I've been window-shopping for a paid-for editing service, getting a set of experienced editor-eyes on my manuscript with a focus on making the leading edge of it, in particular -- the first XX pages that get requested as sample, in other words -- as marketshiny as the storyline will accommodate in hopes of getting more nibbles from lit agents.

I reached out to some editors I had prior contact with from one of my previous books. One of them got back to me after requesting and receiving my current synopsis and 1st 3 chapters, about 45 pages.

"There was enough in the storyline to keep me turning pages", I'm told. "I was sufficiently invested in wanting to see what happens next. And the solid quality of your writing kept me going. My biggest concern is that I didn't find myself reacting well to your main character. He comes across as distant and cold, someone who doesn't care about any of the people he's in contact with, and as a result I found myself pretty apathetic about the character."

insert comic timing pause

It's autobiographical.





Well, that's consistent with the story I'm telling, actually. At one point within the book I relate the tale of trying to transition from childhood to adulthood in the employment zone, only to find that...

Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?

... and as a child I'd had a similar bad time of it in school, not that I never managed to have any friends but that I was so widely hated:

Jan [my sister] didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything like that, but popular enough. Accepted. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t merely some kid who was seen by some as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me.

So my main character -- i.e., me -- comes across as uncaring:

Mark Raybourne [my assigned individual counselor] wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether or not other people approve of my behavior is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I’ve worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was...incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserved this.

I definitely would not describe my main character as more tolerant than their classmates. I wasn't. I was judgmental all through the worst years, elementary and junior high school, just outnumbered very badly, so yes their intolerance was pretty nasty to deal with, but I wasn't a better person or anything.

So my main character is problematic: pushy and with a practiced "I can't afford to care, it hurts too much" attitude towards whether or not other people like me.



The editor who gave me the feedback may still have a good point. First let's make a split between whether the person I was as the main character is not a good main character or it's my painting of that me, how I'm written as that character, isn't a good representation of me. If I want to stick to the factual (regardless of whether I'm marketing it as fiction or as nonfiction) I can't retroactively fix who I was, even if that character needs fixing. But giving the editor a lot of leeway to make a reasonable point here, yeah, my book could be difficult to market because I haven't represented the character as well as I should.

To my way of thinking, it's a selling point that my book actually addresses so many of the editor's critical comments. The editor hasn't read the whole book and would not have seen that yet. I mean, yeah, they're totally relevant issues, but I've attempted to include them in the book. Trust me, I'm narcissistic. I may be vain and self-immersed, but I promise you it's not an unexamined life.


—————


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.

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You ever notice how large a percent of the social argument is about whether to treat your difference -- the factor setting you apart from the conventional assumptions -- as a verb or as a noun?

I have noun hunger; I wish the way I am to be understood as a thing and not a behavior, an identity not a way that I am acting. I don't want to be an adjective or an adverb, a How You Are rather than a Who You Are.

I know enough to be cautious about seeking to be seen as innately different, though. I'm also a psychiatric survivor, a person who's been a resident of a place with bars on the windows and locks on the doors and they take away your shoelaces and your belt. They treated us as innately different. "Ruined useless brain-damaged crazy people, that's Who They Are." So it works both ways.

In my opinion, we of the sexual/gender identity variant sort have done a good job of setting forth how we want to be perceived, claiming the noun, I am this different kind of self. This isn't the entirety of who I am, but it's good shorthand starting point.

I get some pushback sometimes. Good. It's nice talking to the ones who agree with me but if you want to change the world you live in you've got to communicate with the ones who don't. I mean, it's why we push.

So I propose more testimonial personal descriptions of why marginalized people want the noun treatment. The difference in how it feels. Why shouldn't we be entitled to not having our selves painted as a behavior and, since we're variant, a misbehavior? That's the whole point, I'm not being different on purpose, I'm being me; maybe it happens to be different from you being you, however plural you may be and however singular and nonbelonging I am.

I'm not saying nobody ever gets to judge me, I'm accountable for myself. But "different" isn't wrong and you don't get to treat it as wrong.

—————


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.

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Back in December, when I reviewed Cyrus Dunham's *A Year Without a Name*, I noted the author's fleeting worry that an ambivalent attitude towards the identity he transitioned to could be seized upon by transphobes as proof that this whole transgender thing is being embraced by people who might get buyer's remorse and reject it all later.

Torrey Peters takes it to the next level and wades headlong into it, giving us a character who has, in fact, detransitioned. It's not a screed against the danger of having a transgender identity available as an option, but rather instead another novel that upends the neat little identity-boxes and the oversimplifications.

Amy/Ames, the detransitioned character, has not abandoned their she-identity because it did not fit, but because it fit a little too well, opening up an enticing menu of desired options and outcomes that left her as Amy too vulnerable in a world where vulnerability is a liability. The extra social cost of being trans, on top of the interpersonal emotional price tags of being a woman in this society, was too much, and if the response was to close down, to deny one's feelings and be as oblivious to them as possible, why not go the whole way and retreat back into being one of the guys?

Amy/Ames' former lesbian partner, Reese, is the second of the three primary characters. Reese, unlike Amy/Ames, has not detransitioned and is still coping with life as a trans woman. She, too, finds fulfillment and connection an ongoing challenge but she's in it for the long haul, and resents Ames for abandoning her.

Katrina is Ames' boss, and his current lover, and at the book's opening she does not know that Ames lived as a transgender woman. Ames has assumed the female hormones taken during that time ensured sterility. Incorrectly, as it turns out: Katrina is pregnant.

The premise of the book is that Ames is totally not ready to occupy a social and psychological role as a male parent, feeling utterly like a fake man. Reese and Amy had been planning to adopt before they broke up, and Ames comes up with the solution that the three of them jointly should raise this baby.

Katrina is gender-nonconforming in various ways herself. She tops Ames in a BDSM-flavored dynamic and has never felt as ease in the conventional woman role. This is her second pregnancy; she was married, became pregnant, and miscarried, and to her horror realized she was glad because it gave her an excuse to break up the marriage and escape from the projected identity-assumptions of all their married-couple friends.

A significant amount of the story is told as backstory, filled in in flashbacks: we see Reese as a boy, pre-transition, at the ice skating rink, skating with the girls who are his friends, wanting to blend in with them, resenting it when they're all taken to MacDonald's afterwards and he alone gets a boy toy with the Happy Meal. We get to review the Amy-Reese breakup in slow motion, with Amy being distant and unresponsive and Reese pursuing an affair with Stanley, who in one pivotal scene calls Reese and Amy "queers" and fights Amy in a sidewalk brawl. We're shown the attenuated communication between Amy and Reese that led up to Reese turning to outside connections for her emotional needs.

It's neither just an edgy new sitcom nor a feel-good tossed-salad of spectacularly nontraditional identities. There's a sharp edge to the ending, which flings the three of them hurtfully against each other and remains unresolved. So it's a reminder that we continue to hurt each other in our neediness and desperation, and are only now in the process of forging a way forward more united than adversarial and resentful.

—————


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.

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"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...


Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!




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


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My third book is deep in 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.

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Index of all Blog Posts

You don't need anything from me in order to be different from me. You can simply be you, and leave me to either notice or not notice, care or not care.

But if you feel the need to explain that you aren't ashamed of this difference, that you don't consider this difference an inferiority, and that you would not wish this difference away even if you could, then you may feel the need to tell me that not only are you different from me, you are glad of it. That you would not want to be like me.

Interestingly, one experience that might provoke you into doing that is me telling you that am glad I am not like you.

"It's not the same", a primal part of me rushes to shout. "There were always a whole bunch of you, defining yourselves as normal, and singling me out as the one that the rest of you were glad you didn't resemble."

That's true enough, but put a pin in it for a moment. (I won't forget that aspect of things, I assure you. I just want to focus on something else today).

Is it only sheer weight of numbers that makes our situations different? Is your reaction to my difference otherwise equivalent to my reaction to yours?

There, too, I tend to rush forward to say that you folks who are in the majority are fearful and easily threatened by difference, your defensiveness making it get all hostile. And that, too, makes our situation different.

But I need to be honest. I disapproved of you, growing up. I felt superior to you. I definitely thought you folks were doing it all wrong. Your hostility may have made me emphasize how much I didn't want to be like you, but I was already partway there before I fully noticed that. And if I'd been a lot more plural -- that is, if there had been a whole bunch of people like me, people I could compare notes with and discuss you folks and your behaviors and antics and your way of being in the world -- we might have solidifed each others' contempt for how you are. For how wrong you are.

Oh, is this news to you? It really never occurred to you that marginalized folks like me were rolling our eyes at you not just for your unfair and oppressive practices, and not just for going around acting like your identity and personality and behavior are good and praiseworthy and ours is not, ...but that we find your difference from us to be creepy and repulsive and pathetic and disgusting? Okay, we mostly don't give voice to that because we mostly had a lot more reason to outgrown that kind of provincial narrowness. Unlike you, we were in a situation that prompted us, at least most of us, to think a lot about fairness and equality and being careful and thoughtful about passing judgment on folks and their perceived differences. About hating on difference for its own sake.

Well, true confession time, then. I have a better understanding of your hostile xenophobia hatred than I tend to let on. That. Does. NOT. Make it. Okay. If you try to draw that conclusion, I'm going to stick you with something sharper and meaner than a pin.

But what it does do is encourage us to set aside the notion that all such oppressive and hateful behavior originates in a desire to be oppressive and hateful, which would leave you and your majoritarian kind utterly incomprehensible to us who have been shoved to the social margins. It actually opens the door on the possibility of forgiveness. If there's understanding, if you get it, if things click into place for you and you see us and see how wrong this adversarial difference-hating is, then yeah, for me at any rate forgiveness is in the works.


—————


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


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

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






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

———————

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

This is an internal-thoughts monologue excerpt from my work-in-progress Within the Box. Since Derek's mind and overall life-competency are being scrutinized throughout this book, there is a lot more focus on his thoughts and feelings than in the prior books.

I've selected this excerpt because it illuminates an informal but pernicious type of discrimination that exists to the detriment of feminine males.

-----

It’s frustrating being sidelined from having a respected contribution to make, though. All through my school years I figured that when I got to adulthood, I’d be snapped up for the same reasons I got good grades. I mean, I take assignments seriously and I’m smart and I dedicate myself to doing a really good job. Earn the good grade, you know?

That’s not how it’s worked out, though. I’ve mostly been yelled at by employers. And fired a lot. It isn’t because I’m too stupid to understand the work. Or because I don’t try. I don’t think I’ve fallen short of doing what was being asked of me, either. Most of the time, anyway. A couple of times it’s been because they assumed I already knew something so they didn’t bother to explain. But really, most of it has been unearned anger and criticism. Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Employers mostly don’t. Why?

I spent the year before my parents asked me to take care of Grandpa out in an oil field town, Rangely Colorado. I’d been told it was a place where, if you were willing to work, there was plenty of work available and a person could make some money. It was initially true, too: itinerant laborers like me occupied a public campground and lived out of tents all summer and fall, and employers would drive in with pickups and ask for any available people willing to do this or that type of work, and we’d hop on and they’d take us to the work site. While it lasted, I worked day jobs and socked away as much as a third of the price of the piano I wanted. I worked as a hardbander’s assistant, helping him weld lengths of pipe for the drilling operations — for one day, because he didn’t want me back. I worked a day as a roughneck in training, at the actual drill site, getting sprayed with oily water and handing equipment to the operator when requested, but they didn’t want me a second day either. I had better luck with the cutting crew, cutting down scrub pine and cedar with a chain saw or feeding the scraps into the chipper, a machine that turned branches and twigs into sawdust. I worked with them for two and a half weeks before the team boss said he didn’t like my attitude and fired me.

When someone says things like that keep on happening wherever they go, we’re nearly always justified in thinking the problem is their behavior, because that’s all these recurrent situations have in common, right? So I really can’t blame people for starting with the assumption that I’m probably lazy or insubordinate or don’t follow instructions.

It seems more like employers think that I have too high an opinion of myself. Just like Jake and Ronald and Dr. Barnes, they don’t like me talking like an intellectual. I learned a long time ago to keep my unsolicited opinions to myself, try to keep my head down and just do what’s asked of me. But it seems like I have mannerisms, facial expressions, stuff like that, that hit a lot of guys in a way they don’t care for.

My parents are college educated and they read all the time and always encouraged me and my sister to put a high value on thinking and understanding and absorbing facts and learning processes. When other kids acted like I was putting on airs, my parents emphasized that to be more intelligent or better educated than others meant being different from them, and therefore different was okay.

So some of it, I think, is a sort of reverse classism. I have upper middle class intellectual mannerisms and thought processes, and I seem weird and out of place in the kind of environments where I’m qualified to work, given my lack of a college degree. It certainly works in the opposite direction, where someone in a professional setting has a hard time being taken seriously if they don’t speak grammatically or they slouch or don’t have the right kind of serious attentive facial expressions. And if your family or your culture don’t perform the right behaviors, you won’t automatically pick the right ones up just by getting a professional degree or certification, so it’s class snobbery. But that’s the direction we usually think of it working, of keeping the aspiring lower classes at a disadvantage any time they poke their head into a setting occupied by people from higher classes.

I think it happens when someone from the upper middle class like my parents find themselves in a situation where they’re surrounded by the established wealthy, the genuinely rich. For example, I once followed in the wake of a program administrator trying to schmooze potential donors at a charity event, and got the sense that all the wealthy patrons knew each other and had been to the same schools, but the program administrator I was with wasn’t one of them and had a different set of tiny behaviors, gestures, ways of speaking. He didn’t get the big donation he was hoping for.

I wonder what happens when the young adult children of the rich try to have an actual profession, and all their behavioral habits mark them as trust fund leisure class prep kids. Do they come across as uncaringly lazy and arrogant and incapable, even if they’re trying hard, because of their mannerisms?

A big part of me not fitting in when I’m trying to find and keep a job is me not fitting in specifically with males. I didn’t notice that originally, or I didn’t question it that way. But the working class world is a lot more sex segregated than the office world that people like my parents inhabit.

Guys always think I’m doing something offensively wrong. Thinking I’m better than them. They do this thing, it’s hard to describe, but it’s the equivalent of that high-five that Irma has us do at the beginning of morning meetings, and I don’t engage with them the right way.

The hardbander seemed offended that I didn’t join in with his sex-word-laden metaphors for the parts he was working on. I wasn’t offended by his language, I didn’t act all huffy about it or anything like that. But he didn’t like me being polite. The roughnecks kept correcting my way of latching the clamp or handing a tool over. I should do it with more of a bang. They wanted me angrier, more emphatic. I wasn’t slow, and when I latched or attached something, it was solidly latched or attached. But still I wasn’t doing it right; the foreman said I wasn’t taking it seriously and could get them all hurt.

Back when I was in fourth grade, some boys in my class said I walk wrong. I bounce too much, and they took it upon themselves to instruct me. Walk flat and level, like this. And don’t walk around smiling, it makes you look stupid. Wear your face like this. Walk around showing that nobody better mess with me, see? It felt like they were partially doing this to get me on board, for my own good, but they were also irritated with me, annoyed with me.

They started calling me ‘Skippy’ and would prance in an exaggerated way when they saw me in the hallway, mocking me.

—————


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.

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

Hi! I've been churning away on my third book, the working title of which I've changed to Within the Box (previously: In the Box). Here's a scene I'm sharing, where I'm sitting down one-to-one with my assigned personal counselor Mark Raybourne.

The overall backdrop here is that this is a rehab facility; my status is voluntary; I went AWOL once, bored and less than thrilled with the place, and since then I've been barred from going outdoors for recreation, so to get exercise I've taken to making circuits of the long hallways of the institution, walking laps around the rectangle that they form in this sprawling facility.


-----

“Thanks for being flexible about the time”, Mark says. He had had something else going on that conflicted with our regular individual counseling session, so he’d asked if we could meet early afternoon. He knows my schedule, and it’s not like I was likely to have penciled in a dentist’s visit or a wine tasting, but nice of him to ask me instead of telling me.

“We need to talk”, he tells me. “About your excursions up and down the hall. It’s attracting a lot of attention.”

I nod. Yes, and?

“Most people aren’t comfortable in a social situation if everyone else thinks they’re behaving oddly. So it’s not just that you’re walking around and around like a robot, it’s also the fact that you don’t show any sign of recognizing how odd this looks to everyone else. A lot of people on the staff are saying this shows a worrisome lack of insight, and we’re all concerned that you’re in some type of emotional turmoil”.

“That’s interesting”, I reply. “My nursing instructor brought that up to me once. I had just had a patient die on me while I was away at lunch, and she had me clean him up for the family to come in and have a final visit. So I was still in the patient’s room when they all came trooping in, a minister with a Bible and three or four middle-aged people and an older woman with a cane. They didn’t speak to me, so I didn’t speak to them. And the minister said a prayer and we all stood there like that for awhile. My nursing instructor said they all kept looking over at me, wondering why I was there in the room, and she found it weird that I didn’t react to that at all. She said they clearly expected me to leave so the family could be with the man in privacy. But they were all standing between me and the door and it felt like it would be more disruptive to push past them, and I didn’t mind being there, he’d been my patient for all the good I’d done him, and it felt disrespectful to dash off like I have more important things to do than stand here honoring the dead. So, yeah, I can be pretty oblivious to being the focus of attention if nobody’s actually saying anything.”

“Doesn’t it occur to you that nobody else goes on a purposeless march and makes a spectacle of themself in the corridor? Everyone here is trying to get better. Healthier. Nobody wants to look like they’re having some kind of breakdown! So either you really are experiencing a breakdown or there’s something fundamentally wrong, that you don’t care how people perceive you!”

“I’ve been blocked from going out for recreation. I was already not getting enough exercise, so if the hospital’s going to keep me indoors, I’m going to get my recreation this way. Simple as that. If nobody’s going to bother to just ask me why I’m doing it, it must not matter much to them.”

“Well, people are usually reluctant to point out that someone’s behaving strangely. They don’t want to embarrass the other person”.

“I haven’t found that to be true. All my life people have made a point of coming up to me and telling me I’m strange.”

“I was hoping you’d give some more thought to it maybe not being in your best interests to not care what other people think about you. I spoke to you about this just the other day. Clearly, it didn’t seem to have any effect, because next thing I know, you’re out here pretending you’re a wind-up toy instead of a human being!”

“I actually have been giving it quite a bit of thought. It’s an interesting topic. What you need to realize is that I’ve spent a lifetime having people react to me as if I’m weird. They mostly weren’t very nice about it, and mocked me and made fun of me and called me names. I learned not to care because how else would you keep them from getting to you? I was never going to blend in.”

I pause for a moment, reminded of a line of thought I’d pursued once or twice before. “That was less true for my sister. Jan didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or talk about and make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything, but popular enough. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t a kid who was seen as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me. That means even if I agree with you, which I partly do, by the way, that it probably costs me certain things, that’s like saying ‘Gee, if you’re moving to Spain, you’d be better off if you spoke Spanish instead of English’, you can say it and it may be true but you don’t just decide to switch languages and the next day you’re speaking Spanish. Just because you don’t notice any difference in my behavior doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what you said”.

“What does speaking Spanish have to do with walking around and around and around in the hallway?”

I sigh.

-----

—————


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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It is important to be aware of one's privileges and to try to maintain some awareness of what life is like for people who don't have them.

Sometimes our social situations can seem paradoxical or complicated, where one type of identity can look privileged when compared to another in one aspect, but then it looks to be the other way around when you look at a different aspect. That's not a good reason to avoid trying to expand our awareness, though.




I am not a cisgender person; my gender identity is something other than what people tend to assume it to be. To use the conventional language, it's a different value than what my mom's obstetrician scribbled down on my birth certificate, where I was assigned male at birth.

Almost nobody I interact with has seen my birth certificate, of course. They are reacting to visual cues and interpreting those as indications of a specific physical morphology, the same physical morphology that led the doctor to write "male" on my birth certificate. There are ways to modify one's visual presentation and provide different cues so that people are less likely to assign the same value that got put down on one's birth certificate -- and many transgender people make use of these techniques, to present as their real gender.

In a world that still very much regards sex and gender as the same thing, the way one presents as one's true gender is to present as the sex that causes people to assume you are that gender.

I don't do that. I identify as genderqueer, not as transgender; what I want of the world is to be regarded and accepted as sharing a gender with the girls and women, but specifically as a male person, not as a female person. This is a different attitude and a different expectation than wanting to be regarded and accepted as a woman, period, full stop. Not all transgender women are transitioners, people who transition from male to female, people who present to the world so as to be regarded and classified and treated as indistinguishable from any other women. But that's the most widely shared understanding in our society of what it means to be transgender.



There's a lot of stuff I don't have to endure that transitioning people have to deal with, and I am aware that being insulated from this constitutes a privilege for me.

a) BATHROOMS -- As an adult I hardly ever face any harassment or discomfort related to people thinking I'm in the wrong bathroom. I'm not targeted by the hostile anti-trans laws and policies that have been enacted in certain places. My presence is hardly ever perceived by anyone else in a bathroom as a potential threat or as a deviant behavior.

I'm not completely unable to relate to the situation I've heard others describe, though. I had a lot more trouble with being in the boys' bathroom as a child, as an elementary school student. Young boys can be intrusive and uninclined to respect any semblance of boundaries, the communal bathrooms were a space of relative insulation from adult behavioral monitoring, and children can be particularly intolerant of differences and inclined to label and target those they regard as weird. Or queer, you could say.

I didn't like being in there with them. They made it plain that they thought there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't normal for a boy, and I didn't feel safe there. They were also very crude, scatological, obscenely nasty in their talk about bathroom functions and body parts. They were occasionally violent or physically intrusive.

But I really don't experience any of that as an adult.


b) MEDICAL -- Not all transitioning people participate in a medical transition, one that involves hormones or surgery or hormone blockers or other physical interventions. But those that do have to contend with the vagaries of insurance coverage and the possibility of doctors acting as medical gatekeepers and creating hoops to jump through, qualifying criteria that one must meet.

Medical transitioning can also be extremely expensive, requires recovery and recuperation time, and as with all medical procedures has risk factors, the possibility of complications or unwanted side effects and so on.

My gender identity has never exposed me to any of that. It's not something I've ever had to cope with.


c) HOMOPHOBIC CIS HETERO DATING-SCENARIO HOSTILITY -- Awkwardly titled, but what I mean is the reaction of cisgender hetero people to the existence of people of the sex they're attracted to who happen to be transgender people who have transitioned, and their equation of them (and to the possibility of sexualized behavior that would involve them) to homosexuality.

This is primarily an issue for transgender women targeted for homophobic hostility by cis het men. Such men often consider female people to have engaged in a sexually provocative behavior merely by being female and daring to have an appearance. Instead of attributing responsibility for their attraction to their own sexuality, they will often attribute it to the women to whom they are attracted. So in a similar, parallel fashion they regard transgender women as either enticing them or attempting to do so. Add in their homophobic concern about possibly having a sexual interest in someone who was born with a physical morphology that was designated male and it takes the form of accusing transgender women of doing a perverted and invasive form of sexual aggression just for existing and presenting as female in public.

Since I don't present to the world as female, you'd think I'd be completely immune to this. I actually haven't been -- my behaviors have often been treated and regarded as the equivalent of presenting as female, with the same attribution of attempted enticement, and I've had the furious anger expressed to me, and on some occasions violence as well.

But I don't tend to experience much of it as an adult interacting with strangers and casual acquaintances. When it has occurred, it has mostly been a reaction from people who have had opportunity to perceive me over time and form an opinion or belief about me. And, as with the bathroom hostility, it was far more of an issue when I was younger, although more from the older end of primary school years, puberty and adolescence rather than elementary school.


d) MISGENDERING / WRONG PRONOUNS, ETC -- I'm constantly misgendered and I'm so used to it I can scarcely imagine a life in which people correctly gendered me. I'm not, however, constantly seeking to be altercast by other people as an identity that that they already know and recognize (and altercast other people into on a regular basis), and I think that's relevant. There's an investment in the possibility of acceptance that creates a vulnerability.

I'm not sure my situation is safer from microaggressions or less fraught with daily emotional wear and tear, but at a minimum it is different.

We've all been in an occasional social situation where any kind of acceptance as "one of us" was completely out of the question, and we've all had at least a few occasions where it was not beyond the bounds of hope that people would. Rejection and hostility and mockery tend to hurt more sharply in the latter situation.


The main reciprocal side of all this is that transgender people who are transitioners occupy an identity that, at this point in our culture, is known and recognized. Some of the people who know or recognize it are hostile to it and don't regard it as authentic or legitimate, but they've been exposed to the concept.

I don't have that. There is still almost zero social awareness of people who seek to be recognized as having a gender that doesn't match their sex, and to have that hybrid mismatched combination authenticated. This means that the loud social voices that promote understanding and acceptance do not include people like me. It means that allies and thoughtful conscientious people remain unaware of our experiences and have no idea how to accommodate our feelings. It means that structured organizations to promote the equality and social well-being of gender-atypical people are not "us" to people like me -- they are, at best, potential allies, hypothetical groups to which we would logically belong if we could make them aware of us and get them to move over and make room.

I do often feel more marginalized (rather than more oppressed) than conventional transitioning trangender people. But I have societal advantages, too.

I pledge to be the best ally to my transgender brothers and sisters that I can be.


—————


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

Just a couple of decades ago, we had no term, and no concept, for what we now call "cultural appropriation". Like "genderqueer", it's a new notion we can now use to frame our understandings of social inclusion and social justice.


As with the subject of gender variance and diversity, cultural appropriation is not something that should be oversimplified. We should use tools such as this concept of cultural appropriation to add a more nuanced understanding of social patterns, to illuminate what are actually fairly complicated situations and draw our awareness to some patterns that we should be keeping in mind.

In contrast, there's very little benefit gained from trying to use it as a rule, as a policy in and of itself that replaces having to think. Stating "all cultural appropriation is bad" won't take us very far, and even asserting that "dominant groups should not engage in cultural appropriation of more marginalized ones", while more useful, doesn't banish the need to look at situations from multiple angles.


Here are a few example situations I'd like to use as discussion-starters:


EXHIBIT A: Since the 1990s, New York City has had fast-food Mexican restaurants sprinked throughout several of its boroughs with the name "Fresco Tortilla" or "Fresh Tortilla".

They aren't owned by Mexican-American people, nor are they staffed by people of Mexican ancestry. They are universally run by people of Chinese ancestry instead.


When I first came to the city myself, it didn't have many Mexican restaurants (not even many Taco Bells), nor did it have a very large population of people of Mexican descent. Fast-food Chinese places were ubiquitous by comparison. There was less competition to contend with in opening and operating a place that served inexpensive Mexican food, and it is my understanding that an immigrant of Chinese descent learned the cuisine and then moved into this niche, and when it became successful brought other family members in to open establishments at other locations.

Mexican people in the United States are marginalized and viewed disparagingly, have a history of being economically oppressed here. Chinese people, like other Asians, have often had a rough time here as well, but have been an established community in New York for a long time.

In recent decades, many more ethnically Mexican people have moved into the New York City metropolitan region. Opening and running Mexican food restaurants is a likely avenue to financial stability, as it is a popular cuisine.

Is the presence of a chain of Mexican restaurants run and operated by Asian personnel a cultural appropriation issue? Was it less so when there were far fewer families of Mexican origin potentially competing for this niche? Or was that actually making it more of a concern?

There hasn't been a public phenomenon of Hispanic or specifically Mexican people complaining about the situation. Does that mean it isn't problematic? So we aren't being charged with the responsibility of noticing it, we're just being called on to react with the correct reactions when someone makes the charge of cultural appropriation? Does that make it a valid defense to respond "Well, nobody complained about it before now" when someone accuses you of cultural appropriation?

Would it be more of a problem if the people doing it were not themselves a historically marginalized ethnic minority?


EXHIBIT B: One of Paul Simon's most successful albums was Graceland. The music is a combination of heavily influenced and directly lifted from indigenous African musical culture, was recorded in South Africa, and features African musicians who are named and credited. Many people view the album as a mostly successful effort to introduce this music to a wider audience.

Still, Paul Simon is a white person and he was making money and furthering his career through the use of folk music traditions of a different culture, definitely an oppressed and marginalized one.

Does it make it okay that he had the permission and direct participation of African musicians, and credited them on the album?

Unlike the case with Fresco Tortilla, there have been some African musicians who have complained about Graceland and Paul Simon. What percent of the original culture have to approve before it can be considered that they have given permission? Or do we assume that because of their lower social status and clout that they aren't able to give consent, in the same way that minor children can't consent to sex?

The counterargument has been made that if mainstream music and its musicians makes no effort to be stylistically inclusive, music on the margins will never find a wider audience. That the alternative to Graceland would be the major record labels signing contracts with indigenous people to record music that is unlike what the mainstream musical audience is accustomed to -- something that Paul Simon was less in a position to make happen, and which, as the record companies would have pointed out, would not have been anywhere as likely to result in those recordings being purchased and played.

That's a specific example of a more universal response to the charge of cultural appropriation, by the way: if we don't let ourselves be influenced and inspired by traditions and creativities that originate anywhere but within the cultural confines of the mainstream, if we don't learn from and emulate anything except the dominant culture, that clears us of being cultural appropriators but aren't we then turning our backs on the rest of the world, shutting our ears and eyes to what they might have to teach us?


EXHIBIT C: Back in the 1950s, Harry Belafonte released an album of music from various world cultures, titled An Evening with Belafonte. Among other tracks, it included a recording of "Danny Boy".

"Danny Boy" is considered Irish and is associated with Irish cultural pride. And the Irish people, subjected to centuries of English domination and the conflicts referred to as "the troubles", can be considered marginalized and oppressed.

But not only is Harry Belafonte also a member of a readily-identified marginalized group (as with the Chinese people operating Fresco Tortilla in the first example), he is also in this case not appropriating a song that arose as part of Irish indigenous culture. The song was written by an English composer, and set to the tune "Londonderry Air", which itself was not so much a long-established Irish tune but rather a somewhat garbled annotation of one, written down by a songcatcher in the 1800s, a tune the original of which is apparently more closely represented in "The Last Rose of Summer".

How authentically a product of a given culture does a cultural work need to be in order for its use by someone of a different culture to be liable for cultural appropriation?

If a white fashion model styles her hair not in an historically established ethnic fashion, but instead in a style promoted in modern times within fashion magazines that happen to target specific ethnic communities, is she doing cultural appropriation? Does it matter if the fashion magazines pushing the style have white owners?


All of these examples are somewhat deliberately retro, referring to things that happened (or first happened) long before our society began discussing cultural appropriation. That minimizes the tendency of people to respond with whatever views on the specific incidents are already on record as public statements (although less so in the case of the Paul Simon example). It's also a way for me to try to split the discussion of cultural appropriation itself from condemnation of people for doing it. Even there, we don't have a consensus on whether or not it's a valid defense to say "That was a different time and you can't judge people in the past for violating the standards of today". It is, after all, a variation on "Well, nobody complained about it before!" ...


Overall, I can't conjure up any rules that start with "Never" or "Always". Not that anyone appointed me to be the issuer of rules. But for myself, for my own behaviors and my own social responsibilities as far as cultural appropriation goes, I can't write for myself any guidelines that start with "Never" or "Always".

I take the concern seriously. Not because I do not wish to offend. I'm actually okay with offending people sometimes. I have several skirts in my wardrobe and I wear them when I feel like it, with very little restriction as far as where I am or what I'm doing. I manage to offend a few people who don't think male people should wear skirts.

But I understand and agree with the sentiment that it isn't fair to snag someone else's self-expression, one that is tied to their identity and solidarity, if their identity is a marginalized one. And it isn't fair to swipe someone else's meaning-imbued symbols and expressions of their concepts and faith and convictions and use them as adornments and trinkets. The question of if and when a situation falls into that description is a complex one, and there will be disagreements about them, but I am willing to do my best to listen and take other folks' perceptions into consideration.

For my own part, I've been told on occasion by cisgender women that I should not be wearing a skirt because it's theirs; I do it anyway; I go to Ethiopian, Chinese, Czech, Indian, Greek, Persian, etc restaurants and eat their cuisine, and I learn how to cook a decent subset of what I like, and (at least back in the pre-COVID era) we like to have dinner guests so I often serve these cultural appropriations to others, but in the privacy of my home. I'd feel less entitled to open a chain of restaurants (if I had the skill and the means to do so) and serve other folks' cuisines, and even less so if the ethnicity were rare and relatively unknown and I somehow had the clout to establish my restaurant chain as the single definitive source of that type of food.

I have a garment in my possession, a beautiful dashiki I bought from a street vendor in Manhattan; it is gold and green and red and black and I bought it because I liked the way it looks. I didn't think about cultural appropriation as I was buying it, but by the time I got home with it, I had begun realizing it could most certainly be perceived as that. I haven't worn it. I'm thinking maybe I will wear it in the privacy of my home when I have reason to think I won't be out and about, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being in public with it on. Not because I don't want to offend so much as because I can see how it might be offensive, if that makes any sense. It's a shame because for me it conjures up memories of countercultural guys from the early 1970s. But the fact that that's my cultural association for this item of apparel, and not tribal African wear, more or less highlights why cultural appropriation can be a problem, doesn't it?


—————


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

That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class takes place predominantly in three venues: a facility for homeless people with psychiatric histories located on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, a SUNY college campus in nearby Nassau County, and, later, a larger SUNY campus farther out on the island.

At the story's open, I -- via my alias in the story, Derek Turner -- am living in the facility while commuting to and from the first SUNY campus where I'm taking my courses.



Creedmoor Hospital is a relic of the days of massive long-term (mostly permanent) institutionalization. It's not a building, it's a campus, with dozens and dozens of buildings sprawled out across Queens Village and neighboring communities in eastern Queens. The buildings look like medieval fortresses, with massive brickwork and imperiously angular faces and rooflines, bars in the windows and fences around everything.

Inside, the general design reflects a primary consideration for being able to monitor a lot of people from a minimum number of observation points: patients' living spaces tended to be aggregate, with the exception of a sprinkling of isolation rooms, and dining and day rooms were also large open areas. Professional offices were small and tended towards heavy metal doors without windows.

At one time, the institution ran its own support services such as medical and laundry and automotive and other equipment repair, perhaps even its own crematorium, operating as a separate entity from the surrounding suburban communities.

Covered walkways led from building to building, and in many cases underground tunnels connected them as well.

By the time I was placed there as a homeless person, operations had scaled back considerably, with many of these large buildings no longer in use. The east half of Building 4 was the location of the Queens Mens Shelter, where -- in contrast to most other aggregate homeless shelters in the city -- I could lay claim to a bed within a room (even if the room had no door, let alone a locking one) and leave things behind and come back and mostly depend on them still being there. There were lockers and we could store things. It was inhumane, abusive and violent, but the ability to retain some paperwork and some continuity of connection with other people gave me options I didn't have in the shelter system generically.

Meanwhile, the other side of Building 4, the west half, was being refurbished, with walls knocked down and new ones put up and everything repainted and linoleum put down on the floors, and a less prisonlike appearance attempted. This was where the Residential Care Center for Adults was being installed, and along with perhaps 70% of the other residents of the Queens Mens' Shelter I was successfully screened into the program and assigned a case worker.

We were all supposed to be enrolled in a "program", some type of scheduled activity that would theoretically rehabilitate us. My "program" was attending college.

Generally speaking, the RCCA personnel came in three broad types. There were plenty of self-important true believers who thought themselves to be doing good
things for the homeless mentally ill, and were horribly condescending to all the residents and questioned our judgment on each and every little thing, but weren’t malicious about it. There were the sadistic ones like Jerry Durst and Tony the security guard, people who got a jolt of pleasure from dehumanizing and humiliating people, who had probably gravitated toward these kind of situations because of the perpetual supply of powerless victims. And then there were people like John Fanshaw, who were mildly cynical about the world, its institutions, and the fairness of things, who enjoyed helping people where they could and didn’t see the residents as entirely different from themselves, but rather as people in a complicated and unfortunate situation or two.

One of the ongoing themes in the book is the discrepancy between an alleged commitment to client self-determination and self-governance and the realities of institutionalized care of this sort. The intersection of attitudes towards people with a psychiatric diagnosis and attitudes towards homeless people was not a comfortable place to be.


—————


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