There is definitely a personal emotional stake when you write about yourself, about what happened to you, and then make it available to others. It's different from writing fiction. I mean, you can have a significant ego investment in being the author of a work of fiction, and it can leave you vulnerable to dismissive or hostile opinions of readers and potential publishers and whatnot, but at least what's being rejected is your creation, your art. When it's autobiographical, it can also come across as a rejection of you personally: that what happened to you, what you went through, isn't interesting or important. Or that you, as the main character, are not interesting to read about.

That vulnerability is heightened when the specific portion of your own story that you're trying to share is a segment involving psychiatric hospitalization and diagnosis. There's the general shadow of being examined and found to be mentally out of order, to be not processing things as a healthy stable person should. That sort of raises the stakes -- or at least it can, depending on whether you agree that you were indeed in a deteriorated state of mind during that segment. I don't. So in Book #3, Within the Box, I'm inviting the reader to weigh the evidence and think about whether I was the person in the story whose mental processes were worrisome or if, instead, I'm the person in the tale who makes the most sense, whose reactions and behaviors were the healthy ones.

Querying a book -- trying to get a literary agent interested in it, so that it could perhaps get placed with a mainstream publisher and end up being read by a lot of people -- is by its very nature a vulnerability-making prospect. No matter what you've written, putting it out there in hopes of getting a rare thumbs-up isn't a particularly pleasant experience. It isn't a seller's market, at least not for unproven / unknown authors. Your query goes in a big pile and the people to whom you sent it will accept only the tiniest handful of prospects and reject the rest.


I am out at work. Both as a genderqueer person and as a person with a history of psychiatric diagnosis. I've nearly always been so, wherever I've worked, refusing to be silenced or shamed. Since I was out in my private life (which was as public as I could make it), there was always the risk that an employer or colleague or coworker would encounter that, so I preferred that they know in advance. It was my litmus test for whether the venue was a place I'd want to work: if you can't deal with it, hire someone else!

My current employer is the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is actually involved in psychiatric intervention and treatment of people, which makes it a little trickier if someone were to develop the opinion that I'd been quite rightly diagnosed and perhaps have a brain that processes things in a less than ideal fashion.

I'm seeking early-reader opinions and feedback on the book, and among the other places I've sought them, I have made such an announcement at work. Three colleagues I know fairly well from ongoing interactions asked for a copy of Within the box. That was in December. Having not heard a peep, I sent a follow-through email to the three of them on July 6, "Checking in with folks who requested a copy of Within the Box...If any of you would like to discuss the book, shoot me an email!". No reply so far. It's a bit hard not to imagine them reading and going "holy shit" and developing a rather worrisome new view of their coworker Allan. I mean, I am kind of putting them in a position where they either need to set aside some conventional assumptions about institutional behaviors and professional behaviors or else reconsider whatever opinions they'd previously developed about me. What if that went the wrong way?


All of this vulnerability is quite predictable, very much "you opted for this situation going in" stuff. Including the likelihood that if I get upset about any of this, or depressed about any of this, or worried or angry about any of this, that my less-than-cheerfully-stable response to it could get interpreted in a light that other people's behavior generally doesn't. Yes, I did know all that going in. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe it needs doing, and I also wouldn't be doing it if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to cope with it.

In fact, to be honest, I'm actually a bit too close to arrogant about it. Picture me staring at you sardonically and laughing and telling you, "After what I've been through in my life -- including the events from the tale I'm hawking in the form of this book -- there's not much that the world is likely to dish out to me that doesn't leave me saying 'I've survived worse', ya know?', so bring it on!"

Maybe that arrogance needs to get reined in now and then. I'll admit, it does occasionally get intense for me.



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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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That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class was never a trunk novel. It's true that version 1.0 of it was written poorly enough that I rewrote from scratch instead of trying to edit the original, but I always knew the underlying story was worth telling, and that I could tell it, and I always intended to brush the dust off the project and get back to it when I could.

I did, however, once write a genuine trunk novel. One where I knew even as I was finishing it that it had no business ever seeing the light of day.

I called it Czilan and I wrote it in the latter part of 1981, the year after I came out. Like everything else I wrote in those years, it was definitely an attempt to explain the gender identity stuff and make it accessible to people. Czilan was an attempt to do so using science fiction.

The idea was to portray a parallel world that was like ours in most ways but where the gender expectations and assumptions for male and female people were mirror-image reversed from how they are in our world. I set out to develop the stories of four main characters, Kath, Bill, Amy, and Amaten (Martin). Kath was a rather butch female; Bill, a conventionally butch masculine male; Amy, a stereotypically feminine female; and Amaten a sissy femme male. They weren't four characters in the same story; rather, I set out to tell four different stories in parallel, with each of them on their own separate plot line, hopping from one person's tale to the next in consecutive order. In the story, all four of them have magically been plucked up from earth and tossed into a corresponding world called Czilan, the place where the gender roles are mirror-image. And my intent was to show how the people that in our world would be regarded as normative and gender-typical -- Bill and Amy -- would experience profound difficulties, facing hostile attitudes and constantly running into expectations that didn't mesh with who they were. Meanwhile, the folks who'd be considered gender-atypical in this world -- Kath and Amaten -- would sail through comfortably.

Overall, it wasn't a strategy unworthy of consideration. If it had worked, if it had been vivid and realistic-feeling and compelling, it could have illustrated what gender nonconforming individuals go through. Indeed, I've reviewed a very well-crafted movie, "I Am Not an Easy Man", which makes use of the same vehicle of a mirror-image gender-reversed world. So it can be done. I just didn't do it very well.

The first problem was that it was very difficult for me to conjure up the scenes and dialogues necessary to demonstrate these tensions and still have any room at all for subtlety. When I was a hundred pages in or thereabouts, it felt like I was beating my reading audience over the head with the main point in every social interaction. The characterizations of the four characters was heavy-handed and klunky and blocky in its embrace of stereotypes. There was too much repetition -- different dialog, same dynamics; different personnel, same results.

But when I tried to back away from painting the people and the situations in such primary colors, I began to realize that the alternative was to write something akin to oceans of good existing literature that already makes a good "Exhibit A" for what happens to people who run afoul of gendered expectations. Literature that already shows this...or shows it if there happens to be a reviewer or a literature teacher to point it out. But where most of the reading audience probably won't see that as the main point that the book was making, if they see it at all.

I had already noticed that phenomenon with regards to Pink Floyd's The Wall -- a narrative record album that tells the story from the vantage point of a sensitive male person who isn't compatible with the expectations of manliness and masculinity. But although that's what I saw as the takeaway from the album, most other people tended to describe it as being about the isolation of being a rock star, or as simply "the story of this guy Pink, and what happened to him in his life".

So if I'd written a viscerally gripping science fiction novel with good three-dimensional characters in it, and had crafted a vivid portrayal of folks who'd be considered normative in this world being marginalized and isolated on Czilan, and our world's gender nonconformists fitting right in, reciprocally, that doesn't necessarily mean people by and large would have gotten it. They might have, but it's a nontrivial challenge, to make the point plainly enough yet to render the characters as real-feeling and complex instead of oversimplified caricatures.

So a big lesson learned: it is hard to define, or illustrate, gender and gender expectations and the dysphoria of being subjected to expectations that don't fit who one is.

My next book, The Amazon's Brother, switched to first person narrative, and although I never got it published, I felt like it was the right formula, and it's the one I returned to for GenderQueer and Guy in Women's Studies.

When one is writing from one's own firsthand experiences, you can say "The events actually unfolded like this", as opposed to running the risk in a fictional depiction of being tagged as having asserted that, gee, it always unfolds like this.


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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, 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. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

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There's nothing quite like holding the actual physical printed book. Finally! I'm a published author now.

Showing my age, I suppose, but somehow having an eBook to send out as an Advance Review Copy (ARC) doesn't seem much different from just printing the book out to PDF and mailing it to a potential publisher or lit agent.

It is utterly gorgeous. Kudos to Sunstone Press. High quality physical materials, really nice cover, good paper, solid-feeling construction. It feels like something that will survive on library shelves and hold up to being tossed into backpacks and knapsacks and whatnot.



Ten years ago I began writing what would eventually become GenderQueer. (I started trying to get it published in 2013)

Forty years ago I came out on UNM campus — the climactic event in the book. Long before there was any such term as "genderqueer" I described to people how the person I was inside was basically the same persona as what's more typical of girls and women, that this made me different in the same general way that gay and lesbian folks were different, but that it was something else. Not trans, either (I was physiologically male, and that wasn't the problem). I invented my own terms, created my own symbols, wrote my own manifestos and began dealing with the insinuations and innuendos and hints by dropping my own coy allusions and double-entendres into conversations, unworried about whether people could parse them or not, confident, finally, of who I was, what I was, how I was. Let other people be uncomfortable with it if they must, but I'm done with that.



I've been reviewed in a handful of college newspapers with more promised to come, and a couple have been entered on GoodReads. Amazon isn't allowing reviews to be posted until the official release date (I guess?) (3/16/20) and I don't yet have any reviews in commercial or LGBTQ publications but expect those to start appearing as well. Haven't placed any ads yet (aside from a blog tour package) but we're designing them and I do have an ad budget.

I've heard it said that this is a good time for folks to stay indoors and avoid the crowds and curl up with a good book. Read mine! Then, if you liked it, recommend it to your friends.

It's a different story than any you're likely to have read, and I want folks to hear it.



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My book is being published by Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon and now on Barnes & Noble

(paperback only for the moment).

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My 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 -- third grade; sixth grade.

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 hadn't 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.

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 children, 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 de facto 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.

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 single file, on the right side, no talking. 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.

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 boys) 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.

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 if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.

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.

"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"

"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".

"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?"

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).

"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".

I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.

"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"

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?"

"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"

"Eww"

"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"

"Umm no, yuck"

"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".

"Umm, no, no thanks".

After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.


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.

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 at 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.

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.

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.


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As a consequence of my mother dying and an unusually high volume of other friends', relatives', and associates' lives coming to an end within the last year or so, I've heard a lot of summaries of people's lives, condensations of who those people were around some ongoing themes or primary accomplishments.

I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.

Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.

I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.

I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.

When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.

Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.

Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.

From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and as it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.

Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.

I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party

Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.

I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.

And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.

Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.

So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.


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For 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.

But last weekend at my high school reunion, 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."

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. Why didn't I include the event in my book when I wrote it? 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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So... I recently replied to a post on one of the gender forums I'm on, a post from someone doing a research project titled "Are You Transgender?" —


> I'm a girl, that's my gender; I'm male, that's my sex; I'm attracted
> to females, that's my orientation.
>
> I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
>
>
> I don't know if you'd like to include me or not, but I will
> definitely participate if you wish to interview me.


She wrote back and asked me several questions and we exchanged emails and so on. Somewhere along the way I mentioned that I'm trying to have a book published, my coming-out story, "narrative / memoir, possibly marketed as fiction. No author's agent yet".

So she wrote back: "Awesome! What are the agents telling you?"

To which I responded:

> The responses I've gotten over the last year and a half of querying
> tend to fall into one of these categories:
>
> a) "Nope, not our thing, not interested in your idea for a book". The
> largest number of replies fall into this category. No huge surprise
> there. The resources for authors looking for literary agents let you
> search for agents who represent memoirs, or literary fiction, or young
> adult. They do not let you perform a search for literary agents who
> represent LGBTQ coming-out stories. Hence I could either do a lot of
> research and narrow down the pool of potential agents and then send my
> queries or I could just send my queries to the next batch of people
> who represent memoirs or whatever. The latter is actually faster and
> easier to do as a sort of repetitive chore, semi-automated, like job
> hunting.
>
> b) "Interesting idea, but you need more of a social platform. Who
> will buy your book? You need to become more well-known as an expert
> on the subject". This is the 2nd most common reply, at least to the
> queries that position my book as nonfiction. (It's a nonfiction
> thing; fiction authors don't have the same strong expectation of
> pre-existing fame)
>
> c) "Interesting idea but your implementation of it based on the first
> 5 pages isn't quite what we hoped for, for some vague unspecified
> reason".
>
> d) "It isn't quite right for our small agency's lineup but it's a
> fantastic idea, the world needs books like this, best of luck with it"
>
> e) "We'd really like to publish a book on this topic and I was so
> excited to read your query letter but frankly we don't like your
> writing, it's a disappointment, sorry" (ouch!)
>
> f) "We have to decline to represent your book because it too closely
> resembles one we're representing"



Well, that was on the 19th. In the following weeks I've replayed my last answer several times and thought back on the agents' replies and I've come to realize I have way too many in category E to not take it seriously. The rest can be tossed into a giant hold-all basket labeled "Keep on Querying" but yeah, there are too many agents who say they would have liked to have represented a book matching my description, but they don't like my book. Don't like my writing.



So. I'm doing a major rewrite, first one since March 2013. In that rewrite I was focused on condensing. I had 500 pages and in March 2013 I stripped out event-dead and dead-end bits that I decided I could dispense with and ended up with a 295 page story. It was my second condensation pass (hey, I started out with a 900,000 word autobiography, which is is around 2400 pages when single-spaced).

This rewrite is about narrative action. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Not from my own book but from Wally Lamb's book She's Come Undone.


Here's a brief section of Wally Lamb's writing:

> In those days after I moved back, I raked and bagged leaves, washed
> storm windows, shampooed rugs, took five-mile afternoon walks. I had
> the remains of Mas' painting framed at a fancy art shop for $45 and
> hung it on the stairway wall where my and Dante's wedding picture had
> been. A nice place: in late afternoon, the sun coming through the
> front door window cast a ray, a kind of spotlight, right on it.
>
> In November, I got a part-time job as Buchbinder's Gift and Novelty
> Shop. Mr. and Mrs. Buchbinder were Holocaust survivors, a scowling,
> gray-haired couple with thick accents that required me to make them
> repeat whatever they'd just asked. All day long, they
> heckled-and-jeckled each other and pointed out nitpicky little places
> I'd missed while dusting. That was my job: dusting and watching out
> for shoplifters and "stupit-heads" that might break something. They'd
> hired me for the holiday season, the day after Ronald Reagan was
> elected president.


OK, and now here's a different section from the same Wally Lamb book:


> The clock from downtown struck once. Kippy began to whimper. I
> counted my hearbeats past two hundred, daring myself to speak. "Are
> you in pain?", I finally said.
>
> She kept me waiting. Then a bedside lamp snapped on and Kippy was
> squinting at her clock. "My first day at college", she said. "Shit!"
>
> I grabbed for my Salems before the light went out. "Does it hurt?", I
> asked again. "If there's anything I can do—"
>
> She put the light on again. "I fractured my collarbone," she said.



You see how the first section is telling you what happened by making some generalization and the second excerpt is showing you by narrating it as specific events and specific dialog and not generalizing?

My book has a way higher percentage of the first type of paragraph to the second than Wally Lamb's book does. I've decided that I need more of the second variety if I want to keep my potential agents, and potential readers, engrossed in the story.

I've just finished modifying one of the most important chapters, the one titled JUNIOR HIGH TO HIGH SCHOOL, and then I redid the first chapter from scratch, the one titled CHILDHOOD, as a brief little 4-page recap. I have two more major chapters to do.


Current Query Stats:


The Story of Q (main book) — total queries = 455
Rejections: 361
Outstanding: 93

.. As NonFiction— total queries = 333
.. Rejections: 313
.. Outstanding: 20

.. As Fiction— total queries = 122
.. Rejections: 48
.. Outstanding: 73

Guy in Women's Studies (second book) — total queries = 22
Rejections: 21
Outstanding: 1

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In my previous entry, I mostly just quoted the review in its entirety and then sat there basking in the praise. You can't blame me! ** sits here rereading the review again while drinking my coffee **

I will however note that there were two comments that pointed to possible changes or worrisome considerations, which I'll address here.

* The indistinct time frame: it struck me as a valid point that despite an occasional mention of the year in later chapters, all through the childhood section the reader is left to guess when all this is taking place. Combined with the comment from Alicean Brick, the previous reviewer, in which it was pointed out that I need to punch up more awareness of when this was taking place and remind (or educate) the reader about what-all was taking place w/regards to gender politics and etc and hence the cutting-edge nature of what I was trying to write about and say to people (i.e., the writings and other behaviors that got me locked up), this is an additional opinion that I need to do a better job of grounding my story in time. I've done some of that now, entering some additional mentions throughout the book of what year it is and in some cases snippets of what else was going on in the world. I want to do more of this, especially snippets of information about what might have been taking place with regards to gender politics alongside of what was going on with me in these various chapters and sections.

* Taking a long time growing up: although the reviewer said it wasn't necessarily a problem -- "Everything you included seems interesting and relevant, so I couldn't tell you what (if anything) to cut" -- it was at least surprising enough to generate comment that so much of my book was focused on the years before I had grown up. I've actually given myself several days to contemplate that and mull it over. I wanted to write about the years in which these gender issues became intrusive and problematic for me. At each stage I wanted the reader to be able to see how the situation had developed, based on a combination of understanding from the previous bits how I was as a person going into the situation and then reading what happened and how I'd felt, how I'd reacted, and how people around me had reacted in turn. Of a 300 page book,
the first 18 pages are childhood, the next 112 are junior high and high school (hence adolescence), for total of 130 so far, and the rest of 300 pg book are early adulthood, culminating in my attempted coming-out at 21 as a university student. I suppose the bottom line is that if the book loses entertainment value (or impact) in some fashion for dwelling too much on my early life, it's a problem, but for the moment I'm inclined to think (and hope) along with my reviewer that "everything seems interesting and relevant" and not worry about it unless other folks identify it as a worrisome concern.


In other news: on a gender-related forum it was mentioned that the GenderBread diagram (mentioned also by alicean brick, my first reviewer) has been pointed to and its author accused of plagiarism.

That's an item of some controversy (a counter-argument has been made that the original diagram had been made available for adaptive public use by anyone who thought it would be helpful) and for the moment at least I'm going to skip making any further comment on the plagiarism angle. I'll say this much about the diagram itself: I think it makes a useful introduction of the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the topic, especially if one were addressing a group of students or other people where a decently large percentage of the audience would have most likely thought in more simplistic terms: either "you are male or you are female, what else is there?" or perhaps "you are male or female and you are straight or you're gay, what else is there?". I do NOT regard the diagram as comprehensive (not that comprehensive is even necessarily a possibility). For example, on the "Attracted To" pole, the GenderBread 2.0 diagram offers two arrows, both of them starting with "Nobody" and stretching towards, respectively, "Men/Males/Masculinity" and "Women/Females/Femininity". Then below that, "5 (of infinite) possible plot and label combos" reading "straight", "gay", "pansexual", "asexual", and "bisexual". The author is obviously aware of that the graph isn't comprehensive there, but I'll take this opportunity to point out that there's a problem with a single arrow that treats attraction to "Men" as conterminous with an attraction to "Males" or even "Masculinity", and likewise concatenating an attraction to "Women" with attraction to "Females" and to "Femininity". Just as one's own gender expression may diverge from one's biological sex and gender identity, one's attaction to another may have multiple dimensions which don't overlap in the most conventional / expected ways. Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, had her main character, a self-identified Lesbian, pondering these issues:

Once I felt the pressure of her hip-bone along my belly, and being
very muddled and high, thought: She's got an erection.
Dreadful. Dreadful embarrassment. One of us had to be male and it
certainly wasn't me...Does it count if it's your best friend? Does it
count if it's her mind you love through her body? Does it count if
you love men's bodies but hate men's minds? ...Later we got better

If one can BE (for example) a female-bodied person who thinks of himself as a man, one can be attracted to female-bodied men. Or one's attraction could mostly have to do with the biological sex (female people) and could include such people regardless of gender identity and expression. Or, as is the case for many younger folks I've spoken with, attraction is mostly around one or more genders that the person has a sexual affinity for, regardless of the biological sex of that person's body.

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I have several readers holding a copy of my book, having promised me feedback, and I have material back from some of them now.


Alicean Brick, an editorial assistant who describes herself as genderfluid, volunteered to be an advance reader, and gave me these comments , and gave me permission to share them:




(Alicean Brick comments in italics, with my own comments interspersed)


(She writes): Are you familiar with the genderbread person diagram?




I would suggest that YOUR diagrams and theories be illustrated in the printed version.



The genderbread diagram (in my opinion) is a much better diagram for introducing a wider gender theory than those I've seen used elsewhere.


Most of the expanatory diagrams I'd seen as of 1979-80 were far simpler, far more reductionistic things: the one-dimensional Kinsey 1-6 scale (gay to straight), for example.


As far as my own diagrams...in the "Humans and Sexuality" class I was enrolled in Spring of 1980, there was a diagram that looked sort of like this:


Although it wasn't overtly stated that way in the book, what I got from the diagram that the same personality or behavioral characteristics (left hand side characteristics) that would make a male person straight would make a female person gay and the characteristics (right hand side characteristics) that would make a female person straight would make a male person gay. So in my own paper later, I drew two diagrams of my own: first this one, which ALSO made some non-explicit assertions (that opposites would attract, all across the spectrum);

then THIS one which illustrated a social force that I felt was in effect, that defined heterosexuality in terms of one narrow band and tried to extinguish those who did not fall on it:


Anyway, yeah, I've been thinking I do want to incorporate more of what it was that I was trying to say back in 1980. Ideally, I'd like the reader to finish the BACK TO UNIVERSITY chapter (the climactic chapter) thinking that A, yes, I had upset people at the time because they did not understand what I was trying to say, but B, not because what I was trying to say was nonsense-babble; that it was actually cutting-edge gender theory considering the timeframe, even if it wasn't expressed very clearly; and that part of why people reacted as they did was that the content was disturbing to them, which ALSO played a role in their failure to understand: many of them were backing away from it, squirming.



Continuing with Alicean Brick's comments.






Some readers may have a difficult time grasping what a contrarian or anarchist you would have been considered at the time by our prevalent views and cultural norms in that era. It was good that you mentioned examples of other people who had been locked up for seemingly no good reason. your references to what politics and current events were going on at that time help put things into perspective. I would give further examples throughout the book of cultural clashes between gender variant folk and government or society as a backdrop that would illustrate what a deviant you would have been considered at the time and to illustrate what a precarious tight rope you walked on.


your older readers will get this if they remember that time period but it will be missed by your younger readers who will have no recollection of those times. you should amplify the fact that by choosing to be true to yourself and by being who you wanted to be , you were risking your life as well as the image and reputation of family and friends.


you were no doubt a person of great conviction and very brave or daring to be open at that time about who you were. I would like your readers to fully understand this as I think that your story hinges on it.


I'm sure that you could easily pull up some news stories from that period of gender variant people being beaten, abused, slandered and mishandled by the authorities. sprinkled throughout the book this would illustrate the cultural minefield that you bravely crossed.


That struck me as being a very good suggestion. First off, yeah, it helps position the book's timeframe in general, and lest there be some readers who around this point wonder why I didn't just hie myself off the local Albuquerque LGBTQ center and explain my situation, it could be really useful to bring to mind what the awareness-level of the culture was in 1980, both the general population and that of the gay-lesbian-etc subculture that would have been available to me at the time.


Some notes I made, insufficient for me to begin a revamp of that chapter, but with that intent in mind:


* Dan White had shot and killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone in 1978; in 1979, Dan White was found guilty not of murder but merely of manslaughter. His trial gave rise the phrase "twinkie defense"; his defense attorney said he wasn't in his right mind at the time.


* Renee Richards, the M2F transgender tennis player, had recently won the right to compete in tennis tournaments. Her book SECOND SERVE was not out yet, though, and would not make its debut until 1983. Some opponents warned us that if she were allowed to compete in women's events there would be a mad rush by male tennis players to get sex change operations so they could compete against women for women's tournament prize money.


* The term "trangender" itself made ITS debut in 1979. For me and most other people, the term in use was "transsexual" and it was definitely hard-wired to the expectation that you wanted to change your body.


* The 1979 March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights was one of the first major event-occasions where the "umbrella" was explicitly extended to include trans people. In the years leading up to it, the issue was very much up in the air, with some gay and lesbian activists opposing the inclusion. Some felt it made the movement too much of a circus and would delay general-public acceptance, and some lesbian feminist activists in particular did not want to extend the umbrella of FEMINISM's definition of "woman" to include male-to-female transfolk. Jan Raymond's book THE TRANSSEXUAL EMPIRE was publishes in 1979, in fact.


If you readers happen to think of some highly relevant events that happened in 1979 or very early 1980, add some to the list!





And then finally some feedback about the emotional content of the early section:



I'm rereading the childhood section and it really seems very lifeless and flat. Im not seeing much on your reactions to being teased Or how you were treated. Did you cry or if not I think you need more on how those situations made you feel. How each one was another piece of your confidence or self esteem getting chipped away. What were you thinking in the morning before going to school? Did you dread the thought of walking into class? What did those feelings feel like? Did it make you nervous? Did other kids or adults see fear in your face? Did your pulse race or your speech stammer? What was the reaction of the other kids when they teased you? How could they tell they were getting through to you. Did you cower or run. I seem to be missing the whole fabric of emotions from the adults to you and the other kids.


While you were being teased what were your thoughts and feelings? While being teased did you reflect on or have flashbacks to previous times that you have been singled out? While being teased what did you fear happening in the moment, that you would be kicked out of school? Would your parents be ashamed of you? That kids would beat you on the playground or attack you after school on the way home?


I know we have all been in that situation before but as the reader I need to be shown how it made you feel.





Three things, quickly:

a) In my childhool, a good portion of the time my reaction was basically a nonplussed WTF?? sort of thing. I've tried to conjure up a solid sense of me and my head at the time, and the out-of-nowhere nature of some of the behaviors that I encountered.


b) I actually do have sections in the CHILDHOOD chapter that aren't exactly lacking in both emotional and cognitive content, once these events had sort of built up to a critical mass and gotten me worried as well as scraped raw.


c) If my manuscript comes across as lifeless and flat (or the first chapter of it does, which is 98% as bad), that's a problem, but I want to see further feedback to see if that turns out to be a general assessment. I think it may be a matter of style. I hope to post more review material from other readers.

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