As author of autobiographical nonfiction, I'm occasionally questioned and challenged about my recall. I even once had a potential publisher tell me I could not market my book as nonfiction at all, since human memory is so unreliable!

That's an extreme position, and hence pretty easy to dismiss, but to a lesser extent the question has come up in various ways several times.

I do appear to have an unusually good recollection of events in my own life, but another factor involved here is that I've often written about things that happened to me, the events that had an impact on me at the time. That means that when I sit at my computer to write in the 2020s about something that happened to me in the 1980s, it's typically something I've written about previously. That works on two levels: the previous act of prowling through those memories and pondering them in order to write about them probably keeps them fresher than if I hadn't thought about them much in the intervening years, and in many cases I have copies of what I actually wrote at earlier points.

Within the Box has a couple pages of description of my first incarceration, in 1980, as a student at the University of New Mexico.

Here is a portion of that, followed by a snippet or two of an earlier description of the event from 2003 and one from a yet earlier description I wrote in 1982.

I dealt with Mountain View by starting my own local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, and even though they were utterly coercive and we had no rights to speak of, I managed to get most of the patients in agreement that we should listen to each other and be mutually supportive, and try to ignore the horrible treatment the institution was subjecting us to. And I also got the support of a significant percent of the staff members, to the point that it polarized the institution and disrupted its functioning. I was making sense to a lot of people, and making their jackbooted authoritarian ways look silly and indefensible. Upper echelon clinical staff eventually decided I was a rabble raising psychiatric rights activist and booted me out, as if they’d caught me trespassing.

(from Within the Box, "Day Eleven" chapter)

So I make friends with the other mental patients. I’m thinking initially “I don’t belong here this is a mistake”, like most of you probably would, but the other mental patients here on the Seriously Disturbed Ward…umm, they don’t think they’re Napoleon and they aren’t seeing pink elephants and I can talk to them. Heck, I can even explain the stuff in my papers that got me into this place and they understand it (with varying shades of disagreement or ideas about what some things would mean that don’t overlap with my own). And I can understand the stuff that they are wrapped up in and concerned about...

After a week or so, we have started calling ourself the “patient people” instead of “patients” because to survive in this place you need to be very patient with the confrontational and abusive staff who belittle you and order you around, and patient with the situation in which you’re locked up and when not in immediate danger from the psychiatric professionals are generally bored. And we start referring to the staff when they behave at their worst as “impatient people”. We continue listening to each others’ stuff and give each other reality-checks and confirmations of the authenticity of feeling this or that based on what has happened to us here or there, and give each other pragmatic advice and sympathy and just someone to talk to about it. And pretty quickly we’re overtly saying that the only therapy in this place is what we are providing to each other. There are a couple of nurses, one in afternoon shift and another on night shift, who applaud this and say it is excellent. There are others on both of these shifts and everyone on the morning shift who regard it as inappropriate behavior and try to discourage us from talking to each other. The woman whose husband put her in there has a doctor who starts issuing instructions to the staff to stop this behavior. My doctor is mildly supportive but mostly for what he thinks it means regarding me individually. He thinks this is all my doing. At first it sort of was except that it caught on like wildfire once some of this stuff had been said out loud once or twice. There is another doctor who thinks the whole phenomenon is a great success story for “milieu therapy” which usually means “the therapeutic advantages of being surrounded by walls and barred windows” but now because we are essentially doing mutual therapy (and not assuming each other to be “sick”, by the way) we are part of each other’s “milieu” …at any rate he thinks it’s all wonderful and is instructing his patients to participate in our home-grown group sessions.

By the fourth week the staff is openly bickering, not just in the conference room behind the nurse’s station but in front of us out on the ward floor, and we’re behaving like calm patient little Zen masters. One guy hooks up the teenage couple with an attorney friend he knows and although he won’t “take their case” he gives them simple legal advice. I flirt with the married woman in front of her husband when he comes to visit and we imply to him that the two of us are having an affair in the hospital and he suddenly starts saying he’s going to talk to the doctor about her coming home. The guy with the Jesus freak parents is drawing his nightmare visions in crayons and it seems to help him cope and for crayon drawings they are pretty good.

Then one day I’m out in the barbed-wire enclosure (“yard”) where they let the patients go to smoke and get sunlight and when I come back in I find all my stuff is piled in the middle of the intake corridor and they won’t let me go onto the floor. “You aren’t crazy and you can’t stay here. You have to leave. Take your stuff and get out of here.”

(from a message board post, 2003)

...[I]nto the modern shiny psychiatric institution was tossed a stranger who had been handing out strange feminist manifestos, and he had just recently read an article about a group of psychiatric inmates calling themselves Mental Patients' Liberation Front, so when he deciced he wasn't getting what he'd come for, he decided to start a chapter right there in the hospital.

And the members of this new Mental Patients' Liberation Front wanted to talk about sex and politics and religion and love and suicide and life and death; and some of them wanted to sleep with each other while others wanted to sleep on the couches or on the floor, and they said, "So what if it it's emotionally intense, or unorderly, or different from normal? Does it hurt anything?" They complained about the godawful boredom, and some of the women put their makeup on their boyfriends while the men giggled, and the men shaved their eyebrows instead of their cheeks while the head nurse scowled from his plexiglass office.

In group therapy, the patients, now calling themselves the patient people, began discussing and redefining values. The nurses who had come to beam parentally and guide the therapy were told they could join in or listen patiently, but not to interfere impatiently with the patient people talking; after awhile, some of the nurses started talking, too.

But there were also a lot of very threatened and insecure people there who didn't like their reality tested like that, and they yelled, became violent, and insisted that personal contact was psychologically damaging to their patients' well-being. The patient people insisted otherwise, but the fearful ones lost their patience as rapidly as they were losing their patients, no matter how patient the patient people tried to be with them. Psychotropic tranquilizer drugs were ordered all around. It didn't look good for the patient people.

But some of the other therapists and an administrator or two began speaking up for the patient people, saying that these outspoken patients had an interesting set of ideas about reorganizing the care plan procedure of the institution. Some of them even went so far as to say that they didn't think the patient people were crazy at all.

Until one day a fiery MPLF radical or two found all personal possessions stacked in piles on the corridor floor after returning from weekend pass:

"You can't stay here any more. No, you can't talk with any of the other patients. Get your stuff off our floor and leave. If that stuff is still here tonight, it goes outside into the street."

(from The Amazon's Brother, unpublished, written in 1982)



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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, 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, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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I emigrated to New York City in 1984 in hopes of finding my people, other sissy femme males tired of the shit we have to put up with in this patriarchal society, other femme fellows who had had enough of it and had become social activists about it. And to join the feminists, my sisters who had most visibly indicted sexist expectations and gender polarization and the rigid division of society by sex.

I expected us to be a voice on the margins of the gay rights folks' movement, and I expected us to be engaging with the feminist women, but most of all identifying what our own social issues were and developing a platform, creating a voice of our own in this society.

I never found that.




I did eventually find other male people who had a positive response to feminism. Not in person, not in groups where we sat on chairs in the same room and discussed such things, unfortunately, but once I got into graduate school, in the early 1990s, I discovered communities over the internet. "Internet" at that time was mostly not something you encountered using a web browser, but instead was centered on the phenomenon of electronic mail -- email -- and the opportunity to subscribe to LISTSERV lists. Every day, my mailbox on the university account would have a digest of all the posts that the group participants had made, and we'd reply to each other or post new manifestos and screeds and discuss men and gender and feminism.

I was told early and often that we should not refer to ourselves as "feminists". That had been decided. Some (although not all) feminist women felt that men cannot be feminists, and therefore some (although not all) of the males in these groups embraced that notion and ran with it. There were dissenters, but in general anyone who participated was at risk of being treated as an insufficiently reformed part of the patriarchal problem if they persisted. Our role, I was told, was to be supportive of feminism, to be "pro-feminist", and to examine our own behavior as males and to challenge the behavior of other males when we saw it as problematic. Let the women lead -- it's their movement, and men have led enough things on this planet, do us good to be followers for a change.

I wrote often about the different sexual situation of a feminine sissy femme male whose sexual orientation is towards female people -- how it subverts the patriarchal heterosexual institution, on the one hand, but at the same time how our lives at the individual level are complicated by a world with rigidly gendered sex roles for heterosexual flirting, dating, courting, and coupling.

Sometimes those posts were celebrated and embraced and discussed. More often, they were derailed and sidetracked into discussions about whether or not a person can be a pro-feminist male if they still have sexual fantasies of power, dominance, and interests in the female body that could be considered objectification.

To be fair, the PROFEM list was the one most explicitly geared to male people embracing feminism. I had joined some others that were less narrowly focused, where people were endorsing John Bly and Sam Keen, and talking about going to weekend retreats to beat drums and get in touch with essential masculinity. But I wanted to get in touch with essential femininity.

I was looking for the self-defined political concerns of the heterosexual feminine male. The non-feminist groups were focused on our needs and our growth as males, but for the most part I wasn't encountering males who thought of themselves the way I did, and although there wasn't a universal hostility towards feminism and feminist beliefs, there were a lot of recurrent arguments about it.

The pro-feminist group, meanwhile, wasn't focused on our needs and growth. It was focused on repentance.

I grew up in the south, surrounded by Protestant Christians ranging from establishment to charismatic born-again, so I was quite familiar with competitive self-immolation and ostentatious wallowing in the despair of our sinfulness.

In the midst of one of the perennial discussions of whether this or that aspect of sexual nature is tolerable and permissible for pro-feminist men, one person began a reply with, "Let me be the first to acknowledge that feminists are right when they say..." and I imagined someone interrupting, "Oh no, let me be the first!"

I wryly acknowledged to myself that I wasn't immune to this. You call together a congregation of males whose personal self-identity is based on not being like the other males, I suppose it is inevitable that we still want to push off from other males. To find fault with them. To find our validation from once again seeing ourself as different from the other males.

But the biggest problem that I saw was that most of the participants were not at all sure that it was okay to be in this in search of our own interests. If the problem is patriarchy, if the problem is male oppression, then shouldn't we be practicing self-abnegation? That attitude meant that for the most part, we were not examining and critiquing the quality of our lives, coming at this from our own experience the way that women in consciousness-raising groups do.

One person made this telling observation:

>Trivializing is a big problem. We are not supposed to complain. I continually
trivialize, downplay, demean anything that happens to me. My problems aren't
really serious.<


But to complain was to be perceived as selfish:


"I have my own concerns that bring me here", I wrote, "I'm not here to be a chivalrous white knight on behalf of women".

"Oh", someone responded, "so you have to make it all about YOU, got it".




For a book club that I'm in, I'm reading a book about the Combahee River Collective and the Black feminists' statement thereof that made waves in the 1970s. The Black feminists recognized that Black men are allies, even if also sometimes direct behavioral participants in the oppression of women, and they categorically refused separatism. Likewise, they recognized that white women are allies, even if also at times overt participants in racist oppression, and they refused to be polarized against their sisters either. They felt that they could reach and teach, and also that they needed these alliances if they were going to have the necessary impact on the world.

Similarly, gay men have often been acknowledged by feminists as allies, even though they still have male privilege and do sometimes participate in oppressing women; feminists see that the gay male has a different vantage point and brings some useful insights and perspectives to the table, and has an understandable personal interest in overturning patriarchy.

The goal was to establish that the same is true for sissy femme males who don't happen to be gay. We have male privilege and we have hetero privilege and we even may have cis privilege (those of us who do not present to the world as transgender) and yet we are marginalized by patriarchy, damaged by it, and I wanted us to have our own voice, our own movement.


Still looking.



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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!

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 late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

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I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.

This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.

Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.

The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.


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"Many of these ["prehomosexual"] boys tend to be overpolite and obedient, anxious to please adults, to be charming and witty and cute...

"In Tommy's case, his teacher decided to employ her full talents and sympathies at once, right on the first day of school...only Betty J.[the teacher] came to know...that he was a prehomosexual child...

When regular classes started the day after the open house, Miss J. thought that Tommy would find the separation very difficult. Nothing of the kind proved to be true...Tommy left her side quickly and without fussing. Miss J. was delighted. In amazement she wondered whether Tommy was perhaps less of a 'Mama's boy' than he had seemed to be the day before...however, his prehomosexual orientation quickly asserted itself.

"Clearly and pleasantly, Tommy chatted with the new teacher about his age and where he lived. He did not seem the least unsure of himself. But just as soon as he was invited to join one of the groups of other children, or to take part in class activities, he refused -- in the same careful, polite tone...

"When he did strike up a friendship, it was with one of the girls...He used a crayon and chalk, but just as soon as he finished he did something no normal boy would dream of doing: he washed his hands.

'His excessive daintyness reminded me of the fastidiously kept apartments of adult homosexuals...', Miss J. told us..."

-- Peter and Barbara Wyden,
Growing Up Straight, What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know
(Stein and Day), 1969, pgs 104, 116-117, 119

The Wydens might find themselves criticized these days for openly giving advice on how to keep their children from contracting homosexuality as if it were leprosy or something, because a quasiliberal tolerance of gays and lesbians is "in" right now, but there is still a widespread social acceptance of a direct correlation between sex role nonconformity (which the Wydens would probably call "gender-inappropriate conduct") and homosexual orientation. In Tommy's case, the "prehomosexual" label was applied not because Tommy was known or thought to have eventually grown up gay, but solely on the basis of his "unmasculine" conduct as a kindergartener. I chose this example because it is so unsubtle, but it is quite common for adults to claim to know who is gay on the basis of similarly sexually-unrelated observations.

This is prevalent enough to double-define the term through usage, much as fuck has come to simultaneously mean both sex and destruction. What is gay? Is it the way you are, or something you do?

And what do you do if you are, but don't? The question of heterosexual viability, which caused me to wonder if the orientation I was accused of was the only thing available for me, tries to work as a self-fulfilling prophecy.




* * *


All of the above is a "guest post" -- from my 22 year old self. It comes from chapter 8 of The Amazon's Brother, my first serious attempt to write about these issues, which I wrote in 1982. The chapter title was "That Peculiar Sense of Identity". (Yes, I have been doing this for a long time) (Yes, I am that old) (No, I was never able to get it published)



When I first read the Wydens' book, I immediately and strongly identified with their description. It was definitely me they were talking about!

The boys in my classroom mocked me for refusing to use what we called "dirty words", and for not joining in with them in their obsessing about bathroom functions, and especially for openly disapproving of them for doing so. And I, too, preferred the company of girls, and definitely put a great deal of effort and energy into getting adult approval.

So the Wydens were totally talking about me and they made it sound like being who I was was something very bad. They had the sheer effrontery to disparage something as intrinsically good as the way I was!

And all because it supposedly meant I would turn out gay... or was it?



Let's begin with the obvious: it is blatantly homophobic to express such hostility to the idea of being a femme sissy by saying boys like that grow up to be gay men, as if that outcome were so self-apparently horrible that the prosecution can rest their case, sissyhood is bad. And it is a powerful act when sissy femme gay males reclaim their identity with pride and reply "Yeah, and? Your point being?"

But I think there's more to the issue of conflating the two things.

I'm not authorized to complain on behalf of gay guys, I guess, but the notion that a person is femme in order to attract the attention of males seems to me to be insulting to gay males. Think about it. It conjures up the notion that the males who are attracted to feminine gay guys are basically really stupid heterosexual males, stupid enough to be attracted to other male people if those male people appear to be like female people. Attracted to femininity in appearance and expression and nuance but too oblivious to realize or too horny and unpicky to care that the person in question is actually male. And if we shift our attention to the feminine gay guys themselves, we see the notion that they aren't interested in each other, that they abhor gay guys, feminine guys, that they want those beforementioned stupid heterosexual men. There's a lack of mutuality and equality, and a lack of pride.

Meanwhile, as long as being a sissy femme male is thought of as coterminous with being gay, the sissy femme identity is erased. We aren't thought of as a gender. The fact that this is our identity is masked and hidden because people interpret it all as an expression of gay sexual orientation. We get reduced to a set of mannerisms.



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