He said, s/he said: Jonathan Ames on Jonathan Ames.

I met Jonathan Ames in a small cafe in his Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, neighborhood to discuss Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs (Vintage), which Ames edited and for which he wrote the introduction. He arrived ten minutes late, even though he lives only a block away. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm congenitally ten minutes late for everything. I really apologize." I told him it was not a problem, that I have the same issue. But what turned out to be a problem was our interview. We began in person in the cafe, but then things took a bad turn and we had to complete the interview over e-mail. The two parts of our conversation are titled simply Parts 1 and 2.

PART 1

JONATHAN AMES: Are you a tranny chaser?

JONATHAN AMES: What's a tranny chaser?

JA: Come on. Don't be coy.

JA: Did you say goy?

JA: No, coy.

JA: Oh, I thought that maybe you said "Don't be goy" because I wasn't fessing up to something. You know, like I was showing WASPish restraint or something.

JA: No, I said coy, because you've written about transsexuals quite a lot. Like in your novel The Extra Man.

JA: Yeah, but that's a novel. Novels are fiction. Fiction means you make stuff up.

JA: Well, you've also written about transsexuals in your nonfiction essays.

JA: [silent]

JA: And now you've edited this book all about transsexuals, so just answer the question: Are you a tranny chaser or not?

JA: Is that tape recorder working?

JA: The red light is on. That means it's working.

JA: Check it. Just to make sure. Sometimes I've been interviewed and the thing doesn't work and we have to start all over and it's kind of, you know, frustrating.

JA: [I check the tape recorder. It's working.] Listen, I'm sorry if I put you on the spot with that first question. I can start with something else.

JA: It's all right. It's a legitimate question.

JA: So you do know what tranny chaser means?

JA: Yes, I know what it means! Do you know what it means?

JA: It means someone who chases trannies. Who likes to have sex with trannies.

JA: [Stands up.] You know, I'm not usually good at protecting myself and having boundaries, because of some weird erotic childhood abuse I suffered and enjoyed. So I let people do whatever they want with me. But I'm working on this. So fuck you and have a nice life. [Walks out. Thirty seconds later, he walks back in.] I'm really sorry. I almost never curse. That was bad. Let's do this over e-mail, okay? When I write I can be sort of honest. In person, it's too personal. You know?

JA: No problem. I'll e-mail you.

JA: You know my e-mail?

JA: Yeah.

PART 2

[e-mail]: I didn't get a chance to say it the other day, but I'm sorry about what happened in the cafe, and I hope we can make this work in e-mail. So, can you tell me how and why you came to put this book together?

[e-mail]: Before I answer that, let me address what happened in the cafe. The reason why I got upset about the tranny chaser question is this: The term tranny chaser usually refers to someone who likes preop (i.e., preoperative) transsexual prostitutes. But most preop transsexual prostitutes do not want sex-change surgery, and this book is about people who have undergone sex-change surgery. So I felt like you were making this about me and not the book, since the book has nothing to with tranny chasing.

But looking over what I just wrote, I realize that preop transsexual prostitutes shouldn't be called preops any more. There's some kind of cultural shift going on. When I first started hanging out with tranny prostitutes in 1992 (to do research for The Extra Man), most of the trannies spoke of someday getting the surgery. But nowadays almost none of the girls talk about it. "I like my cock," they say, or, "I like myself the way I am, why should I change?" Stuff like that. They've become more pro-cock or something. It's weird. Also, they refer to themselves as transies not trannies. So I think the phrase tranny chaser is probably outdated. It probably should be transy chaser.

[e-mail]: So are you a transy chaser?

[e-mail]: No, I'm not a transy chaser! Or a tranny chaser. In my youth, back in the early '90s, more than twelve years ago, I might have been classified as such. But not now.

[e-mail]: But you wrote, "nowadays almost none of the girls ..."--which would seem to imply that you're still in the scene.

[e-mail]: Is this an interview or a cross-examination? I'm not in the scene anymore! Occasionally, though, out of habit and nostalgia, I dip back in and visit a tranny club. My interest, the titillation I receive, is from being in the presence of something that is "other." And this may run parallel to the girls being more pro-cock. Perhaps they feel less of a need to completely transform and are satisfied with being other. They're not female, they're not male; they're other. And a sexual other in the twenty-first century has somehow become more acceptable, even though the United States is now a theocracy.

[e-mail]: I like what you wrote in your last e-mail, but can you briefly tell me how and why you put this book together?

[e-mail]: Okay. In 2001, I was sent the memoir of a transsexual--The Woman I Was Not Born to Be, by Aleshia Brevard--to blurb. I read the book and realized that Aleshia had picked me up in 1990 in a bar in Pennsylvania. It was a December-May thing, and I was May. She was in her early fifties and I was twenty-six. We had a few kisses that night and I never saw her again. At the time, in 1990, I thought she was a biological woman. Then I got her memoir eleven years later, which was, obviously, an incredible coincidence. It was like something out of a Paul Auster novel, but perverted. I blurbed the book, and Aleshia and I had a very nice reunion in San Francisco in 2002.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Anyway, after reading Aleshia's memoir in 2001, I noticed a rash of books that seemed to be about gender: Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, by Diane Middlebrook, which is about Tipton, a woman who passed as a man for years, fooling the jazz world and, supposedly, his/her own wives; As Nature Made Him, by John Colapinto, which is about a boy who lost his penis in a botched circumcision and was raised as a girl; and Crossing, by Deirdre McCloskey, which is the memoir of a University of Illinois economics professor who underwent sex-change surgery.

Also around this time, Jonathan Lethem gave me a copy of The Vintage Book of Amnesia, which he had edited, and I thought to myself, I want to put together an anthology, it looks like easy money. So I asked Lethem how much he was paid for the book and he told me a rather high number, which turned out to be all wrong. But I didn't discover that until much later. Thus spurred by visions of money, combined with the confluence of all these gender books, I got the idea in my head for an anthology whose unifying theme would be the changing of one's sex. I was going to include transsexual memoirs, the Middlebrook and Colapinto books, some stuff on hermaphrodites and transvestites, and works of fiction that featured transsexuals. Gore Vidal, Jerzy Kosinski, John Irving, and David Ebershoff all had novels that qualified on this front, and I figured I could self-promote and include a passage from The Extra Man.

I was teaching then at Indiana University, so I used the Kinsey Library and Xeroxed about a thousand pages of material and sent it off to Vintage. They made an offer that was one-third of what Lethem had told me he got. I checked with him and he realized he had made a mistake.

I was disappointed but took their offer, and the editor and I decided I should whittle the book down just to the memoirs of transsexuals. Then it was such a pain in the ass to get permissions--I had naively thought Vintage would do this for me--that I didn't do anything with the book for years. I kept waiting to make some money from Hollywood so that I could pay Vintage back the first part of my advance. Then some money from Hollywood did come in, and instead of giving up on the anthology, which I had been privately referring to as the "tranthology," I hired someone and he did everything and now the book is out! So the book is about sex and I did it for money. A classic tale!

[e-mail]: I think I've got enough now for the article. Thank you!

[e-mail]: You're welcome! Sorry, again, about the cafe!

[e-mail]: I forgive you!

In this column, writers dilate on their reading enthusiasms of the season.