The last time I saw Jill Soloway, it was the autumn of 2014. The writer and director of Transparent had flown over from the US ahead of the show’s launch, and we met in a central London hotel room. Soloway had more than an hour’s hair and makeup beforehand, and was visibly nervous, uncertain what the reception would be for a show with a trans character at its centre; Soloway, I wrote in my notes, “fiddled a little girlishly with her long hair”. Bruce Gilbert, Soloway’s husband, was working as music supervisor on Transparent, and we discussed how nice it was to have the support of your spouse in the workplace. One thing Soloway did not especially want to discuss were the personal experiences that influenced the show, and I had to ask about them several times before it finally emerged that Soloway’s own parent was transgender.
Well, two and a half years can be a long time. Transparent, of course, has been a huge international success, a major force in bringing discussions of trans rights to the mainstream. Soloway is now rightfully celebrated as one of the most original voices working in this golden age of TV and has been duly garlanded with awards. On a personal level there have been changes, too. Soloway and Gilbert have separated and the director now identifies as a gender non-conforming queer person, who prefers to be referenced with gender-neutral pronouns (they/them/their), and if reading an interview in that style takes some getting used to, I can assure you that writing it up did, too. Soloway has also become much more comfortable talking in interviews about how their shifting gender and sexual politics inform their work, of which there now seems to be a never-ending stream.
On top of currently finishing up the fourth series of Transparent, writing a memoir and making a movie, Soloway has made another series for Amazon, I Love Dick, based on Chris Kraus’s cult 1997 novel, starring Kathryn Hahn, Kevin Bacon and Griffin Dunne. The most reductive description of the book is that it’s about a married woman, Chris Kraus, and her obsession with an academic called Dick. But what it’s really about is chaotic female sexuality and the ethics of using your life in your work – in other words, ideal grist for Soloway’s mill – and they have done a clever job in adapting a seemingly unadaptable novel. However, where Transparent is underpinned by familial love and Jewish comedy, making it accessible to the masses, I Love Dick is soaked in feminist rage, so I suspect its appeal will be a tad niche.
This time we meet at Soloway’s house, up in the hills of Silverlake, Los Angeles. It’s one of the most desirable areas of the city, although its bohemian reputation is now somewhat undermined by the expensive cars parked in front of the rambling bungalows – Porsches, 4x4s and, of course, Priuses. Soloway still shares the bright and rambling house with Gilbert and their eight-year-old son (Soloway also has an older son from a previous relationship), and glimpses of their now wildly successful life are scattered around, like Through the Keyhole clues: a script for Transparent is on the table, a clutch of Emmys are shoved in the drinks cabinet and an assistant is in the kitchen making guacamole. Soloway, who looks like Lena Dunham’s older sibling and is as warm and engaging as I remember, is in a checked shirt and Gucci pyjama trousers. The long hair is gone, replaced by cool little quiff, and unlike last time, Soloway is bare-faced: “I think I’d had two hours of makeup before last time we met, didn’t I? Wow,” Soloway says, marvelling at their past self. “Anyway, have you seen the show? Tell me what you think.”
What I think is this: no one creates female characters as original as Soloway does, in all their angry, damaged and highly sexed glory. There’s Rachel in the 2013 film Afternoon Delight (played by Soloway’s neighbour and regular collaborator, Kathryn Hahn), who hires a stripper as a nanny and throws her family into chaos; or Sarah (Amy Landecker) in Transparent, who trashes two marriages and begs dominatrixes to spank her; and now there’s Chris (also Hahn), gloriously unhinged in her fury at a world so freaked out by female art and desire. And seeing women like this on screen, I say to Soloway, feels almost as revolutionary as putting a trans character at the centre of a show.
“I totally agree,” Soloway says, drinking an iced tea on the sofa. “And in many ways I Love Dick’s the perfect show for now, because so many women are so filled with rage. If we were in Hillary’s America, I think people would have been like: ‘What’s she so mad about?’ But now it’s like: ‘Well of course she’s furious.’ It felt like the entire planet got sexually harassed [when Trump was elected].”
Soloway’s production company is called Topple, as in toppling the patriarchy. What does that mean in a practical sense? “Well, I would just like to topple the whole thing: get Trump out of office, have a female president, a queer president, a person of colour, that war is not the default. And if Trump can be president I have to believe that something like this can also rise. I just hope [I Love Dick] is something women will tuck under their arms and hold close to them, because if Transparent was about the trans community then Dick is really about the female gaze. This really is a celebration of the feminine,” they say.
Soloway has been trying to celebrate the feminine since they started writing for TV. While working on shows including Six Feet Under, United States of Tara and Grey’s Anatomy, Soloway kept writing their own stuff, and has “at least 10 scripts” on their desk featuring female characters, many of which have what they describe as a “hipster Jewiness” to them and “a so-called inappropriate attitude to sex”.
“I do feel lucky that there was a sea change in the past five years with Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, Broad City and Amy Schumer, where a quote unquote unlikable – that’s just a phrase that reflects the mainstream view – female heroine can carry a show. Because before I kept being told: ‘Where’s the great man at the centre of this?’ or ‘She seems a little difficult,’” Soloway says, their voice spiking with sarcasm.
Soloway was also known for being a little difficult. In 2011, Soloway was turned down for a writing job on Glee because of their tricky reputation and their agent lent them money to tide them over. But instead of using that loan to pay off their debts, Soloway made Afternoon Delight, which led to a best director award at Cannes, which in turn led to Transparent. It’s a classic Soloway story, in that they refused to do the conventional thing and ended up winning anyway, which would certainly annoy a lot of people. But what does Soloway think people meant when they labelled them “difficult”?
“I probably was a little bit difficult, actually. If I was on somebody else’s show and I felt something could be better, it would be hard for me not to stand up,” Soloway says.
On set, Soloway encourages everyone to speak up if they see a problem, pointing out mistakes that will “illuminate the path to a more truthful moment”, wresting the usual directing techniques away from those with “masculine intention”. Talking with Soloway is a little reminiscent of the conversations I had with friends when we discovered feminist and queer theory and revelled in the jargon. And, as in those university days, the experience is both thrilling and occasionally bewildering.
Soloway talks about how “the gaze is male, and the urge to squarify the activity is male”, which is fun, even if it doesn’t get us very far (so should screens now be circular?). But no one can accuse Soloway of being just talk: their sets are famously diverse and I Love Dick has been directed largely by women, including Andrea Arnold and Kimberly Peirce. Soloway doesn’t even yell “Action” or “Cut”, preferring “Go on then” and “That’ll do.”
“All the traditions of film-making – the shouting, the prioritising of schedules, the way it feels a little like war and there’s a lot of men on set, the being on call all the time, they work very well for anyone who has a masculine intention and never wants to be home. But we brought feminist, cooperative, utopian ideals to the workplace in a way that gave this immediate bounty,” Soloway says proudly, and the Emmys in the booze cupboard are a testament to that.
One utopian ideal that Soloway brings to their sets is what they call “doing box”, which is when everyone gets together at the beginning of the day, stands on a box and shares whatever they’re going though in their personal life. This way, Soloway says, “Everyone knows humans are prioritised over time and money here. It’s a patriarchal-toppling tool.”
Soloway pauses for a moment: “I’m actually renovating a house down the road and I brought this theory to the guys working on it.”
And how did the builders take to being told to share their feelings?
“I was really worried they were just going to think I was a total asshole. Then I finally gave myself permission to say one day: ‘I do this thing at work and I want to try it here.’ We now have a weekly meeting and we go around and say how they are. We call it emotional check-in. It’s really sweet,” Soloway grins.
Has it helped with the house? (Soloway is moving to this new house, and Gilbert is staying in the family home.) “For sure and … OH MY GOD YOU GOT YOUR HAIR CUT IT LOOKS AMAZING!”
Soloway breaks off to shout at a short-haired woman who has just walked in. It’s Soloway’s older sister, Faith, who stays with them a few months a year while they work on Transparent together, and the conversation that ensues could be straight out of the show:
Faith: It’s great, but it feels a little Hitler-y.
Jill: You don’t look like Hitler.
Faith: I don’t?
Jill: No, you look so cute. Will it change the way you move through the world, do you think?
Faith: I’m sure it will [she does an exaggerated cowboy walk and they both laugh.] I’m such a boy, right?
Jill: Yeah, it looks great. Super cute.
I point out that the two of them are wearing near-identical checked shirts.
Faith: Oh yeah!
Jill: Yeah, it looks cute, right?
“Cute” is one of Soloway’s favourite praise words now when referring to a person’s looks. “When people gender me as female, I feel strange, and if someone is like, ‘You look so pretty’ or ‘beautiful’, I feel offended. It’s like I’m succeeding at something feminine when I’m not trying, and that feels like a strange insult,” Soloway says.
These days, Soloway adds, they get rid of their whole wardrobe every six months: “I’m changing every day, so every six months I’m like: ‘None of this stuff makes sense any more.’ I got rid of every even slightly feminine shoe. There’s a feeling of being grown up, and moving through the world and feeling like I’m the subject instead of the object and that doesn’t really work for me if I’m feeling feminine.”
But, I say, surely the revolution is in re-defining what feminine or female attractiveness means rather than rejecting femaleness? After all, I Love Dick makes the feminine the subject.
“I think it’s more about the binary, the masculine and feminine,” Soloway says, lapsing back into the jargon. “There will always be incredibly masculine people and completely feminine people, but that has nothing to do with people’s bodies, whether they have a penis or vagina. And besides those two poles there’s also a place in the middle, the non-binariness, the people who don’t register as one or the other. I’m happy to speak on behalf of women and on behalf of feminism. But I notice when people see me as non-binary, I get treated more as a human being,” Soloway says.
Hearing Soloway, whose work is so profoundly feminist, suggest that the best way to be treated as a human is to not be a woman is so befuddling that I am almost speechless. But, I manage, isn’t the point that the definition of a woman should be broader, as they have shown in their work. To retreat from being called a woman feels as if they are giving up the field.
“I hear that, and I felt that way a couple of years ago,” Soloway says. “I do agree that ‘woman’ shouldn’t mean a particular thing, that it can mean anything. But the words man and woman, male and female, they describe who we used to be. You know, there are a lot of trans men who menstruate and there are a lot of trans women who get offended if the feminist movement is about vagina hats. [The binary] is not going to stand in the future.”
I don’t doubt that the world would be better with fewer divisions, but the reason Soloway gives for wanting to dissolve the gender binaries is so astonishing to me it feels like a betrayal. Unfortunately, time is pressing and I have to move on, but as soon as I leave the house I send Soloway an email: “Do you see any contradiction,” I write, “in that your work celebrates femaleness but you personally are rejecting it?”
A lengthy correspondence ensues, in which Soloway sends me emails filled with phrases such as “a non-binary, spherical, balanced crucible for being that is un-gendered”. But after a few weeks of this, in which I basically ask the same questions over and over and they patiently reply in various ways, Soloway sends an email that makes me sit up: “I identify as trans, which means that I am not seeking to synthesise my appearance with the label assigned to me at birth and instead am opting to live in a space where a label other than male or female is used to define me,” they write.
I hadn’t heard Soloway use the word “trans” in relation to themself before, so I ask them to elaborate. “Under the transbrella, there are so many identities. I haven’t made the big ‘I’m trans’ announcement because the politics in the community are so intense. It’s more like I had the realisation that the word cis didn’t work for me, so first there was the ‘not-cis’ revelation, which linguistically means the same thing as trans. As I said, most people who play with gender norms like butch women don’t identify as trans so it’s a little wobbly. I think in a year or two, more people will.”
Soloway grew up in Chicago and their father was an emotionally absent psychiatrist. Their mother, by contrast, was a teacher and enthusiastically involved in the civil rights movement: “Faith and I definitely grew up just knowing that trying to make something happen is your antidepressant for getting through the day – I have to change the world.” When Soloway’s father came out as trans in 2012, a lot “made sense.” The highly sophisticated second series of Transparent looks at how gender and sexual traumas reverberate in families and impact later generations, so I ask if Soloway thinks their father’s issues with gender affected Soloway and Faith?
“Oh totally. Faith and I, we used to have an idea for a play called The Soloway Brothers, and we both have thought of ourselves as boyish our whole lives, even though I was more female. I guess I didn’t see myself as a boy when I was younger, but now we both see ourselves as boys, kind of jokingly.”
However Soloway sees themself, there is no doubt they are now having a good time. They are currently single, having recently come out of a relationship with beat poet Eileen Myles. “I’m having my queer adolescence now,” Soloway smiles. “It’s fun.” We then talk a little about the cliched dynamics men and women fall into in relationships, and Soloway tells me a story about how they recently eavesdropped on some couples in a jacuzzi (“And the men were like: ‘If I get her a kitchen, maybe I’ll get sex!’”) that makes me double up laughing.
At this point, the Guardian’s photographer, Sarah, turns up and suddenly the room is flooded with women: aside from Faith, there’s the photographer, me and at least three assistants variously connected to Soloway, and Soloway promptly involves us all in the photo.
“I don’t want to look like a girl, OK?” Soloway tells Sarah, and one of the assistants brings down a recent magazine shoot to show what shouldn’t be done.
“Look how they fixed my hairline, and it looks like they airbrushed on makeup or something,” Soloway says, and we all collectively recoil. Soloway produces a photo of Pedro Almodóvar, saying they want to look like him instead.
“You should wear this blazer,” one of the assistants says.
“Do you think? What do you think?” Soloway asks, turning to me and putting on the blazer. Soloway looks great and I say so.
My taxi back to the airport arrives and we hug goodbye. As I leave, Soloway, Sarah and the assistants are all deciding which pair of glasses Soloway should wear (“So cute!”). In another era I would have described them as looking like a creative female collective. Now, I don’t know what the right words would be. But I will say this: it sure looks like they’re having fun.
I Love Dick is on Amazon Prime Video now.
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