Sherilyn Connelly: Another Dimension
If Sherilyn Connelly ever crosses your path, consider yourself lucky. Host of Pirate Cat Radio, and co-producer of the cult cable access show, kittypr0n,(Best of the Bay Award) she avidly pursues all channels of media to provoke and amuse. Her short stories and chapbooks are a sly take on the dark fringes of San Francisco's streets. Connelly's stage work ranges from portraying Karen Carpenter to directing her live adaptation of a Twilight Zone Episode. Welcome to another dimension. Welcome to Sherilyn Connelly.

Connelly is my family name. My first name is taken from the actress Sherilyn Fenn. My girlfriend was obsessed with her for a while after watching Twin Peaks, and I found the name unique and beautiful. I have no middle name.

Fresno, California. I moved to San Francisco in 1994 to attend film school at San Francisco State University and to get away from Fresno, not necessarily in that order.

I've always written, more at some times than others. I'm primarily a memoirist, though I'm moving into fiction. I don't write poetry per se, but I'm often billed as a poet and have featured at poetry-oriented events, reading my prose. It says a lot about San Francisco that poet is more of an umbrella term than writer.

In my darker moments I wonder if I really have gotten serious yet, but--2002, when I started going to open mics in San Francisco. Aside from my online diary, I hadn't done much writing for years. Hardly any at all during the nineties, really, except for occasional overlong, confessional emails to friends, which were the inspiration for my online diary. I think I'd decided that writing was one of those things I was just never going to get back into, a dream that was never going to be realized. Not unlike being a girl--didn't think that was ever going to happen, either. Thankfully, I found the courage to overcome both self-imposed obstacles.

No and no. I initially majored in Journalism at Fresno City College, but it didn't agree with me. I switched to Cinema, and graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. Although I didn't quite mesh with many of my fellow students, I have no regrets about that decision. Film has always been a passion, and through studying it, I learned a lot about the world, especially gender roles. Still, it seems like everyone I know has a Masters in Poetry or something equally hardcore. Me, I watched movies for six semesters and wrote incoherent papers about Sam Peckinpah. Film grads are the drummers of the lit world. (If you’re not sure what I mean by that, ask a drummer.)

I can't get arrested in the goth scene, and the tranny community is only slightly more aware of my existence. Ultimately I feel I'm part of the overall San Francisco arts/lit scene, which has been welcoming and nurturing. It has a very strong queer element, although I frequently participate in non-queer events. I feel very fortunate to live in such an inclusive city, in which my gender and/or sexuality is seldom an issue. I have no reason to believe I've ever lost a gig because I'm a tranny. As for the women's community, I also feel accepted. If anyone has a problem with the fact that I was born male, I haven't heard about it.

Looking back at my pre-transition writing, mostly the aforementioned epic letters to friends, I see my sensibilities and basic political views were mostly in place, as well as my idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation habits. But I am a different person. I used to be a boy who wanted to be a girl. Now I'm a girl dealing with having been raised as a boy. I'm doing a pretty good job, all things considered, but I'm still making it up as I go along. Not all of my writing is about being trans (that would be too boring), but it's an inescapable subtext.

My personal writing is about how I see the world, and that’s certainly changed since transitioning. The feature film Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me details the last seven days of Laura Palmer's downward spiral into sex and drugs, leading indirectly to her murder. I've always loved the film on a cinematic level, but the character's behavior was abstract to me, bearing no identifiable resemblance to my own life or experiences. Even though I was a straight boy, I was somewhat asexual, and even the extremely heterosexual eroticism meant little to me. Watching the film now, I identify with Laura in a way I’d never (consciously) imagined before. She’s doomed from the beginning, but I find myself envying her. In the deeper recesses of my soul—as well as some parts right on the surface--I want to be her, a powerfully sexual creature, feeling and experiencing more in the last week of her seventeenth and final year than I have in over thirty. These days, the film has a dark, erotic allure, as though it strikes a nerve I never had before.

This does not mean I consider a fictional homecoming queen with a coke habit and a penchant for rough play and drunken sex with strange men in bars to be a positive icon of femininity. I don’t even like boys, yet I feel a strong urge to go down that destructive path, to raid the temple of desire, to burn out rather than fade away. Again, I am not saying that’s what it means to be a woman. This is my own damage--and that is ultimately what my writing reflects. (Whether it's a coincidence that I started going blonde shortly after the last time I saw the movie is for history to decide.)

The second season of Six Feet Under gave me a similar sense of longing. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so just watch it and see.

Not as much as you might expect. Hell, not as much as I might expect, or hope. Although I've been writing in it nearly every day since February of 1999, it doesn't provide much spoken word material. When I am able to use something, extensive rewriting is usually required to make it presentable. My online diary is a half-decade's worth of embarrassingly rough drafts, typos and clumsy grammar intact, for the world to see. As it turns out, the world isn't looking.

Wicked Messenger was started by my pal Anders Toone and I in 2003. We called it a "21st century variant kabaret." (Misspelling intentional.) The idea was to feature a little bit of everything--poetry, homo-hop, spoken word, drag, music, burlesque, and so on. My personal goal was that every show there would feature at least one truly unusual performance, something the audience had never seen before, something to make us a little different from every other variety show in this performance-glutted City. (The male stripper on a pogo stick was perhaps my proudest moment in that regard.) We also made a conscious decision not to play up the gender angle, even though Anders and I are both trannies. All the same, it was sometimes referred to as a "gender variant kabaret.” Just goes to show.

Spelled lowercase with the numeral zero in place of the O and pronounced "kitty-PRAWN," kittypr0n is a teevee show comprised entirely of cats. I co-created and co-produce it with my partner Maddy. There are no human faces, except in the occasional archival footage or pictures in the background. Over the video we put unusual music and sounds, experimental/noise/ambient stuff, not the sort of thing associated with cats. We never use funny sound effects or music, and seldom if ever anything which the average person on the street would consider to be music at all. It ain’t fuckin’ America’s Funniest Home Videos, y’know? On a more highfalutin' level, it's a way to satisfy my love of visual arts. I wasn't a cinema major rather than an English major just to avoid reading The Grapes of Wrath, after all, and I doubt I'll be making movies anytime soon.

I've never been involved in a project of Lynn's per se, though we've toured and worked on plays together. Anyhow, the theatre has influenced my writing in the sense that I find myself writing things which are much more character-based, better suited to being performed rather than simply spoken, if you grok the difference. One of my most popular pieces only really works when performed aloud, and with a lot of energy. On paper, it isn't nearly as powerful, and reads like what it is: a script. Acting is a lot of fun, and I live in eternal fear of boring my audience, so occasionally getting theatrical with my spoken word isn't a bad thing.

I do consider myself a feminist, and have since before I transitioned. Equality of the sexes has always made sense to me, especially since I viewed gender as fluid at best. Otherwise, I tend not to wave flags, at least not ostentatiously. I could put in my bio that I'm a tranny goth dyke atheist vegetarian who loves noise music and thinks that Star Trek Voyager was the most underrated series of the franchise, but it's more fun to just be myself and let other people figure it out. They'll focus on whatever they want, and I don't fret about it. I'm amused by how much attention the goth aspect gets, and I have no reason to believe than anyone's ever thought to themselves, gosh, I'd love to book Sherilyn for this show, but she wears black clothes, stripey tights and too much eyeliner. When I featured at a local open mic called Smack Dab, the promoters advertised me as "Sherilyn Connelly, goth superhero." That was my most favoritest flyer EVER.

I don’t claim to represent any particular group with my writing. I hope people can connect with my words, but if they’re offended because they find something I wrote to be unflattering to women or trannies or any other group, they’ve missed the point. I'm far too solipsistic to claim to speak for anyone but myself.

I don't really have a method or a routine, though I need one. Often I'll jot stuff down in my notebook and expand on it later at the computer.

Ah, rewriting. That's the majority of the work. What first comes out of my head is usually kinda...um...unpolished, and requires no small amount of reshaping to be truly presentable. (Again, I present my diary as a sprawling example of unshaped, largely unpresentable material.) My best editing usually happens right before reading a piece in front of an audience for the first time. That's when the errors really leap out. You'll often find me scribbling and re-scribbling furiously before a show.

I am, as they say, currently between day jobs. Ideally a job would allow me the opportunity to write, but, well, beggars and choosers and all that.

I write because I'm here and living this life. (Not that I'm anything special. Every life should be documented, however mundane it may seem.) I want the readers or listeners to have some idea of who I am, of what it's like to be me. As I go along, I get a better idea of who I am, too.

An incomplete, alphabetical list: Lynn Breedlove, Christa Faust, Spalding Gray, Courtney Love and Yoko Ono. Spalding’s influence is especially strong regarding my autobiographical writing. He was so unafraid. Even when fictionalizing events from his life, he knew the audience would take it at face value, and he wasn't worried about being seen as a Bad Person. I'm trying to find that courage.

Honesty. Don't be afraid to tell how it is, how YOU are.

There is no such thing as Too Much Information. Don't ever let anyone tell you not to write about something. It's your life, not theirs.