It’s hard to imagine that any couple could be busier than Diane and Jake Anderson-Minshall. The third book of their co-authored Blind Eye Mystery Series – Blind Faith -- was recently published. Diane’s solo erotic novel, Punishment with Kisses, came out in June. Jake is working on his solo novel, a young adult book called Swimming Upstream. He also is the syndicated columnist of TransNation and is a radio show co-host. Diane is editor in chief of Curve magazine.They are both working on their memoir, Queerly Beloved, and are foster parents. It doesn’t seem there are enough hours in the day for them to accomplish all that they do … and on top of it all they do it well. Diane was named one of PowerUp’s 2006 Top 10 Amazing Women in Showbiz. Blind Faith was a finalist at the 2009 Lambda literary awards, which recognize excellence in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature.
The couple’s story began some 20 years ago… as a lesbian couple. They co-founded Girlfriends magazine in the early ‘90s and have spent many years as journalists for a variety of publications.
In 2005 Jake underwent a gender reassignment transition, making their relationship more complex but no less committed. They have been married as both a lesbian couple and a hetero couple.
SheWired caught up with Diane and Jake in Portland, Ore., where they live.
SHEWIRED: Congratulations on your nomination for a Lambda Literary Award. What was that experience like?
Jacob Anderson-Minshall: It was awesome, really awesome and to make it to the final was so incredible.
Diane Anderson-Minshall: It was so beloved but completely unexpected … we are sometimes a little hard to categorize because we are a lesbian and a trans man writing together, aiming at a lesbian and queer audience and I think sometimes people don’t know … should we be in the lesbian category or should we be someplace else… who are we writing for, who is our audience and who are we to tell these stories?
SW: You both write the books. That collaborative process fascinates me …
D: It’s the one thing that everybody always asks about, too. The thing I really love about the collaborative process is that it is no single person’s voice…It’s not really my voice … It’s not Jake’s voice.
SW: I couldn’t distinguish one voice from the other and I tried…
J: I think that’s a combination of things. We know each other’s voices really well, to the point that we can almost write from the other person’s voice …
D: We were reading the books afterwards, individually, and I would say, listen to this line, Jake. This is so brilliant. I can’t believe you came up with that and he’d say, ‘I didn’t… that was yours,’ and we had that a lot.
I call it a little mini factory … we truck along with the same manuscript 24/7 and we rotate in and out … so wherever I leave it at the end of the day that’s where he takes off and he starts writing from.
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SW: Do you have any rules?
D: We do. We sit down and kind of agree on a couple of basic things … the main thing is who’s going to be killed … and we decide if there are any major arcs that the characters need to go with, like if somebody is going to be dealing with relationship issues or a trauma or something like that… Once we have decided on those, whoever has it takes it whichever direction and the next person has to catch up with it and deal with it. We each have a character that we have veto power over. We know that character more than the other person, so if we absolutely say there is no way she would do that then the other person has to suck it up and change the text.
J: I feel that in some ways our work is always collaborative and part of that is because we do a lot of bouncing ideas off each other and we do a lot of reading and editing and commenting on each other’s work.
SW: You’ve been together almost 20 years. That must help…
D: Absolutely. The term co-dependent lesbian couple… we practically coined that when we were baby dykes because it so perfectly illustrated who we were. And now, even as a queer, male-female couple, we are still enmeshed … We co-founded Girlfriends together in the 90s … Now we are collaborating on not just the books but on parenting together so teaming up with this kind of work seems logical.
SW: Why did you decide to become foster parents?
D: We talked about having kids and we have gone back and forth on raising children and whether that meant biological children or adoption … When we were writing Blind Faith we were doing research into reparative therapy and the plight of gay kids… how many are homeless, how many are in the foster system because they are thrown out of their house… It kind of dovetailed with us talking about how we could do something where we were there to foster parent a queer or transgender teenager and see if we could fulfill our need to have children in our lives and our need to give back to our community… the younger people in our community… We ended up getting into a particular program that is very specific and it’s a very intense program because you work with teenage boys who are adjudicated.
J: … that means that they have been through the juvenile justice system and we’re actually considered part of the therapeutic team ... When we first got accepted we started to realized how adult our queer lives had been. There is so much material they don’t want these kids to have access to …
D: We struggle a lot with our own visibility and our own outness … The part of it that is great is that you’re able to have an impact on somebody’s life …
J: It’s one of those things where you burn out quickly. Our back-up plan is not to get out of foster parenting entirely… it would probably be to move out of this program and go to something that was a little less intense.
SW: Diane, how do handle all you do? Curve, foster parenting, your burlesque group, writing novels…
D: I’m not really sure actually… I don’t sleep enough … definitely I think that’s part of it…. I have a great support team for all of these things …
J: We are usually juggling multiple things and that definitely has been a stressor … we try to switch off a lot and give each other a lot of space. We try to have different nights where one of us gets to go and the other person stays with the kids …
D: I still fly to the Curve office in San Francisco once a month and I’m usually there 7-10 days and then I come back home for three weeks --- I’m lucky that I have a partner who can take care of the kids that whole time that I’m gone… A few months into the foster parenting, I remember saying to Jake, I need to take my hat off to any single parent out there. I don’t know how anybody can parent alone and still have a job and outside interests. Also, when I started B6 (Bang Bang Betty's Big Beautiful Bombshells burlesque group). I turned 40 and I said I want to get a tattoo and I think I want to start burlesque dancing. I have a lot of work in my life and I need to have something that is fun but once I was doing it I realized it was my first non-career related hobby maybe ever. A lot of time what I envy about other people is not their success but their ability to have BBQs on Sunday afternoons.
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SW: When Jake transitioned it had to put a lot of pressure on your relationship. What kind of a reaction did you get from the lesbian community?
D: It’s funny … because initially I was super worried and Jake was even more worried about how this would affect my career. Generally the response has been really great. People have been pretty open and supportive. I am definitely very Trans positive but I am open to the dialog. I did talk with my publisher right away to make sure I wasn’t going to lose my job. That was a concern, that people would say you are now with a man so you are no longer a lesbian therefore you can longer edit the magazine
J: I have been really surprised at how positive it has been. We definitely have had moments… people who we thought were friends. It sort of enrages me. It’s one thing to say something about me and to say I should not be in the queer community even though I love it and I want to be part of it but to pretend that my decision about my body and my gender forced her to change her entire identity is really giving me too much power and really like stripping it from her and her ability to be who she is …
D: I do try to turn that around to people if that ever comes up. I generally say, so is it your partner’s genitalia that defines who you are, because it doesn’t define me. I still am perfectly happy to define myself as a lesbian.
J: A certain amount of it is, you rejected me. You were part of my community, you were a lesbian and then you said, I don’t want to be that anymore and it is really hard not to take that as a personal rejection …
SW: How important do you think lesbian books are for the community?
D: I think they are absolutely critical. I think if there is any talk that we don’t need lesbian publishing at this point that it’s sort of ridiculously premature. I think that lesbian books and lesbian media overall -- and I mean that from Curve to SheWired to way back to The Ladder -- that media and those books help us tell our own stories in our own ways and they help define our communities and our culture …
Look for Diane and her Punishment with Kisses 2009 Bookstore, Boudoir or Backyard BBQ Tour. If you gather 20 friends she’ll come to you, do readings, autograph signings and hang out with you and your friends. Current tour cities include Salt Lake City, Boise, New Orleans, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Atlanta and New York.
You can read more about the Anderson-Minshalls and their books at anderson-minshall.com,blindeyemysteries.comand boldstrokesbooks.com.
