tag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889ahunter3ahunter3ahunter32021-10-03T21:10:49Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:80991Author Event — Los Alamos Author Tells a Story From a Different Closet2021-10-03T21:10:49Z2021-10-03T21:10:49Zpublic0<a href="https://laconm.libcal.com/event/8105228">https://laconm.libcal.com/event/8105228</a><br /><br />Mesa Public Library, from which I used to check out books when I was a kid, is hosting me to read from <i>GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet</i>, lecture for about 20 minutes, and then open it up for questions and discussion.<br /><br />This will be the first event of its sort to be hosted in Los Alamos, the place where the majority of the action in the book takes place.<br /><br />They want folks to register for the event in advance so as to know how many people will be in attendance, so if you're interested, please click through!<br /><br />It's <a href="https://laconm.libcal.com/event/8105228">October 7, at 7 PM Mountain time, aka 9 PM Eastern time</a>.<br /><br /><br /><br />———————<br /><font size="4"><br /><br />The book in question, <i>GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet</i>, was published by Sunstone Press in Spring 2020. It is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/GenderQueer-Story-Different-Closet-Hunter/dp/1632932903/" target="_blank"">available on Amazon </a> and <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/genderqueer-allan-d-hunter/1136554566" target="_blank""> Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, </a> and as ebook only from <a href="https://books.apple.com/us/book/genderqueer/id1502855007" target="_blank"">Apple</a>, <a href="https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/genderqueer-1" target="_blank"">Kobo</a>, and directly from <a href="http://sunstonepress.com/cgi-bin/bookview.cgi?_recordnum=1096" target="_blank"">Sunstone Press</a> themselves. <br><br /><br />My second book, <i>That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class</i>, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to <i>GenderQueer</i>. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.<br><br /></font><br /><br />Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my <a href="http://www.genderkitten.com"><b>Home Page</b></a><br /><br />———————<br /><br />This DreamWidth blog is echoed on <a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal</a> and <a href="https://genderkitten.wordpress.com">WordPress</a>. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><font size="4"><br /><a href="https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/23016.html"><b>Index of all Blog Posts</b></a><br /></font><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=80991" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:72413Eleven Pipers Piping — Bleak Midwinter Quiltbag Funfest!2021-01-03T21:40:04Z2021-01-03T21:43:15Zpublic0#BleakMidwinter #PipersPiping #QuiltbagHistoricals<br /><br />QUILTBAG Historicals, a Facebook group for LGBTQIA+ authors and the folks who read them, is in the midst of hosting a literature event based on the 12 Days of Christmas song --<br /><br /><blockquote><br /><b>Authors</b> - you are invited to join in by posting on the Twelve Days of Christmas - 26th December to 6th January - snippets of your work, flash fiction, outtakes, what you will and/or offering a pdf copy of one of your ebooks to add to a prize bundle.<br /><br /><b>Readers</b> - you are invited to enjoy the posts on each of the 12 days and to enter your name in the prize draw for a chance to win the prize. What’s not to like? <br /></blockquote><br /><br />My entry is for "Eleven Pipers Piping", and I opted to do it as a narration, like a mini-audiobook, and is scheduled for January 5, the 11th day of the sequence.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.genderkitten.com/WS3/BleakMidwinter/BleakMidwinterSchedule.html">Schedule of Authors' Entries</a><br /><br />----<br /><br /><br /><br />I'll go ahead and add the link (early release!) to my own entry:<br /><br /><iframe width="1114" height="627" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y0FkN9l8euQ" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0FkN9l8euQ">Author reading on YouTube</a> -- excerpt pgs 162-167<br /><br /><br /><i>GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet</i>, Sunstone Press 2020<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />———————<br /><font size="4"><br />You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!<br /><br />My book, <i>GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet</i>, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/GenderQueer-Story-Different-Closet-Hunter/dp/1632932903/" target="_blank"">available on Amazon </a> and <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/genderqueer-allan-d-hunter/1136554566" target="_blank""> Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, </a> and as ebook only from <a href="https://books.apple.com/us/book/genderqueer/id1502855007" target="_blank"">Apple</a>, <a href="https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/genderqueer-1" target="_blank"">Kobo</a>, and directly from <a href="http://sunstonepress.com/cgi-bin/bookview.cgi?_recordnum=1096" target="_blank"">Sunstone Press</a> themselves. <br /></font><br /><br />Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my <a href="http://www.genderkitten.com"><b>Home Page</b></a><br /><br />———————<br /><br />This DreamWidth blog is echoed on <a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal</a> and <a href="https://genderkitten.wordpress.com">WordPress</a>. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><font size="4"><br /><a href="https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/23016.html"><b>Index of all Blog Posts</b></a><br /></font><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=72413" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:67586Los Alamos Home Town Newspaper Reviews My Book2020-08-14T18:47:38Z2020-08-14T18:47:38Zpublic0I have had many nice reviews printed in college newspapers and I've been reviewed in the LGBTQIA press. And I've had notices and interviews in mainstream papers that speak to the <i>existence</i> of the book, but which weren't actually <i>reviews</i> of it. But until this week I did not have an actual review of <i>GenderQueer</i> printed in a mainstream municipal newspaper.<br /><br />So it seems utterly appropriate that the first to do so would be the <i>Los Alamos Daily Post</i>, the newspaper from the town where I attended junior high and high school. The newspaper from the town where most of the action in the book takes place.<br /><br />Lifestyles Editor Bonne Gordon was a great interviewer; when she called me to ask questions about my book and my experiences, it was obvious that she had not only been giving the book a close read but was also familiar on a deep level with the relevant backdrop issues. We discussed gender from the standpoint of LGBTQIA experiences and feminism, and how things have changed (and how they haven't) over the forty years since the events described in the book.<br /><br />Los Alamos is both a small community and a special, well-known one. It's received far more literary attention than a typical village of 12,000 inhabitants would, but not so much that the people who live there don't become interested when a book about living there goes to press. So with any luck, the article will spark some local interest in reading my book.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://ladailypost.com/putting-the-q-in-lbgtq-growing-up-different-in-los-alamos/" target="_blank">Putting the Q in LGBTQ: Growing Up 'Different' In Los Alamos</a> — Bonnie Gordon, <i>The Los Alamos Daily Post</i><br /><br /><br />———————<br /><font size="4"><br />You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!<br /><br />My book, <i>GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet</i>, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/GenderQueer-Story-Different-Closet-Hunter/dp/1632932903/" target="_blank"">available on Amazon </a> and <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/genderqueer-allan-d-hunter/1136554566" target="_blank""> Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, </a> and as ebook only from <a href="https://books.apple.com/us/book/genderqueer/id1502855007" target="_blank"">Apple</a>, <a href="https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/genderqueer-1" target="_blank"">Kobo</a>, and directly from <a href="http://sunstonepress.com/cgi-bin/bookview.cgi?_recordnum=1096" target="_blank"">Sunstone Press</a> themselves. <br /></font><br /><br />Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my <a href="http://www.genderkitten.com"><b>Home Page</b></a><br /><br />———————<br /><br />This DreamWidth blog is echoed on <a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal</a>, <a href="https://genderkitten.wordpress.com">WordPress</a>, and <a href="https://genderkitten-echo.blogspot.com/">Blogger</a>. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><font size="4"><br /><a href="https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/23016.html"><b>Index of all Blog Posts</b></a><br /></font><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=67586" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:52741Seventh Grade2019-06-22T18:02:48Z2019-06-22T18:02:48Zpublic0My book effectively starts with eighth grade, but I covered my earlier life in my initial autobiography, the tome from which my book was taken. I've done blog posts about earlier segments in my life -- <a href="https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/33366.html" target="_blank">third grade</a>; <a href="https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/41420.html" target="_blank">sixth grade</a>. <br /><br />I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we <i>hadn't</i> moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72. <br /><br />Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as <i>children</i>, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had <i>de facto</i> segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated. <br /><br />The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk <i>single file, on the right side, no talking</i>. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate. <br /><br />It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly <i>boys</i>) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent. <br /><br />Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering <i>if that thing that I do is this</i> and, if so, <i>oh, so other people do that too?</i> and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case. <br /><br />Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories. <br /><br />"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"<br /><br />"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".<br /><br />"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"<br /><br />That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).<br /><br />"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".<br /><br />I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.<br /><br />"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"<br /><br />I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"<br /><br />"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"<br /><br />"Eww"<br /><br />"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"<br /><br />"Umm no, yuck"<br /><br />"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".<br /><br />"Umm, no, no thanks". <br /><br />After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again. <br /><br /><br />I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past. <br /><br />I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh <i>at</i> me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.<br /><br />The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it. <br /><br />Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.<br /><br /><br />———————<br /><br />This LiveJournal blog is echoed on <a href="http://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/">DreamWidth</a>, <a href="https://genderkitten.wordpress.com">WordPress</a>, and <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=487279134184303537#allposts">Blogger</a>. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/25809.html"><b>Index of all Blog Posts</b></a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=52741" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:30668A Late Change2017-10-02T19:29:44Z2017-10-02T19:40:10Zpublic0For the most part, I regard the manuscript of my book as "finished", with the only changes being outgrowths of suggestions or requests from my editor. <br /><br />But last weekend at my <a href="https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/34064.html" target="_blank">high school reunion</a>, a guy who had been in 8th grade with me approached and described this event: "I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn't react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head."<br /><br />I did, of course, remember the event. I haven't racked up a lot of experience smacking people aross the head with lunchroom trays, so my foray into that activity sort of stands out in my mind. <i>Why didn't I include the event in my book when I wrote it?</i> I don't know for sure; maybe I found it a bit too cringeworthy, or maybe I had a disinclination to portray my 8th grade self as violent. This incident stands out as a solitary "man bites dog" event against the everyday backdrop of the biting going the other direction, and it was my goal, during the original composition of the autobiography from which my book was distilled, to convey how intensely and mercilessly I was picked on, and how alienated and hated I felt. Maybe that's it. Also, I did have a mention of a bunch of disgusting food being dumped all over my lunch when I was trying to eat, so maybe a second mention of an event in the cafeteria seemed too redundant. <br /><br />Either way, having it brought up to me during the reunion, and hearing it described from the perspective of the other party to the encounter, got me thinking. <br /><br />A couple years after the event, my next door neighbor laughed about it and said "Oh yeah, you were famous. Everyone was talking about that. There were people who even saved some of the plastic fragments of the broken tray as souvenirs". So let's designate it as memorable. And part of the purpose of attending the reunion was to drum up interest in the book among people who were there for some of the events described within it. <br /><br />Then there's the interaction I've been having with my editor. He'd like to see more emotional vividness in the early part of my book, more of a sense of what I was feeling at the time. "It's too dry and emotionless. You need to tell it with all the bloody bits... readers want to feel what your character is feeling". But what I was feeling, from pretty early on, was shut down. I'd been told over and over again to not let the bullies see that they were getting to me, and it had become apparent to me that no one was going to intervene — and that I just had to suck it up. So the lunchroom tray incident makes a nice bridge scene in a way: I start off NOT REACTING, and (as we now know from his own description) the boy with the squirt gun wanted a reaction so he kept going, kept squirting me over and over. Then I do react, smashing the tray over his head. So it's got some expression of frustration and anger, and at the same time it contributes to the narrative that I am becoming increasingly unreactive and stoic at this time in my life.<br /><br />And in retrospect, I think it is good to show my main character (i.e., me) as someone other than a passive victim to whom bad things are happening, and to show how indignant and outraged I was when being treated this way. So in it goes.<br /><br />I have yanked the short mention of someone dumping a huge glob of mushed-up food all over my lunch and inserted the entire squirt-gun and lunchroom-tray scene as a better replacement.<br /><br />————————<br /><br />I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is <a href="http://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/">here</a>. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/25809.html">Index of all Blog Posts</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=30668" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:30398High School Reunion -- 40 Years Since Graduation in 19772017-09-25T22:22:07Z2017-09-25T22:49:35Zpublic0Los Alamos NM <a href="https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/30884.html">is where the first third of my story takes place</a>, covering the critical years of puberty and adolescence when questions of gender and sexual orientation emerge from a person's negotiations towards adult sexual expression.<br /><br /><br />This weekend, my high school held its 40th reunion. I had not been back to Los Alamos since my parents retired and moved elsewhere, and I hadn't been to a reunion since the 10th in 1987; so from a combination of nostalgia, a desire to see some people I hadn't seen in eons, and an opportunistic interest in promoting my book to people who were there for the events portrayed in Part One, I opted in for this one and made the journey.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:1.4em;"><b>Hey, it doesn't take much to get the author of an autobiographical account to start talking about themselves, we're admittedly rather self-immersed!</b></span></div><br /><br />I made arrangements to have an author's table to receive interested visitors and discuss gender issues, growing up genderqueer in Los Alamos, and my forthcoming book specifically, to sign folks up to be alerted when it becomes available for order. And I posted to various relevant Facebook groups so the class of 77 knew about the book and were invited to drop in at the author's table.<br /><br />My girlfriend A1 (one of my partners) flew out with me to Albuquerque and we hopped into a rental car. I think I would have managed the journey using the dusty rusty memories of making the drive back in the day, but I was glad to have our GPS along. Northern New Mexico, and the Jemez Mountains in particular, are still heartbreakingly beautiful. Our rental economy car chugged and gasped its way up the road, desperately trying to burn gasoline at 7200 feet; we weren't doing a whole lot better ourselves, with our six-decades-old, sea-level-acclimated lungs and hearts. I rejoiced in the dryness, mostly, but my lips and my nose were dissenters, chapping up and otherwise protesting the lack of moisture.<br /><br /><br /><br />• There was an interestingly varied reaction on the part of my former schoolmates to my coming out + book project, but by an overwhelming margin the most common reaction was supportive and congratulatory. People said "you are doing a good thing" or "thank you for this" or "I thought I was the only person who was a gender or orientation minority in Los Alamos, no one talked about it back then". People said "I remember you and I always thought you were very brave. You were your own person and you stood up for yourself". People said "Congratulations! When is it coming out? Can I order it yet? Oh, I'm definitely going to buy a copy, I'm looking forward to reading your book".<br /><br />• I received one heartfelt apology in private from someone who remembered having participated in harassing me back in the day. He said that looking back on it he viewed his behavior at the time as ignorant and hateful. I found the gesture healing and I did my best to extend the same to him, noting that I hadn't been very tolerant of masculine boys and their ways and behaviors either, at the time, and my own hostility and judgmental attitude didn't make me an entirely innocent victim.<br /><br />• Another person recalled a specific incident from back in 8th grade at Cumbres Junior High: "I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn't react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head." I remembered the incident well -- I think it was a rather famous incident, in fact, as my neighbor told me when reminiscing a couple years later: "Some people even saved fragments of that lunch tray as souvenirs". Anyway, I explained to the guy that by the time of the squirt-gun incident I had been bullied and harassed so often that my reactions were pretty shut down, but when I did react it was all out of proportion because it wasn't about him, it was about the whole ongoing phenomenon, and because he wasn't stopping. We shook hands, and later he came over to hang out at our table. I hadn't included that event in the final version of the book but now I'm thinking I should reinsert it: it's a good example of the way in which all the advice to "not let them see that they're getting to you" started to show up as me not reacting when things like this happened.<br /><br />• Perhaps understandably, the event organizers weren't 100% comfortable with the prospect of a bullying victim returning to the scene and attending an event that would also be attended by some of the participants in my erstwhile victimization. One person wrote, "Please consider that our committee has worked really hard to try to make this a fun reunion, and conjuring up bad feelings about high school or junior high events that were unpleasant puts our efforts in jeopardy." I had to grin to myself at the image it conjured up, of me returning to settle up 40-45 year old scores as my fellow alumni backed away in horror. "Don't worry", I said (reassuringly, I hope), "I'm not going to descend like Maleficent to point my bony finger at people and curse the proceedings. Like everyone else, I'm looking forward to seeing people I haven't seen in years; this isn't a vengeance and retribution visit, I promise!"<br /><br />• People did ask me about the book, not merely at the author's table but as they came by and (re)introduced themselves. "So I hear you wrote a book?" One couple asked enough questions to get me started (hey, it doesn't take much to get the author of an autobiographical account to start talking about themselves, we're admittedly rather self-immersed); in as abbreviated and encapsulated form as I could, I summarized an early life in which I'd identified with the girls and made efforts to not be seen as one of the boys, and had protected myself from hostility and harassment by being a teacher's pet and embracing adult protection; then had come to Los Alamos in 8th grade just around the age that hormones were kicking in, and as it turned out I was attracted to the girls. "So the book really revolves around the question of how to negotiate sexual relationships with girls when I had modeled myself as someone just like them, a girlish person myself". The guy half of the couple didn't really get it: "So... would you say you're more gay, then?" Well, there's a reason I wrote a full-sized book, a representative memoir. It <i>doesn't</i> encapsulate easily into a quick overview that everyone can follow. In our society we see and interpret things through the lens of how we understand the world, and the world does not have an understanding of how a male person can be a feminine and yet function as a heterosexual person, a male person who would have sexual experiences with female people -- any more than I myself did.<br /><br />• A majority of the people who expressed interest in the book did so in passing rather than at the author's table I'd booked, so I did not harvest their email addresses. In a separate post to the various FaceBook groups I will invite them to send me their email address and that way I can let them know when the book becomes available and include a direct link to where they can place an order for it.<br /><br />————————<br /><br />I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is <a href="http://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/">here</a>. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/25809.html">Index of all Blog Posts</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=30398" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:28171Albuquerque: Where the Story Takes Place (Part II)2017-07-30T13:03:29Z2017-07-30T13:29:18Zpublic0The second and third major chunks of my book are set partially in Los Alamos and partially in Albuquerque. I wrote about Los Alamos in my <a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/30884.html" target="_blank">July 2 blogentry</a>, so I figured I'd describe Albuquerque a bit in this one.<br /><br />Physically, Albuquerque is a mostly-flat city but surrounded by mountains to the east and the Rio Grande to the west. The land on the other side of the Rio rises up to a mesa so that from certain angles Albuquerque looks like a city in a bowl with the mountains making the rim. <a href="http://gokml.net/maps-azteca.php#ll=35.116512,-106.554055&z=12&t=h&q=Albuquerque%2C%20NM%2C%20United%20States" target="_blank">Satellite view</a> The really impressive mountains to the east is the Sandia ridge and the smaller echoing ridge on the other side of the river is West Mesa. <br /><br />In a pattern that people familiar with Manhattan would recognize, the majority of the city is laid out in a grid of streets making rectangular blocks. Three hundred some-odd thousand people were living in Albuquerque in 1978-1980 when the action in my story takes place. The population is up over five hundred thousand now. It's the big city in New Mexico.<br /><br />It's at a lower elevation than Los Alamos, although still considered a high-elevation city, and the lower elevation means it is hotter and dryer. The surrounding countryside is a barren landscape of scrub and rock. Once shortly after I moved there, I went out for a long walk after getting stoned courtesy of my neighbor's bong pipe, and got it into my head to walk out beyond the bounds of civilization to be in "nature". The suburban streets featured trees, locusts and cottonwoods and oaks and whatnot, and I think I unconsciously visualized myself coming out into some kind of primitive forest. Instead, I found myself leaving a green oasis of lawns and trees and ending up in the desert.<br /><br />In the book, I end up living in Albuquerque twice, both times for the purpose of attending a school: First, I was a student at Albuquerque Vo-Tech, a trade school that seems to have disappeared into obscurity (it wasn't the institution called TVI, but rather a different one); I think it was somewhere around Eubank, north of Central. I lived on Grove Street SE in a rented house with another Vo-Tech student in 1978 and 1979. I was 18 and I had bailed out on the college trajectory my folks expected for me because I wanted financial independence early and thought that I'd enjoy being an auto mechanic.<br /><br />I <i>was</i> regarded by some who knew me at the time as having insufficient aspirations for myself, but my attitude towards money wasn't all that peculiar for the region. In much of the west, in fact, there's sort of an attitude that self-sufficiency is <i>very</i> important, but once you get beyond that you're supposed to be low-key about wealth. It's OK to have it, to be well-off or downright rich, but it's in poor taste to be ostentatious about it. In Albuquerque the millionaires are likely to be wearing denim and to spend very little effort trying to impress other folks or being snobby about how rich they are. And I had met my share of people who simply wanted to earn enough to be adequately comfortable and to put a higher priority on independence and respect, to do something well enough that you could get paid for your skills and call your own shots, move on if you don't like your job because your abilities are in demand everywhere, be your own person who didn't have to take shit from anyone else. Yeah, that looked good to me.<br /><br />Albuquerque is roughly half Hispanic (or Chicano, as folks say in New Mexico) and half non-hispanic white, with a sprinkling of other races and ethnicities. This is a part of the country where folks of Spanish ancestry were here first, with the oldest families being in the region before Mexico had separated from Spain and other families having come north to settle here between Mexico's independence and Mexico's loss of this land in the war with the US in the middle 1800's. There is some ethnic friction, some of which is apparent as a social backdrop in the Albuquerque sections of my book, but it's not a high tension adversarial hostility so much as an occasional clash of cultures and different ways of looking at things. <br /><br />I had a bigger problem with being in a virtually all-male environment. There were very few women at the Vo-Tech school, and my experiences during that year brought an increased awareness that I still didn't integrate particularly well with male company. It wasn't so much that I was the target of violence and hostility (although yes, there was some of that) as I was left lonely without people to be friends with and talk to. These were also my first years out of the parental home, getting used to living my own life and learning about myself and becoming an adult.<br /><br />A contributing factor to my loneliness was the format of partying and socializing in Albuquerque. I had come from Los Alamos where the teenagers and young adults would congregate in a single specific parking lot and obtain beer and learn where the outdoor bonfire party was at this evening; and then the party was public and no invitation was required. The equivalent social action in Albuquerque took place either in people's private homes or in bars or, especially for younger people who couldn't legally drink in bars yet (like me at the time), driving around, cruising certain blocks and showing off your car and chatting with people through the car windows and so on. The indoor scene required social connections and invitations and doing the car cruising thing successfully required having enough money to spiff up your car and keep the gas tank filled. As a student on a tight budget with no income of my own, I could afford some weed and some beer but not much else.<br /><br />I did, however, scheme and plan about pimping out my ride. I was training as an auto mechanic, after all. Someday, when I could afford it, it was going to have this additional equipment and that color paint job all deep lustrous laquer, and more chromium and seats like so... oh yes, despite whatever difficulties I was having mixing with the guys, I still conceptualized myself as a guy and I embraced some images and notions about how to be a guy, notions I expected to work for me. Countercultural cool, longhaired intellectual blue-collar neo-hippie, you know? <br /><br />The attempt to kick off a career as an auto mechanic did not pan out for me for a variety of reasons. I passed the course but came out the other side without the years of experience that some guys had. I returned to Los Alamos but ultimately I was unable to land and hold on to a job that would give me the self-sufficiency I'd sought. A year later my folks succeeded in talking me into trying college after all, and I came back to Albuquerque to attend UNM in 1979.<br /><br />The University of New Mexico is a commuter campus for the large number of students already living in Albuquerque, but this time around I lived in the dorms. I was in Coronado Hall. The campus is mostly compact instead of being sprinkled in pieces all over the city as some urban college campuses do; most of UNM's campus sits between Central and Lomas Boulevard with a somewhat looser sprawl of buildings north of Lomas. There are a lot of business catering to the student experience and campus life in the blocks south of Central Ave, trendy shops and eateries. Back in 1979 there was a head shop selling marijuana paraphernalia and Freak Brothers comic books and across from it a vegetarian restaurant called The Purple Cow, a used record store, and so on. Some scenes in the book take place in the Frontier Restaurant, home of the best huevos rancheros you'll ever eat, and in the Siren Coffeehouse, a feminist hangout that used to host poetry readings and women's music.<br /><br />The front lawns of the campus were a congregating spot for people to sit and party and socialize. In addition to students, there were travelers hitching or driving through and local people who didn't attend the university but liked the scene. Here at last I found the informal socializing environment that most closely resembled the party scene I missed from Los Alamos. (It was also where one went to purchase weed and other psychoactive substances). <br /><br />The music department buildings were nearby. I was majoring in music with the intention of becoming an orchestral composer and a performing / composing pianist, and I would get high and chat with folks on the lawn and then dive into the practice room, notebook and portable cassette player in hand, to practice and write my music.<br /><br />It was during my time as a university student that I came out. It was an environment that theoretically <i>should</i> have made that easier--instead of the all-male and macho-inflected world of VoTech or the small-town cautions of Los Alamos, I was now for the first time in a place where other students were sending me signals left and right that they thought they knew my secret and that it was OK, that I should accept myself and that when I did I would find that others accepted me too. <i>But I didn't know who--or what or how, if you will--I was yet</i>. It wasn't what they thought I was, the identity that they were so ready and kindly willing to accept. They were onto something though. It was that kind of difference. The winks and gentle hints were as discomfiting to me as the violent hostility had been, a never-ending poking and nudging at me to deal with these questions for which I had no answer. <br /><br />And that's the setting for the book's climax and reconciliation.<br /><br /><br />My book, <i>The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale</i>, is scheduled to be published by NineStar Press on November 27 of this year. <br /><br /><br />————————<br /><br />I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is <a href="http://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/">here</a>. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/25809.html">Index of all Blog Posts</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=28171" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-08:2967889:27367Los Alamos: Where the Story Takes Place (Part I)2017-07-02T17:35:09Z2017-07-02T17:35:09Zpublic0My book, <i>The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale</i>, is scheduled to be published by NineStar Press on November 27 of this year. This year is, coincidentally, also 40 years since I graduated from high school, and therefore the 40th reunion is imminent, scheduled for September 23. I haven't been to a reunion since the 10th in 1987 but it's too irresistibly tempting to attend this one under the circumstances. With any luck, between me and my publicist John Sherman, we'll manage to get me booked into a space where I can speak to an audience and read some from the book and combine that into the same trip.<br /><br />The first major chunk of my memoir is set in Los Alamos. (The second and third sections are divided between Los Alamos and Albuquerque NM. I may describe Albuquerque as the second story setting in a later post).<br /><br />A handful of the specific events described in my book as well as the general social environment portrayed there may be recognizable to other people in my Los Alamos graduating class from their own recollections. <br /><br /><br /><br />Los Alamos was neither an especially safe venue nor a nightmarishly horrible hellhole in which to grow up as a sissified feminine male person. It is most famously known for being the community where nuclear physicists developed the atomic bomb during World War II, and it is still very much an intellectual science-centric community with the scientific laboratory dominating much of the culture. The population is less than 15,000 people and, as is typical of towns of that size, folks tend to know each other or to know <i>of</i> each other, and that is especially true of students in school. Physically, it's at high elevation (over 7000 feet) and is spread out along the top of several mesas interspersed with deep canyons, and there is a lot of undeveloped land immediately near the schools and houses.<br /><br />It was (and is) a somewhat old-fashioned town in many ways. The highly educated scientists were disproportionately recruited from small colleges in small communities, so there's an interesting tension between the tendency towards sophistication that comes with being an intellectual with an advanced degree and the conservative outlook that reflects those small-town origins. <br /><br />It <i>wasn't</i> the conventional central-casting junior high and high school environment reflected in so many books and movies. First of all, it wasn't anywhere near as athlete-centric, although yes we had athletic students and, true to stereotype, I did have a lot of conflict with the male sports-centric boys. But whereas in some towns (at least as described by other authors in their own books) the entire school's social life seems to revolve around male athletic boys and their cheerleader girlfriends, in Los Alamos they were just one clique and not an overwhelmingly dominant one, and there was a lot of overlap with other social clusters that mainstream America doesn't tend to associate with athletes, such as Yearbook Committee or the drama club and so forth.<br /><br />The most popular kids often belonged to several factions, such as student government and school sports and Olions (the theatrical drama and performing-arts kids) and choir and band and orchestra, and to know and interact with people from more than one social cluster. <br /><br />I started off as a new kid in town in 8th grade and did not integrate into the society of the junior high school very effectively. I wasn't particularly nice or pleasant to the other kids and held myself aloof, and also had a rather thin skin about being teased and mocked, which wasn't a good recipe for speedy acceptance. Almost overnight I acquired a reputation. In a small town, all new kids get a fair amount of curious attention; in my case I became a source of widespread amusement. Eighth and ninth graders aren't widely known for their tolerant attitudes or their easy acceptance of people who are different, and these small-town dynamics made it worse for me, but I think it is important to point out that I didn't start off being very tolerant of <i>their</i> differences from <i>me</i> either. I was often a hostile and judgmental sissy, glaring at masculine boys and disapproving of their way of being in the world. It's just that I was just severely outnumbered!<br /><br />The social clusters where I eventually put down roots were the Boy Scouts (which tended to have a high concentration of geeky boys who liked to read science fiction), band and choir, and, finally, the loosely affiliated cluster of kids who attended pot parties. The latter group is a counterintuitive group for a kid like me to have found welcome, but that, too, is heavily shaped by factors that were specific to Los Alamos. Unlike larger communities, or the suburbs of built-up metropolitan areas of the country, the kids in Los Alamos did their partying mostly outdoors on that undeveloped land I was talking about. And one thing that meant was that you did not need an invitation to be at a party, nor was the party taking place at some host's home, a host who might declare some unpopular kid unwelcome.<br /><br />The general attitude of adults — parents, teachers, policemen, etc — towards teenagers was an interesting combination of permissive and dismissive. Our behaviors were tolerated with very little effort to shut us down; we were not generically regarded as troublemakers nor our inclination to gather as a worrisome precursor to vandalism and other crime. That hands-off attitude also manifested as a disinclination to insert themselves into our affairs and change how we treated each other, and as a consequence of that I was pretty much on my own, interacting with a contingent of kids my own age who had very few constraints on their behavior towards me.<br /><br />————————<br /><br />I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is <a href="http://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/">here</a>. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user. <br /><br />————————<br /><br /><a href="http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/25809.html">Index of all Blog Posts</a><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ahunter3&ditemid=27367" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments