Coming to Terms With It


I don't have the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. To be relevant and capable of explaining a lot of things that you were concerned about.

I think that a lot of the things I say and write are important and powerfully explanatory, but for the most part I don't have what you could call a following. It's an interesting word, following. When I was a juvenile, it had a kind of stuffy "congregation of the church" official kind of vibe, but now I'm more likely to associate it with TikTok and FaceBook and YouTube, places where you get other people to follow you and listen to your videos or read your posts.

I am frustrated because of this. Obviously I want the experience of being regarded as important. Let's be upfront about that, I definitely have an ego invested in this. It would be fun and would feel really satisfying to wow people. Musicians have that, the desire to really affect an audience, to have so many people tuned into you. Oh, and incidentally I am a freaking musician and I think more people should be listening to my music because once again I think I'm better than the miniscule size of my audience ever gave testimony to.

So in terms of desire and me putting focus on it, I'm definitely craving the experience of feeling important and connected to a set of listeners.


Please treat all the preceding paragraphs as Item 1. The observed fact that I crave that kind of attention. You're invited to be cynical. Children do that, but we don't necessarily give them attention because we agree with them that their ideas and opinions and perspectives are important. We often regard it as immature, but cute and some of us regard it as selfish if it persists in adults where it is a lot less cute. So here's Flouncy Derek, getting all frustrated because he's not getting the attention he craves.

Back to me not having the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. Communication is a competitive market. I'm not doing well in that market. I don't seem to have the skillset. I don't think that should be terribly amazing to anyone, insofar as I've been trying to explain myself as a marginalized outsider person. I don't know how to do the communication-market magic stuff. It's not that I am cynical myself about the process of selling what one has to say — I could admire the trait of being good at it, and I can definitely envy it — but my frustration does have me wondering if there aren't better ways to share stuff that you really want other people to pay attention to. Making it available to them is easy; but how do you make them aware of its availability when they don't already know what it is you're selling?

Say a shorter version of it, they say. Give me a Synopsis. Explain everything in one page. Please summarize what it is that your book says in one sentence. Give me the bumper sticker version.

This limits what one can say. I just applied to enter a writing contest.

(Admittedly Cynical Reason: claim another award in the text of my query letter)

I see a contest where nonfiction is eligible and what you submit is a full 1st 50 pages. After so many contests where they want you to submit 500 words, a page, 275 words, 100 words, etc, this appeals as a chance to communicate more. But on page two of the application, they ask for a Synopsis, 100 words maximum.

The usual description of Synopsis is "boil down your book into a single page; include all spoilers", which is a horrendously reductionistic request, but to do a 100 page version utterly defeated me. I wrote

1982. Derek, nursing student, is kicked out of program, refused to pressure patients to take medications. Parents think he has drug/alcohol problem. Sell him on idea of fancy rehab and life-coach facility.

Derek's genderqueer (sissy femme), wants facility to make him better speaker.

They're pushy, tell him he's in denial. Other residents initially resent him for being disruptive.

They're slickly manipulative, he's stubborn, they treat his femininity as pathological, he tries to get something out of the program but they're headed for a collision.

Want real synopsis? I need more than 100 words, I don't do bumper stickers.

That's a hundred freaking words.

There has to be a better communications process. I have my author's group where people read from what they've written and give each other feedback. What I visualize is something hierarchical but not in the sense of bosses and employees or captains and lieutenants and sergeants, but instead a hierarchy of communication itself, with little groups that meet often being a part of somewhat larger groups that meet a bit less often and concepts that get a lot of endorsement or generate interesting conversations are more likely to be brought forward into the larger group. Or something like that. I mean, I have more specific ideas but if we were to do this, I'd need to listen to other people's ideas pretty early on.

Call the preceding paragraph Item 2, if you will. This notion of a communications funnel. Local smallgroup passing on that which communicates in a meaningful sense to the next larger group.


That notion, Item 2 (even if it's not how our markets are really structured) suggests that I should select topics and insights that aren't mine or, even if they are, precede the stuff I'm attempting to publish, and trace back to some point where it's easier to make sense to people.

Circling back to Item 1, the ego stuff, ...I really don't know if it's how people in the publishing industry thing of it, but to me, it's like a conversation, very awkwardly conducted:

Author: I have stuff to say

Market: Who can you sell it to?

Author: That's what I was going to ask you, dammit!


Back to my lack of skillset.

Then somehow I'm supposed to leverage my sense of connection to those people so as to find the people to whom I could say more without losing them or failing to make sense to them.

God I hate this. I hate this process. Flouncy Derek: You people are hard to make sense to, I have stuff to say, I'm not very good at what I set out to do, and I'm very frustrated!!



Item 3: Acceptance


I once said — as recounted in the very damn book I'm trying to sell — that I think the Serenity Prayer should be inverted, like so:

God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between the things I cannot change and the things that I can, the courage to change the things I can change, and when all else fails, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

I'm 65. Retirement age.

I actually retired once already from pushing this specific gender agenda. This whole notion that I had something important to say. I put it down when I left college, grad school, 1992. Not toting a PhD. Not having made a mark in academia with my ideas. Then I picked it all back up in the mid-2000s, intially just thinking and processing and rereading the things I'd written.

So I picked it back up and (again) pushed and spoke and wrote. (And yeah, again got all full of self-worship for how exquisitely damn GOOD it was).

But once again it hasn't caught much fire.

I don't want to use "acceptance" as an excuse for not trying any more. But if I'm going to keep doing this, I need some protection from how utterly frustrating and demoralizing the experience is.


Oh, as long as we're on the topic, here's the shit I usually append to the bottom of my blog posts. What is there about self-marketing that I don't get? It's like shouting into a void.
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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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Cory is a fifteen-year old, bright, gay, friendly, but a bit wary of the other kids because he has been called a freak. And it hurts. The hostility and ridicule hurt. He's also lonely, and pines for the someday when he would have a boyfriend. The loneliness hurts, too.

The Boy in Makeup, by Anthony Connors-Roberts, is a cute, warm tale in the gay coming-of-age genre. It's aimed at a young adult audience and does a good job of showing what it's like to be a marginalized identity without too much graphic violence or excessive darkness. In fact, it's a pretty optimistic and welcoming view.

Cory's crush Ben is sweet and kind, his parents and his best friend Lizzie are totally supportive. There are hecklers and harassers, but they are background, people without fully developed characters. Just stuff you have to endure.

The one major exception is Mr. Harris, the faculty member with the intense hangup about male students wearing makeup. Cory has to avoid him as much as possible or be confronted with the demand that he remove all the cosmetics from his face. Which is something he hates to do, because it's a major part of his self-expression.

There's enough tension and frustration around that to stand in for a more general canvas of disapproval and nonacceptance. And while my memories of being fifteen, and those of lots of gay guys my age as well, involve much more hostility, all signs point to genuine progress, and it is nice to see so many characters who take being gay in stride as a part of the normal world.

Structurally, there is a context-switch rather late in the story, where after more than a hundred pages of seeing events from Cory's perspective, we're briefly watching things unfold from Ben's viewpoint instead. It's more typical that an author either starts alternating contexts early on or sticks with one character. I didn't find it jarring, though. Roberts is explicit in doing so, and while I was surprised by it, it didn't throw me out of the story.

Last year I came out as gay to the school. Hardly anyone was surprised, mainly because I had been wearing full-on makeup for a while, and I had never been one of the lads

- p. 6

I have to get on my soapbox now. Reluctantly, because The Boy in Makeup is such a sweet little book that being critical of it feels like attacking kittens or something.

But although the book makes a gesture or two towards inclusivity for the myriad other identities on the LGBTQIA spectrum — for instance, the introduction of the transgender girl Jenny — it participates in the ongoing conflation of being femme (or of behaving and being seen as one of the girls rather than one of the lads) with being a gay guy.

The narrative could have, for instance, included at least one gay guy who isn't discernably feminine. Cory's love interest, Ben, although introduced as a football playing masculine boy, is depicted throughout as joyful and smiling, interested in makeup if not quite to the same degree as Cory, and only doing football to please his dad.

The reporter smiled. "But Ben, why the need for makeup to tell everyone that you're gay?"

And hey Anthony, why would wearing makeup mean that you're necessarily gay?


Don't get me wrong, I'm not oblivious. I understand that if you grow up attracted to males, and you also have the mannerisms and personality traits that are associated with girls and women, you're going to be called sissy and fag, you're going to be marked as a girlish male who is homosexual, because the world doesn't distinguish between feminine and gay when the person in question is male. So since both of the things you're regarded as are true, they'll seem connected to each other for you, too.

But, so? For the cisgender heterosexual mainstream world, being male means you're expected to be attracted to the girls and to be masculine in your various personality and behavioral traits, so to them that's all bolted together as a single identity. But when they go around asserting that this is what being male is all about, it erases gay guys, it leaves you on the outside of how they're defining male, and marks you as an anomaly, as weird, as, well, queer.

And in a similar way, whenever I encounter "does girl things" = "gay", it erases me, a heterosexual femme, and makes me feel unincluded and marked as a peculiarity that can be ignored, doesn't count.

It doesn't have to be that way. Jacob Tobia's book Sissy is from the standpoint of a gay male who is femme and who likes makeup much like Cory does... but it's about a second coming out, what Tobia refers to as a "coming of gender", of making a separate identity-statement about being one of us femme people. (2019 review)


Anthony Connors-Roberts. Amazon: The Boy in Makeup eBook and paperback. 2023 (self-published), 197 pgs


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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.

My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Sewing is a good "exhibit a" sort of example of gender in the classic feminist sense. Gender, as distinguished from sex, in this formulation is something that is culturally associated with one of the sexes, but arbitrarily so, artificially so -- there's no built-in biological reason for it to be so, and it could be otherwise.

The distinction is a good and useful one, even if you happen to believe that some (or all) of gender actually is built in somehow. Perhaps (for instance), you believe that there is some type of hard-wiring in the brain that predisposes a person to be femme or masc, man or woman, regardless of whether their body developes with male (penis) or female (vagina) sexual morphology (or, for that matter, a configuration that doesn't map to either of those). The reason it's a good distinction is that it enables us to have a conversation about what is biological and what is cultural. And a conversation about people who believe it is all biological or about people who believe it is all cultural. Or people who believe Characteristic Five is mostly cultural but think that Characteristic Seventeen is a built-in biological difference between the sexes.

It's even a good distinction if you don't think it's an either/or proposition. I, in fact, don't, when you get right down to it. I think there are some traits that most people of the female sex in general tend to exhibit more strongly than most people of the male sex do, which tends to support the notion of a real built-in difference, but I think for those exact same traits we see some people of the male sex exhibiting them more strongly than most other male people and more strongly than all but a few female people as well. That is what happens when you have a lot of variation among males and a lot of variation among females and only a mild average variation between the sexes, and I think a lot of the differences that get incorporated into our cultural notion of gender folllow that pattern -- that there's probably a built-in tendency based on sex but since there's a wider range of differences among different male people and among different female people than there is between the sexes as a whole, you get a sizable minority of exceptions within each sex.

What makes sewing a particularly good example for such discussions is that in the modern era nearly everyone will agree that it is cultural, in part because it is mostly past-tense cultural. In the era when I attended junior high and high school, home economics was still required for the girls but not for the boys, and sewing was a part of the curriculum, but even by my generation only a handful of them took it up seriously and made an appreciable percent of their wardrobe on their own sewing machine. One hundred years ago, sure, women were expected to do so, and did, and hence most of the women you would have met were people who sewed. But in today's world, it's sort of a "lapsed gender trait" and if we know that someone is skilled with a needle and thread we don't automatically assume that person is a girl or woman. For many modern people, the last time they saw someone at a sewing machine was in a revival of The Fiddler on the Roof, and that someone was a male.


Last summer, I blogged about making a summer bathrobe, my first serious sewing project in eons. (I mostly just make patches for my blue jeans and sew on buttons and replace zippers). My partner anais_pf was my mentor and supervisor for the project. Well, the choice of kitten fabric for that robe was partly inspired by my existing winter bathrobe, a flannel bathrobe handmade by my mother, in a print with serious purposeful kittens in blue peering out from an off-white background.

Well, I've had that robe now for nearly 20 years and I've mostly worn it out. I've patched several holes in the neckline (the part where you hang it on a hook) and across the back and shoulders, but last winter it had reached the point of being ripped and tattered. Problem is, my mom died in 2018, so I have no source of mom-made bathrobes, so I'm emotionally attached to it and don't want to throw it out, you know? So the current bathrobe project was an intensive repair -- to trace the shape of the panel from the collar / neckband across the shoulders and back, the part where all the wear and tear occurs, and then cut out new flannel and sew it in from the inside.

Tracing the shape of a stretched and worn-out panel was a bit of an exercise in frustration! I finally managed, by pinning the old bathrobe down to a quilt, first, so that it would stay put. Then I traced along the neckline down the side and around the sleeve openings and cut out the resulting shape to get this shape in paper:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3620_sm.jpg

Folded the white flannel material in half and cut out that shape, resulting in a
bilaterally symmetrical insert.

Pinned it to the inside of the robe:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3603_sm.jpg

Began sewing the insert. Here you see where I'm matching it to the sleeve opening:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3604_sm.jpg

As much as possible, I'm attaching to existing seams:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3610_sm.jpg

Mostly done except for the bottom...

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3606_sm.jpg

When I got to the bottom, I folded the edge under so that that surface would be protected from unravelling. But that wasn't an option for the other edges, since they had been cut to exactly match to the existing contours.

That meant that I was at risk of having all this work undo itself -- that the flannel would unravel out from under my stitches and make a mess. I had the notion of making a piping to lay over my stitches and sew it down, which would protect those raw edges from unravelling:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3612_sm.jpg

My partner anais_pf asked what I was up to and when I explained, said "Well, what you're doing is fine but it's a lot of work and you don't have to -- I have some seam binding you can use which will save you a lot of trouble".

So I began covering my stitches with seam binding:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3613_sm.jpg

Closeup of seam binding showing one edge being attached. Later I made a second pass attaching the other side:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3614_sm.jpg

Yay, it's complete!

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3615_sm.jpg

Winter and summer kitten robes side by side:

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_3619_sm.jpg


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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 and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.



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

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I have a book that should have an impact on other gender inverts like me.

Problem is, they don't think of themselves as gender inverts. I chose that term because there wasn't an existing term to express my gender identity. Same with more colloquial equivalents like male girl and male femme. It's not like there are others who are already using those terms. So I can't advertise the existence of my book directly to the people most likely to be affected by it.

Counselors. Supportive people, listeners. Folks at LGBTQIA centers whose job it is to sit down with young people, curious people, worried people, concerned about their identity, exploring these questions perhaps for the first time, perhaps without much personal experience of anything besides a conventional community that doesn't seem to make room for people like them.

I would think the counselors would see the value of my book. It enters a possibility onto the map. It describes how it was for me, in case that matches how it is for the person who comes in to your center seeking answers. It offers an explanation, an identity that worked for someone and might resonate for other people whose experience is similar.


Is that you? Is that the kind of work that you do? Do you do that? Do you counsel folks who are seeking an answer to who they are, what their gender or sexual identity is?

How do I reach you, and people like you? What do you read? What do you watch? If you were me, where would you place an ad to reach people like you? Where do you hear about books that would be of potential use to the people who come in your door? Where do you hear about books that would expand your own knowledge base and help you counsel the people who come to you for help?


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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 Stay tuned for further details.



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

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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My book was featured by two book bloggers this week, both of whom drew attention to the purpose for which I wrote it in the first place --


"Society has gotten better at describing and acknowledging the many differences in people where sex, gender, and sexual preferences are concerned, but I realized that I didn’t have as good a handle on some of those possibilities. LGBT, I get, but if you’re in that Q+ that gets appended by some people, what does it mean? After reading GenderQueer, I feel like I’ve got a better handle on it."

— Big Al, at Big Al's Books & Pals






"Gender has gotten to be a pretty complicated subject. Personally, I was born female and I identify as female. I know or have met many other people for whom their gender does not match their biological sex. This may result in them deciding to alter their physical form to match their gender identity, as is the case with those who are trans. However, some may not feel out of place in their given body even though it doesn’t match their gender identity. That is the case for Allan D. Hunter, or as they go by in the book, Derek.

This is what is now referred to as “gender queer.” It’s the Q in LGBTQIA...

GenderQueer is very well written. It is not just any memoir that somebody threw together. This one took years of passion and it shows."

— Amanja, at Amanja Reads Too Much



Of the two of them, Big Al was stepping a bit outside his typical reading fare when he chose to read my book, whereas Amanja often reviews books with LGBTQIA themes. So it's reassuring that both reviewers got that sense of my narrated life as "Example A" of a phenomenon that still is not discussed anywhere near as clearly or as often as being transgender is.


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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

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.


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

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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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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There's a brand-new genderqueer memoir out, a genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age tale going to print, and I'm jealous. Obsessively insanely jealous. I wanted mine to be the first.

Those of you who've been reading my blog regularly are aware that I didn't have such an intense reaction when I discovered Audrey MC's Life Songs: A Genderqueer Memoir. Well, there are two reasons for that: firstly, Life Songs is basically and primarily a transgender story, a tale of transitioning to female by someone assigned and regarded from birth as male, and then very late in the book the author tacks on a throwaway line about how being a transgender lesbian is "so limiting in its binary construct" and so she now identifies as genderqueer; and, secondly, Life Songs is essentially self-published. So on balance I didn't feel authentically beaten to the punch.

SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia is the genuine article. Jacob happens to be a gay male and their experiences of being a genderqueer femme were shaped by that, but this is not a gay coming-out story with a nod towards nonbinary appended. This is the real deal.

"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don't identify that way for fun. I don't identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don't identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am."

As large as being (and coming out) gay did loom in Jacob's teenage years (and how could it not?), it's pretty much incidental to the main narrative they're telling, so yes, there's finally a book being published about what it's like to grow up genderqueer, as a sissy, a feminine male who actually embraces their identity as feminine male, one of us.

And published? Putnam, baby. G. P.-freaking-Putnam's Sons. Yeesh. I have dreams of getting my book picked up by the likes of Seal Press or Sibling Rivalry or something. Compared to that, Tobia is Cinderella in a gold carriage and I aspire to a pumpkin on a skateboard that I can push down the road and call a coach. Did I mention jealous? Jacob Tobia may be in for one seriously bitchy review here.



First, though, some of the sparkly bits. Sissy has some real gemstones.

One of my favorite takeaways is Tobia's replacement of The Closet with The Shell. That being self-protective, and not being cowardly, is the reason people aren't Out yet; that when threatened, one may retreat into one's shell and that there's no reason or excuse to belittle this as if we aren't entitled to put something between us and a hostile world. That we don't owe the world an honest testimonial to our identity, as if it were our secretive lying behavior that causes the surrounding society to make hetero cisgender dyadic normative assumptions about everyone. It's not our doing that makes that the norm that we have to push off from and differentiate ourselves from in order to come out! If we owe a coming out to anyone, we owe it to ourselves, but there's really no excuse for the community to mock people who don't do that, or haven't done so yet.

Tobia at several points talks about what it's like to be in a world that has no term and no concept for who and how we are —

As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others.

... and later, starting college ...

The problem is that there are generally no lines written for people like me. There was no role for a gender nonconforming person at Duke, hardly even a role for a gay boy. Without realizing it, just by doing what they were used to, by following the rules suggested by the structure around them, my classmates had erased me

... and again in the vivid confrontation at Duke with their classmates and the organizers of a retreat called Common Ground. This time there is a specific conflation of sex and gender: the participants are told to sort themselves:

"Today we'll be talking about gender... we'd like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants"

Tobia pitches a totally appropriate hissy fit. It's frustrating living in a world that perpetually, obliviously insists that whosoever is biologically male is a man, that sex means gender, that dividing the room along this fracture line creates two groups each of which will contain the people who belong in it. Tobia starts with warning the organizers that the male group had better be focused on the male body, male morphology, and not about the experience of operating as a man in this world. "Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation."

As someone who has spent a frustrated lifetime trying to put these things into words myself, I kept on bouncing in my seat and occasionally raising my clenched fist and cheering.

The showdown with the Common Ground participants is the closing bookend to Tobia's college experiences. The opening bookend took the form of a couple weeks in the wilderness with a different campus retreat group, Project WILD, that hiked into the Appalachian mountains. In the natural setting, temporarily cut off from ongoing social reinforcements and structures, they found gender polarization withering away. "Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight." It has a lasting effect on Tobia, providing a taste of how things could be different, but less so for the others who disappointingly retreat into their gendered shells once back in the school environment.

It's appropriate and consistent that these bookend-moments are events that are designed to get people in touch with themselves and each other. Tobia is active in the church in his pre-college days and despite living in the south (North Carolina) spends most of the book's trajectory in social environments that are tolerant and open in a modern sense. This is not the Bible-thumping Alabama conservatism of Jared Eamons in Boy Erased, and the issues that Jacob Tobia had to cope with are the same ones that still plague our most issue-conscious and woke societies now. Most of Tobia's story is about a person who is out and proud as a gay person but still trying to figure out how to come out as someone who is differently gendered. It's us, and it's now. Tobia gives us the much-needed "Exhibit A" to enable society to talk about genderqueer people with some understanding and familiarity.

After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine.

I have no idea why Tobia proclaims that they never came out as genderqueer. Maybe they meant specifically to their parents?! It's a worrisome disclaimer at the time it's issued, because this is before Tobia goes off to college, and although the story up until this point includes a lot of secret femme behaviors and tastes, it seemed to me that there was still room for the story to be all about a gay guy who, now that they're writing a book, opts to identify as a sissy femme as well. But fear not, it's not so. It's a coming-out story if there ever was one. Tobia tells many people in many ways, many times. It's just more complicated because when you tell folks you're gay they don't generally get all nonplussed and stuff and ask you what that means, exactly; but coming out nonbinary or femme or genderqueer is nowhere nearly as well understood.

Now, Jacob Tobia does equivocate sometimes, and they of all people should know better! Whilst looking around for a social circle in high school that wouldn't be a badly uncomfortable fit for theirself as a still-secretly femme sissy, Tobia muses about the degree of homoerotic locker-room experiences among the jocks and compares it to the substantial amount of homoerotic anime available to the nerds. Look, hon, if you're going to write an essay about how being femme is its own thing, try not to step on the hem of your own dress. We get another misdemeanor offense like that when the college essay is being crafted — an essay about going forth in public in high heels — and Tobia refers to it as "an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on this planet." T'weren't so much as a mention in that essay of noshing on dicks or craving male sexual companionship, and just like the Common Ground people treating male as the same as man, this is a problem. Some of us sissyboy folks might like to go forth in high heels ourselves (although that's not quite my aesthetic taste) despite not also being gay guys, and we get just as erased by this conflation as by having "male" tied to being a man.

Be that as it may, gay male culture has not exactly been an unmitigated embrace of femme culture. There are scores and hordes of eligible gay guys posting personal ads and specifying "no sissies" or "no feminine nellies" or "masculine presenting only," and shrinking away from anything feminine as gross, like they think we sissies have cooties or something. There's a scene in Sissy, after Jacob has dashed across the Brooklyn Bridge in stilettos to earn money for an LGBTQ shelter where the masculine gay interviewer asks if comporting like this isn't "playing into stereotypes." So it is a politically flouncy act for a gay femme to put it out there and in your face and to underline their pride in being this way, femme, specifically as a person who is also that way, gay.


In the aftermath of Project WILD, Jacob Tobia finds themself back on a campus in the midst of fraternity and sorority rush (ugh!) and the intense gender normativity and polarization drives them away from the connections made with classmates in the Appalachians.

"In the vacuum that was left, I did what came most naturally: I started hanging out with the queers... within about a month, I'd cemented msyelf as the first-year activist queer, attending every meeting of Blue Devils United, our undergrad LGBTQ student organization… .

Yeah, well, convenient for you. To have a structure like that in place where a person like you would fit in on the basis of sexual orientation (which is almost always going to be the majority identity that brings participants in; you get a roomful of gay guys, a smattering of lesbians, a couple token transgender folks of the conventional transitioning variety, right?). I did promise bitchy, didn't I? You got a platform from this. You made social political connections where you could start off recognized as an activist gay student, something people could comprehend, and over time, even if they didn't fully get that your issues as a femme person were something other or more than an expression of gay male concerns, you could push those too, get them out there, explain them to people who started off believing you were in this group for your own legitimate reasons, marginalized for being gay.

Aww fuck, I can't win with this whine, can I? It's not exactly going to fly for me to try to claim that hetero sissies are more oppressed or that gay sissies are privileged in comparison. Well, Jacob Tobia, one thing you reinforced for me is that if I feel the need to bitch and whine, I should go ahead and be proud of being a sore loser, I should refuse to be classy even if the people I'm jealous of, who seem to have advantages I don't have, are good people with more than a compensating amount of situational detrimental oppressions to offset all that.

I aspired to this; I went to college to be an activist about this peculiar sense of identity and I tried to connect and to become part of a community. I rode into downtown New York City and hung out at Identity House and marched in parades and tried to connect there too. But mostly I met gay guys who came to such groups or events in order to meet other gay guys, or trans women who wanted to talk about surgery, hormones and passing. I even attended a bisexual support group for awhile, thinking/hoping that even though "this wasn't it," that the mindset of people in such a group would be more conducive to someone espousing sissy lib and socially interested in connecting with a butch or gender nonconforming female person who found sissy femmes attractive. No such luck: the bisexual gals tended to interact with males in a conventionally gendered way, according to the heterosexuality script I was trying to avoid. And one consequence of all that is that I didn't become a part of an environment where I could be a spokesperson. (I had similar problems when trying to hang with the feminists, by the way; they didn't regard gender issues as my issues, and saw me as a supporter only).

I suppose it's fair to say that heterosexually inclined sissies get bought off. We're not as often in situations where our queerness can't be ignored; our sissyhood doesn't get us found in bed with a same-sex partner at the motel or in the dormitory, and we don't get seen holding hands with a same-sex partner while walking down the sidewalk. We don't go to designated social scenes that would draw attention to our identities, the way the patrons at Pulse in Orlando did. So it's easier for our difference to be tucked and bound and hidden. And so far there hasn't been an "out game" for us to join so there's been no counter-temptation to offset that.



Hey world, you still need my book, too. Buy Jacob Tobia's, yes, buy it now. It's powerful. Buy it and tell everyone about it, spread the word. But an author in Tobia's situation can't directly attack and dismantle society's equation of sissy with gay. When someone comes out as a gay sissy, it corroborates the stereotype that sissies are gay and gay males are sissies, and because of that, a heterosexually inclined young sissy boy reading Sissy or watching someone like Jacob Tobia in a television interview may not feel very reassured that who they are is someone that it is okay and possible to be. Furthermore, all the gay sissies in the world, along with all the lesbian butch women, can't fully dismantle the gender-polarized scripting that constitutes heterosexual flirting and coupling behavior. Oh, they threaten it: whenever gay or lesbian people connect, it challenges the notion that sexuality requires the participants to be rigidly assigned to a sexual role by their biology. Even in a gay or lesbian relationship where one person is the butch and the other person is the femme, you don’t start out where each person is automatically assigned to being the butch or the femme because of what sex they are. It may be a negotiation between the two people, or perhaps a person comes to feel that the butch role or the femme role is the one that fits them best. And of course lots of relationships don’t use butch and femme at all. But the real challenge has to come from genderqueer people who participate in biologically heterosexual encounters, finally making it so that heterosexuality itself is no longer dependent on those binary polarized oppositional roles.

Well, also history. I came of age and came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The entire community of marginalized orientation, gender identity and intersex people (MOGII **) has an interest in learning how being gay or being trans etc. was and has been over time and in different settings. In particular, being genderqueer/nonbinary is often seen and spoken of as if it's an affectation, something that no one would come up with on their own if it wasn't already out there, trending and looking edgy and stuff. So hearing stories from people like me who came to a genderqueer sense of identity before there was such a term (trendy or otherwise) should help retaliate against that attitude.


Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and most other likely venues. Support gender-variant authors and buy a copy!



* Tobia's preferred pronouns are they, them, theirs

** As an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP acronym, MOGII is becoming a popular way of designating the community. We're together in this because our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or our physical body is different from the mainstream.

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"That's not a very good thesis project for a sociology dissertation," the professor told me. "What you should do is select the group you study based on objective criteria, like whether they have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or have petitioned to have their driver's license gender marker changed, and then interview them about their feelings and attitudes and intentions and beliefs and so on. But what you're trying to do, to study male subjects who identify as 'sissy' or 'feminine', there's no external marker for that so it's all intercranial, it's all inside your subjects' head, depending on self-identification, and then you want to interview them to see what ELSE they think and feel, and that's not very sociological".


* * *

Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --

Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex

Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex

Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex

Genderqueer people: ??

Gender inverted people: ??



Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!


But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.

Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...

Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.

Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".

Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".

Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.

Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.

Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".



Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.

I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.

Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.

This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .


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I'm deep into the author's conference that started on Feb 4, with our 4th weekly assignment turned in last Thursday and comments still trickling in on what we wrote (and replied to that other people wrote) from the previous week, assignemnt 3, as well.

I'm on pins and needles because for both assignment 3 and assignment 4 what I turned in are scenes from my book that specifically highlight my sexuality and my attempts, at the time, to get things to work and/or figure out why they weren't working. And so it's personal and it's hard not to just talk their ears off explaining and elaborating in response to every little tidbit of feedback.

Assignment 3: a scene where your character is in a difficult situation and how they handle it

Assignment 4: a scene full of dialog in which what a character says is at odds with what character actually feels or believes


For Assignment 3, I snipped a bit from "Back to University", where a girl in my college class invites me back to her room and I'm hoping she fancies me and things will develop; but she talks about her divorce and how she sometimes misses staying in bed on a rainy weekend and having nonstop sex, and I get all self-conscous about being a virgin and not knowing how the heck people figure out how to get from "friends" to "yeah and sex".

For Assignment 4, I snagged a section from the previous chapter, about 6 months' prior to the Asgn 3 event in real life, where I was at a party and wondering why the hell I never get a girlfriend or get laid and I get all cynical and wonder what would happen if I just act like other boys, in other words be overt about seeking sex and pretend like I don't care if she does or not... and holy shit, the girl I try it out on doesn't get pissed off, she SAYS that I'm being disrespectful and she's not that kind of girl etc but she's bantering with me. And it freaks me out quite a bit (and confirms my cynical anger about How Things Are) and I quit playing


The feedback is interesting (and I crave more more more feedback dammit, and discusson and stuff!).

In general: the others in the class see my main character (that would be ME) as sexless or asexual in Assignment 3, and then in Assignment 4 so far (feedback just starting to trickle in) they see my behavior with this girl as totally normative, completely missing that I'm acting in anger and contempt, that I'm acting out of character and that this isn't at all what I want, this demeaning humiliating game. And they ask "Gee why did your MC stop? Did he fail to get that the girl was into him?"

This all constitutes a mixture of good and frustrating results. Good, that people read the scenes and without prompting, and without me pounding them over the head lecture style, they perceive "Hey wow, you experienced yourself as a sexual being who just wasn't having any success, and yes indeed the reason is that your participation was so different from 'normal boy' behavior that you were completely off their radar, you came across as sexless" in Asgn 3. And good, that I did not have to claim that the girl was interested in me, or that my verbally sexually aggressive behavior (overtly asking for sex, not letting it drop when she says no) was in fact normative and that I was copying boy-behavior I'd seen all around me.

What's more frustrating is that my book needs to get people inside MY head, the MC's head, and with the others in the class reading a scene here and a scene there, I can't know (yet) whether they'd have a clearer sense of my feelings and attitudes and, well, my sexuality, if they'd read up to this point in the book instead of just being dropped down into this scene.

In our "introduce yourself" first emails to classmates, I did say I was genderqueer, without much additional explanation: "I'm genderqueer. (sort of like being trans, which you've probably heard more about; more on that later)". I think most of them have forgotten, I haven't brought it up since then.

I did reply "backchannel" (i.e., to her email address alone, not to the group as a whole) to one other author, because she replied to my Asgn 4 immediately, on Thursday, and I wanted an early feel for "if I explain a little, does it click into place?") -- and that went very well, she said not only these two scenes but another one featuring me being beaten up for very little discernable reason, suddenly made a lot more sense.

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