Last week, I participated in Berkshire Choral International's rendition of "Considering Matthew Shepard" by Craig Hella Johnson at the National Cathedral in Washington. This was the culminating event after months of at-home practive (memorizing my part in five momements and becoming familiar with the remaining ones) and a very intense week of rehearsal with the other 150-someodd vocalists.

As you might expect, this piece drew an abundance of LGBTQ singers. (Not that there don't tend to be a significant number at any given BCI event, but not to this extent).

Because of the current political climate, and because transgender people in particular are being targeted for political victimization, I for once put my self-immersion on hold and made a real attempt to blend, both as a vocalist and as part of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow, instead of putting a lot of effort into representing my specific identity as a genderqueer male femme. And although I didn't feel perceived and recognized for exactly who I am within that coalition rainbow, I felt embraced welcomed and, for once, part of things, part of the community.

We put on a hell of a good concert. Our conductor, Jeffrey Benson, was exceptional, and polished us as a group to precision detail.



Maybe the sense of affinity and belongingness touched me and started some deep-inside-the-head process, I don't know, but I've been experiencing emotional extremes a lot in the days following Berkshires. I went for one of my 25-mile walk excursions and dredged up a lot of misery and foreboding and feelings of defeat, and chewed on them until they dissolved. Later, I sat on our porch steps and smoked some weed and contemplated for an hour or so, and at the end of that I found something pathetic and vulnerable lurking in the dark corners of my head -- the attitude that it's only okay that I am the way I am if I change the world. That effecting social change, successfully establishing this gender identity I've claimed as my own, makes that identity okay.

That is a bit short of real self-acceptance, if you see what I mean. It has to be okay to be who I am and not change the world.

Not that I don't intend to continue to try, mind you. What that unhealthy attitude really indicates is that I'm not as insulated from caring about what other people think of me as I tend to believe I am. I think I'm pretty immune from being hurt or troubled by what this acquaintance or that stranger thinks of me, but in the aggregate I still want to explain myself to the rest of my society and get a nod of understanding and acceptance. OK, I don't think that's necessarily an unhealthy desire. But when it leads to thinking badly of myself, thinking I'm not trying hard enough, or making harshly critical assessments of my skills for engaging with people, that's essentially kicking myself over and over for not being a successful activist. It's basically punishing myself for being who I am without changing the world.


—————


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.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

So I do a vanity search one day on YouTube, being too lazy to just go to my profile account and click on "videos". And up pops:

This video review of GenderQueer

... from somebody named "Novelzilla".


Which got me quite excited, because I seldom get unsolicited reviews. Naturally I'm curious to see whether they liked it and what critical observations they had to make about it, and how they saw it tie in (or fail to tie in) with the existing perspectives within the LGBTQIA community and so on.

First observation: it's being read by a text-to-speech application. Not one of the good ones. The expression and emphasis do not fit the sentences, and the cadence and rhythm aren't as good as the voice in our car's GPS.

But, okay, some people can't speak for themselves because of various impairments, and some people really don't like their own voice and prefer to have the computer read what they've written. I'm in an authors' group and some of the authors have software read their selections instead of reading it out loud themselves. Novelzilla should have consulted them -- they have better ones that they're using!

Well... then Novelzilla gets to the second sentence and informs people that "Through a combination of personal narratives, interviews, and cultural analysis, the author sheds light on the challenges and triumphs of those who exist outside traditional gender norms". Which is disconcerting, because there are no interviews in GenderQueer. I wouldn't describe it as having "personal narratives" either... just the one personal narrative, my own story.

I am told that my approach is "deeply compassionate and respectful" and that I treat genderqueer identities as "valid and worthy of understanding". That would be compassionate towards and respectful of myself, since I'm my own subject matter, and if I didn't think my identity was valid and worthy of understanding, why would I have written my story?

"Hunter highlights the journey of individuals", continues the narration. Umm, no, just the journey of one individual.

Deeper into the review, Novelzilla states that I "incorporate critical analysis of cultural representations of genderqueer individuals". That would be an interesting project: I'd be inclined to say there were no cultural representations of genderqueer individuals in the 70s when the story took place, since the word "genderqueer" wasn't in use yet. That was the point of the book! To show what the experience is like when there's no widely shared identity for such a person, no word and no concept, just a lot of inaccurate and inadequate misidentifications.

If my book has been assigned as reading for a course somewhere, I could believe some student had taken the time to write a review of a book they hadn't bothered to read, to fake their way to a passing course grade. But since it isn't, I'm quite bewildered.

My best guess is that someone is playing with an artificial intelligence program and dropping some keywords in and seeing what it comes up with for various books. The "review" is mostly generalities that would probably apply to nearly any published book about being genderqueer, including mine, but the algorithm isn't distinguishing between someone writing social-political theory and someone writing memoir, so that's where it's tripping up.

Novelzilla has other videos up, all reviews of various books, mostly nonfiction and imbued with social commentary in some sense. I see there's a review of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, for instance. From a brief peek, it looks like the AI is getting better; it seems more accurate in its specifics than it was for mine, although it's possible that Norah Vincent would notice things that are overly general or outright incorrect.

Maybe Novelzilla is an aspiring writer itself, and reviewing books is how Novelzilla is learning the craft. Keep an eye out for any new titles such as Sentient Software: Another Identity Like and Yet Unlike Your own, or of such ilk as that.

If they get publishing contracts, and hence payment for their work, AI's can use their earnings to buy books and hence will become a part of the market, and perhaps in a few years the bookracks will be stocked with books written by and for AI's.


—————


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.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I've paused querying my third book Within the Box.

As I've mentioned, I hate querying. Well, lately I've come to realize that when I have a task that I hate, my default way of handing it is to take a deep breath, scrunch my face up tight, and then go at it with single-minded determination, blocking out everything else, and just blast ahead it until it's done, thinking "let's get this over with!".

And that's often effective and efficient, but there's also a price tag. For example, one of the things I detest is getting rained on. I hate the feeling of cold wet clothes and wet feet in squishy socks and wet hair in front of my fogged-up glasses and the slipperiness of the wet ground and getting chilled from it and everything about it. But when my attention focuses so narrowly on just getting to a covered destination, I block out awareness of obstacles, the terrain, and other moving objects like cars and other pedestrians. My intense dislike for the sensations means I'm trying to not pay attention to how anything feels. So I have dashed out in front of cars on occasion, I've bowled over people with umbrellas. I once twisted the hell out of my ankle trying to round a corner on a wet cobblestone. I'm a menace to myself and other people when I'm being rained on.

So with that in mind, I've realized I shouldn't approach querying my book with that attitude. I have grudgingly sought feedback on my query letter from people in a forum I dislike almost as much as the rain, and before I got banned for not being sufficiently grateful and appreciative, I acquired enough comments and observations to let me (after I cooled off somewhat) shorten and tighten it.

They made me realize how inadequate and inappropriate my comparable literature list was -- it's nearly all fiction, and my book isn't! And the titles that weren't were mostly published over a decade ago. "None of that should matter", I mutter, annoyed with the industry. "My tale has more in common with these fiction books, and who cares when the damn book was published, that should tell them what my book is like!". Yeah. Uh huh. I dash through the rain because I don't like to be rained on and I'm just trying to get out of it. When it comes to querying, I don't like it that lit agents want titles that are in the same genre as the book being queried, and of recent publication. I don't like it that they expect me, the author, to tell them about where my book would fit into the current publishing market.

Meanwhile, I have also belatedly realized my book is weak in one area that it shouldn't be, an area I'd like to tout in my short descriptions of it as one of its feature strenghts: Derek is not just a patient being subjected to violations of patient self-determination in Elk Meadow facility, he's also specifically a genderqueer individual being viewed through a homophobic and sissyphobic lens. I need that tension to be there. But although I've got Derek's own internal musings about gender well-documented in the tale, he's keeping that so much to himself that the gender-identity tension between him and the institution isn't very well illustrated! So perhaps I will rewrite some of the internal dialog spots as conversational dialog, ideally within a group therapy scene and maybe followed by informal continuation with other patients around the cafetaria table. Or perhaps I will write entirely new scenes to handle this.

Also meanwhile, I continue to read from the book in its current form to my bi-monthly author's circle, and so I continue to make little changes in response to the feedback I get from the other authors.

All total, I need to stop approaching the selling of my book to a lit agent as a necessary chore to dash through. I need to wait until the book is in its best form, and I need to hone my querying tools patiently instead of trying to jam some words on a page and get it over and done with.

—————


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.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I approach the topic of maleness from a different angle than most people. It isn't irrelevant to who I am; I do identify as a male person. But it means different things to me than it apparently means to most male people, or, for that matter, to most non-male people.

I'm a sissyfemme, one of the girl people, someone whose gender is queer instead of the expected value for male folks. Most of them grew up internalizing a lot of beliefs and attitudes about how a boy or a man ought to be, a lot of notions about how to compare themselves to other males and how to assess themselves.

For me, it was more like having been issued something, like a vehicle or an office or an identification number or something. I didn't choose it but nobody else did either. "Here, this is the morphology from which you'll be living this life", you know? Or at least once I came to be of an age where I observed myself to be more like one of the girls than one of the boys, that's the way I ended up thinking about maleness. It didn't contradict me being more like the girls. It also wasn't wrong. They simply didn't have much to do with each other.

I'm certainly not the only person for whom maleness and man-ness aren't coterminous:

"Yes of course, I have a male body. But why does that mean I have to go with the other males? Are we only going to be talking about our bodies? Are we only going to be talking about our dicks and beards and how weird it is when you start to grow hair around your nipples?", I asked quizzically. "Or are we going to be talking about being men? Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation".

-- Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, pg 276

...Reactions from Grindr and OkCupid users enlightened me. I either have to be a drag queen, transsexual, or woman for my identity to make sense to some people. I am a cisgender male who occasionally wears makeup and might dress in drag three or four times a year. I am not a drag queen because I am not in possession of that fierceness. I am not a transsexual because I was assigned male at birth and I identify as male. I am not a woman because I am not a woman. Some women do have penises and they are still women. My penis is a man’s because I am a man. Can I make this any clearer? I urinate standing up.

-- Waldell Goode, Queen Called Bitch, pg 134

It's a fine enough morphology, and overall I have few complaints. At puberty, I gained a lot of strength without having to do anything, that was kind of cool. In general I like the aesthetic design of narrowness. Growing dark hairs in all kinds of places that either previously didn't have hairs or only had pale soft nearly-invisible ones didn't immediately rock my world, but I became fond of them pretty soon. I almost immediately resisted the expectation that I was going to start scraping them off my face with a razor: "Why, what's wrong with them? I kind of like it!"; getting a swollen bulge in my larynx was a bit offputting, to be honest, as I was a narrow skinny teenager and now looked like I'd tried to swallow something I shouldn't have with unfortunate results, but I liked the new baritone voice.

I was brought up with a somewhat puritanical set of adult teachings about the body and the parts that we were supposed to always keep hidden, the private parts of the anatomy. Less an emphatic "that's dirty" than an awkward embarrassed adult self-consciousness combined with anger and disapproval when some kid was being exhibitionist. The body parts in question were referenced mostly in terms of body-waste disposal, both by the various adults and by the other children, with a far less recurrent and far more veiled reference to the reproductive and erotic functionalities, so it was like pee/poop/{sex}.

Having a main part among these covered-up bits be extrusive and hanging out instead of tucked away didn't seem like a great design feature in a world where everyone either stammered and blushed or busted out in coarse crude vulgarity if they had reason to discuss such things.

I didn't have any direct experience of the primary alternative morphology, of course. Like everyone else, I got the version I was issued without any option of test-driving them both first. I was somewhat curious about what it was like, I suppose. I liked girls in general and thought they were cool so I didn't associate their form factor with anything negative, but there were areas of life in which I was in competition with them -- to be perceived as mature, self-controlled, on the road towards adulthood and responsibility -- and in that competition I was definitely a male who was keeping up and giving them a run for their money, beating them at their own game, the inverse of what the tomboy gals were doing on the playground.

Jack and Jill Magazine came in the mail once a month. I remember the story and the illustration: "I'm tired of being peanut butter", the girl's thought-bubble proclaimed -- she being the middle kid and feeling like the middle of a sandwich where the youngest and oldest kids got more attention. I found her cute, as drawn. Attractive. I had discovered touching myself, "tickling" private parts in a way that felt good, and it somehow got connected with looking. Yeah, first kink, I was such a pervert, a pretty non-uptight pervert who didn't worry I was doing anything wrong but at the same time I sure didn't want anybody to know.

At any rate, the erotic was pretty quickly linked to fascination with female morphology, looking at it, thinking about it. And soon enough this prompted some perplexed thoughts about what it meant to be female, insofar as the place I was "tickling" was specifically the place they didn't have. By early adolescence, I had learned that they "have one" too -- that in the analogous area they had a place that made the same kind of sensations and felt that way.

What was less obvious, less discernable, was whether or not they liked thinking about male bodies if and when they did that to themselves. Or whether looking at us gave them the same feelings I got from watching girls in their female shapes, taut jeans and dance leotards and swim suits and other apparel where you could see their shapes, especially right there where they were different.

Just as most of what is socially packaged as attractively masculine is irrelevant and foreign to me, most of the small array of presentations of male anatomy as visually erotic and desirable hits me as pretty hilarious and impossible to take seriously. Underpants with hot dogs or bananas depicted on them, that sort of thing. Or the associations with weaponry and the obsession with size. That all feels like it has more to do with the whole masculine thingie about being an adversary and conqueror than with the body contour itself being something that could evoke erotic appreciation. Oh well, I've read things written by female authors expressing a combination of mirth and dismay about wedgies-r-us bottoms (swimwear and underwear), "boob tray" tops that contort breasts into silly shapes, and other processes that convert the female body into something utterly without dignity. Still, the relative lack of cultural awareness of how people who desire the male body experience it as an object of desire creates a certain dubiety about any attempt to package it as such.

Not being someone who has wished to be female rather than male, I'm not a central candidate for being accused of autogynephilia, although yes, that has happened. I don't tend to view my identification with the women and girls as having anything much to do with my fascination for their physical architecture, and certainly not with any visualizing of myself as a person in possession of that architecture, since those are two entirely different things. But be that as it may, I have imagined being female and that imagining was definitely erotic in nature. But how can you act upon someone else's nerve endings without some notion of how that would feel? Reciprocally, being on the receiving end of someone else's tactile attentions is nowhere near as much fun in the absence of imagining the pleasure they're getting from it. We all do that, don't we? I don't think erotic emotional experiences are intrinsically gendered, but they may be sexed, even if only as a consequence of the architectural differences.

Maleness is one thing; being a man is something else. To echo what Jacob Tobia and Waldell Goode said, I don't have anything to add to the latter except from the outside, but maleness itself is part of my experience and identity.


—————


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 tertiary drafts, 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.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Folks seem to think I need their acceptance, that I need them to think of me a certain way in order for my identity to be valid.

That's not really true.

Let me clear some things up for you.

I don't need you to think of me as one of the girls. I'm alerting you to the fact that I've spent a lifetime thinking of myself as one of the girls. Knowing that should make it easier for you to anticipate or understand my behaviors, which is something people have often complained about, that I'm weird and incomprehensible. If this FYI about myself makes it easier to understand me, good.

I don't need you to accept me as queer, as a genuine member of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow. The term "genderqueer" lets me explain my situation using a word you may have encountered before. So I use that terminology. If that makes it easier for you to understand me, good.

I don't wish to pass. The annoying default way of reacting to people like me is to assume we want to be viewed and accepted as ordinary boyish boys, or manly men, but we aren't pulling it off successfully and hence must be feeling like a failure at it. I'm not, and I never was. I don't need or want your acceptance of me as boy or man. But I also don't need you to embrace the notion that I'm different from them, that I'm actually more like the girls and women.

I don't seek to pass as a boy or man. I don't need to pass as a woman or girl. I don't need to pass as cisgender or genderqueer or transgender, as hetero or gay or lesbian or anything else you ever heard of.

I started speaking up because other people kept making an issue of it. Bringing it to my attention. Some being nasty and hostile about me not being right for a guy, and others being embarrassed on my behalf and trying to be supportive about me being ok and trying to reassure me that I was valid as a guy anyway. It got on my nerves and I felt like it was time I said out loud that I like how I am and I'm not trying to hide or slip under the social radar.

So now occasionally I get people telling me "just accept yourself". Or tsking about my need to get everybody's buy-in on my special snowflake identity.

But I wasn't putting it up for a vote.


—————


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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.


My third book is about go to into 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. Contact me if you're interested.






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

A handful of my friends and associates have told me they bought copies of my book but for various reasons (visual impairment, dyslexia, etc) they find it difficult to read anything book-length. "Is it available as an audiobook?", they've asked.

My publisher, Sunstone Press, has never discussed the possibility of either of my books being released in audio format, but I've read selections out loud at several author's presentations (discussion groups, book clubs, library featured author events, etc) and I got to thinking -- I have decent recording software available to me (I'm a musician after all), so I could record myself reading my own books out loud easily enough.

I decided to proceed with that. I figured I'd get feedback from the friends who had told me reading my book was a problem for them, and if they say my voice is sufficiently clear and easy to understand, I'll contact the publisher and see if they're interested.

That puts the audiobook format of the book only into the hands of people who already bought the paperback, so they shouldn't object, and they might wish to make it officially available for others who'd prefer an audio copy.



I'm using Sound Studio, a basic but reliable shareware product from Felt Tip that reminds me of the old Macromedia SoundEdit 16 I used back in the 1990s. Designate the input source (I use the Logitech USB headphones that I use for Zoom and softphone purposes, it has a good microphone optimized for speech purposes), click the Record button, and begin narrating.

Now and then I stumble. I make a mushy inarticulate rendering of a word, or I accidentally skip a line or insert a word that doesn't belong or leave one out... I hit the stop button. The sound wave patterns of what's been recorded up until then are on the screen in front of me, and although I can't look at the wave patterns and discern exactly what sounds they represent, I've learned the basics. I can tell where a phrase or sentence likely begins, highlight it, and play it back to be certain, verify that yep, as I thought, I made an utter hash of that, then open a new window, record just that little bit, copy, switch to the main window, delete what I've got selected, paste, then go back and replay it to make sure I've done it better the second time.

The book I'm working on is the first, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. Typical chapters are 30-45 minutes, although it starts off with a couple short ones and will end with a short one.

I save as I go, in full-quality uncompressed AIFF format. Then I do a playback, listening through the headphones, stopping whenever some section seems lacking in enunciation and clarity, and again re-recording the snippet and pasting in a better replacement.

Sound Studio lets me fill in MP3 tags (track title, artist, track number out of how many total tracks, album name), so I do all that (using book name for album name, author name for artist, etc) and then do a Save As and save the file in MP3 format.


It took me a long time to appreciate my speaking voice. Nobody's voice sounds to them on a recording the way their voice sounds inside their head when they're speaking. The resonances you hear from within your skull aren't the same as the resonances that go out into the room. My recorded voice always sounds more hesitant and less clear, and thinner, than I think I sound. To me, when I'm listening to recordings of myself speaking, I sound like all the words run together as a sound puddle asifIwasn'tproperlypausingoremphasizingwhereonewordstopsandthenextwordbegins. Fortunately, that part, at least, is better when I'm reading from something that's written down, including my own work. I also had a challenge getting used to the tone of my recorded voice. The timbre of it is strange. My trans women friends are jealous, because I get ma'amed on the phone by default and I've never made any effort in that direction, it's just how people gender my voice when they hear it and don't have the visual of the bearded tall person with a prominent larynx in front of them to offset that impression.

I've done the first seven chapters, with ten more to go.

—————


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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.


My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. Contact me if you're interested.






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

On a general-purpose, socially-progressive message board, someone posted to ask about the wide array of gender identity terms now in use, citing the available gender choices for one's FaceBook profile:

The list includes these choices: Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transsexual Male, and Transsexual Man. Do these terms describe different genders? Or do these terms all define the same gender and are personal preferences for what people wish to call their gender?

Pretty quickly, someone else replied:

Those aren’t distinct “genders”. They’re phrases representing various preferred ways for people to describe their gender identity.

I replied directly under that:

^^^ This.

Don’t think of the genders the way you think of the elements on the periodic table of the elements, or the nutritional components of the human diet. Think of genders as each being one or more person’s articulation of their gender identity as a response to our society, which presented them with a Problem. The Problem was (and still is) that society divides people into male and female and treats the male people as all, indistinguishably, having a box of characteristics in common — let’s call it the Boy Box, later to evolve (for all the males, in the same predetermined way) into the Man Box. The female people get the Girl Box / Woman Box. The reason it’s a Problem is

a) It’s a generalization, and then the exceptions are treated like we’re wrong, evil, sick, pathetic, and/or unsexy and heterosexually ineligible in particular;

b) It hits people on an intensely personal level and is very hurtful to the exceptions to the rule, which sucks, and it isn’t really a lot of fun even for the people who do (mostly) fit the original description; it’s very depersonalizing about something that’s intensely personal, and it’s limiting;

c) It isn’t just a generalization even to start with. There’s a large dose of “prescriptive” stuff that never fit anyone of any conceivable sex, so much as it represents what our social structure would like people to be like for manipulative and exploitative reasons. (I’m personalizing social structure as if it had “likes” but it’s a useful way of thinking of it anyhow).

That's my thumbnail sketch version of what gender (and gender variant people) is all about.

Not everyone here on the LGBTQIA+ rainbow would endorse that view, though. Most centrally, not everyone agrees that gender is social and that it's all about personality and behavior and all that. Some people think of gender as a built-in characteristic that exists independent of social beliefs and concepts.

For instance, in a different but similar context, a participant in a FaceBook LGBTQ group wrote:

Hey, gender is real. We're born with it. You should read what Julia Serano wrote in Whipping Girl, we're born with a wiring diagram in our brains that tells us what gender we are, and for some of us it's in conflict with what society considers us to be. If it were all social, we'd all just go along with what society says.

Well, I did read what Serano said, thank you very much, it's right here on my bookshelf. First off, she says we should not think of this as gender. She's talking about a wiring diagram that sometimes says the body we are born with isn't the one we were designed to inhabit:

It seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female...brain sex may override both socialization and genital sex...I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my phyisical sex...for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word "gender".

Other people, however, are more emphatic that they realy do mean gender when they talk about something hardwired into their brains. They will describe a range of things that I consider to be socially attached to a given sex -- like whether you wish to adorn yourself with cosmetics and dress yourself in a skirt, or whether you'd rather play pool and drink beer all evening than sip cosmopolitans and giggle about the latest episode of Sex and the City -- as being caused by some kind of coding in the brain, perhaps genetic, perhaps induced by prenatal hormones.

I don't know about that. I see a problem with that notion.

One of my LiveJournal friends recently wrote on the topic:

Isn't it OK to categorize myself in order to present a somewhat-accurate description of who I am? Like identifying as an introvert or an extrovert? But we don't call "introvert" a type of "gender" or "race". Introversion is a personality characteristic -- would you rather have a lot of friends or a few close friends, do you derive energy from social interactions or do they wear you out?

Let me riff on that notion. Let's suppose that after a sufficient number of years of successful gender activism we reach the point that none of these characteristics are associated any more with whether you have a penis, a vagina, or some other biological merchandise. Well, at that point the gender identities are free-floating; each of them represents a certain way of "being in the world", a batch of personality traits and behavioral tendencies, but now that they are no longer in any way anchored in any particular physical body structure, they aren't appreciably different from notions such as being an introvert or being an extrovert.

There would no longer exist such a thing as a cisgender person. Nobody would assign you any identity at birth based on what you pee from. And with no cisgender people, there would also be no transgender people either, or genderqueer, nonbinary, or any other identity category of that nature.


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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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



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

———————

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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Index of all Blog Posts

Most of the books on my LGBTQIA+ shelf are either memoirs, where someone is telling from their personal experience what it's like to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian or intersex person or whatever, or they're explanatory books that set out to shed light on the situation of gay or trans or genderqueer people but don't do so by telling a narrative story. Then there are a few fiction books that sort of do the same thing as the memoirs, where the story about a nonbinary child or a pair of gay men in the 20s serves to illuminate what those social experiences are like.


When I began reading Black & Bold by Kevin Mosley, I started out thinking of it as one of those explanatory books, laying out the issues specific to black gay men in our society, and it does indeed do a good deal of that, but I came to realize as I read onward that it's actually more of a self-help book.

This is Kelvin, who having come to terms with his own identity, is reaching a hand back in love and support, saying, "You can, too!" A warmth and supportive reassuring presence is palpable throughout. There are guided meditation-like contemplative thought exercises and affirmations at the end of each chapter.

The most central pastoral care message that comes through is about rejecting self-hate. Mosley talks about the social hostility and negative messaging and how important it is to scrutinize these and set them aside and to feel good about yourself as a valid person -- a message that has applicability to everyone but of specific relevance to folks growing up black male and gay.

Reciprocally, there is a solid message about the emotional positives of being out, both for internal self-acceptance and for external social possibilities.

There is some thoughtful elaboration on the specific ways that being gay or growing up gay is different for black people, although not as much as I was expecting. Mosley is writing for a primary audience of black gay guys and hints and indirectly references a lot of this, though, and much of that may be self-evident for those in that position. That is partially a part of the tradeoff of writing a supportive therapeutic guide rather than a sociopolitical theory book -- the voice is clear and the material is well-organized and entirely absent of jargon, but it relies on more shared assumptions that remain unstated or only peripherally examined than a theory or a manifesto piece might develop.

That's not to say that these issues are unexplored altogether. The author makes the important point that, when compared to the predominant culture, the black community is more respectful of and affected by religion, making religious views of sexual behavior and sexual orientation a stronger force. Mosley spends a lot of time unpacking Christian-positioned judgmental responses to being gay, and does it without an antagonistically anti-religious framework, reaching to an audience that will contain many people who continue to consider themselves Christian, as well as people who don't but have been deeply affected by the embrace of those perspectives within their community.

Another theme often addressed and evoked even without a lot of academic analysis is intersectionality (although he doesn't use the word) --

A person who identifies with the struggles of living their life openly gay might still consider themselves superior to people with different abilities or skin color. Their experiences and identities do not automatically erase their potentially preprogrammed racist tendencies. This is why we often bear witness to gay white men executing racial crimes against a gay black man.

Mosley mentions how being a member of multiple deprecated outgroups increases the likelihood of being viewed negatively -- by police profiling, for instance -- and, on the other hand, how not also belonging to yet other such groups can ameliorate the judgmental attitudes that some people in the community are inclined to bring --

For the white man, he has his skin as his first line of defense. Before he is gay, he is white, and because we live in a twisted world that still indulges in the practice of racism, they are more likely to get fairer treatment from self-acclaimed moral police and preservers of outdated customs.

Mosley puts very little focus on ranting about what needs changing in the world, though, and mostly aims to hold a kind mirror to the individual reader, so as to help them make the internal changes from which they will benefit. He urges us to question the kind of stereotypes that polarize the world. He relates the story of Andrew, a young man worrying that anyone who figured him for being gay would be hostile, perhaps violent... he is conversing with a guy he has a crush on and two older black men approach and he's anticipating an attack, only to have it turn out that they're a couple -- his crush's two gay dads!

This is not to say that we are not discriminated against or that every crime against our race and sexual identity is imagined. If you look behind the veil, self-hatred and the inability to accept yourself for who you are is the first form of discrimination you experience.

Mosley is a mixed bag on inclusivity. Clearly he is writing about, and for, black gay men, but in discussing the processes of inquiry and self-examination, the acts that might lead to coming out as gay, he attempts to incorporate some other possibilities for the reader's consideration. He stirs in bisexuality and pansexuality the best, mentioning in several places that gay versus hetero is not an either-or consideration, that there is fluidity and complexity in attraction and expression and behavior.

Other LGBTQIA possibilities that might lead someone to ponder the possibility that they're gay are nowhere near as well addressed, though. He makes repeated mention of being part of the "LGBTQ+ rainbow" and attempts to separate gender conformity from sexual orientation in a "myths" section titled "Allowing boys to play with dolls will make them gay", but doesn't ever really unpack the possibility of how gender variance or gender nonconformity can be present as something utterly different from being gay.

He makes a better attempt to dismantle the inverse situation, of being gay without necessarily exhibiting gender nonconforming traits, in a different myths section titled "Gay people live flamboyantly" --

It doesn't suddenly turn us into label-loving fashionistas who want to wear feminine lingerie and put on tons of makeup... as a matter of fact, one of my closest gay friends plays football, drinks Guinness through a rusty funnel, and doesn't hesitate to knock a few teeth from the mouth of a homophobic if the moment calls for it.

-- but in many more places throughout the book he re-conflates the notion of being a femme or expressing as such with being a gay male, without holding it up for examination. As anyone who reads me regularly is probably well aware, treating gender and sexual orientation and physical morphological sex as being the same thing is a hot button for me and does get me up on my soapbox.

Before I climb up on it, let me make the disclaimer that Mosley isn't doing it any worse than many a transgender author has done in their narrative story, or worse than I see in many memes posted to LGBTQ spaces.

But on a chapter exercise on page 17, asking the reader "What is your primary sexual orientation?", he lists transgender, queer, and intersex as choices. Transgender and genderqueer are not sexual orientations, they're gender. Intersex is not a sexual orientation either, it's morphological sex.

And while it's nice that we're told that at least one gay fellow is a football hooligan who beats up homophobes, the book is rife with unexamined comments that imply that there's something gay about being feminine if you're male, and when you do that within a book designed to reach out to uncertain self-questioning people exploring their identity factors, that reiterates our culture's mainstream message that gender is an aspect of sex and of sexual orientation.

After years of attempting to blend in, I threw in the proverbial towel and dared to be myself... I slide into my rainbow dress, strut the streets , and stomp this battleground with my 6-inch thigh-high boots.

That's positioned as the author coming out gay. Not as the author coming out femme.

The alpha male and his supposed superiority over his counterparts are an urban legend that has fed the ego of brutish and selfish men who think little of everyone else. These guys perch on the fragile branches of delusional misconceptions...peering down on anyone who acts or talks in a way that is not considered fitting for men in their ranks. But laughably, despite all their show of brute force, it appears that the antidote for toxic masculinity is gay.

That's in a section that comes so close to indicting sissyphobia, misogyny, and homophobia as interrelated but separate processes, and yet for a lack of closer examination doesn't quite do so. Is the antidote for toxic masculinity gay even when the gay person in question is the football fan with the rusty beer funnel? How about the sissy femme male whose attraction is towards female folk, is he not an antidote? When stated as it's stated in the paragraph above, it's conflating being gay with being femme.

When Mosley discusses his own coming out, he says many people said he wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know.

This meant this huge secret I thought I had successfully kept from the world was not so much a secret as much as it was me living in denial...Meanwhile my "shame" was hanging out to dry for anyone to see. I wonder if it was because I dressed as Amy Winehouse for that Halloween party at Chad's?

Why would dressing as Amy Winehouse signal that someone is gay? Well, because we live in a culture that conflates femininity in males with being gay, but when you just toss this out without pinning it to the wall and untying those threads, even in a throwaway line, it adds one more underline to the notion that dressing as a female person would dress means you're attracted to the same sex.

Well... we do live in a world where we grow up hearing those equivocations. And if you happen to be attracted to the same sex as a male and you also happen to have some femme (or for that matter a lot of femme) in your disposition, it's natural, I suppose, to think of them as the same phenomenon. Hateful people react to your femininity and say you must be gay, and despise you for it, and when lo and behold it turns out you are indeed gay, you reject their judgment but have less reason to question the notion that they recognized you as being gay because you were so femme.



Black & Bold -- A Guide to Self-Love: Conquer Sexual & Racial Inequality, Proudly Identify as Black & Gay by Kelvin Mosley, publication forthcoming, © 2021
Kelvin Mosley is a member of the LGBTQ Writers Facebook group I'm in.

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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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Safe spaces exist so that those of us who are marginalized minorities can be with each other, speak and listen to each other, in an environment where we won't be mocked, belittled, or harassed by people who don't share our experience. They exist so that we can find words to express and explain our situation, in a world that previously only had derogatory, judgmental, pathology-labeling words for our difference.

Separatism is similar, but more political in scope: that oppressed marginalized people can come together with those who share that specific situation, to unify and decide collectively what to do about their oppression, without the interfering presence of people who are not in that same situation. Separatism is deliberate and positive identity politics, the position that our political interests require a polarization of ourselves against those who are not us, so that we can assert ourselves on our own behalf.

In both cases, they define a negative space, the "people that we are not". The Other. The ones who don't belong here.

Since the act of Othering a bunch of people so quickly conjures up images of prejudicial bias against some category of people in the worst and most blindly hateful sense, we tend to be quick to distinguish between Othering people for factors that are built-in and biological or essential to their being, and Othering people for their attitudes and viewpoints and behaviors and perspectives, which we can politicize without being haters. And yet we often do Other people on the basis of essentials anyway! The argument is that if a person's inborn characteristics in this social context mean that they invariably have a different social experience, and hence a different perspective and world-view, then we aren't really Othering them because of their skin color or their sex characteristics or the pattern of their sexual attractions, we're Othering them for the privileged and oppressive mindset that invariably comes as part of the experience of owning those identities in this society.

That's not to say that we don't sometimes Other people strictly on the basis of what they think and believe and how they behave, and would accept anyone as one of us regardless of any of their biological innate identity characteristics. Because we do that a lot, too.

Othering people and tying it to one of their innate categories, in pure form -- regarding them as permanently, always Other -- creates a situation that can't be readily fixed by any kind of political activism. If they are as they are because their experience (as a cisgender heterosexual white male, for example) invariably means they will have a mindset that you and your colleagues must oppose, then you've just defined an enemy that, by your own definition, you can't change. So your problems with them will persist for as long as they do.

Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, meanwhile, looks a lot less malignant on the surface. "We don't hate anybody, but we hate the following views and beliefs and attitudes". On the one hand, it's entirely reasonable that we get sick and tired of rehashing the same points over and over again, so we create the safe spaces or the separatist environments so we don't have to.

But Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, in pure form -- regarding the matter of these toxic beliefs and viewpoints as fully and permanently settled, that they are wrong and evil and totally not up for discussion ever again -- is eventually problematic, too. It creates a litmus test where anything voiced that has even the superficial appearance of belonging to one of the banned viewponts is considered sufficient evidence of being wrong and not up for any consideration. Since the banned-as-wrong views never get discussed, they become undefined and not clearly understood by the people who fervently refuse to give them any consideration. This breeds increasing intransigence and refusal to listen, and an ever-broadening scope of "wrong thinking" that we, as the good people in this safe space or separatist enclave, need to avoid.

Feminist author Lisa Weil and I connected in the course of corresponding about each other's books (hers: In Search of Pure Lust; mine: That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class). She said her book has often been celebrated for preserving a crucial part of lesbian feminist history, but that people have generally avoided addressing one of her central points -- she views her book as "a critical reflection, specifically on the polarizations of identity politics and performative allyship and all the resulting damage and waste".



I have spoken of these types of Othering in their "pure form" for a reason. They aren't toxic and can be quite beneficial when deployed as tactics. As temporary or partial approaches. As strategies rather than absolutes.

My employer, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is seeking feedback from "WSW" -- women who have sex with women -- to get a better sense of any health inequities affecting that population. I am a femme, albeit a male one; I don't tend to refer to myself as "a woman" but other people who were also identified at birth as male, including some who still refer to themselves as such, sometimes do identify as women. I could, if I thought that what this inquiry was trying to get at was something that really ought to include me, take the position that for purposes of this survey I am a WSW insofar as I am a person whose relationships and attractions are indeed towards women.

But I don't have to defend my option of doing so by taking the position that every single time the word "woman" is used, it always includes me. And in this particular instance I don't think that it does.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, there are several groups defined as being for lesbian feminists. They are having discussions that I'd like to participate in. The questions that are required to apply to join make it plain that they would not regard me as an appropriate participant.

If they formed other groups in which they didn't exclude me, it would be a tactic, a strategy. There are no doubt ways in which my experience as a person seen and regarded male all my life does mean my presence would be disruptive and divisive some of the time. But to the extent that they only discuss the things they discuss in groups I can't join, they make it an absolute. I suspect most of them would find that my views and perspectives actually mesh with theirs and that I have some interesting contributions precisely because of my different viewing angle. Things that might help with the larger project of contending with the world's shared toxic world-views and changing them in a life-affirming direction. But they aren't going to ever know that.


I think safe spaces and separatism are useful and necessary as long as some of the time you come out from behind that wall and communicate with the people who are on the outside of it. With the Others.


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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. 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.

———————

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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Index of all Blog Posts

Once upon a time there was a culture, and as you might expect, the people in that culture held beliefs about how life was for them.

The predominant notion, the one held by the mainstream of people, was that relationships were sort of like parallel lines, moving in the same direction, although that direction might change from time to time; there would be some zigs and some zags, but the lines never touched, and were not supposed to.

Something like this, if you were to draw it like a diagram:



This is fundamental to our culture, they said; this is the floor upon which everything else resides, so this is important!




Well, there were people who interacted differently, and experienced matters differently, and they were considered by the mainstream to be doing something they were not supposed to. These folks spoke with each other about their own experience and discarded the predominant notion, and formulated their own beliefs about how life actually was.

Relationships were actually like cells, and all cells touched adjoining cells and there was nothing akin to the untouching parallel paths that the mainstream folks liked to describe.

They began drawing this symbol and wearing it on their t shirts and putting it on flags that they carried at their rallies:



"What's WRONG with the mainsteam people?", some of them asked each other. "Why do they insist that reality is something it so obviously is not? We have shown them, we have pointed, and still they deny the absolute truth of the touching cells -- why?"

"Oh, they do it specifically because they hate us", came the answer. "It's a lie, since the truth is plain to see. The purpose of the lie is to have an excuse to condemn us!"

And in mutual support and solidarity, they embraced the understanding they had as the foundation of liberty and equality and all possibility of peace, so that lies like this could not bring them down again.




Then one day some other people who also interacted with a different pattern than the one prescribed by the predominant culture spoke up and said "Actually we do have the lines. We also have cells but for us the cells don't touch each other. They're separated by lines. We think you've got it a bit wrong. It's really more like this:



And the touching-cell activists frowned in disapproval of these new dissidents. "We support you for being hated on and attacked by the dominant culture group, but you really need to listen. You are falling into their trap by believing in separation. Your model would leave cells so that they don't adjoin each other and that is the real essence of what is bad about the mainsteam insistence on parallel lines that never touch. So you need to get over that, okay?"

Meanwhile, the mainsteam folks were quick to condemn the new dissidents the same way they had done for the touching-cell folks, because they were all threats to the essential doctrine of separate parallel lines. It was okay to zig and zag but not to touch!

Pretty quickly the new dissidents got mad and began saying that the touching-cell folks were lying and were full of hate, because the baseline truth was right there in plain sight if one cared to look, and this intolerance could not be excused just because the touching-cell movement people considered themselves outcasts and therefore social victims of the mainsteam.



This is, of course, a metaphor, and you probably already anticipate the visual punch line:




Before you say "Yeah yeah, blind men and elephants, etcetera, and 'why can't we all just get along' thrown in at the end, seen it and heard it before", the point is actually not so much "Gee why can't we just get along", nor is it "let everyone have their own reality and don't condemn anybody else", really. The point I'd like you to take back from this is that things look differently based on how the light falls on them and the angle from which one views things, but if, instead of contradicting what someone else is seeing, you get them to start there and move their eyes far enough to see how the other interpretation can be perceived as part of the same overall pattern -- then you have a chance of communicating.


And yeah, I had specific groups in mind. Of course I did. The mainstream view is the cisgender heterosexual patriarchal floor plan. The touching-cell folks are the second wave radical feminists. The new dissidents are the gender identity activists, including trans and genderqueer and nonbinary people.

I don't care who you are, quit holding on to the notion that in order for you to be right, they have to be wrong. Quit using their hate and intolerance as a reason for ignoring their perspective. Of course hate and intolerance is wrong, and of course their insistence that your truth is wrong is, itself, wrong. But be leery of the possibility that their hatefulness and their refusal to listen to you is being mirrored in your own behaviors.

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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. 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.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts