like for whatever reason why I'm here on this planet is to be able to use my privilege and platform and knowledge to try to have these conversations across perspectives. Sort of be the diplomat that goes in there and it's like, okay. Because I actually find that a lot of straight guys, they'll ask me things like, I don't know how to talk to women anymore. I don't know what I'm supposed to say. And part of me is like, Oh, mother fuck, am I supposed to be your therapist?
Jill:
Unpaid emotional labor.
Liz:
Yeah. Then on the other hand I'm like, well, I do have an opportunity to speak to this person and in a calm way and maybe give them some things to think about and take away that will possibly impact their interaction with the next-
Jill:
It's nice that you're so generous with your time.
Yeah. I don't find myself really raging at cis men in person. I feel like my most problematic behavior is sort of being somewhat intolerant of just what used to be common social situations. After hanging out with so many women and queer people and non-binary people, people who are interested in other people's pronouns, I'll walk into a setting that is cis-centric or hetero-centric, and yeah, I just feel like I can't be here. I can't be in this space. It's too uncomfortable for me.
Liz:
Well, I know a space that you and I are also very interested in is the art world, which is another place just like Hollywood that hasn't totally ... I mean, Hollywood's definitely had its reckoning because there's already a lot of big light shone on it. I know you only collect ... You don't collect any male artists.
Jill:
Yeah. It's the same thing with when people come and say, I want you to work on this movie about a man. And I go, I don't really do that. It's not that I'm trying to be mean. It's just that I really truly believe that we're all really in an awful place having our minds colonized by patriarchy. And so I think when men are like, well, why can't I? I just say, well, just imagine what it would feel like to have been looked at your entire life by people who decided that you're more important for how you look than what you think. I don't think men can realize what it feels like to grow up female and have your worth and your value be created by the male gaze. And so no, I don't want to contribute to more men telling more men how it feels to be a man. I think it's unethical actually.
And when men asked me what they should do, like men say, I'm a filmmaker, or men say, I'm a writer. You don't want me to create anymore? I say, no, create, but expose patriarchy. Tell the truth. Tell the truth about what happens in locker rooms. Tell the truth about what it means to not be an alpha male. Tell the truth about the way men treat each other. Tell the truth about hating guns, hating murder, the discomfort of masculinity. Stop fucking feeding the machine that prioritizes powerful white men over everybody else.
Liz:
I Love Dick, really resonated with me.
Jill:
Speaking of the machine that prioritizes powerful white men over every-
Liz:
I went to art school in New York, and I remember my freshman year at SVA, this artist who's a great artist called Lyle Ashton Harris, I don't know if you know his work, he's a black gay man, was really coming up at that time. This is '96. He was in a show that Thelma Golden, the curator that did the [piece] called Black Male, and he came and spoke to the school. It was a big deal because he was quite relevant in New York at that time. We were also excited. I remember him saying to us, if you're a woman, you might as well just give up now. You're going to have much harder time than me as a black gay man. And that set the tone for what I experienced and what I observed in the art world. So it was really interesting, I Love Dick, seeing you kind of take that head on.
Jill:
Yeah. Marfa, Donald Judd.
Liz:
I went to Marfa for the first time last year. This one man building this monument to himself, it was almost like I can't ... and it's so expensive. These huge concrete slabs.
Jill:
I think so much of the art world is men building monuments to themselves. You go to Marfa and you just ask yourself, where are the women, where are the women? Obviously, where are the women artists at Chinati, that's the most obvious. Out of 30 artists that are part of Chinati, there is one who is a woman, but where are the women when the men are making the art together? Where are the women when their men are working with crews and crews and crews of people to erect these giant monuments? For what? At least I think when men are making an argument about, oh, we're building a building, or we're defending a country, and that's why me and 100,000 men are working all day instead of including women in our thoughts and our minds and our souls. It's just like, this is just art. It's just a fucking thing, and yet it still is another excuse as so many things are for a bunch of men to work with a bunch of men on things that are interesting to mostly men.
Liz:
That's not open to the public. You have to pay to go in. There's no sort of inclusion in that way. For me with art, I feel very strongly that art is for and by the people. So I really love museums that are ... like the Hammer Museum for example, which is free, which does do I really love public programming because I think it's already such a difficult place for people to have access to or feel they feel intimidated by it. So to have these institutions really actively go out into communities and embrace communities and in an open and welcome way, you don't feel that there. Are you ever invited back?
Jill:
To Marfa?
Liz:
Yeah.
Jill:
I feel like Marfa was really welcoming to us. I mean there's a lot of queer people and there are a lot of feminists people in Marfa and they're all having this conversation. Everybody's having this conversation.
Liz:
Are they Chinati Foundation too?
Jill:
Well, I don't know specifically what's going on at Chinati. I mean they have their own whole history with him as well as I think his ex wife and his family. And there's so much about what Donald Judd means to Marfa, which almost became a metaphor for what it meant to Chris Kraus. Two totally different worlds, we kind of melded them, but I think the feeling in general is the same as the thing we're talking about, which is everybody has made it okay for women to center men, and we've been doing it our whole lives. The reckoning made it so that we're able to start centering ourselves. And so in reality it means I find myself in queer spaces, I find myself around women. I don't find myself at a table surrounded by men anymore where I'm having to sit there while they hold forth about the way they see the world. That just doesn't happen to me anymore.
Liz:
You create your own space.
Jill:
Yeah. I'm in spaces with women and queer people and trans people. Black people are creating spaces that are mostly black art spaces, and I think white people or men get angry, but I feel like especially women we're just like these kinds of like, yeah, we're babies. We're two years into a reality where people are saying your point of view matters and it barely matters. It doesn't matter legally yet. It doesn't matter politically yet. It barely matters. So for me, when I meet men who aren't actively saying, I want women in leadership, I'm going to help women get the word out, I'm going to read women's books and tweet about them, I'm going to ask Liz and Jill how I can help, which by the way, no men do. Zero. I look back and I'm like, I was a fan of Howard Stern and Jon Stewart and John Oliver and David Letterman, and I worshiped these people and I promoted them and I went to their shows, and I read, David Sedaris and Dan Savage, all these men.
And now all these women are coming out and having their voices, and men are doing the same thing for women. They're not tweeting about them or promoting them or putting them on their shows. I mean they're just starting to, just starting to welcome people onto the six hosted by men shows that take over late night TV. I just don't think men can start to get their heads around the ways that they have not only been ignoring female, feminine, feminist, queer, trans voices, but how we have actually all been falsely promoting them throughout our lives as a way of just spiritually surviving in patriarchy.
Liz:
What do you say to people who aren't in situations or areas of the country or the world where they do have the privilege to create their bubbles or their own spaces and still have to ... What do you suggest to them are ways that they can in their daily life, daily routine, be authentic and awkward?
Jill:
Gosh, I don't know. I don't know. I think there's so much amazing stuff happening right now in terms of podcasts and listening to podcasts and surrounding yourself with the kind of ... We can surround ourselves with an ecosystem that makes us feel comfortable. So yeah, I don't know. I really don't know. It's not safe. I was at a kind of rural place over the weekend and it was like a big old barbecue festival joint. It was out in the desert and I was staring at some people who were cooking giant amounts of ribs on a grill, and these two kind of like good old boy type guys came up, and they're like, how's it going? Good. And I'm talking to them and I'm wearing a baseball cap and I'm dressed masculine and kind of having a dude conversation with them. We're talking about the meat and the grill and the beer, just being down low with them where they're not going to 'flirt' with me or try to pick me up.
And my friend comes up and she's kind of fem and the guys now sort of like register us as two women and they start going, so yeah, nice to meet you. What's your name? I really wished that I didn't have to say my name was Jill. I wished I had a more masculine name so that I could not enter into the thing which is like, there are two guys, there are two girls, we're at a bar. Hey, we're taking you in, because we can, because you're women. And somehow my fem friend coming up made them start to look at me as like, okay, this is two guys here and there's two girls. I was like, I would like to slip out of this. I wish I could just ...
When they said to her, what's your ... she said her name. They said to you, what's your name? Said to me, what's my name? I had this moment where I was like, I want to say a guy's name so they don't start doing this thing to me, which is like we're four heterosexual people out at a bar. But it wouldn't have been safe for me to be anything other than a girl in that moment because that's what they were seeing, we're two guys, here's two girls, let's just talk about ... That's probably what it's like in most places. It's not safe. I find myself sitting in a bar in a small town every so often, and they'll put the drink, sounds like, ladies. Every so often I'll say, Hey, I'm non-binary. Ladies isn't my pronoun. They'll be like, oh, I'm so sorry. But it's very, very hard to get people out of that binary.
I mean the binary's what makes people feel safe, just quickly clocking, that's a woman, that's a man. The simple opening up and saying, X, there's three instead of two, is a destruction of the binary that is fully uncomfortable for most people's bodies, just like good, bad, woman man, right, wrong, friend, foe, fight, flight. There's this third space which is what we're talking about. It is a constant, spiritual, connected understanding of whether or not your connection and your permission is real. Knowing you're a woman and I'm a man gives 10 kinds of shorthands that make life easier for people or the other way around.
Liz:
I really like the way you keep bringing up spirituality, because that to me is also I think a very core thing that needs to be integrated into these conversations around sexuality and gender, and so often it's separated from...
Jill:
I think Transparent is Jewy and I'm definitely Jewish, but I'm always kind of ... I've always been clawing my way to try and understand spirituality, I think the same way I've been trying to understand gender, but I wouldn't say I have a great spiritual process.
Liz:
Well, the fact that you're clawing your way to understand it is more ... because I think a lot of people who aren't raised in sort of organized religion, they sometimes come to that at the end of their life when they're trying to hold onto something - for them to [have] faith. If you're spending your life ... if you're constantly questioning these things on a day to day basis, it becomes less scary, right?
Jill:
Yeah.
Liz:
My last question for you is what are you still learning about sex?
Jill:
Well, I'm learning everything. I think I'm fascinated with the ways this conversation that we were having, which is when you're heterosexual or when I was heterosexual, I used to sort of cloudiness around consent, including my own cloudiness around consent as a way to keep alive, that kind of sexy vibe. It's like as people were talking about consent, I was like, wait a minute. Somebody sort of offering the mysterious mood that they may or may not have sex with you, which is cloudy consent is what people consider sexy. Flirting is people offering cloudy possibilities that they may or may not have sex with you. Mystery seduction is cloudy consent. These are super problematic things if you're a young woman growing up in this world.
If you're a guy, you're leading the questioning, right? This is one of the things that gender is good for. If you're a guy, it's assumed that you consent, that you want to have sex. And so men get to kind of push, push, push, push, push on boundaries until they get the sex. So having these very clear boundaries around heterosexuality, actually give people some rules, which is the guy can push, the girl's going to say no and then acquiesce. This is what we fucking grew up with. This insanity is what we grew up with.
And so, yeah, I mean I'm just learning that as I move from masculine to feminine inside of myself, masculine to feminine, male to female, boy to girl, man to woman, and I'm traveling through those different identities, whether it's in a second, in an hour, in a day, in a week, my relationship to your desire of consent is constantly changing. Knowing what I want and being able to care for others comes more naturally to me when I think of myself as masculine, and that's mind blowing. How can that be? That for me, when I'm feeling feminine, I feel like confusion around whether or not I'm consenting. I feel like anger about having to hold space for others. When I think of myself as masculine, it's very natural for me to care for others and I know what I want. That's really fucked up.
Liz:
But it's great that you're able to tune into that and think about that.
Jill:
Yeah. It's a gift. Like the non binary identity, who knew that would be such a gift. I was reading the New York Times this morning. They're talking about having these b'Nai Mitzvah. They're doing ceremonies for people that are Bar Mitzvahs, where people are like, I'm not a gender, but I'm an adult. Can you imagine if we'd been offered this? Can you imagine in your family growing up if you were able to be offered as a young person, Liz is not like that girl over here, but Liz is this incredibly special being who's got a kind of bothness that nobody in this family has yet to express, but Liz is? Because you have so much of both genders and you know that.
Liz:
We all do. The reality of the situation is that we all are both.
Jill:
But when you say that you were in the editing room and you had pictures of women up everywhere, that's the kind of thing that most men would be like, oh, I've never seen a woman before who's able to have pictures of women up and still be in her power. You have these things that you do naturally, which are, you're able to talk about sex and desire and hold space for the complexity of feminist things without feeling like ... I mean, it's not masculine, but it's just, you're not a typical woman in terms of like, oh, I can't talk about that stuff.
Liz:
I have a lot of masculine energy and I think about it a lot. I've actually had a crazy accident a couple of years ago that left me learning to walk again. I was in a wheelchair. I had a metal rod. No. I mean actually it was amazing. It was such a gift, because it brought me in touch with my vulnerability, with my more the things that you associate with femininity that actually I feel like we don't allow men enough of that, we don't give them spaces for vulnerability, which is a huge problem.
I do feel sorry for men. That is why I'm empathetic and want to do this work, because I see how much they struggle with not having those spaces to talk about things. But for the first time in my life, instead of approaching things like, I've got to be forceful, I've got to really work hard and be taken seriously and subvert my femininity in order to be taken seriously. All of a sudden I was like, oh my God, my vulnerability is a great gift and a great strength, and it even makes me feel more empowered sexually to be in touch with that.
Jill:
That's amazing. It's like a beautiful metaphor. The power of vulnerability, it is a spiritual way to move through the world
Liz:
Thank you. Thank you for this conversation.
Jill:
Yeah. Literally, I could have this conversation for the rest of my life and never stop. This is all I ever want to talk about.