I remember when I was an early elementary-school aged child, old enough to have gotten the "where do babies come from" talk but too young to have picked up on the notion that when I got older I'd have a craving for that, an appetite for that activity. An interest in doing that for reasons other than wanting to become a parent. So we're talking a stretch of time when I was between 5 and 11 years old.

I can see where the following paragraph might be TMI, so consider yourself warned, but...well... I had a secret perversion back then, despite being a notoriously squeaky-clean prissy and prudish kind of kid. I was fascinated by where girls pee from. Their shapes, right there, where they were physically constructed differently from me. I wasn't the kind of eight-year-old who likes telling stories about bathroom functions, or making fake fart sounds with my armpits or by flowing through pieces of paper. I didn't scrawl four-letter words on bathroom stalls. So this was embarrassing to me. To find that I liked catching a glimpse of girls where I could see their anatomical shapes, like if they were wearing pants or shorts, or swim suits or ballet leotards. Or underwear. I was surreptitious about it, keeping it a total secret, never telling anyone, because although I didn't think it was hurting anyone, I sure didn't want people to know I was a kinky pervert.

I was embarrassed back then because I thought it was just me and had no idea what it meant. By the time I started attending junior high as a 7th grader, that part was no longer so. I got it. Sexual appetite, okay, that makes sense! And it was expected, and girls and boys would start dating and all that.

I'm bringing this up for a reason.

The mainstream trans and nonbinary message these days is very much about "what you've got between your legs doesn't matter and doesn't count and isn't anybody's business". You know -- because if you were born with a vagina but you're a man, the vagina part doesn't make you less of a man. Or your body came equipped with a penis, but you're one of the girls, and the penis doesn't invalidate your identity or your femininity. And so on.

But I don't feel included or taken into account by that message.

I was definitely one of the girls growing up. All during that same time frame, elementary-aged child, I liked who the girls were and admired them, and aspired to be just as good as they were in the ways that count. Being self-regulated, a mature person responsible for her own behavior. Being patient, even-tempered, being able to behave within the rules and color within the lines, to be a good student and a good citizen and not a bad rule-breaking coarse crude violent brainless jerk like the majority of the boys. I was told I acted like a girl; this was supposed to make me stop it or prove I was as "boy" as anyone, but my attitude was "yeah, so? they're doing it right!" So: femme or sissy or girl, that was me.

But skippng ahead to adolescence, once there was a prospect of actually acting on those "gee I'm fascinated by your girl parts" feelings, those sexual-appetite feelings, well, I was only going to be comfortable expressing that if it was going to be a mutual thing. The girls were pretty vocal and emphatic about finding it creepy when boys were only interested in them as sexual possibilities. That selfish boys who didn't care if the interest was mutual were annoying. I didn't want to be thought of as being like those boys -- as being different from these girls, the people that I emulated and admired -- so yeah, if these feelings were going to be openly acknowledged, they had to be mutual, and that specifically meant that my parts needed to evoke within them the same fascination and appetite that I felt for them and theirs.

Maybe as a society we're too focused on finding someone with the designated Right Set of Genitals to partner with, I'll grant that. But I don't particularly want to find someone who will like me as a person and shrug and decide she doesn't care about my physical configuration. Because I can't reconcile that with her having a craving for someone with a configuration like the one I've got. I don't mind if she also gets the hots for people of a different contour. Also find broad-chested big-jawed guys hot and cute? Sure, why not? Also get turned on by female people with perky breasts and deep throat hollows and green eyes? No problem, I can relate! But she better have an erotic response to slender wiry longhaired bearded male-bodied persons, whatever else may be appealing to her.

A lot of gay and lesbian people say it matters to them too. That their identity is not about "I don't discriminate based on people's reproductive morphology, I'll do anyone equally if I find them to be appealing people", but is instead about "in contrast to the expectation that I've the hots for the conventionally opposite sex, I totally don't and have a same-sex erogenous interest instead".

I am sorry if it hits you as transphobic, or binary, or genitally obsessed, for me to care that people know what merchandise I come with. I do understand that many people don't have a single physical design that they find sexually appealing, and I also understand that many intersex people and transgender people don't want partners who "chase" folks with their specific physiology because of a fetishistic obsession for that. I, on the other hand, do. Hope you're okay with that.

I won't rule out the possibility that I need to listen and learn things from you. But only if you're going to listen and learn from me, and maybe modify the message to make me feel less erased by it. I don't wish to fit in, indistinguishably, with the female people and to be thought of as a woman like any other woman. That's not where I'm at. I'm not a transgender woman, I'm a genderqueer sissy femme male person.

And I seem to have been born this way.

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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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You’d think a place associated with being nice (kind, sweet, gentle, good) would be appealing to sissy femme males. Their mascot sported long hair in an era when males in general did not. But no, I didn’t find it so.



In my book, woven into the section about growing up, I describe how I tried to fit in and find friends and acceptance among three cliques or groups – Boy Scouts, the choir, and the countercultural mellow potheads. I mention church in passing, as a place through which I’d met this or that person or as the sponsor of this or that event, but I don’t develop a story-theme about trying to find friends and fit in among the others in the church congregation where we attended. That’s mostly because it would have been redundant, wouldn’t have added much to the story. (Three examples are enough).

But I have sometimes thought (and blogged) about the possible affinities between the clergy and the phenomenon of being a feminine male, so lately I’ve been musing about what church was, and wasn’t, to me growing up.

First of all, church wasn’t a place where boys and girls of a certain interest or disposition chose to go, so that those were the kinds of people your own age that you’d encounter there. Instead, church was a place to which children were taken – dragged, if necessary – by their parents. My childhood prior to 8th grade was mostly in south Georgia, and starting with 8th grade (which is when the book’s story gets underway) we lived in Los Alamos, a small and insular community that was also very churchy, populated as it was with scientists recruited from small and often conservative towns. So it was something that people of my parents’ generation did – you took your family to church on Sundays. To whatever extent your children didn’t seem enthusiastic, it was thought to be true to at least that same extent that they therefore needed it all the more. That meant that the other children my age were often there under duress or, at a minimum, would not have picked this as the place to be on one of their weekend days.

For the long span of years from early elementary to junior high, the boys I encountered in our church’s Sunday school classes were full of misbehaviors, being rambunctious, destructive of materials, noisy, crude, and belligerent. Sunday school – for the benefit of any who weren’t raised in a Protestant Christian churchgoing family – is an hour’s worth of time before the church service, and is divided up and, at least for children, age-specific (so it parallels the kind of divisions that define elementary school classrooms); adult classes might be focused on some theme or general topic of discussion, while children’s classes were taught by an adult Sunday school teacher who would come in armed with lesson plans and songs and construction paper and crayons and scissors and whatnot. The adult leaders teaching us (usually women) tended towards condescension and our classes were geared towards absorbing and regurgitating religious-content facts or memorizing verses or learning lots of trite children’s religious songs.

As usual, the girls were better behaved and were generally more willing to get immersed in the purpose of whatever lesson was being dumped on us, and their interaction with each other was nicer and I respected them more for that. There were girls I liked that I saw there and encountered in classes over the years, but since Sunday school wasn’t a discussion format for us, this wasn’t really a place where I made many friends with them either.

I liked the church service better, with its formality and ritual, and the quiet and serious solemnity. Reintegrated with the adults, I wasn’t forced to be among boys my age. I liked the hymns and I particularly liked the choir.

But I was happy when it was over and the rest of the day was available to me. Part of it was the damn clothes. Since I’m a sissy femme, that may seem odd, that I didn’t care for dressing up in the fanciness of Sunday clothes. Was it because, like the rest of the experience, it was imposed on me and not something I chose for myself? I’m not sure, but I hated the suit coat and the collared shirt and the tie, and the cut of the dress pants. Everything had a way of hanging on the body like a set of curtains, loose in places I preferred clothes to be tight yet bunched up and distracting in other places where I preferred to be unencumbered. Little boy dresswear is adult male dressware scaled down to size and I think maybe it just doesn’t fit as well because it wasn’t designed with a child’s body in mind in the first place. Part of it may also have been the gender disparity of it all, too, although I wasn’t conscious of being annoyed by it at that point. People made a fuss over the cuteness of the girls and the prettiness of their Sunday dresses, and the girls seemed to enjoy their garments a lot more. Certainly what they were wearing was quite different from what I was wearing. That wasn’t so true for everyday wear – I would go to elementary school in pants not particularly different from girls’ pants (and they did wear pants as often as they wore skirts and dresses), shirts not particularly different from girls’ shirts. Male formal wear is far more of a costume, all composed of clothes quite different from our everyday clothes but the same for every male except for minor variations in cut and color. It was a uniform. I hated it and wanted out of it as soon as possible.

In later years, in New Mexico as an older kid, the Sunday experience continued to involve the same nasty bullying classmates I was already at odds with from school. There did start to be a shift towards discussion of moral issues and socially relevant topics, and I liked that, at least. I think the church scene could have ended up being an outlet for me. Yet, by sheer luck of the draw, our church congregation consisted of a lot of boys my age but no girls, and a similar concentration of girls a few years younger who were therefore in a different youth group. I do make reference in my book to some church-sponsored activities that gave me opportunities to socialize and mingle, or to discuss important things like sexuality and the possibility of having a girlfriend and being able to date.

But mostly the church scene was not much of a resource for me.

For the purposes of the book, I had a better example with the Boy Scouts; it, too, was an organization that was affiliated with the notion of Doing Right and Being A Good Boy; and although there was considerably more self-selection and I did make better connections there, it, too, was eventually a venue where I didn't have enough in common to keep me from feeling like an outsider. I placed a scene in the book where the Scouts are telling dirty jokes that become increasingly crude about sex and misogynistic towards women. I think it makes my point sufficiently.

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Today I want to talk about sexual feelings. Surprisingly, we don't do that often. We discuss sexual orientation, and gender identity; but our thoughts and attitudes about sexuality itself are often the same as the ones held by the prevailing culture and we're prone to repeating them, unexamined.

Consider this paragraph:

The habit of using women as sex objects may explain why seeing other men with long hair used to make, or still makes, some men so irrationally angry... Why was it so important for those men to be able to tell at a glance the boys from the girls? One reason may be that only in this way could they be sure with whom they might be free to have fantasy sex. Otherwise they might be daydreaming about having a great time in bed with some girl only to find out suddenly that "she" was a boy.

-- John Holt p 71-72, Escape from Childhood (Dutton 1974)


We immediately giggle about the fragile defensiveness of the homophobic guys getting all upset at having momentarily entertained a fantasy of this nature, and we're all quite familiar with the notion that the loudest and most emphatically heterosexual males are the ones least secure in their sexual orientation. But quite aside from all that, why is it or why should it be so disconcerting to make a cognitive or behavioral error that involves our sexuality? It isn't solely due to the historically disparaged status of gay sexuality, although that certainly plays a role in this example.

Consider a woman on the subway and a passenger with a camera on an extension stick who photographs her body from under her skirt, and then masturbates later to the image. If she were aware of it at the time it was happening, it's obvious why that would be experienced as creepy and invasive, but what's interesting is to pose the question to women about how they'd feel about it if they did not realize it at the time and that it wasn't made public in any fashion, so no one else would ever know about it either, but that it did in fact occur and they somehow learned of it later. People I've asked say it's still horribly invasive, a violation of their boundaries, one that makes them angry and creeped out to contemplate.

We can mistake a stranger on the sidewalk for a friend or colleague and generally not offend, even if during our confusion we interact with them physically and/or say things of a personal nature out loud -- as long as none of it has sexual overtones. We can slip into a packed elevator and end up brushing up against body parts and the question of whether or not it's offensive hinges mostly on whether or not there's an interpretaton of sexual intention in it. So it's not a matter of boundaries per se, so much as it's that boundaries work differently when it comes to sexual interaction, we tend to be a lot more sensitive and triggery about it than most other matters. I doubt that I'm saying anything you don't already know, but we don't tend to theorize about that and what it means; we tend instead to discuss sexual interaction as if all reasonable attitudes and thoughts about it could be derived from general principles of human interaction and autonomy.

If a man stares at the crotch of a nude statue or painting, or at the breast of a woman during a social interaction... the image becomes stolen. Notice that stolen images come in two forms: looking at something one is not authorized to look at and looking lustfully at what one is authorized to look at...

Stealing images of women's bodies is a troubled activity that pervades many heterosexual men's adolescent and postadolescent social experience...

-- Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism

Ignoring the heterocentricity of Beneke's language (he himself acknowledges it) -- I am reminded of thoughts I've had about butch people, as a person who is not butch, that in part what I think of as butch is a openness and confidence about their sexual lusts, that who they are to themselves and to the world at large is a person who sexually covets people, who do not avoid the perception that they are sexually predatory (for better or worse, with or without a leavening of some degree of respect for others' boundaries). Now, I think those things as a non-butch person, and perhaps am obliviously opaque to what butch experiences are truly like. What I know more about are the feelings of many people who are not butch in this sense, who, however post-prudish we may be in our current lives, still have residual carryover fears that whenever we are perceived as sexual, as having sexual desires, we will be thought invasive, dirty, even disgusting:

Gather on a hill of wildflowers
A certain kind of piney tree
Hot sweet piney tea
Oh Gather Me
And on a hill of wildflowers
Oh Gather Me
A writer who's in need of sleep
A lady who's in loving need
Don't hold the sprout against the seed
Don't hold this need against me

Melanie, from the inside cover of the album Gather Me


Another locus where we see the vulnerability of sexual feelings on display is the matter of sexual exclusivity and monogamy. I myself am polyamorous and hence I don't take it for granted as inherently normative and natural, but it's certainly a trend and perhaps not entirely attributable to the history of patriarchal marriage and property and inheritance, although once again, yeah, those matters do play a role here. Polyamorous people often point out to other folks that we form friendships and don't feel a need to require our friend to not have any other friends; people who are parents can love multiple children and not feel like they're being unfaithful. But sexual-romantic love is probably more frightening, its attractiveness being part of what makes it so frightening, and that high-stakes high-vulnerability situation is probably also a factor in why so many people feel safer if they are their partner's only partner. Or think they do, at any rate.

A corollary of that much vulnerability is the possibility of great power, of having a form of emotional dominion over the other person's vulnerability. The kink scene (BDSM) is one where power play is recognized as a factor and overtly played with, negotiated, discussed. It's obvious when it's on display in the form of bondage restraints and punitive devices like whips and floggers or reflected in the language of domme and submissive, sadist and masochist, master and slave; but whether it is out in front like that and recognized as a component of intimacy or not, power inequities are present in intimacies that involve so much vulnerability. It need not be permanently ensconced in such a way that one partner always hold power over the other, or in such a way that the player identified by sex or gender or role is always the one in whom the balance of power is vested -- in fact, the spark of excitement in a sexual relationship may depend quite a bit on the vulnerability shifting and trading. But that's a different thing than a hypothetical situation in which the participants are never invasive, always consenting, balanced in autonomy and self-determined authority at every second. And that's part of what frightens us. It's risky and there's a threat of being deprived of our agency and our sense of integrity and personal balance. To the devoted advocate of total equality and the elimination of all oppression, as well as to the fearful conqueror who needs to always be the winner, love is not a safe endeavor.

We do try to hammer out some rules for boundaries, and establish them so that we share the same notions of them, so that we can expect of each other that these notions have been established and agreed upon:

• No one gets the right to have sex with someone. You aren't intrinsically entitled to it. The intensity of your lust for it doesn't entitle you to it. People get to say no and you don't get to smash through that.

• No one gets the right to be found attractive by someone either, though. You aren't entitled to be flirted with, not by someone who has been observed to flirt with someone else, not by someone you wish would notice you.

• Everyone does have the right to like who you like, sexually speaking, though. It may be long lanky freckled longhaired guys with long curly eyelashes, or women with big butts and plump faces and wide shoulders. You have the right to be attracted to people in part because they have a penis, or a clitoris. Or skin of a certain hue. That's not to say that our sexual tastes are 100% free of being politically and socially problematic, mind you; we may harbor biases and we may have eroticized certain things as an outcome of contextual discriminations or ongoing oppressions, and perhaps we would all benefit from challenging those things within ourselves, especially when our sexual tastes appear to reinforce and mimic existing social stratifications. But be that as it may, this is not a venue in which "should" gets to intrude and supplant our inclinations. We don't tolerate being told that we aren't allowed to like what we like.

• It's not a meritocracy, where you get rewarded for your socially desirable good-citizen / good-person characteristics. You don't get to earn a high sexual desirability score by getting checkmarks on a list of admirable traits. I say this as an actual Nice Guy™. You don't get to earn sex.

Sexuality is historically something we've regulated maybe more than anything else in human life, maybe even more than reproduction. At the same time, we don't trust regulating it and rebel almost immediately against any attempt to restrict and channel it. But we fear unregulated sexuality too.

There has been pushback against structuring consent into a formal and overtly spoken package, and there have been people who have spoken or written fondly of how much more "natural" and less clinically oppressive "animal" sex was or would have been before we tried to tame it and shame it and channel it with our institutions and regulations. I myself vividly remember being very unhappy at the age of 19 when it seemed to me that I was attending the university to get a degree and become economically successful in order to qualify for a female partner who "would then let me do it to her", and wanting very much instead to be found desirable for who I was. I also remember reading a description of a commune in California which was attempting to unravel middle-class sexual mores and create something egalitarian, and their approach was to set up a sleeping-with schedule in which all the women would rotate through all the men, a different one each night. I could readily imagine a group of people who knew each other and loved each other deciding to embrace a group marriage that worked that way, but to walk in and join up as an interested stranger? Being assigned by schedule to a sequence of beds felt instantly oppressive, invasive, degrading. If some people wanted that kind of system, and consented to that, fine for them, but if such a thing were imposed on people? Hell no!

I knew a self-identified witch, a woman of indeterminate middle age back when I was barely out of my teens, who once told me "The problem a lot of people have is that they believe that they are their minds and that they have a sexuality. The truth is, you are a sexuality and you have a mind." I've come to see the wisdom of that viewpoint. We tend to have a very limited and nastily derogatory notion of sexuality. Gutter crude and selfish and focused on immediate nerve endings and their satiation and all that. But if that's all sexuality was, we'd simply masturbate and be done with it, why involve other people? Whereas suppose that what the sexual urge really leads us to do is not merely to get our rocks off, or even find someone cute and sexy with whom to get our rocks off, but instead to seek out and find, or if necessary create, the truly ideal context in which to connect, get our rocks off, and raise the resulting children, all with safety and comfort and with the maximum integration of all that we wish to bring into that intimacy. When you start thinking of it that way, it starts looking vibrant and noble and socially progressive; and if that is who we are, and our highly intelligent human minds tools of that, hey, that's a pretty good deal, yes?


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It kind of started with third grade, along with the rest of it. That's when I first remember feeling different and being proud of it. I was good, like the girls. Not like the boys. Boys were bad. Of course I was proud of it. Boys were mean and stupid, an embarrassment. Embarrassing to me, because I was a boy myself, so people would see me as one and treat me as one and expect me to be like them, and I wasn't. So naturally I did things to distinguish myself from them and get people to think of me the way they thought of the girls, in other words as who I really was, what I was actually like.

Last September, I blogged about being a genderqueer third grader, but one of the things I didn't specifically write about was the fighting. Boys fought. Girls didn't. On the playgrounds, in the neighborhood, with their friends or against their enemies, boys got into fights. Shoving and trash-talking would escalate to hitting and wrestling, usually culminating in one boy straddling the other boy's chest and pounding his face and shoulders while his arms were pinned until he said he gave up.

So it was logical for me to drop out of fighting. It would go a long way towards distinguishing myself from the boys and being viewed more like one of the girls. Up until then, yeah I could dish it out, I knew how and I was reasonably adept at it. But grownups didn't want us to. It was against the rules at school and you could get into trouble for it. Most importantly, they talked about boys and how immature we were, and how we were discipline problems and couldn't be trusted, like if the teacher had to leave the room for a moment. A teacher would often ask a girl to take names of anyone acting up in her absence.

So I did that. Yeah, little Mahatma Gandhi, no kidding, I went totally nonviolent as a nine year old as part of showing I was different from the other boys, as good as the girls. It was easier than you might think. Little boys aren't all that efficient at inflicting pain; their punches insult more than they bruise. Also, they're surprisingly formal and stylized in how they escalate from taunting and shoving and daring and when I simply refused to lift fists they'd get frustrated and insult me harder, then get contemptuous and accuse me of being a sissy, which was sort of like trying to insult a witch by implying she's a witch if you see what I mean, and then they'd stalk off in disgust.

So anyway, since this is titled "Sixth Grade", you probably see where this is headed. The three years between being a nine year old and being a twelve year old are some pretty long years. I'd been the target of some really intense bullying and harassment, mocked and giving the most insulting pet names people could come up with, and the physical confrontations had gotten scarier. They'd circle me, several of them, egging on the principal assailant and adding additional threats. The adrenaline made my stomach churn and my voice shake and they could see how they were making me feel and they liked it, they got off on it, they found me quite entertaining. Meanwhile, they'd gotten a lot more efficient at hitting and hurting, and I was out of practice and hadn't learned what they'd learned in those intervening years. Somewhere along the line I had ceased to feel like I had a choice: I couldn't fight.



Mark Fiveash was one of those boys, the ones who thought it was funny and clever to make fart sounds with their armpits and clown around ridiculing and tormenting people for the entertainment of his amused followers. Sixth grade teacher Mrs. Mason had asked him to put the film camera up on the shelf and he held it between his legs with the lens barrel facing out and mugged for the classroom. I scowled my opinion. Then he made as if to insert the lens under Cindy Salter's skirt.

"That's rude", pronounced Betsy Johnson in the desk to my right.

I nodded. "Act your age".

Joey Joiner's seat was behind Betsy's. He leaned over and commented, "You never laugh at anything Mark does. Why not?" I said he wasn't funny, simple as that.

It was Joey who was waiting for me when the end of day bell rang. And he didn't bring a crowd. It was just him. "Fight me", he urged. Like he was suggesting that we go ride bikes together or something. "C'mon, fight. Put your fists up". Joey was a fairly quiet student, put off a little bit of a tough attitude but wasn't among the people who typically harassed me at recess or lunchtime. He was also not particularly large. I was taller and skinny as I was I probably weighed about the same. So by himself he didn't seem especially scary.

I wasn't going to fight him. I didn't do that. He didn't get louder and make increasingly boastful threats but he was relentless, intractible. He wouldn't get out of my way. To get home I first had to cross the grassy school campus. The initial throng of students leaving the building had thinned away and we had the schoolyard to ourselves and still we stood there deadlocked. So I started walking slowly towards him, my hands at my side.

If he had continued to demand a fight but didn't physically interfere with me leaving, that would have worked, but he saw how that was going to play out and began peppering me with punches to the face, shoulder, and chest. "C'mon, just make a fist!"

I walked into the punches and reacted as little as possible and kept going at the same pace. Joey began taking more care with what he was doing and made each punch land hard in painful places. It hurt, it really hurt. I was also shocked that he was doing this: how can someone just keep on hitting a person who hasn't done anything to them and who won't fight back?

He kept hitting me on the eyebrows and cheek and I got more sore and each impact hurt worse until with maybe thirty yards of grass between me and the sidewalk he succeeded in making me cry. I was hurt and I was angry and outraged, and I couldn't keep going on, couldn't take any more, and that frustrated me too, broke me. I turned around and walked back and into the library, which was still open. He followed me, still whacking me when and where he could, until he saw that I was going inside.

The librarian had seen the end of it and now saw me coming in crying and furious. "I'm so sorry, that was horrible, that was so mean! Are you OK? Want a tissue? I don't understand how people can behave like that. There's a bathroom down there if you want to freshen up. Stay here until you feel a little better, stay as long as you want. You can call someone if you need to."

I appreciated the sympathy and the protection. She let me sit in a dark office sniffling until the shock wore off. Then I thanked her and carefully looked out the windows before deciding Joey wasn't lurking in wait for my reappearance, then I headed home.



A couple weeks later, Mrs. Mason made a statement about how important it was for boys to treat girls and women with respect because their greater delicacy entitled them to this important consideration, and I snapped, "It's supposed to be that we're equal". I wasn't on the road to becoming a men's rights activist, exactly, but I was starting to sense a fundamental unfairness to the whole setup, a sense that I was not just a bullying victim but was being badly treated on a systemic basis.

There were double standards afoot. Karen Welch, the girl who lived across the street from us, was in Mrs. Mason's class too. She had a boyfriend, Tommy. I had had a girlfriend in third grade but not since, and missed having that in my life, missed it very much. And now boys and girls were starting to be interested in each other more often, to be boyfriend and girlfriend. That part was good, but it should have been me. Not with Karen, I didn't particularly like Karen, but I liked a lot of the girls and if anyone was going to have a girlfriend it should be me, not loud rude typical boys like Tommy.


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During my senior year of high school, my after-school job was to sweep up the floors and empty the trash cans at an auto repair shop.

I was theoretically destined to have a different and more privileged life than these auto mechanics I saw everyday. I was going to attend college, getting an ROTC scholarship to defray the tuition and dorm costs, then go on to graduate school and get an advanced degree and live my life as a professional or as an academic.

But as the end of high school approached, I found myself envying the auto mechanics and not feeling so good about the path I was to follow. I would continue to be dependent on my parents financially for a long time to come, bringing in no reagular income of my own any time in the foreseeable future. I would be spending many more years of my life trying to earn the good grades and approval of people in a hierarchy above me into which I would be seeking to rise. Those Air Force instructors would be superior to me in a military arrangement, the university would be my landlord, I'd have professors to please and impress, and I might have dormitory RAs and such folks to deal with as well.

Day after day I saw the auto mechanics in the space where they worked, as they wrapped up their day. They all worked for Dave, the shop owner (except for Dave himself, of course), but to a man they behaved as if they could effortlessly secure a similar job turning wrenches in some other shop, and his behavior towards them was easy and friendly and non-bossy. (He was that way towards me too, for that matter, and I appreciated it. My previous after-school job had been at a pharmacy where I'd been yelled at and belittled constantly in a boss-to-peon-employee way, and I'd hated it).

I had the feeling the guys were well-founded in their confidence: they seemed good at what they did, and every adult in town had a car and had to take it somewhere to get maintained and fixed. All of them, Dave and his crew, had a discernable pride in their skills and they projected a strong sense of "Nobody tells me what to do". They didn't take shit from anyone, didn't need to suck it up. After an honest day's work fixing folks' cars, they popped open beers and lit up a joint or two and sprawled on comfortable sofas, turned on some tunes, and we all hung out for another half hour or more relaxing and chatting before heading home.

The homes they headed to weren't luxurious palaces but they had comfortable friendly pads to which they could bring women if single, or which they shared with their wives if they were married. Theirs was a masculinity composed of self-determination and the comfortable sense of being people who contributed a skill that other folks needed and would pay for. Women apparently found them sexy for who they were and how they were.

When I looked down my own road, I was doing so with virginal eyes; I had not had a very successful dating life thus far. What people kept telling me was that I would acquire social status and hence desirability by eventually getting those advanced credentials from the university environment, and then obtaining one of the high-status positions that would be available to me as a consequence — that would make me an attractive prospect for women. My mind sourly translated: I spend years getting a professional education so I can get money and status and then maybe I can meet a security-seeking woman who will let me do it to her.

If you see what I mean, it was not an image of masculinity that had much inherent appeal. The auto mechanics seemed able to present as sexy on the basis of who and how they were in the world, including their confidence and their attitude of doing as they wanted to do and not letting anyone push them around. I was being offered a competing model in which any sexiness I ever obtained had nothing to do with who and how I was as a person, as I saw it, but more like a perk for doing as I was told, the chance to be with women who would admire my social status and my wealth, but that had nothing to do with me as a person, see?



I was counterculturally-minded and didn't care about wealth and social status, and I really liked the idea of having a skill, like a craftsman of old, able to ply my trade in virtually any town I chose to plop down in. And it looked like I could get there a whole lot faster than the 8+ years of college education on the path I was expected to walk. I jumped ship, I bailed on the college path and went to Vo-Tech school to learn to be an auto mechanic. I received the training and then held jobs in auto shops for a couple of years before reluctantly deciding that without better skills and further training I wasn't going to reach the point of being self-supporting.

So the auto mechanics thing didn't exactly pan out as hoped for, but neither did my subsequent attempt at being a college student in 1979-1980, so in the early 1980s, with only a high school diploma to my name, I put in some time as a manual laborer in a variety of settings in the western US where a temporary oil-boom economy made jobs readily available.

So I had a few years of being, and being among, the guys of the social and economic class I'd aspired to, as well as the one a notch or two below. I didn't fit in. I found things not to like about them and their culture and attitudes, and they likewise found things they didn't like about me and mine. Many people would attribute that to class cultural differences, and there's probably some truth to that, but it's not how I experienced it.


I worked as a roughneck on an oil rig for a couple of days and was remonstrated, "You don't slam the coupling closed with a bang like you're supposed to. Don't just close it to where it latches, do it like this!" At first I thought there was something mechanical that happened if you slam it, or that the sound was an important cue to the other workers or something — nope, they just got something out of things banging and from the crew enthusiastically slamming things around.

Working with the hardbander — the welder who joined the lengths of drilling pipe — was easier at first but then he became unfriendly because I didn't reciprocate with the bragging about the chicks in town and what he would do to them.

I liked working on the tree cutting team, working the chain saw and feeding the chipper, cutting the new road to the drilling site. That time it was me who was resenting the attitude of my coworkers. Foreman asked us to unload a truckful of scrap metal parts and then come back for a new assignment, and the other guys wanted to go at it slow and lazy, picking up one metal piece at a time and walking to the edge of the truck bed and pausing and then tossing it onto the pile, then making some joking remark, eating up the time. I figured the foreman would be seriously pissed at us all when he saw how little we'd gotten done, and I was right, but they wouldn't listen or didn't care at the time, and they were affronted that I'd stand against what the rest of them wanted to do.

The surveying crew seemed nice enough until the lead surveyor began scowling at me and saying dismissive things. Finally told me I had an attitude problem. The rest of the crew was always grinning and joking, and because I was all serious and stood around like I had a stick up my butt, he felt I thought I was better than him and he didn't care for it.

Intertwined with other issues, a lot of it had to do with maleness and masculinity. It was sometimes overt and sometimes subtle but it was always there. I had gotten myself into an all-male environment. There was no reason women could not have done these jobs, and been hired to do these jobs, but there weren't any there. If I'd been a college student, or a professional in one of the fields dependent on an advanced degree, it would not have been an all-male environment, but this was. For the first prolonged period in my life I was pretty much exclusively in the company of guys.

I'd craved the freedom and the proud sense of "No one bosses me around and tells me what to do", the self-determination of economic independence, but now I found myself immersed in a hostility towards anything reeking of "sissy". I was now in a noisy crude and coarse performance for which I wasn't very well cast.


I'd also craved what I perceived to be their model of sexiness and desirability, but among these guys I ran into the attitude that guys always pay for it: "You can get a whore, or you can be single and take girls out and you pay for the date, or you can get married and you bring home a paycheck, but if you want that pussy, you gotta pay for it somehow". That didn't sound any better than the white-collar educated-track version. I wanted an equal relationship, starting with being equally desirable.


Gender does map onto class in interesting ways. It's a trope, a cliché: Bogart and Hepburn on The African Queen, her with her tart crispness and him with his coarser working-class modalities. Men have maleness in a patriarchal world, and can embrace the sloppy informality of the working class, but women are expected to hold themselves up to a standard lest any sloppiness be associated with sluttiness. There's a gender dichotomy around good and bad: for males, good is passive, the absence of assertively and rebelliously doing bad things, whereas bad is active. For girls it's constructed the other way around, where bad is passive, a weak failure to impose discipline upon yourself, a state of being carried along to perdition, while good is that active state of straightening one's backbone and displaying the starch of one's character.

The guys' complaint about me was the same as their complaint about women: that I acted like I thought I was too good for them. They recognized the overlap and directly said so: I needed to act like a man, I was acting like I was pussywhipped, I seemed faggy, I wasn't a regular guy. I'd been targeted for similar comments while I was growing up, but in opting for a blue-collar environment it seemed like I'd made the proverbial jump from frying pan to fire.

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