Nearly Roadkill

An Infobahn Erotic Adventure

by Kate Bornstein & Caitlin Sullivan

Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Thriller written in...

Cyberspace: The final frontier.

Scratch and Winc: Two genderless beings who pose as a host of different personalities, switching identities and genders as quickly as they create passwords.

Their World: The net, where any persona and any gender can be created. A world in which there are no boundaries--virtual, sexual, logical or otherwise.

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CAITLIN SULLIVAN is a journalist, editor and playwright. She was the editor of the first multi-media CD-ROM magazine, Medio Magazine. She has produced several plays, was the editor of the Seattle Gay News for six years, has edited several books and small publications, and has written for the artistic and transgendered communities. She lives in Seattle, where she alternates working for evil corporations and artistic projects.

Kate and Caitlin met at a writers' conference, then corresponded for several years via email. They thought the result would be Nearly Roadkill but soon realized they'd need a plot. Since they lived in different cities (Kate lived in San Francisco at the time), they uploaded chapters and portions of chapters to each other, revised, augmented, then sent the work back. In this way they wrote most of the book -- around the 10th chapter Kate moved to Seattle where Caitlin lived, and soon after Nearly Roadkill was a wrap. This is the first novel for both of them.
Read The Reviews!

Entertainment Weekly

This randy, engaging "infobahn erotic adventure" is the latest example of E-mail lit, in which a chaotic day-after-tomorrow plot is told through the characters' in-box missives and cyberchat sessions. Here, the chief protagonists are Scratch and Winc, two online lovers who never do reveal their gender to each other, and in so doing somehow touch off a nationwide FBI manhunt. With a wry teenager as their familiar and our narrator, and a beleaguered fed named Wallace Budge as their pursuer, Scratch and Winc discourse on sexuality--no surprise given that coauthor Bornstein is a transgender performance artist--mess with people's minds, and create a massive youth following, all while out to do little more than diddle each other electronically. The characters have a tatty, profane earnestness that keeps the reader on line. Best of all, when our two heroes finally meet, they are not at all what you expect.

--Ty Burr

Lambda Book Report

It's an old fight, the battle between the sexes. Sullivan and Bornstein's erotic thriller, Nearly Roadkill, takes a very serious yet playful look at the literal definition of that conflict -- the one where people dwell between the hard-and-fast definitions of "woman" and man." As in A Clockwork Orange, a new cyberlanguage (complete with glossary) is offered to us. Most prominent are the pronouns which combine the masculine and feminine: "ze" instead of "he" or "she"; "hir" to combine "his" and "her."

Scratch and Winc, two self-described "genderless" cybersurfers, fall in love after they discover each other during sexual trysts on the Internet. Altering their personalities, gender, and member profiles nearly every time they go on-line, they baffle both the objects of their virtual affections and the members of the Federal Bureau of Census and Statistics, who subsequently can't get a demographic handle on them.

There is an echo of Orwell's 1984 as well. A strong anti-government, closely Libertarian sentiment pervades the novel. In the world of Nearly Roadkill, the government controls, monitors, decides which aspects of the Internet are best for the user -- and clandestinely bans him from the rest. As Scratch and Winc, our hir-oes, fight for complete access to -- and freedom on -- the Internet, the chase begins. This freedom, of course, is highly dangerous to those businesses in cahoots with, the government. They can't understand "why [the people] want complete access, when most of them can't even access their microwave to cook their morning poptarts."

The FBCS tries in desperation to tag their ever-morphing suspects only to find that their popularity has influenced thousands of other Net users to exercise their own rights to privacy and freedom. Fearing that governmental control of the Internet will be lost, the FBCS upgrades the original charges against Scratch and Winc from being Registration evaders (and using secret bypasses to get on-line) to child pornography and ultimately High Treason.

The format of the book is as fascinating as the content. Parts of the novel are presented as journal entries by Toobe, the seventeen-year-old in whom both Scratch and Winc confide. Still other parts are narrative entries (presumably also on-line) of cyber-whizzes who have the technical know-how to keep Scratch and Winc safe from administrative eyes. The rest are on-line transcripts of chat rooms, advertisements, and announcements, which leave the reader with the sense that she is actually on-line with the main characters. It takes a few chapters, but once the reader acclimates himself to the simulated computer screen format, the reading is a pleasure.

Nearly Roadkill presents an indisputable parallel between the oppressive mandates of the government for Internet users and that of society itself when it comes to how we deal with the definitions of "man," "woman," or "other." We as readers are urged to redefine how we interact with others as well as how we may (or may not) define ourselves.

-- Rachel Astarte Piccione

Seattle Weekly

::blushing:: sure, I'm a girl, ;-}

by Kate Thompson

If you've ever lurked in an on-line chat room, you know the banality of evil. OK, "evil"s too strong. Banality, period. You're on the internet-or something like it-participating in a purported pinnacle of human technological achievement, a vast honeycomb of crisscrossing electronic dialog whose sole purpose it seems, is to unite horny, unimaginative people with marginal lives:

You have entered "Women Who Like Hairy Men" There are eight people in this room.

BigStud: ::stroking hisself:: you type like a real fox, what are you wearing?

TooHot2Handl: ::blush:: Does the phrase "tube top" mean anything to you?

BigStud: ::whistling through teeth:: Wanna go to a private room?

Enter Winc and Scratch, the on-line protagonists of Seattle performance artist/writer Kate Bornstein's and playwright/journalist Caitlin Sullivan's Nearly Roadkill, An Infobahn Erotic Adventure, a giddy rollercoaster ride through a digital world of gender-mutable sex, dominance and submission, youthful hackers, dark corporate conspiracies, and-forgive me-improbable coding.

Scratch is a moody riotgrrl and Winc a submissive boy toy who sneak off to have steamy virtual sex in a private chat room. True "identities" are not revealed-both the reader and the characters must accept the details that are shared and the things not shared. Particularly the question of gender. While knowing what gender one's partner is might seem to be useful, if only to guide the mechanics of sex, the question becomes more academic on-line where sex is a question of imagination and sexual proclivities and gymnastics are limited only by the writer's ability to describe.

So it goes with Winc and Scratch who continue to run into each other in the dark corners of the Net-first by accident and later by design. The next time they meet on-line, it is as Leilia and Karn, vampire fetishists who continue to challenge each other on the notion of identity:

Karn: ::slowly:: What do you think I am?

Leilia: Don't know. Was focused on gender thing earlier, but I don't care now. It's great! It's that moment I wait for on-line, where I no longer care, where (I believe anyway) I'm truly relating to the inner, formless being of someone....

Between sexual encounters that cover pretty much every category in The Weekly personals plus a few more, uh, experimental ones, Winc and Scratch and their fellow travelers wax polemic on the yin and yang of human relationships. Each encounter raises the stakes, and the characters, determined not to reveal their "true" selves, deepen a relationship based on something seemingly more primal.

And wait, there's more. Government and business interests are conspiring to regulate the Net through Registration, dividing netizens into hated market niches, selling feminine hygiene products to apparent females and guns to apparent males. Under the guise of protecting children from predators, basic constitutional rights end up in the virtual trash. Winc and Scratch, refusing to register because they can't get past the "Sex?" question on the form, become unwitting cyberoutlaws leading mass insurrection and ultimately facing grim charges. There is intrigue, there is bloodletting, there is even, gulp, the feared corporeal meeting-two people, in the flesh, stripped of both keyboards and lofty presumptions left to hack out a relationship in realtime.

Set in a firestorm of overly-trendy typefaces, each introducing a different character or medium, Nearly Roadkill captures the strange rhythms and non-sequitered style of on-line chat while remaining wonderfully readable. Conversations are observed and transcripted by a Greek chorus of teenage hacker wannabes, brilliant troglodytes, cops with hearts of gold, and cybersorcerers weaving their worms and viruses through gossamer modem lines. In the end there is the inevitable chase, shes become hes become hirs become zes and back again and the reader is left with the vague notion that maybe "binary" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Ever wonder who you'd be if you were a boy/girl instead of a girl/boy? Or "none of the above"? All those zeros and ones, nature's simplistic code making each of us one or the "other". The first thing we notice in a fellow human is what s/he is and we adjust our clothing, our bodies, our conversation, our expectations, our baggage accordingly. We raise or lower our voices, we ignore or acknowledge the buzz in our genitals, we are receptive or aggressive. Now go on-line, the authors say, and leave that stuff at the door. Become a stone butch lesbian and wink across the room at the coy femme with the auburn hair. You are a stone butch? Then try on "Christian, male, married but looking". Tap tap tap, you are what you type.

Kate Thompson is an art director and Web designer who likes the idea of gender mutability.

 Authors Kate Bornstein (background) and Caitlin Sullivan (foreground).