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A Gender Blogger and Author Takes Stock
Jan. 11th, 2022 12:41 pmI started this blog in 2014. I'd recently finished my first book, the one eventually titled GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, at that time being pitched as The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale. Lit agents who gave personal responses to my queries often said "Your problem as a nonfiction author is that you have no platform. Nonfiction authors need a platform, a ready-made audience of people who are already listening to them".
So I started blogging, in an attempt to create that platform.
After a couple of years of random interval posting, I settled down to a more disciplined routine of cranking out a weekly blog post. And pretty early in, my blog posts began to resemble lesson plans and lecture presentation points.
TEACHER
I was supposed to be an academic, you know. A college professor somewhere, with a classroom of students, a professor who also wrote articles and made presentations at conferences and all that stuff. (My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which should come out later this year, goes into how that didn't happen as planned). I guess the weekly blog posts became a type of make-believe exercise for me, of creating a curriculum, a weekly installment of professor Allan Hunter's course in genderqueer politics and experience.
I was supposed to be not only an academic but also a provocative social presence, a maker of big ripples. The kind of thing where people talking or writing about gender issues would respond in part to what I'd said. Where the things I'd said had become ideas that people would feel the need to react to, whether they agreed with me or not. Where the things I'd said changed the dialog. Modified the conversation and inserted new ideas into the discussion.
I wanted to provide a way of looking at these things that would make some things click into place for a lot of people, would make some things suddenly make a lot more sense to people. I've had people tell me that did happen, so I got to have some of that experience, if not quite as much of it as I'd hoped for.
I wanted to find my people, to be the person who created an IDENTITY that other folks would claim as their own, people for whom the things I said really clicked; I wanted to someday be in a room entirely filled with gender inverts, both male and female, heterosexual males who were femme, whose personae were like girls or women but who didn't wish to present as if they were female, and heterosexual female people who were masc or butch, where who they were as people make them 'one of the boys', but who didn't opt to wrap themselves as male. I daydreamed of conferences attended by gender inverts, and bars and other businesses that catered primarily to gender inverts, and even entire parts of town that were known to be the gender invert sections, you know? Well that didn't happen. To a limited extent I occasionally "found my people" -- where someone would comment that I had put into words some experiences and notions that they'd never seen in words before and that something I said totally captured how it was for them -- but not often enough or with enough people to make a movement like that.
More often, I got some likes on my posts and some dissents. I received replies and responses that gave me some indication that I had made sense, and other reactions that made it clear that I hadn't, that I was just confusing people, and overall a sense that most people had only understood a part of what I'd said.
Which is how it would have been if I'd been a college professor. I mean, that's pretty standard. You do your lectures, you provide some readings and you lead some discussions, and you see that some students get part of it and others are a lot less clear on it, and it's rare that a lot of students fully understand all of what you've presented.
THE RIPPLE MAKING THING
The way I view society, after decades of studying it pretty intensely and trying to inject my ideas into the social conversation, is that most people find a cluster of people where they're comfortable. A social environment. And they embrace and absorb the worldview that is shared as part of what defines that social environment.
If that sounds snotty, like I'm putting folks down for not doing their own thinking, well, even my most radical gender concepts and ideas are just a subtle departure from a body of thought that's already out there. I have some specific original content -- the specifics of being a gender invert and how that's different from being transgender, and how it's similar and yet different from feminist women's rejection of rigid sex roles and sexist expectations and all that -- but the original stuff fits on top of an established set of thoughts about gender and sex and identity and variation from the social norm. And that's a really good thing, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain.
We aren't just mindless puppets who passively soak up ideas from the social world around us and then parrot them. It often seems that way, to me and to other frustrated individuals, but new thinking does get stirred in, and those new notions and concepts get introduced somehow. Perhaps there are ideas "whose time has come" and a lot of people begin putting the same notions into words at the same time and that's when they get some traction.
I suspect there's a talent for being a ripple maker. I suspect it's akin to the talent some people have for being able to go to a party and make a splash, to be different and yet to have one's difference make one stand out all new and shiny and interesting, instead of one's difference making one not fit in and just look wrong and out of place to everyone else. It's the kind of talent that lets one person's YouTube channel or their tweets get millions of views. Whatever it is that comprises such talents, I don't appear to have them. I never have.
My second book will soon be out, but in contrast to the first one it's less centrally on-topic. It explains why my first book is wrapped and positioned as LGBTQ and not as a radical feminist male's political coming-out, but it was the first book that really sets out to explain being a heterosexual sissy, a gender inverted male. It could be that, nevertheless, the second book catches fire and draws attention to me as a person speaking important ideas that are worthy of social attention, but it seems unlikely.
MOVING FORWARD
I've been doing this for a long time, and it is crossing my mind (not for the first time by any means) that I don't have to keep doing this. I can put it down. I can move on to other interests and let my life have a different focus.
I may not do that -- when I've contemplated that in the past, I ended up circling back to it, unable to leave these issues alone for long. Still driven to push them, to speak up about them, because it needed to happen. And because I had a right to speak.
But it's personally important to me to remind myself that I don't have to do this any more. It's not an obligation. Even if it needs doing, I don't seem to be spectacularly talented at doing it, and I do get to live my own life, in whatever way seems likely to bring me satisfaction.
—————
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
So I started blogging, in an attempt to create that platform.
After a couple of years of random interval posting, I settled down to a more disciplined routine of cranking out a weekly blog post. And pretty early in, my blog posts began to resemble lesson plans and lecture presentation points.
TEACHER
I was supposed to be an academic, you know. A college professor somewhere, with a classroom of students, a professor who also wrote articles and made presentations at conferences and all that stuff. (My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which should come out later this year, goes into how that didn't happen as planned). I guess the weekly blog posts became a type of make-believe exercise for me, of creating a curriculum, a weekly installment of professor Allan Hunter's course in genderqueer politics and experience.
I was supposed to be not only an academic but also a provocative social presence, a maker of big ripples. The kind of thing where people talking or writing about gender issues would respond in part to what I'd said. Where the things I'd said had become ideas that people would feel the need to react to, whether they agreed with me or not. Where the things I'd said changed the dialog. Modified the conversation and inserted new ideas into the discussion.
I wanted to provide a way of looking at these things that would make some things click into place for a lot of people, would make some things suddenly make a lot more sense to people. I've had people tell me that did happen, so I got to have some of that experience, if not quite as much of it as I'd hoped for.
I wanted to find my people, to be the person who created an IDENTITY that other folks would claim as their own, people for whom the things I said really clicked; I wanted to someday be in a room entirely filled with gender inverts, both male and female, heterosexual males who were femme, whose personae were like girls or women but who didn't wish to present as if they were female, and heterosexual female people who were masc or butch, where who they were as people make them 'one of the boys', but who didn't opt to wrap themselves as male. I daydreamed of conferences attended by gender inverts, and bars and other businesses that catered primarily to gender inverts, and even entire parts of town that were known to be the gender invert sections, you know? Well that didn't happen. To a limited extent I occasionally "found my people" -- where someone would comment that I had put into words some experiences and notions that they'd never seen in words before and that something I said totally captured how it was for them -- but not often enough or with enough people to make a movement like that.
More often, I got some likes on my posts and some dissents. I received replies and responses that gave me some indication that I had made sense, and other reactions that made it clear that I hadn't, that I was just confusing people, and overall a sense that most people had only understood a part of what I'd said.
Which is how it would have been if I'd been a college professor. I mean, that's pretty standard. You do your lectures, you provide some readings and you lead some discussions, and you see that some students get part of it and others are a lot less clear on it, and it's rare that a lot of students fully understand all of what you've presented.
THE RIPPLE MAKING THING
The way I view society, after decades of studying it pretty intensely and trying to inject my ideas into the social conversation, is that most people find a cluster of people where they're comfortable. A social environment. And they embrace and absorb the worldview that is shared as part of what defines that social environment.
If that sounds snotty, like I'm putting folks down for not doing their own thinking, well, even my most radical gender concepts and ideas are just a subtle departure from a body of thought that's already out there. I have some specific original content -- the specifics of being a gender invert and how that's different from being transgender, and how it's similar and yet different from feminist women's rejection of rigid sex roles and sexist expectations and all that -- but the original stuff fits on top of an established set of thoughts about gender and sex and identity and variation from the social norm. And that's a really good thing, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain.
We aren't just mindless puppets who passively soak up ideas from the social world around us and then parrot them. It often seems that way, to me and to other frustrated individuals, but new thinking does get stirred in, and those new notions and concepts get introduced somehow. Perhaps there are ideas "whose time has come" and a lot of people begin putting the same notions into words at the same time and that's when they get some traction.
I suspect there's a talent for being a ripple maker. I suspect it's akin to the talent some people have for being able to go to a party and make a splash, to be different and yet to have one's difference make one stand out all new and shiny and interesting, instead of one's difference making one not fit in and just look wrong and out of place to everyone else. It's the kind of talent that lets one person's YouTube channel or their tweets get millions of views. Whatever it is that comprises such talents, I don't appear to have them. I never have.
My second book will soon be out, but in contrast to the first one it's less centrally on-topic. It explains why my first book is wrapped and positioned as LGBTQ and not as a radical feminist male's political coming-out, but it was the first book that really sets out to explain being a heterosexual sissy, a gender inverted male. It could be that, nevertheless, the second book catches fire and draws attention to me as a person speaking important ideas that are worthy of social attention, but it seems unlikely.
MOVING FORWARD
I've been doing this for a long time, and it is crossing my mind (not for the first time by any means) that I don't have to keep doing this. I can put it down. I can move on to other interests and let my life have a different focus.
I may not do that -- when I've contemplated that in the past, I ended up circling back to it, unable to leave these issues alone for long. Still driven to push them, to speak up about them, because it needed to happen. And because I had a right to speak.
But it's personally important to me to remind myself that I don't have to do this any more. It's not an obligation. Even if it needs doing, I don't seem to be spectacularly talented at doing it, and I do get to live my own life, in whatever way seems likely to bring me satisfaction.
—————
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
