I was so painfully self-conscious.

In the book I’m working on, I’m writing about dropping in at Identity House, circa 1986. So I’m conjuring up the memories. Coming up the stairs and opening the doors and then being afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“Hey there, welcome”, said a thirty-esque guy with wire-frame glasses.
“Hi”, I nodded back at him. I broke eye contact and glanced around. A woman with spiky styled blue-tipped hair and wearing snug dark blue jeans was sitting on the arm of a couch, watching a red-haired girl stapling paper to a large green sheet of construction paper. A black guy with large oval earrings was singing softly along with his radio over in the other direction.

I felt awkward, as I often did in gay and lesbian environments. Didn’t want to display overt interest in the attractive girl; lesbians presumably don’t come to gay and lesbian centers to be stared at by guys. Didn’t want to focus attention on any of the guys, lest they get the wrong idea. Stupid social clumsiness. Like they’re going to think anything faintly approaching friendliness from me is an act of sexual aggression. Yeesh.

Do you want to know where that came from, that overwhelming fear of being perceived as person with [gasp!] sexual lusts and interests and appetite? Here’s what that has to do with being a sissy –

Let’s start with the boys. As a sissy I was periodically accused of harboring sexual interest towards my male classmates and other acquaintances. I’m using the word “accused” advisedly – the notion that I had any such feelings was addressed with significant hostility, contempt, outright hatred. If I had indeed felt such feelings, these attitudes would have made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with my identity and my nature, and I would have had to wrestle with that, I think. In my case, I didn’t; if I had ever been inclined to find males sexually attractive, any such signal was rapidly drowned in the noise of being accused of it, mocked for it, having my face rubbed in it, so to speak. After a few years of that, I was less likely to be friendly, to be curious or interested, to expect to be included or welcomed. Standoffish and snobbish elicited their own forms of the same basic hostility, so I was trained to a mild and non-judgmental presence, neither recoiling from them nor paying any attention aside from getting out of their way.

Well, that left the girls. Here’s the situation with the girls: they made observations about unwanted and intrusive sexual attention from boys, observations that were the precursors of #metoo, that lots of boys were sexually creepy, with “hands problem”, selfishly pushy about sex. And also that, within relationships or on dates, boys would press for sexual activity, not caring about the girl as a person, and what self-respecting girl would want to get close to that? I, as a self-respecting sissy, most assuredly didn’t want the girls thinking of me that way. I wanted the girls to respect me as they respected themselves. Oh, I wanted sex, all right, no question about that, but I wanted it to mean something. I wanted a girlfriend. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of casual sex, but if it was going to be casual sex it had to be mutual, and it had to take place in such a way that both of us felt OK about our participation, and not like we’d been throw down into the sewer.

I go through life walking on eggshells terrified that someone’s going to think I’m sexually interested in them. That’s part of my experience as a sissy male, that people react to the possibility of me being interested in them with disgust and irritation.

In an LGBTQ context, like Identity House, you might think it would be easier, right? But although I was for once not in a context where males having sexual interest in other males would be stigmatized as something disgusting, I was walking into that situation with a lot of unease and lack of general comfort about people thinking I had sexual interest in them. I was afraid the boys, if they misread me and got the wrong idea, would later think I was being judgmental or prudish or rude; I didn’t have a well-developed repertoire for turning aside sexually interested people gracefully. Then there were the girls, of course. It was easier, to be in a situation where they’d be less likely to assume any guy they encounter was likely to be on the verge of expressing unwanted sexual interest. But on the other hand, most of them would be lesbians and I was afraid that it might be especially annoying to a lesbian to encounter some guy in a place like Identity House and pick up on him being attracted, because presumably she isn’t hanging out at gay and lesbian centers in order to be stared at or focused upon by males.


This was the situation in which I found myself as a young adult. It was very much an empowering insight to rethink that situation, for the first time, by comparing it to that of women my age. They were widely considered (and expected) to be, to varying degrees, wary and cautious about expressing their sexual interests and appetites. It was socially understood that even when they did, in fact, feel sexual interest towards a person, they might have ambivalent attitudes and feelings about acting on it, including the act of letting that interest be known and perceived. (Admittedly, they seemed to do a far better job of coping with unwanted attentions, but perhaps that came with practice)

Here was a model for accepting this kind of hesitant and uncertain sexuality without regarding it as pathetic, damaged, unhealthy. In fact, being aware of one’s own complex feelings about sexuality was often portrayed as a sign of a good healthy respect for one’s self, in contrast to which enthusiastically availing one’s self of sexual experiences whenever the opportunity held some degree of appetizing attraction was seen as a possible sign of lacking sufficient standards or appropriate boundaries. In my case, it was liberating to be able to view myself as a non-pathological sexual creature, ambivalences and wariness about my own sexual interests included. Maybe it wasn’t a very practical way to be in the world if one were male, but when I considered it this way, it looked like I would be not so far outside the normal if I had been female. Or if I considered myself to be the same kind of person that they were.

And it meshed with the rest of how I saw myself. It immediately fit. I’d always emulated the girls, admired them, measured myself against them as my role models.

I stopped feeling ashamed and stopped worrying that I was sexually broken, some kind of basket case. I liked who I was and now that could see my sexual nature from this vantage point, I liked my sexuality as it was. And I realized I wasn’t going to find a suitable expression of it within any of the behavioral models offered to men. If I were going to make it work, I would do so by looking at how women, the people who were most like me, had made a successful go of it.

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I am part of an author's group where we read 1800-word excerpts or installments (or, for the poets and short-article writers, the entire thing) and give each other feedback. For my own selections I have been bouncing around a bit, getting feedback on portions from all over the book, but also gradually getting a sense of people's reacion to the overall message, and it's a positive one, they're getting it. Even carved up into snippets delivered in random order, sufficient exposure to what I wrote is conveying the concept of being a gender invert to an audience of people who aren't particularly familiar with MOGII* identities or gender issues. That's all good news.

Most of the others who are working on long, novel-length books are bringing in their latest chapters and therefore picking up where we were left off at the previous meeting. That has got me thinking about returning to work on my second book, provisionally titled That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, about my undergrad and graduate school experiences as a women's studies major and about trying to explain my peculiar sense of identity within the framework of feminist theory.

It's been a long time since I worked on it. The autobiography certainly covered that portion of my life, but it's less easily lifted and edited and repurposed as a book than the eighth-grade-through-coming-out portion that became the first book. To render it as an interesting entertaining read, and to tell the story I want to tell, I'm going to need to rewrite it from the ground up and just rely on the autobio as a reminder of events and situations I might otherwise not think to use.

I started doing that, briefly, back in 2015 but didn't get very far because I've been so immersed in trying to get this book, GenderQueer (aka The Story of Q), into print.

I'm hoping the discipline imposed by wanting to have a new selection to read to the group will keep me going this time.

* MOGII = marginalized (or minority) orientations, gender identities, and intersex; an alternative formulation I prefer over LGBTQIA+ or QUILTBAG (queer/questioning, uncertain, intersex, lesbian, trans*, bisexual, asexual, and gay)

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On March 12th, I will be giving a presentation at Life In Nassau at their regular monthly meeting in Woodbury NY, titled "Gender Inversion, being Genderqueer, and how Kink facilitates stepping away from gendered assumptions".

I'll be using a lot of the material from my Gender Isn't the Same Thing as Sex blog posting, including the visuals you see there (I had them printed out on sturdy posterboard to use as visual aids). I've done a run-through with anais_pf kindly sitting in as audience and I covered the material in my notes in 25 minutes. It should be more like a one hour presentation, so I need to go back through and insert anecdotes and examples, describe things in more detail, flesh things out more. That should make it a better talk anyhow. I tend to worry that I'm going to go way over so this time I sort of overshot... undershot? I did too good a job of compacting my message and now it's too short! Anyway, my first venture into lecturing since speaking at the Boston College Women's Center in 2010.

Hey, y'all, I'm building a platform!

I'm going to try to take this show on the road, give the same talk elsewhere, and then diverge from there, expand on it and so forth.



Last weekend I attended a one-day seminar called "The Editor's Eye", presented by Francis Flaherty, a former NY Times feature editor and geared towards helping people edit their own work more effectively. I thought it was well-presented and although some points were self-evident and not exactly news to me, overall I think it gave me a fresh sense of how to approach revamping my own work.

From my notes:

• insert ACTION to make paragraphs pop: sometimes by describing the present as a harbinger of the future, using language that anticipates, use metaphor, set up the future as a consequence of current processes and describe those using ACTIVE verbs.

• similarly use vivid action-inclusive metaphors and similes in describing your characters' mental processes

• describe decisions; don't have your characters float through time passively with things happening to them, be explicit about their decision-making process. Decisions are active

• embed yourself in each scene as if YOU were interested in what was going on at the time; if you are (or were) bored, your readers probably will be too

• sensory descriptions, especially other than visual (although in my case my writing actually does not tend to describe how things look, I'm NOT a very visual writer so in my case all 5 senses need to be punched up).

• Example A is about emotional human face of an abstract theoretical idea. Insert emotional content even if at the level of metaphor throughout the scenes of the book. Add body language: yours, that of other characters

• For trimming, think of your main message as a bullseye target. In each section look at paragraphs in terms of how close or how far they are from the bullseye. Trim more aggressively on parts that are farther from the bullseye.




I opened my my email as usual on Wednesday and saw another email reply from one of my query letters. The overwhelming majority of these are "Thank you for querying but after due consideration we don't think your title would be right for our line, sorry, best of luck" type letters so as I was double-clicking it to read it I was mentally already opening my query database to mark another rejection, yet I found myself staring at this:

> Dear Allan,
>
> Thank you so much for your query and we apologize for the delay in
> getting back to you. Is your manuscript still available? If so, we
> would be happy to read the first fifty pages or so of THAT GUY IN OUR
> WOMEN’S STUDIES CLASS. If you could send them as an email attachment
> with the word REQUESTED as the subject line, that would be wonderful.
>
> Thank you so much, and we look forward to the reading.

I blinked. Wait a minute. Oh wow, this is about BOOK TWO, which I haven't sent queries out about since last April. Heck, I haven't even been reporting my second book figures when I've posted my stats on # of queries sent and all that. The original idea behind book two was that, firstly, one way to get your book published is to get a different book published, then you're a published author; and, secondly, that I could directly query academic presses about the second book while still being able to say, honestly, that the main book has not been sent to any editors yet. But not too long after I'd started sending out query letters for the second book, I decided the book needed a massive restructuring and rewrite of its final 30%, that I had made it too much about a pissy argument with my academic advisor when I should have focused on how it led to me deciding I could not pursue a career as a feminist theorist in academia, that as a male person I could not theorize in directions that feminist women were not already pursuing, since trailblazing inevitably brings conflict and that in turn would lead to me arguing with feminist women about how to properly pursue the enterprise of feminist theorizing. Anyway, book two has been dormant and virtually forgotten. Except that now I have a request.

Fortunately, the first 50 pages are prior to the section that I think needs the radical surgery. I just finished applying some of my newly-honed editing skills, cutting some chaff and tightening the narrative.

Only 22 queries for book two were ever sent out. This is the one and only reply expressing interest and asking to see additional material.



Current Stats:

THE STORY OF Q

Total queries: 536
Rejections: 466
Outstanding: 66

As NonFiction—
Total queries: 348
Rejections: 332
Outstanding: 16

As Fiction—
Total queries: 188
Rejections: 134
Outstanding: 50

GUY IN WOMEN'S STUDIES

Total queries: 22
Rejections: 21
Outstanding: 0
Under Consideration: 1

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