It’s around 10 p.m. on a cold Tuesday in an industrial section of Bushwick, and people are streaming into one of the Brooklyn neighborhood's many cavernous music venues. In some ways, this night is like any other: people are coming to see DJs spin records — or do whatever DJs do with digital turntables, I’m not an expert — dance, maybe do drugs, and make out.
But usually the DJs are just, like, DJs, not former political prisoners who changed the course of history through their brave whistleblowing; they’re not usually the subject of intense and vitriolic criticism by politicians and the media; and while they are often trans — this is Bushwick, after all — they’re usually not the focal point of an entire nation’s transphobia, their gender scrutinized and lambasted by thousands of people for years on end. And most DJs, thankfully, haven’t written books.
Really only one person in the history of the world can claim such a disparate set of descriptors: political prisoner, trans icon, hero to many, traitor to some, but most importantly tonight, a DJ.
Chelsea Manning did not choose many of these descriptors. She does not want to be Chelsea Manning the household name, the political football, or even the trans icon. She wants to be Chelsea Manning, the person. Her new memoir, README.txt, which she is promoting at this event, is an attempt to reclaim her life from a narrative that she had very little part in creating, to become the person she wants to be on her own terms.
So it’s no wonder as the crowd filters into 3 Dollar Bill, she seems stressed, her red-tinted sunglasses providing a barrier between her and those talking with her, or at her. She takes several breaks in an empty back room, then returns to sit on an uncomfortable couch as young gays and transes gawk in amazement at her mere existence. She wants to tell her story, but she, understandably, doesn’t want to talk about it with 100 strangers.
The price of achieving a fame you never asked for means it’s unclear what exactly people like about you: Is it your activism, the inspiring story of how you went through hell to reveal the horrors of U.S. imperialism, or simply the fame itself — that you’re well-known, successful, and trans? For many people here, it seems to be the latter, or at least a confusing combination of all of the above.
“I don’t really know what she did because I was too young, but she’s a whistleblower so that’s cool,” one tall, bisexual guy tells me on the edge of the dance floor.
“I was institutionalized a lot growing up, and I thought about her a lot and her strength to get through that,” a shorter gay man says.
It’s not that Manning doesn’t want to be an activist, or be remembered for her work in exposing U.S. government secrets. She just wants to be known for other things, too. And the importance of tonight is that it allows her to reintroduce herself as the person she wants others to see. So she spins records and bounces around her CDJ as about 100 people, most young, most queer and/or trans, mill about and dance a bit. There’s no grand talk of American imperialism. There’s no political discussion at all.
But reinvention is hard for anyone, especially when you have tens of thousands of articles written about you and a gaggle of young admirers who already have a preconceived notion of who you are. On the day of the release party, Manning tweets out a poll asking her followers what she’ll be most remembered as: 59% respond “activist,” 11.8% “DJ.”
Shortly before the party starts, Manning sits down with me in an empty-ish section of the club to discuss her book and her life.
How are you feeling?
I’m very tired. It’s been a long day. And we’ve got a pretty long night until we go.
Why’d you decide to write your book?
My version of events and my version of my story is largely left out of the picture and ignored. And I wanted to put down in writing the context of who I am, my whole life, my life story — from my perspective as much as possible. Obviously, it’s in the context of people’s interest in certain events. But I am an all-encompassing human being, and I didn’t come from a vacuum. I was shaped into the person I’ve become. And I wanted to sketch that out, give people an idea of my own background, my own story. It’s been called a memoir but I think of it more as a coming-of-age story.
How does it feel to see your name in every newspaper, everywhere, and not be in control of that narrative?
It’s a little frustrating. I will often be talked about, but not asked questions. And I’m very limited in what I can say, by government restrictions, by various NDAs and agreements. So it’s frustrating to try to explain and tell a story. I very rarely read articles or watch things about myself. It’s bad for the brain to consume that. But it’s frustrating to deal with people who view me through the lens of being a symbol instead of the complicated, nuanced human that I am. I’m trying to remove the black-and-white. I feel like there’s a lot of gray in my life and my story.
How do you deal with being a name? It must be hard even when it’s in a positive context.
One assumption that people make is that my life story is over somehow, when I feel like I’m just trying to get off the ground and start. Having been imprisoned, I never got the chance to do that, so one of the struggles I’ve had in the years since is grappling with CPTSD [complex post-traumatic stress disorder], grappling with expectations placed on me. I didn’t know how credit cards worked, I never had a credit card, I’d never paid rent before.
I’m learning how to navigate life and having all these expectations put upon me while also grappling with anxiety, frustration with trying to settle down into friendships and relationships when I don't have the same background as a lot of people. It’s very hard to relate to people because I have a very different background than they do. I spent so much time in prison that I view everything through the lens of prison. People are like “how does this compare to the free world?” and often I’m like, “I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure out the free world.”
Does being trans add to all that — being in the public eye, and being stressed about being in the public eye?
Normally, no. But whenever someone has a critical opinion [of me] it always leads to transphobia. There’s always a tinge of transphobia to it. But it’s very easy to ignore that. So I don’t really encounter it that much. Since finishing the medical side of the transition process, it’s not at the front of my mind anymore. While I am a member of the trans community, it’s pretty clear that especially as an upper-middle-class white woman in Brooklyn that there are other factors at play that impact how I move through the world. I’m much more likely to be catcalled than a male, but that’s just about walking around the world as a woman, as femme-presenting. There are other things that are going on, in the bigger world, in my world, where this has taken a back seat. I travel through the world pretty freely. It’s not like I have a giant trans flag on my backpack. I mean I have one, but I’m not usually wearing it, it’s usually reserved for marches and things like that.
What’s at the top of your mind, activism-wise?
I’ve been kind of typecast as a trans activist, but I focus mostly on digital security, digital privacy. I’m a security consultant. Most of the clients I have are journalists, activists, all over the world. I was doing volunteer work on the border of Ukraine and Poland, trying to assist in getting trans women through Poland and host cities across Europe. I’ve been doing a lot of things that may have a relationship to trans or queer activism but they’re part of a bigger thing.
I’m a trained data scientist. It’s what I do. Other things I do that aren’t activism-related are machine learning, artificial intelligence research — and from that I can see the warning signs of what’s coming. I am often a Cassandra, telling the world that a new technology is going to have consequences. But it’s usually ignored, and the tech is implemented. I’m trying to get people out of the awareness phase of these problems and get them to start working on prevention, actively developing countermeasures and cultural strategies to combat this stuff. Doctors have the Hippocratic oath, lawyers have the bar; they’re held to a much higher standard than machine learning experts and technology people. And people are creating things that have the potential for life-and-death consequences in the future, and they don’t have any ethical standards to abide by.
Given that the world is pretty bleak right now, what gives you hope?
I look to our elders. I look to our past. Several decades ago, even in my own life experience, things were worse. Yes, we’re going through a period of a reactionary wave. But that’s because we went through a progressive wave before that. You always see the ebb and flow. And yet we still survive, we still progress. Thinking about Reagan, how many people we lost, but still our community survived and found our wells of hope, and we rebuilt and we came back. If anything gives me hope it’s the immense resiliency of the queer and trans communities.
Random question, but what’s the last movie you saw in theaters?
I think it was Dune. So it’s been at least a year. But I had to see it in theaters. And I was floored. I thought it was very good. I saw it in 4K on my OLED TV too, and thought, “I’m so glad I saw this in theaters,” because even my home theater couldn’t match the experience of the sound engineering that you can feel in the theater.
And what are you hoping to get out of tonight?
To have some fun, let my hair down. I’m very busy with a lot of things so DJing is one of a number things I have going on. I’ve tried to fit in more practice. Sometimes I only have a week to prepare the DJ sets. I want to change that. And I want to move into actual music production, when I have the time. But unfortunately my time has been brutal. I’ve had probably one day off in the last three months. I haven’t even had a weekend.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
README.txt is available now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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