From the perspective of transactive energy, the energy trading among interconnected microgrids (MGs) is promising to improve the economy and reliability of system operations. In this paper, a distributed energy management method for interconnected operations of combined heat and power (CHP)-based MGs with demand response (DR) is proposed. First, the system model of operational cost including CHP, DR, renewable distributed sources, and diesel generation is introduced, where the DR is modeled as a virtual generation unit. Second, the optimal scheduling model is decentralized as several distributed scheduling models in accordance with the number of associated MGs. Moreover, a distributed iterative algorithm based on subgradient with dynamic search direction is proposed. During the iterative process, the information exchange between neighboring MGs is limited to Lagrange multipliers and expected purchasing energy. Finally, numerical results are given for an interconnected MGs system consisting of three MGs, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified.