A "Bitch"-y Conversation

'I'm going to get burned at the stake!'

Sparks will fly when things collide, a basic alchemy long understood by the musician Bitch, who's been blending folk and punk, and pop and politics, both as part of the 90s queercore band Bitch and Animal and as a solo performer. Different sparks flew when Bitch was booked to play at the Boston Dyke March this year, a decision that was criticized by many because of Bitch's support for the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The Festival, which only allows entrance to "women-born women," has become a focal point in the cultural conversation about trans inclusion. In Provincetown this weekend for Women's Week with her new band, Bitch and the Exciting Conclusion, Bitch opened up to Bay Windows about Michigan, being "uninvited" to the Dyke March and her future projects.

Q: What are you looking forward to about Women's Week?
A: Well Provincetown is one of my old homes. Even though I only spent one summer there, it was a monumental summer. It was right before I started my touring life, and it's such a home for transients. So it's a place to land when I get off the road.

Q: You must have been very young then, and what an amazing place to be for a young queer person.
A: Totally. I had heard of it, which is why me and Animal moved there. We just packed our shit into a U-haul and went. We had been playing in New York for not quite a year, so Provincetown was a real jumping off spot for us. We did a free show at Bubalah's, and word spread. And because it's a tourist town we were playing for people from all over the country, so we started building a following. And then we started touring full time.

Q: What can we expect from your Provincetown concerts? I hear you put on a wild show.
A: I do, very theatrical. I like to encourage heckling. It's an impulsive, improvisational thing. We're debuting some new material, which is exciting. We're getting ready to record this winter, and I hope the album will be out next spring.

Q: Will Daniela Sea be there? [Sea, who plays transman Max on The L Word, is Bitch's girlfriend]
A: No, she's still working on The L Word right now.

Q: Now how does that work out? Because I though this band was a collaboration of yours and Sea's.
A: I gotta figure out a better way to say that. That's how we started the band, Daniela and I had this aesthetic vision for it, and she was the third band member. But then when her career kept her on the West Coast, we had to get somebody else. She will still play a show with us every now and then, but otherwise it's impossible to coordinate. She's the aesthetic advisor.

Q: It must be great having a partner who's also an artist.
A: Yeah, it really is. We both kind of feed each other, and help each other shape things.

Q: I heard you two are collaborating on a screenplay.
A: Oh gosh, yeah. We've been working on that for a few years. I'm gong to try to hole up somewhere this winter and finish it.

Q: Can you tell me about it?
A: Nope! We made a pact not to talk about it until we had a draft that we were happy with. It's not like we worry about it being stolen or something, it's just that it's in its birthing process still.

Q: That reminds me, I wanted to ask you how you got involved with John Cameron Mitchell's film, Shortbus.
A: It's funny. When Daniela decided she wanted to be an actress, we heard through Murray Hill that John had been working on this project for a couple of years and was still having a hard time finding lesbians.

Q: Because there are no lesbians to be found in New York.
A: I know. They're so scarce! So Murray asked for a picture of Daniela, and the only good one was a picture of both of us. And the casting director asked us both to come in. So it was kind of random, but I went in and auditioned for it.

Q: You didn't have one of the sexual parts.
A: He asked if I'd be willing to have sex on camera, but I was not willing to. I felt shy. Of course once I saw the movie, I thought "Now I get it." Reading scripts, it's hard to envision what it's going to feel like.

Q: I thought the final product was fantastic.
A: Me too. I felt so proud to be a part of it.

Q: Would you like to do more acting?
A: I would. I'm putting that out there.

Q: Being an independent musician is demanding enough. And your sound doesn't fit the usual mold of female singer/songwriter. You're more pop, but also more avante garde. Has it been hard finding and building your audience?
A: I do wonder about that. People ask me what kind of music I play and I don't have a one-word answer. But it's hard to compare to an experience that you haven't had. It's easy to say that if I had a more basic sound I might have been picked up by some huge management company, but that's not really my goal. This next record is more rock and more easily categorized, so we'll see.

Q: We're in this interesting political moment now, with the pendulum starting to swing away from the Bush years. Melissa Etheridge's new album is very political - though part of me thinks, what took you so long-
A: Right. Like, okay, now it's cool? I've gotten the advice over and over to be less political. Fuck that. What kind of world do you want to live in?

Q: But this could be the big moment for outspoken artists.
A: Great, let me capitalize on that! [laughs]

Q: You were booked for this year's Boston Dyke March, and were uninvited at the last minute because of concerns about your support for the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Where you surprised by the controversy?
A: No, it's something I've been dealing with for years. I was kind of surprised by the outcome, because I've been protested for years but it's never been very [pauses] threatening. What the Dyke March told me was that there were security concerns, like there was going to be some huge uprising, which I don't think would have happened. But really, no, I wasn't surprised. It's an age-old paradigm, oppressed people turning on each other. It's very upsetting.

Q: The one constant in the debate then was that everyone was upset. Everyone had strong feelings.
A: And me too! The Dyke March Committee made a statement that said, some people are upset that Bitch wasn't here, while others are concerned about transgender rights. As if I'm the opposite of transgender rights. It's sad, and I don't want to be involved with that. The argument is completely offensive.

Q: You mean, looking at it as so black and white?
A: Right. First of all, using me as a spokes model against transgender rights. Talking about making a space that's all-inclusive? That's awesome. But to be preaching all-inclusiveness, minus this one dyke, is ironic.

Q: Everyone analyzed to death some of your past comments about Michigan. [In November, 2006 Bitch spoke with About.com's Kathy Belge, who writes the "Lesbian Life" column for the website. In that interview, Bitch said, in part, "If someone tries to tell me [Michigan] is transphobic, I tell them to stuff it. There's so many trannies there. And it's not trans people being marginalized. It's people who were born as men."] How well do those quotes represent your views?
A: I do feel like they were taken out of context. I read them and thought, 'I'm kind of offending myself!' This interviewer and I were having a long conversation about trans people at Michigan, and I was trying to look at one aspect of the argument. I find a side that gets lost is the misogyny involved. We have to acknowledge that there's male privilege going on within this argument. Notice that there isn't this kind of organizing around male-only space for our trans brothers. And I just want to add that into the whole debate. I think people who are born as women, in a certain way, are used to not being invited somewhere, and are going to be less loud about it. That interview was actually the first time I ever even talked about the issue, and in the years since this debate has been going on, I have noticed a lot of artists, and people in general, feeling silenced out of a worry of being un-PC. I'm sick of that. I don't feel like I should not talk. I want there to be a dialogue about the situation, and I don't want it to be all one-sided. In that interview I was trusting that I could speak about something that has many sides, and that I don't feel black and white about - I don't feel like I'm on a side in this issue - I was trying to trust in my community that I could say something that was touchy or maybe wrong as part of the dialogue. I guess I'm in a certain position of power that makes it awkward, and I can't have a dialogue about it. Now if people email me and ask me what I think about Camp Trans, I say "Call me!" I don't want things to get black and white. That's what happened in that interview, everything I was saying was squeezed together, and the conversational side of it was taken out, and I looked like I was ranting.

Q: What needs to happen for the dialogue to go on?
A: I think if we could get to a less war-like place, I feel like there are all sorts of assumptions being made about me, and what I believe. I support separatism, I am in support of my elders making space that they feel comfortable in, and I'm also in support of younger people having visions of how that can change and grow. I'm not necessarily in favor of forcing our elders to change what they're doing. There's a war-like attitude in this debate that I find really hostile, and I think we need to change that. We need to ask more questions and make spaces for open dialogues. We need to keep talking about it until we work it out.

Q: It's hard because it's a very emotional issue for lots of people, and that can make it difficult to really listen.
A: Right. And there are so many issues [pauses] even before that interview, I would get protested just because I played Michigan. And I wonder, well where do you all work? Do you agree with every single policy of your employer? Should I try to undermine your right to be there? I think a lot of stuff comes up around celebrity. We sometimes want to hold our idols to standards we don't hold ourselves to. There's so much at play.

Q: I hate to try to just bottom-line you when you're advocating for nuance, but do you support the trans-exclusive policy of Michigan?
A: I don't support the policy because it's strangely worded. I don't understand what the policy is when they say "women born women." Because plenty of trans women I've talked to say they were born as women, even though it was into a male body. So there's so much room for discrepancy, I don't even understand what they're trying to say. I'd be psyched if Michigan decided they want to include trans women. I don't call it a trans-exclusive place, because there's a lot of trans people who go there. That raises a whole other issue of: what is trans? There are levels of transgenderness, and I believe a lot of our elders...when I talk to Ferron, a lot of her experience seems to be similar to my trans guy friends, who are living in a different time and have access to different medical care. I feel like transness is all over our queer community. And trust me, inside that festival are plenty of genderqueers and people messing with gender on so many levels. I know that I'm living in a world that does not accept women stating their own boundaries, and that's what I'm trying to acknowledge when I think about the debate. Are we incensed that these women are saying no? [pause] Oh my god, I'm going to get burned at the stake!

Q: [laughs] Well at least you're being honest and nuanced. And you didn't say "Down with trannies."
A: No, of course not. Michigan, to me, is not trying to define what a woman is. I think they're saying, this kind of woman is welcome here. It is a gray area, and that is the problem with the policy. It's not clear, and it's not acknowledging a certain kind of queerness.

Q: To end on a lighter note, I like hearing your respect for people who came before. That's kind of uncool in American culture.
A: Thank you. You know, the fact that we live in an ageist society is a factor in this debate. I do think there may be an element there of, "Oh, those unhip old ladies!" Anyway, I'd love it if you mentioned that I'm working on an album with Ferron. I want the younger generation to understand her music. That'll be out next spring or summer, and hopefully we'll tour together.

Bitch and the Exciting Conclusion play The Post Office Cabaret, 303 Commercial St., Provincetown, at 10 p.m. Oct. 6-8. Tickets $15. Info: 508.487.0130.