A few days ago, I got on a call with Pierce Eldridge; founder and editor of SISSY ANARCHY, an online/offline poster cum publication cum publisher; to talk resource sharing in trans and queer spaces, slipperiness, and Misha Honcharenko’s upcoming novel, TRAP UNFOLDS ME GREEDILY.
Misha’s book is currently being crowdfunded. Consider donating here if you can.
Andy Grace Hayes: What’s been happening?
Pierce Eldridge: The new haircut looks beautiful—
Oh my God, I'm so sorry. There's a truck that's coming.
I think he's going to pick up the bin.
Dammit, he is. It's going to be so loud.
AGH: There’s going to be a giant truck?
PE: Oh no! We don't have enough time.
AGH: I can't hear anything. Is it making the noise now?
PE: Oh really? You’re going to be able to hear it in a moment.
AGH: I’m imagining, like, atomic levels of noise.
PE: Look, I’ll show you.
AGH: Who’s that?
PE: That’s a dog. Hi, dog. He's about to—
AGH: Hi, dog.
[Yellow-lidded dumpster tips into a dump truck.]
On this end, that was completely inaudible.
PE: Was it loud?
AGH: No nothing. I heard nothing.
PE: It’s like deafening here. [Laughs]
AGH: I looked this up and I thought it was fun, it's your birthday. It's SISSY ANARCHY's birthday soon.
PE: Oh my God!
AGH: Your first post was on the 22nd of March.
PE: Whoa, so it's upcoming?
AGH: Yeah, it's coming up. So, coming up to a year, how's SISSY been going?
PE: Good question. That’s so exciting. I didn't even know that. I suppose I don't really celebrate these anniversary things. I think that's because when I was living in Townsville, up north, there was an incredible woman I worked with who religiously did not believe in birthdays. She didn't think it was a cool thing to celebrate the anniversary of someone just coming into the world.
AGH: I think it’s intensely chic to forget your birthday, to forget how old you are.
PE: Yeah, like, ‘I haven't celebrated that in years.'
In terms of SISSY ANARCHY this year, I think we're trying to be more thoughtful with what we do. Though simultaneously, by doing that, we're also focused on creating more of a lasting impact on readers, especially because I feel like there’s scope to grow it internationally.
Living between London and so-called Australia, I have been exposed to the disparity between a metropolis—and their communities and what they have access to—against what I feel like is quite a disparate connection to resources and a lack of connection happening in rural environments.
The anti-trans rhetoric, whilst in both places is very severe, I think can tend to feel more ostracising when you're in a town or a suburb without access to community gatherings or cultural institutions that reflect trans people living, experiencing joy, experiencing happiness.
SISSY ANARCHY is so bred on the type of violence that we're seeing in the UK at the moment. You know, Sunak recently in Parliament had those cruel comments about our sister and then the efforts at the moment to defund health schemes which are meant to be there to promote queer and trans programming and health and safety.
All of that insidiousness is being attacked at the centre, but from that centre, I feel like fractures emerge and filter into these rural spaces. That type of venom—what these disgusting people are trying to do—substantiates and gives reason to conservative people to not only kill us in metropolis spaces but also to kill us in rural ones.
The thing I find most interesting too is that the types of anarchism that happen between these environments look very different. I think SISSY ANARCHY will always have its roots in London because that's where it began, but I think we're trying, this year, to infiltrate and abolish picket fence neighbourhoods and these spaces that are trying to hold out against us.
It's been going good, you know? We’re going into publishing books.
AGH: Yeah, tell me about the book.
PE: We’re doing the book with Misha [Honcharenko], TRAP UNFOLDS ME GREEDILY. It's a super gruelling read, but I'm excited for people to get a copy of that because I think these types of readings are so necessary for creating a textual form of anarchy that I think is so reliant on forming and creating groups.
We're crowdfunding for that at the moment as well, which is an interesting test to see how people can move with mutual aid to publish texts that need to be released. Well, I mean, I say they need to be read, but, you know, the jury's out until it's in the reader’s hands! Let’s see what people say!
AGH: I like the idea of community borne not solely from the academy where we've seen a lot of queer anarchist theorising before. Instead, moving into a broader space, a more public space—be that online or in person, that gives people agency.
PE: Yeah, I love the point where it becomes the community that surrounds it. The first two issues of SISSY ANARCHY serve London and the types of people who are contributors to it there. But I think I want to figure out how—like when I was in Miami, or as I am experiencing the lack of these conversations in so-called Australia—how to create a pseudo version of SISSY ANARCHY that is reflective of the types of people who are here? Not only is the name super striking, which will stir heads, but it also becomes a good way to have intense radical conversations about the types of anarchism that exist in these spaces.
I want to go through this idea of deconstructing everything that SISSY ANARCHY is and put it into the hands of different communities and be like, ‘Well, this is yours too. How would you put this together?’ While still leaning into the idea of trans anarchism and considering: to be a sissy feels like the ultimate type of anarchism, to sissy anarchism feels like the model I’m working with.
AGH: Yeah, what will SISSY ANARCHY become? Your contributors bring these tears or guises to the publications, which I enjoy, being both revelatory and concealing. You take on various forms, you have poetry, interviews, essays, you have all these different arrays of media. How do you begin conversations with contributors?
PE: It’s a good question because beginnings feel like they should be easy, but I don't think they always are.
Ultimately, it starts with very simply getting excited about stuff I find in the archives. I spend a lot of time at the Bishopsgate Institute and I sift through old radical pamphlets and journals. I get a sense of what type of protest and rhetoric was happening at the time and then connect that to contemporary conversation by looking for different types of work and people. I think it's about being a big reader and super inspired when people share their words. That’s maybe why I post so much online because I feel like it's not an isolating or isolated thing to share what you're thinking and feeling.
I'm always looking for people who are doing it in a diaristic way, responsively. To the benefit of SISSY ANARCHY, I’m looking for people who are explosive and emotional online because I feel they’re able to deliver something that is actually radically experimental.
I can meet people online, it could also happen in person. There's so much nuance when you're talking to someone at an event, something trans-friendly and trans-focused, and they string together this little verse or sentence that mesmerises me. I latch onto them for some reason, to their words. I think to myself, ‘Oh, that's where the grit is.’
I'm not looking for the pristine hyper glossy bullshit that you can find anywhere else. I want to be a mirror to a person's intuitive magic and give them a space where they can continue exploring that idea with me in SISSY ANARCHY. It doesn't need to be something super formulaic.
It needs to be something that can, like you say, be torn or ripped apart and chewed up. I think that's just more exciting and actually readable. Plus, like you say, there are various things in there. That’s important as well, people are responding or coming to these ideas with different ways of digesting and explaining; be that essay, poetry, photography, or anything else
I think giving people a prompt to work with and seeing how they respond makes it easier for me to recognise that all of this isn't as digestible as we think it is. It is ontological, messy, and unfettered and it's entangled in everything and becomes a part of the way people experience and respond to their own lives and how they feel about violence—being ostracised, attacked or worked against.
I think maybe the one thing, if I can say quickly, that will always remain the same. The backbone of SISSY ANARCHY is that we always talk to different anarchist leaders, activists or archivists. In the first issue, we spoke to Otherness Archive and in the second issue we spoke to Pissed Off Trannies. Having those features feels quite integral. It gives people a further connection to organised groups that are already operating.
AGH: I think that explosiveness, that diaristic quality, brings a heaviness that features in the magazine. How do you go about working with contributors or even responding to what you receive from the people that you're working with?
PE: As I'm asking for those prior things, I think you have to have an emotional capacity to handle what you receive. It does take me a few reads to feel out the work. I need to have some time to review and look at it from various angles and to consider the style, the format and the tone. I want super violent stuff, there's space for that and I want work that is complicated in its own argument. I think we need to develop a capacity to read work again that is troubled in and of itself and is troubling the world around us.
Maybe the answer to your question is that the texture someone puts into their work is what you have to be responsive to. And the only way that I'm able to appropriately work with that is to have a back-and-forth about what that texture is. And so, I'll ask clarifying questions, or I'll make clarifying statements on their pieces to have that correspondence; and then with that exchange, I feel like there's a sense of care with the work—that’s how I go about getting it to publication.
AGH: I’m interested too, in addition to your working with many contributors for the magazine, how has it been working with Misha on the book? You’ve worked with him before.
PE: Misha has been in the last two issues. He’s incredible. I think he is just the epitome of a survivor. He has braved so much and he has so much resilience and can, on top of all of that, create incredible work that I think is going to fuck with the literary canon.
I'm not just saying that because I have a connection with him, I really believe the writing is unbelievable. The new novel is just harrowing. It's this combination of being super miserious, the prose is juicy, and then all of a sudden it just punctures you and it keeps you laser-focused on a specific type of torment that he's trying to show you he has endured.
I feel like that's what writing should do, and that's the type of writing SISSY ANARCHY needs to be publishing because we can't look away from these problems. I think working with him has been life-changing for me. He's shown me how to remain resilient, after so many atrocities that I could never possibly imagine enduring, he’s shown me how to love. He is a war resister and this novel is his protest.
I think his work has changed a lot. I think he's becoming a more succinct writer and I mean that in the sense that his poetry has sharpened. I think he's moving away from an unnecessary desire to fluff his life. It's like he's trying to get to the most tender part, which is the marrow. He's cracking through the bone, getting to the marrow, that's where he's writing from.
He's just brilliant. I love working with him. We’re doing a fundraiser for the book on the 14th of March at Set Social in Peckham, London. Please come along, Misha’s going to be there, he’ll come down and he'll do a reading. You can get a ticket here and help fundraise with various tiers that have rewards: https://igg.me/at/sissy-anarchy-book/x/35609777#/
AGH: And final question, what do you see SISSY as at this current moment? You know, like two issues behind you, a first book, where do you want to see it?
PE: Yes, I don't really see us as a magazine or publishing house. It's more slippery than that.
It's more than the amalgamation of its parts at the moment. I began writing about it as a platform, but maybe that's just another digestible way to say that it's various things simultaneously coalescing with one another that is able to hold different outcomes.
I don't know how to succinctly say what it is right now. It's a project, it's a platform, it’s curatorial. Those feel like good starting points because maybe it will become something different. I get the sense that it's growing at the moment. We've been featured in exhibitions, we have various stockists, we’re doing a book, I’m about to deliver sissy workshops… There's so much upcoming.
I was talking about the first issue the other day. When I first spoke about it, I called it an activist poster. It's really interesting to see that it's changed into being talked about as a zine. Maybe that's because in capitalism we sell zines, not posters [Laughs].
AGH: Everything has to be zine!
PE: Zines are so hot right now.
I'm fond of how use creates function and then how language emerges with function. So, it could be a protest poster, it could be a zine, it could be a literary journal, it could be a publishing house, it could be activist propaganda.
I was telling people with the last issue to, like, cum on it—it could be a pornographic rag, it can be used however people want.
SISSY ANARCHY has been picked up by other artistic institutions at the moment. I've been invited to be a guest lecturer. So it's not simply staying as one thing. And it’s not all me, there is Caitlin [McLoughlin] who is designing it, there are the people who read it who I want to bring in—to become a representation of what SISSY ANARCHY is.
And then the ultimate goal—because this publication is nothing without the hands that touch it—we need to create a space where we can share resources and come together, ask questions and have a forum where people are connected.
One of the things about travelling to these different locations, my access to medical health care is different in both countries and the type of strenuous fucking nonsense… It just never ends with how many hurdles they try to fucking make you crash into.
I have the benefit of being aware of how this medical world works because I've been in it for such a long time that I'm able to know when to disclose and when to hold information. I've learned that the hard way. I’ve had things denied to me. I don't want other people, who don't have the similar strength to persevere and persist, to have to resist the bigotry that comes out of general practices, from doctors that are meant—that are using our taxpayer money—to look after us but instead are finding ways to kill us.
I'm getting far away from your question, but like, I’ll circle back. I want there to be a space for resources to be shared and for people to be able to know how to fucking resist. To be able to have a guide like: What are the types of questions I can walk into those environments with, in different locations?
You know, I went to my doctor recently because I stayed for an extra month. I needed more patches, I needed more T-blockers, and he told me I'd have to go through the whole process of seeing an endocrinologist and therapist again. And I was like, ‘Dude, no, I have my discharge from the NHS. I had my discharge from an endocrinologist in Australia when I began here many years ago.’ And then he had the audacity to be like, ‘You need to go talk to an endocrinologist by yourself again.’ And I was like, ‘You need to refer me! If that's the case, I need you to go and write the letter.’
Trans people don't need to go through that experience daily, at each intersection of life, so we need to build a space to make sure that people can have access to information, especially in the time that we're in now, because it's just so violent.
Woah. I really put you through it with these answers.
AGH: No, not at all. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.
PE: Thank you. God, we could talk about this forever.
AGH: I know. It's been so good to see you.
Please consider donating to the crowdfund for Misha’s new novel, TRAP UNFOLDS ME GREEDILY!
—Andy x