Night crawlers in both San Francisco and Boston will remember Charlie Anders as the host of the infamous Writers With Drinks spoken word series, which has featured literary guests from the worlds of erotica, queer fiction, poetry, science fiction and far, far beyond. The always outrageous event has been making waves for four years now, and has been chosen as Best Spoken Word Event by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Best Reason to Celebrate by The Bostonian.

Also the publisher of other (billed as "the magazine of pop culture and politics for the new outcasts"), Charlie has been published in the anthologies Pills Chills Thrills & Heartache, It's All Good, Pinned Down By Pronouns and The Anti-Capitalism Reader, as well as in Salon, the SF Bay Guardian, Tikkun, Genre, and ZYZZYVA.

With her debut novel Choir Boy, newly released by New York's legendary Soft Skull Press, Charlie offers a story that's both challenging and charming. The tale of Berry, a 13-year-old choirboy who wants to keep his voice forever -- and uses hormones to do it -- Choir Boy is a new brand of gender narrative, one that stands outside the usual categories. Like its protagonist, Choir Boy looks at gender from a fresh perspective -- and finds rare beauty in doing so.

We caught up with Charlie for a brief conversation about her novel.

Eros Zine: Given that your first novel is "A seriously unique story," as Michelle Tea so eloquently put it, was it a book you had to shop around to different publishers?

Charlie Anders: Soft Skull was always close to the top of my wish list of publishers for this book, especially once it dawned on me that it might not fit comfortably into an established literary genre.

I got a lot of positive feedback on an early draft of the novel, but I also got a strong sense that the freakish sense of humor that pervades the book might throw some people off. It's a book with an impure pedigree, like a mutant dog with goldfish DNA spliced in. It's sort of the literary equivalent of an Emo/Polka album.

EZ: You're well known for hosting the "Writers With Drinks" events on both coasts. How important was live performance to the development of the book? Did you perform excerpts from the novel as you were writing it? Did that affect the way the novel developed?

CA: I did read snippets of Choir Boy at Writers With Drinks way back in 2002 and that was really helpful in gauging how many crotch lacerations to include.

Actually, though, apart from that one airing, I didn't read much of Choir Boy before it came out. Which is good, since I've read from it dozens of times since it hit stores. I've had to be pretty careful about choosing passages to read from it, because it has a million supporting characters who pop in and out of the novel and have their own crises while nobody's looking.

I'm actually pretty happy with the immense supporting cast and the sense that they're all having their own disasters and freak-outs while we're not seeing them. A character will turn up whom we last saw five chapters ago, and it turns out in the meantime her boyfriend left her to go on an underwater tantric vision quest, that sort of thing. But it makes a lot of the book hard to read aloud, because you have to keep stopping to explain who all these random people are.

EZ: When did the idea for the central situations of the novel occur to you? Is this a book you've been planning for a long time?

CA: I definitely worked on it for a long time. Choir Boy started out much more as the story of Wilson, who ended up being a supporting character in the final draft. Berry was a minor character who popped up a few times in my first draft, and then I got fascinated by his determination to stay a choirboy and the extreme methods he was willing to take. I found that dedication to an impossible goal really compelling. You know in the end that he can't have what he wants, but he's not willing to give up on it anyway. And he does succeed in achieving his goal, in a way. Just not quite in the way he wants it to happen.

EZ: In choosing the theme of the novel -- the "accidental" trans kid who wants to remain a beautiful singer -- are you intentionally trying to take concepts of gender into a place where the usual politics don't apply? In what way is this book intended to "deconstruct" or go against the grain of what readers expect from a "trans novel"?

CA: It's definitely more of a twisted take on transgenderism. If you look at it one way, Berry loves the male bonding of the boys' choir so much, he's willing to become a girl to hold onto it. That's stretching it a little, but it's kind of true.

I definitely wanted to tell an atypical transgender story. I feel there's room for different kinds of stories. And I deliberately left it kind of ambiguous whether Berry really wants to be a woman, or whether he would have become transgender even if he hadn't been so determined to stay a choirboy. I'm not sure, though, that Choir Boy is really deconstructing expectations of transgender fiction.

I hope that people who read Choir Boy will question some of their assumptions about gender in general, more than about transgender people in particular.

EZ: In writing the book, were you influenced by other specific novels?

CA: I was pretty heavily influenced by Scott Heim's books Mysterious Skin and In Awe, so it was a total thrill when Scott read the book early on and said nice things about it. I read Ann Rice's castrati novel, Cry To Heaven, while I was working on Choir Boy, but it didn't make much impression on me. I definitely was thinking about Barbara Gowdy and Katharine Dunn while I worked on Choir Boy, but there's also a lot of other influences in there, including science fiction novels, cartoons and television shows.

EZ: One of the things I love about the book is in the early part of the book, the accurate portrayal of guy shenanigans and the crass "male" humor of Berry's choir-and-classmates. I get a sense that Berry just accepts the behavior at face value. Do you see the behavior of those male characters as being part of the book's gender commentary, or is that simply part of the "landscape" of the novel?

CA: I started out writing about my own experience as a choirboy, because of that weird mixture of extreme brutality and exaggerated cherubishness. When I was in a choir, we really did beat the crap out of each other -- well, mostly I just got beaten up, not so much the reverse -- and then pretend to be sublime and innocent in front of the congregation.

Then there's that dramatic shift when you turn 13 and you're not a boy any more, you're a man. So I guess the rough-housing is part of the "landscape," but it's also definitely part of the gender commentary. A "men and boys choir" is a super male-dominated, testosterone-rich environment, but it's in the service of all this ethereal beauty.

EZ: There's a lovely and harrowing scene where Marco, Berry's father, loses it and becomes violent -- a very different character than the sort of flaky hippy he was in the early pages of the book. And yet in some ways even then he seems just as ambivalent as Berry is about gender. In what ways do you think the ambivalence of Marco's character reflects that of Berry's?

CA: Wow, that is a tough question. If I ever get around to creating a reader's guide for the novel, I might steal this question. It made sense to me from a story point of view for Marco to be kind of freaky and scary, and he always alternates between silly and kind of alarming. He starts out the novel burning his wife's pantyhose and destroying all the appliances in the house. Marco is kind of set up as a failed adult and the specter of what Berry could become if he doesn't take control of his own destiny.

EZ: Judy, Berry's mother, is quick to classify Berry as her daughter -- whereas at that point Berry still isn't sure he wants to be a girl. In fact, Judy keeps trying to call Berry "Becky." Are there ways in which Judy reflects the parents and other supportive loved ones who can, ironically enough, see trans status as something they can deal with as long as they pick a pronoun -- but a "questioning" youth who doesn't identify as male or female to be more difficult to accept?

CA: I'm not sure how often that happens in real life. With so many genderqueer people coming along now, it probably will happen more. Judy tries really hard to be supportive and to make the situation work, and it's just a really scary confusing situation for her. But she's also definitely thrilled to have a daughter all of a sudden, with a whole new host of possibilities. It's like she sees Berry in a whole new light.

EZ: Choir Boy has received some wonderful praise from writers like Pagan Kennedy, Michelle Tea, and Scott Heim. Have reviews been positive? How about feedback from the trans community?

CA: So far, the response from the trans community has been overwhelmingly positive. TG writers like Gwen Smith have praised the book, and the members of some local SF transgender email lists have been very happy with it. Even though the book is definitely a non-traditional trans narrative, people seem to be embracing it, which is really terrific.

EZ: Is there another novel in your immediate future?

CA: I'm working on my second and third novels right now, and they're both very different from Choir Boy. My second novel, which I'm hoping to whip into shape soon, is about a group of young New Democrats who graduate from college early in the Clinton Administration. The disappointment of Bill Clinton's first term sort of mirrors their disillusionment with life as young adults. It's sort of morphed into a meditation on gender politics and the meaning of platonic love affairs, though.

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Choir Boy by Charlie Anders. 2005, Soft Skull Press. $16.95 hardcover.

Charlie Anders - by Thomas S. Roche

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