Jill Soloway on Dating ‘Butch’ Women and Identifying as Femme

Jill Soloway is under construction. This is true both ­literally—Soloway’s house, in the Los Feliz hills of Los Angeles, smells faintly of sawdust and has caution tape ringed around the banister—and in a deeper sense: The writer and director recently came out as gender nonbinary, meaning Soloway doesn’t identify as a woman or a man and prefers to use singular they pronouns rather than she or he.

It’s a significant shift for someone who has long been a proponent of the “female gaze” in filmmaking, meaning movies and TV that present women as the protagonists rather than as objects of male pleasure. For many years Soloway was a producer and writer on shows like Six Feet Under and Grey’s Anatomy, but you most likely know them as the creator of Amazon’s Transparent, inspired by Soloway’s own parent coming out as transgender. Onstage, accepting the Emmy for best director of a comedy series last year, Soloway yelled, “Topple the patriarchy!” (Topple is also the name of their production company, which most recently produced the Amazon series I Love Dick.)

The past few years have been full of change in other ways too. After Soloway and their former partner, music supervisor Bruce Gilbert, separated in 2015, Soloway dated punk poet Eileen Myles. The couple broke up last year, and these days Soloway is enjoying being single, setting up house, and focusing on writing. We sit down for a conversation in Soloway’s bedroom, which is painted a soft, purplish gray, with French doors that open out onto a wide patio. Soloway does a lot of writing here in bed, they explain, particularly on a “hilarious and moving” book about the past five years of their life, from when their parent came out as trans to when they came out as nonbinary. It’s been quite a journey.

Glamour: How do you feel about being part of “TV’s female revolution” in Glamour when you don’t identify as a woman anymore?

Jill Soloway: I’m happy to always be included in the list of women. I feel like nonbinary can mean both. I’d like to be in the sections about female leaders and male leaders. Why not?

Glamour: How did you start to question your female identity?

JS: I always had trouble with the idea of getting dressed up. I remember being 25 and dating this guy, and he was talking about a wedding that we were supposed to go to. I was just like, “Ugh, weddings. People getting dressed up. Why do people do it?” I could put on a dress and do hair and makeup, but I felt like I was in drag. I couldn’t wait to get home: That feeling of, “Get these Spanx off me. Get these shoes off me.” When Transparent happened, every couple of days somebody was coming over to put makeup on me, and then we would look in the mirror and decide if I was pretty. It’s assumed that if you’re a woman, you want to be the prettiest version of yourself. It always put me in a bad mood. It was like, “OK, I’m successful. I’m supposed to be happy. Well, why aren’t I happy?” Part of the problem was that my looked-at-ness had become a priority over my art making. Over and over again it was like, “I don’t have time for this. I want to work.” I love writing. I don’t love somebody putting false eyelashes on me.

Glamour: Why did you feel you couldn’t say no to hair and makeup?

JS: Before I had all this information about my parent being trans, I just accepted certain aspects of what it meant to be female or feminine or femme. [Recently] I was thinking about being a little girl and letting your tummy stick out, and then puberty hits, and you have to hold your tummy in. And you’re not really allowed to let your tummy out again until you’re pregnant. To just walk around leading with the belly—you can’t do it. You can, but you won’t be sexy. And that, to me, just feels like a real kind of handicap.

Glamour: Did that shift after you started dating women?

JS: I was still mostly dating butch women and identifying as femme. So my prettiness was part of our dynamic. Then I [realized] I don’t actually want to be femme at all. When I started thinking of myself as butch—oh my God. It started to change everything: the way I walked, the way I sat, the way I talked. I said my ideas out loud more. I didn’t think about how I sounded. A lot of this is influenced by Eileen Myles. I was so in love with her and jealous of her; I really studied the minuscule amount of difference between her interior self and her exterior self. We’ve all heard women say, “I have to put my face on”; [that implies] there’s a very big difference between who they are alone and who they are outside. I wanted to put together my interior and my exterior.

Glamour: Of course there are some women who sincerely enjoy lipstick and heels!

JS: There are a lot of women who are thrilled to have a conversation about shoes…. [But] the category of nonbinary or gender-queer feels like a relief to me. It’s sort of a safe home, a place in which my self wishes to reside…. I know it’s awkward and hard to understand, but all we have is the language. These words are attempting to catch up to something that is a question of how one exists inside one’s mind or one’s soul.

Glamour: How do you work differently than straight male showrunners or directors?

JS: I’m working a little bit more like a psychologist or a magician, offering the actors the opportunity to spend a lot of time on the set until they feel like they’ve lived there for 20 years. And then we’ll tiptoe in with a camera. We’ll put some music on. The camera operator will shimmy over close to them. I’ll slowly but surely turn the music down. I’ve secretly told somebody to start rolling sound. And we just swish into the feeling. I don’t know if that’s female or feminine, or just not male, or not the way things have been done. [We want to] generate a whole new style.

Glamour: If heels and lipstick once limited you, what is making you feel free these days?

JS: The shorter my hair gets, the more I’m like, “Oh, I actually don’t have to look in the mirror, because there is nothing to adjust.” Wearing men’s clothes and having my waistband be down here, rather than up here—’cause then I can just stick my stomach out.

Glamour: Belly pleasure is real.

JS: Yeah, it’s real. And I’m so into decorating my room and wanting it be both masculine and feminine at the same time and just have all parts of me.

Ann Friedman writes for New York magazine and the Los ­Angeles Times; sign up for her newsletter highlighting great stuff to read at annfriedman.com.

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