I’m sitting in a restaurant in Manhattan––as we call it here––considering the world and my place in it, when Charlie Markbreiter arrives, a fashionable twenty minutes late. Heads turn and eyes flash––New York’s own real life Lonely Boy has just entered Carbone. Charlie struts purposefully towards me in Telfar loafers filled with blood. “Sorry,” he says, greeting me with a kiss on each cheek—an affect doubtless picked up during his recent jaunts to Europe–– “I had to fit in a run before the interview.”

That’s Charlie, always talking about running even though it’s soooooo boring. 

He sits opposite me and orders seven quail eggs––shells on––which he later devours dipped in the dish of butter his oversized shirt sleeve often falls into while becoming animated drawing links between Minions: Rise of Gru and television’s own Blair Waldorf. She’s one of the stars of his upcoming publishing debut: Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, out this November from Kenning Editions. 

MM: So, Charlie, why Gossip Girl? 

CM: I first became interested in Gossip Girl because of the era in which it’s set. For the books, that means 2002-2011, and, for the TV show, that’s 2007-2012, plus now the reboot, which premiered in 2021. When the Gossip Girl era began, it was still plausible for Francis Fukuyama to argue, as he did in 2002, that history had “ended.” What did it mean to live after history? 

Fukuyama was famously wrong, of course. Not only because the 2008 Financial Crash cast doubt on the eternal durability of neoliberalism and western hegemony, but because, as Ayesha Siddiqi has repeatedly pointed out, the Bush era marked a dramatic extension of the American state’s punitive apparatus. During the Bush years (to quote Ayesha), “the War on Terror expanded, the reactionary far right organized, the wealth gap grew. Rather than expanding the middle class, the gig economy absorbed those falling out of it into even more precarity, while the pyramid scheme of content creator culture entrenched a new form of serfdom in the US. Meanwhile, my generation was dressing up as the kid from Where The Wild Things Are.”

So when the “indie sleaze” trend began, it felt surreal, because the era I’d been researching was now on my FYP. But instead of an analysis of how the Bush era expansion of authoritarian state power continues to affect us, we just got a glamorization of the era’s evil and stupid cultural moments. Like, “Omg, you know who’s cool? Terry Richardson. Let’s wear American Apparel ironically (unironically).” As if the only response to oppression is being obsessed with your oppressors lol. 

I was also interested in the Gossip Girl era because it’s right before the 2014 “Trans Tipping Point,” which is when, according to TIME Magazine (lol), “trans” entered mainstream discourse. How did we talk about trans before “we” knew what trans was? What did it mean to be a trans child/teen then? The work of historian Jules Gill-Peterson is especially helpful here: she tracks the long history of trans kids and their relation to the medical industrial complex in the twentieth century, and links this to the state’s recent efforts to “become cisgender” as part of a larger expansion of its punitive apparatus (Bush era redux indeed).

The last reason is embarrassing because it’s personal, haha. I grew up on the Upper East Side, which is where Gossip Girl is set, and went to a single-sex private school, just like Serena and Nate. I watched the show as a teen, and would sometimes even see them on set. I’ve deleted most of my memories from that time, so it’s hard to say which feels more real: my time at The Spence School, or Blair’s time at Constance, which imitates Spence? Something something Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Something something “fanfic.”

Either way, Gossip Girl’s loony YA teen soap format (in contrast to realist comedy dramas like Succession) helps the show successfully tackle topics such as: nepotism, inherited wealth, old vs. new money, information capital, and NYC’s role as the cultural center of an empire which, by the tail end of the series, was already visibly in decline.

Btw I made this answer really long on purpose. I'm in a rush. I need to feed Gravity. I’ll do that now. {He coughs. Frozen meat cubes tumble from his mouth and fall onto a golden bowl, which he sets next to his own plate of food. A small, apricot-colored toy poodle devours the cubes before aggressively licking Markbreiter’s spicy Rigatoni. “Down, Gravity,” he murmurs before digging into his dog spit pasta dish. Maz becomes distracted Googling the admissions fees for The Spence School.}

MM: So, is your Dad single? Haha. No, just kidding. Unless he’s into ftms…you know what, let’s not go there. What would Kathy Acker’s favorite episode of Gossip Girl be? 

CM: Lmao. Well, while Acker is perhaps best known for being a trust fund brat who used inherited wealth to kickstart an experimental writing career, she also became obsessed with bodybuilding towards the end of her life. “I want to work past failure,” she said, a description of how lifting breaks down the muscle fibers before rebuilding them again. 

In which case, I’d say Kathy Acker’s favorite GG ep would be when Nate’s dad, a Bernie Madoff stand-in, becomes a competitive bodybuilder, frequenting big Wall Street meetings in banana peel yellow G-string bikinis to foreground his oiled up abs. The episode ends with Madoff planting steroids in his son’s weed. Nate smokes them, tests positive, and is kicked off the lacrosse team. Fathers are often so jealous of their sons. This episode isn’t real. 

MM: It’s interesting, having read your book, to note the vastly different approach the official Gossip Girl TV reboot took. It neutered a lot of the nastiness of the original in a (maybe?) valiant attempt to be less white, straight, cis, etc, but doesn’t get into any of the interesting territory which could be explored by following a set of “diverse” private school graduates, who IRL are often the ones who structurally benefit from the concept of “diversity.” When watching it, I longed for a version as bitchy and malevolent as the original, but with trans trust fund kids—which is something your novella delivers. How was writing GGFFN as news of the reboot unfolded? 

CM: I want to say something smart here but honestly I just felt lucky that Gossip Girl had re-entered mainstream discourse just in time for my book to come out lol.

But, beyond that, it’s interesting to ask, as you literally just did, why the original GG was aesthetically successful in ways that the reboot arguably was not. One answer is that the reboot was interested in individually “humanizing” its protagonists, as if the right individual actions could ever compensate for structural inequity. The original didn’t care about that. It cared about how individuals are produced by their environment, and, more specifically, about how NYC’s ruling class socially reproduces itself. 

MM: Trans history is often written by the winners—if you’re not looking at criminal court records you end up with these historical figures who were, in various ways, the exceptions rather than the norm, due to class. In Britain, records of aristocracy and peerage led to one trans man—Sir Ewan Forbes—being outed and fighting (successfully) to inherit his title. Secrecy around the case, and Forbes’ success, meant it was erased from history to the benefit of fellow British aristocrat Arthur Corbett, who got out of divorce payments by declaring his marriage to April Ashley void due to her trans status. The prior case, and other examples of wealthy white trans men acquiring the privileges of their acquired gender, are sometimes celebrated as examples of trans inclusion. Can you speak a bit about how your novella explores, critically, the ways trans people—and usually a specific subset—do get “included”?

CM: On the population level, assimilation always works along axes of power—as evidenced by the historical context you referenced above! It’s easier to be “included” as a trans person if you’re already also rich and white, just as wealth and whiteness make transition easier. Gatekeeping resources is an attempt to ensure that the “right” kind of trans person exists and that the “wrong” kind of trans person is eliminated. 

So the trans GGFFN characters can assimilate to varying degrees based on their identity positions and like…how much they want and need to, lol. Nate Archibald transitions on his parents’ dime as a child––which is rare now, and was even more so pre “Tipping Point.” Gordon, who’s in the writer’s room for Gossip Girl 3, comes from an upper middle class family but is downardly mobile, on the one hand, because he can afford to be, and, on the other hand, because it’s still sometimes hard to be trans and have a normal job, haha. Nia, who is visibly racialized and doesn’t come from money, is trying to assimilate via class mobility. She feels she has to. You’re less disposable if you’re rich.

MM: Do you feel like 2000s nostalgia is just the inevitable wheel of time turning, or is there something more tWiStEd at play?

CM: Because Western cultural discourse is so…West-centric, haha, it’s easy to think, oh, all nations are plagued by their own nostalgia cycles. But that isn’t true. South Korea—which is the true center of soft power now, not the US—produces so much culture that’s firmly rooted in the present. Which makes sense. Why fetishize the fifties (Golden era of American hegemony, era of the South Korean War), when you could instead depict your own political ascendence? 

Unable to cope with our own decline, we proliferate images of our “glorious” past. It’s MAGA in form, if not content. I tried to touch on this a bit in my book via the analysis of franchises. Instead of investing in new cultural forms, corporations only want to do what’s been popular already, and also they don’t want their IP to expire. That’s one reason why we get so many CGI remakes: not because anyone wants to watch them, but because a new product with the same IP extends the license, plus you know the hardcore fans will still turn out. So is the CGI Lion King remake the cultural equivalent of an animated corpse? Yes, but so is Joe Biden…lol

MM: I’m interested in your use of fan fiction in the title and in the text. It would've been easy enough to distance yourself from fanfic––the aforementioned Acker isn't defined that way, Ulysses isn't lol––which is seen as quite cringe. There’s also real critiques of fanfic as funneling creativity through IP. I'm less interested in this critique than the ways in which (lol) fan fic has become professionalized and mainstreamed in the last ten years: 50 Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan Fic, there’s academic writings and nonfiction books and contemporary art about fanfic, there was that whole section of One Direction fanfic in season 1 of Euphoria lol. It now feels quite far removed from something that teens were doing for erotic fulfillment and socializing on Tumblr. It didn't seem like anyone was trying to get a book deal back then, although my knowledge is admittedly limited. {Maz laughs smugly and stares at Charlie.} I was never really on Tumblr. 

CM: {Gravity growls.} That’s not really a question? It’s more of a comment, isn’t it? 

MM: Sorry, that happens––I was a teen Trotskyist. That was my Tumblr. Can you speak a bit about your use of fan fiction In GGFFN? Especially in relation to aforementioned USA nostalgia cycle and IP saturation. 

CM: Such an interesting question, Maz.

If you Google “fanfic,” one of the first suggested questions is, “Is fanfic allowed?” That is, does fanfic violate the source text author’s IP, and when does it matter? Who’s the copy and who’s the original? Am I even real? Maxi Wallenhorst calls that last question “one of the cheap catchphrases of dissociative style,” but, to gloss Maxi again, just because it’s cliche, doesn’t mean it’s less true. Maybe that makes it even more true, haha. So I was interested in fanfic as a “dissociative style,” a way to talk about dysphoria without having to always… talk about it. Avoiding dissociative dysphoria while allowing it to nonetheless permeate everything…just like life! 

Fanfiction arguably began in the sixties, as Trekkies, many of them women, began writing slash fic, which they then began selling at America’s first fan conventions. A similar movement was simultaneously happening with manga fans in Japan. When the internet became mainstreamed, fanfic became even easier to produce and consume. 

It’s possible to tell the history of fanfic as an attempted collectivization of IP and pushback against content monopolies like Marvel, but, as you pointed out, it’s actually much messier than that; in GGFN, I tried to get at this via Steve Vander Ark, one of the most (in)famous Harry Potter fan content producers. You’re from the UK and prob sick of hearing about JK Rowling, so feel free to… {Maz extracts a pair of noise-canceling headphones from his murse/tote and puts them on} Wait is the recording…um…whatever makes you happy. Okay. 

Basically, Vander Ark wrote this Potter encyclopedia which was so thorough that Rowling herself often referenced it while writing; sometimes she’d even go to it before returning to her own books. But this symbiotic relationship ended when Vander Ark began, from Rowling’s POV, to encroach on her IP. This happened in two ways. The first was that Vander Ark hated how the books ended, knew that many Potter-fans agreed, and so began encouraging them to write their own endings. The second was that Rowling, likely looking for new ways to maximize her IP now that the OC had ended, decided to publish her own Potter-verse encyclopedia, and so sued Vander Ark for copyright violation. Watching the trial sucks. Not just because Rowling is a TERF, but because it’s David versus Goliath, and Goliath wins. 

Which isn’t to say that Rowling then went after all Potterverse fanfic creators––she can’t. Not only does she need the veneer of benevolent rule, but the fans are essential to her role as content creator: they’re the demand which legitimizes her as the supply. So what she did instead was ally herself with fans who didn’t threaten her IP, many of whom also gleefully excommunicated Vander Ark, their former friend, from the HP community. You can take your headphones off btw. {Maz of course can’t hear.} I said… {Charlie trying not to seem annoyed, waves his arms, which accidentally knock into Julia Fox/Kanye West/Kim Kardashian/Harry Styles/Terry Richardson/Francis Fukuyama/Lord Voldemort. What are they all doing here, at Carbone? Maz, wowed by the power of celebrity, takes the headphones off.} 

MM: Ugh. The crowd here is horrible. New York ain’t what it used to be! What were you going on about? 

CM: Oh. I was just going to finally answer your question by saying that, per your question, fanfic has been professionalized by suing producers who are seen as violating IP in a way that impedes the OP’s profits, while fanfic which can maximize that profit and the OP’s power are assimilated into the OP’s CMU. Is that how trans assimilation works also? Haha, probably… 

MM: Right…

CM: Right…

MM: Right…