Blogging: A Self-Evaluation


communication, frustration, grandiosity, platform, literary agent, listening

I started blogging in earnest about 12 years ago, mostly because I kept running into the idea that all nonfiction authors have to have a "platform" if they want to snag a literary agent. By "platform" they mean a pre-existing audience already following what the author has to say whever it is that they say it.

But it was kind of contagious, this process of making these diaryesque entries, entries which rather quickly morphed into classroom lesson materials, with me playing Dr. Hunter, PhD in women's and gender studies, you know? I mean, that was the stuff I wanted to talk to the world about via the mechanism of my book, and presumably the lit agents not only want you to have a following, they want you to have a relevant following. Well, that was my thinking at the time at any rate. Besides, I wanted to put a lot of that stuff into words, to practice expressing it, to get it down. And ideally to reach out to people with it, share these concepts.

It turns out that people don't flock to a blog where they are lectured at, at least not unless they get a grade and some class credit for doing it. I had a handful of people originally, reading my blog posts, mostly other bloggers. But some of them drifted away from blogging and those who are still around have mostly stopped commenting and interacting.

Well, I'm also in a Facebook group someone set up, and the person who set it up keeps asking questions instead of providing lectures, and she gets much better interactive discussions going on.

I think it's been meaningful and appropriate that I've slowed my own blogging pace this last year. It's not that I'm giving up on this "communicate with other people" thing so much as thinking "this isn't working" and step enough back from what I've been doing to see what I'm doing wrong.

One thing I should try is asking questions. Creating space for the people who read what I've written to talk about what they think about various things.

I really am a self-immersed person, and here in this case I think it isn't so much that I haven't been caring what anyone else might think but that I somehow expected that me making a bunch of declarative expository intellectual content and flinging it out there was how you started a conversation. I thought people would talk back at me. But I didn't bother to invite anyone, just sort of assumed they'd show up!

I still have a lot to learn about this "communicate with other people" thing. I feel like I'm awful at it. Or I guess I'm reaching for a lot more than I'm able to grasp. Anyway, I've never been satisfied with how well I do it.


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


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

I am still querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking readers for reviews and feedback. I think of it as a jam session at this point: sure I'd like to get it published, just like a musician wants to get their song recorded, but in the mean time the musician's still gonna want to play it for people. Same for me as an author! So come read what I've written! It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






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

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Index of all Blog Posts

I haven't been blogging very regularly in recent months. I suppose some of that is maudlin discouragement. Thinking nobody reads what I post anyway, or that my posts have no impact in the world.

But the mood doesn't come from out of nowhere. I'm trying to query. And I'm trying to research each literary agent and give at least a superficial reason for why I'm querying that specific lit agent when I send out my queries. That may not seem like much investment, but it's taking a toll. It makes me care that much more, because I'm writing to someone I actually have a sense of, and I can't help developing a hope that this one will actually want to represent my book. And so far, nobody does.


What else? Well, I signed up for a proposal course, a course in how to write your nonfiction proposal. So far I'm very very unimpressed. It's broken into three segments of 1 hour each, on consecutive Thursdays. So far, all of it is geared towards people who are experts in their field writing nonfiction guides or prescriptive recommendations. Which does, admittedly, cover a lot of nonfiction offerings. But my primary reason for taking the course was that as a memoir author I find it really hard to shoehorn what's closer to being a fiction suspense tale into a format designed for experts in their field giving advice.

I've said it's as if you'd written a politcal polemic about social justice and to get it published you have to format it as a legal brief to the court, obeying all the structural injunctions about what statutes you need to reference and what precedents you need to cite.

Anyway, the second session was entirely devoted to having a platform. Because, generally speaking, nonfiction authors need a platform, i.e., a bunch of people already tuning in to what you might have to say on your subject.

I'm familiar with the notion that as a nonfiction author I ought to have a freaking PLATFORM. That's why I have a goddam Facebook account. That's why I blog. It isn't working. I don't have a following. Telling me I need to have a platform, that I need to develop a following, isn't helpful right now. It's just depressing and frustrating.

What I want is help developing the best nonfiction proposal I can, given the platform, such as it is, that I do have. And the overview, and the review by chapters, and all the other shit that proposals involve.

I have one more session upcoming. We're supposedly going to get individual feedback on the proposals we have, and I'm going to be pushy about getting such feedback on mine. Otherwise, a complete waste of money and time.

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


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

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






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

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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

I won't be quitting my day job, but it was nice to have this arrive in yesterday's mail.



Fledgling authors get warned a lot about discouragement and despair in the querying and submitting phase, and I would still consider that to be the hardest and most demoralizing slog to get through. But if, like me, you get published by a small publisher that's in no position to do promotion and marketing and advertise your book, you'll most likely face a second discouraging phase once it's actually in print and it seems like no one is reading it.

My sales didn't take off like a skyrocket, going ever-higher and higher, but they also didn't hit an initial max as all my blog readers and followers and friends obligingly went out and bought a copy and then plummet afterwards. Instead, I got a sawtooth of good sales periods interrupting the doldrums and a gradual accumulation, ultimately doing nearly twice as well as I thought I was doing. Later, I'll do an analysis to see if (as expected) the upticks in sales corresponded to when I did author readings or had new ads out.

This is for the first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. In the most recent months reported, sales have fallen off as my attention (and blogging and advertising) has mostly focused on the second book. But I'm releasing combo ads that tout the two books as a continuing tale (which is true) so maybe that will fuel another good month or two for the first book.


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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.

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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

GenderKitten.com

"Authors", they told me, "are expected to have a web site".

"Oh, no problem, I've had my own web site since 1995", I replied.

So they go take a look at it and then they contact me, giggling. "You can't use that! That belongs in an Internet Museum or something. Seriously, you don't even have your own domain, that's just an old freebie web space you got with your internet service provider. It's all Web 1.0 right down to being in a web ring, having a visitor counter (which doesn't even work, by the way), and even advertising the fact that you made it yourself in freaking PageMill? And those colors ... excuse me, but the 90s are calling and they want their decor back!"

Hmmph. OK, I suppose they have a point there. (Besides, earthlink had given me notice that they were freezing these old "home page" web sites and would be taking them down soon). So after doing some asking around, I selected Fantastic Worlds and explained that I was an author with my debut book coming out soon, and they worked with me and accommodated my wishes and intentions for the site and built me a new one.

The work has just been completed and the site rolled out live, focusing on the book and my availability as speaker and lecturer.


** pulls back the curtain **



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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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Home Page

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

... and later, starting college ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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



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

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

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In order to get published, promoted, distributed, represented, featured, etc, you first need to have a critical mass of people paying attention to what you're saying. People begin taking you seriously enough to pay attention to you once they realize that other people, not just themselves, are encountering what you've written or said, which in turn is largely dependent on being published, promoted, distributed, etc.

This is the "platform" conundrum I am up against. Publishers (and literary agents too) want to know if the authors who query them already have a built-in audience of people. People who read their blogs, who watch their YouTube videos, who read and follow their tweets and retweet them, who come to hear them lecture.

I have had some of them informing me that getting a book published is no longer a mechanism for reaching people with your ideas. It is something that you do when you are already successfully reaching people with your ideas.



I have a prepared "about the author" statement that I include in my queries when the instructions for submitting to them say to give some background information about yourself, your prior publications (if any), your education (if relevant), position of employment or expertise (ditto), and, yes, your platform. At the end of it, after describing my academic background and history of being a gender activist and so forth, I have this:

About the Author's "Platform" — Many literary agencies and publishers, when they request the nonfiction author's bio, are primarily interested in knowing who will buy the book based on the author's reputation and stature in the field. This isn't that kind of memoir. No one (except maybe my Mommy) will read it simply because I'm the author; the book is interesting (and marketable) as a "representative" or "illustrative" memoir, the story of what it is like to be a particular TYPE of person (genderqueer, in this case).

Yes, I'm aware that that's probably not what you meant by "platform", that you're less interested in whether I'm a household name than in whether or not I have a following of potential readers and purchasers of my book. Well, I blog weekly; in this day and age, no one leaves comments directly on blog pages, but I post links to my new blog entries in a couple dozen gender-centric Facebook groups and I have a modest but supportive audience who follow me there.

The whole situation is frustrating, but I believe it makes it difficult, not impossible, to get traction. I keep reminding myself that I have twice had a publishing contract for this book, and if it had indeed gone into print I would have reached many people and more people would pay attention to the things that I say and write because I was a published author on the subject.

It's also useful to remind myself that only some people will not pay serious attention to a person's thoughts and ideas until and unless they believe that a lot of other people are also being exposed to what that person thinks. There are, fortunately, people who will get quite excited about or supportive of a line of thought that "clicks" for them, no matter where it comes from or who else is likely to be exposed to it.

Getting to critical mass is to some extent a random thing, a matter of chance. The longer I keep doing this, the more likely it is that my writings will affect someone who has something of a platform of their own, either in the sense of having the ears and eyes of a lot of people or in the sense of knowing some specific key personnel whose attention to this project could help propel it forward. That would, of course, include literary agents and publishers, who certainly possess the power to make my book a success.


Meanwhile, none of the other modalities of communicating with people make more sense to pursue instead of focusing on trying to get my book published. I already have a blog; a small handful of people read it and I don't know how I would increase that. I already post links to my new blog posts all over Facebook, and that's one reason I have the handful of readers that I do have, but again I don't know any magic tricks for drawing more attention to them. I have a Twitter account and I tweet about my blog posts, but I'm a clumsy and clueless twitterer and I'm not likely to suddenly become adept at expressing myself usefully in postage-stamp sized textmorsels. I've addressed some groups, giving presentations and leading discussions, but it's not easy getting booked when one has no authoritative position or official role and does not have a book published. I've even made a few YouTube videos, but they don't tend to pull in people any more rapidly than my blog posts do. And meanwhile, I've got a book, already written, so it kind of makes sense to continue to try to get it into print.

(Be all that as it may, if you have suggestions for how to get more people to tune into my thoughts and words, or for more useful ways in which for me to render them and make them available, by all means give them)

I probably should hire someone to make a home page for me, perhaps with the table of contents (i.e., "Index of all Blog Posts", see below) embedded in it. Or at least find out if I could afford it, etc. I could do something along those lines myself, but graphic design is not my strong suit and my HTML skills are pre-CSS, HTML 1.1 edition stuff at best.


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Women's Studies Coordinator Ann Peiffer and I were chatting after the evening of my final presentation at Mars Hill. We were talking, in part, about one male student who wants to be an ally and the limits of a person's role in someone else's struggle. I started talking about a critical turning point in my career as a women's studies student:

"When I became a grad student, it was in sociology. I was having some friction for trying to use a feminist perspective in my papers and for wanting to do a feminist project for my dissertation. But right around that time, a women's studies certificate program was being pulled together, they didn't have their own department yet but they crosslisted courses from English and History and Art and Anthropology and so on. Anyway, I was encouraged to take their feminist theory course.

"Unfortunately, the people who had pulled that together were mostly from the English department. And they had used poststructuralist theory to justify teaching authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker even though they weren't dead white European guys, you know, questioning the social construction of 'excellence' and all that. So that's what they were teaching as feminist theory. And it was... well you know, you've read that stuff, ...

"So after a few weeks I said, 'This is what you're teaching grad students as feminist theory? Your own students will theoretically someday be teaching undergraduate students--is THIS the material you want them to put out there to introduce new students to feminist thinking? It's opaque and really difficult to understand, and then when you understand it, it strips all the meaning out of things. You can't say women have a justifiable anger or a moral right to equality after you've just explained that everyone's sense of what is right is caused by their location in culture and time and that no viewpoint is privileged.' And I went on for a bit about how poststructuralist feminist theory is a problem for feminists."

Ann Peiffer nodded. I continued, "Well, the professor got annoyed and said 'Why don't you try being silent for awhile and experience what it is like to be marginalized. Do you realize you are a male student telling feminist women that we aren't doing feminism right?' And... of course she was correct. Highly embarrassing. But it was more than just that moment's conversation. It really rocked me back in my tracks. It made me question whether I could say the things I wanted to say, about my experience and identity and all that, from within women's studies. And eventually I decided it just wasn't going to work".



On March 29 and March 30, though -- 25 years after I abandoned my PhD attempts and left academia behind -- I made a successful reappearance in the women's studies classroom. Things are different now. Women's studies has embraced the wider subject matter of gender and, on many campuses, has relabeled and repositioned itself as Gender Studies, or as Women's and Gender Studies, or as Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. And since last fall (dating back to when I thought my book was about to come out in print), I've been pitching the idea, via my publicist John Sherman, that those departments should consider having me as a guest speaker, to present my perspectives. Mars Hill said yes, so I rented a car and took off early Wednesday morning, driving for 11 hours to get there in time for my first presentation, to the evening-class session of Women and Society. Ann Peiffer met me and took me out to dinner for a first chance to talk a bit, and then took me to the classroom and introduced me, and I was on.


I have a generic presentation structure that I've been using, sort of a baseline skeleton, and then I vary it depending on the type of audience. I described "the binary"-the traditional simplified notion that there are two and only two categories, the man over here with his male body and masculine characteristics, and, distinctly different and other from that, the woman over here with her female body and feminine characteristics. Then I put up my main diagram, the scatter chart.



"This is STILL an oversimplification. It assumes all people are biologically either male or female, so it ignores intersex people. And it treats the other characteristics, all the behavior and personality and nuances and priorities and tastes, all that stuff that is typically associated with the two biological sexes, as if masculinity and femininity were polar opposites like left and right, when actually it might make more sense to think of them more akin to sweet and salty, where someone could be one, the other, both, or neither. And it pretends that people occupy one point on the graph, but people change constantly, during the day or according to their mood and so on. But it is LESS of an oversimplification than the original binary because it shows that you have a lot of variation within each sex, and that you have a lot of overlap, with some of the female-bodied people being way over here on the masculine side and some of the male-bodied people being way over there on the feminine side, even though the same general rule still applies, that men in general are more masculine and women in general are more feminine".

Talked about how generalizing isn't evil and this generalization isn't wrong, AS a generalization. Talked about moving from descriptive to prescriptive.

Then I introduced my cast of characters, individual people that I use in my presentation as a way of explaining the different experience of the same social world that conventionally masculine males and feminine females have when contrasted with the experiences of those expectations and predictions and assumptions by the folks who are outliers, masculine females and feminine males.

My characters have a mixture of sexual orientations, and I used that to illustrate the ways in which gender characteristics interact with sexual orientation. After awhile I identified myself on my diagram, my own location and my own experiences as a male femininine person sexually oriented towards female folks. I compared how my own experiences juxtaposed with those of the other characters I had described. This lets me contextualize my own situation, to show how it fits in against the backdrop of other folks' experiences.

We discussed the process of figuring out one's identity when the default mainstream expected identity isn't a good fit, and how a person comes to arrive at a divergent understanding of themselves from among the ones that are out there, socially available as alternative identities.


The next morning, after breakfast, I made the presentation a second time, to the daytime session of Women and Society, and then a final time (with some modifications for the shift in audience composition) to Safe Haven, the campus group for LGBT students and allies. I felt like all three went well and I had attentive people at all three of them and definitely felt like I was reaching them and that they were following what I was saying.

I had several good questions during the post-presentation discussion periods:

I find it interesting that you choose to have a beard. Does it interfere with your ability to get people to perceive you as a girl? (I reiterated that I accepted both my biological sex -- male -- and my gender -- girl, or feminine person. And we made some guesses about what girlish people would do with various male physical characteristics if they were the ones who had them instead of guys. I kept going back to the limitations of expressing as a male girl in a culture that has no notion of what a male girl would typically look like)

I have a female friend who has only recently realized she is genderqueer. She is always wanting to talk to me about it, she isn't finding this easy, and I don't know what to say to her to help her get through what she's going through (None of us had any easy pat answers to this, but several of us encouraged the male student who had posed the question to realize that by making himself available as a sounding board, someone she feels she CAN talk to, that that is being supportive. I asked if she likes to read, and suggested some memoirs and narratives, adding that it is helpful to read about how someone else who is like you came to terms with it)

I see on your handout you say you are polyamorous. Can you talk some about that? (I hadn't brought it up in the presentation. I talked about how a combo of 1970s vintage "hippie" ideals of free love and feminist critiques of sexual possessiveness had always appealed to my sense of how I thought things should be. And I talked aobut how multiple partners kept me from becoming so immersed in a relationship that I was a boring mirror that just reflected my partner's interests and didn't bring much to the relationship, and also how getting different feedback from different partners makes it easy to get a more 'objective' sense of how my behavior is coming across, instead of wondering if it is me or if it is just her).

There was a follow-up question, essentially What about jealousy? (I mentioned that as an atypical male, I was never going to be fully at ease with the idea that my partner would not miss the interactions with more conventionally masculine males if she'd had such relationships in the past, and that polyamory was a way of not asking her to give that up; and that, reciprocally, when I find a woman who does find me sexually appealing, I don't tend to think of other males as direct competition -- "Go have other boyfriends, sure! It may be easier for me to say that and not be worried about being replaced, because there's a low likelihood of her connecting with guys who are a lot like me". Went on to say that no one wants to be abandoned but that polyamory means not needing to discard one person in order to be with someone else. And I described the relationship summit, a periodic formal opportunity to air grievances and concerns and do a "state of the relationship" assessment, and said that poly people talk about jealousy all the time, that it is openly discussed.)

Can you describe a time when you had an effect on someone where you saw them go 'Whoa' and really change their perspective? (I described a gay rights activist I had appeared with long ago; he had told the audience he was sick and tired of gay guys being stereotyped as less manly or sissy, and he told them it wasn't manly to gang up on one guy and beat him up as a group. He challenged them: 'If you have a problem with me being gay, come up here and say it to my face.' It got a lot of appreciative applause in a 1980 classroom of Human Sexuality students; they appeciated the guts it took for him to take them on like that. He was less impressed with me when I spoke to the same classroom immediately after him. He said "So, your whole thing is that you don't want people to think you're gay, is that it?" I tried to explain about being a feminine guy and the assumptions that people make. "So? People think I'm straight lots of times, you don't think that gets awkward? Look, straight is the default. You shouldn't go around saying you're not gay, that just says you think being gay would be horrible. It's not necessary for you to go around saying you're the default". So I said back to him, "Well, YOU just spent several minutes explaining to this classroom that you aren't a sissy, that you're all masculine. Isn't masculine the default for males?" And he started to answer fast and then looked at me and it was like I could see that light bulb going on for him)

Do you experience dysphoria? (I think I gave a bad answer on this one. Or partly bad. I said "no". I said I had never felt like my body was wrong. I had come to believe that if people perceived me as female, I would be treated more as who I actually am, but the body ITSELF, physically, wasn't the problem, it was what people assumed because of it. I think I should have created a distinction between "physical dysphoria" and "social dysphoria" and said that most of the emotional content of dysphoria, as conventionally described, was very much what I have experienced, but that we do not tend to distinguish between "dysphoria because they think I am a guy or man" versus "dysphoria because my body is a male body"--the first one is social and the second one is physical. I should do that in the future: along with distinguishing between sex and gender, and between transsexuality and being genderqueer, I should create this distinction about forms of dysphoria.

What would you say to a cisgender heterosexual male who wants to be supportive of lesbian gay and transgender people and their rights? (This is where we came in. Before Ann Peiffer gave her own reply, I said that I would say to such a person 'Try to be aware of how YOU have been oppressed by homophobia and transphobia and sissyphobia and so on. Even as a cis male hetero person, there have to have been moments and situations where something you did drew some attention or comments. And all your life you have seen what happens to gay and sissy and gender-atypical people and, at least in the back of your head even if you were not conscious of it, some part of you was thinking I DO NOT WANT THAT TO HAPPEN TO ME. So you learned to tuck your odd corners under where they will not be seen, even if you had to do far less of that than gay and genderqueer and transgender people. That means things got taken away from you. Reclaim that. Avoid any self-censoring that is designed to keep observers from perhaps categorizing you as gay or whatever. And then you are participating in part for your own reasons, which is a good thing'.)


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I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.

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On October 18, Janet Rosen, assistant to Sheree Bykofsky, wrote back to me to say that she had completed her reading of my manuscript and that although it was not without merit, this was not a project that Sheree Bykofsky Associates could pursue.

This wasn't entirely surprising (the longer it became since Ellora's Cave folded and informed me that they would not be publishing my book, the less likely it seemed to me that Sheree Bykofsky Associates would continue to act as my literary agency and find me a new publisher). To review, I obtained their services to help me negotiate a favorable contract with the publisher AFTER the publisher had made their offer; they never took me on as a conventional client. Yes, I was hoping that some intellectual proximity, a bit of sympathetic loyalty, and a pleasant experience of me as a person to work with would make them more likely to represent me than if they had merely received my query letter in the large daily slush-pile stack that lit agents get every day. And maybe it did, just not sufficiently to cause them to embrace THE STORY OF Q, who knows?

So I am situationally back to that mythical drawing board, with neither publisher nor lit agent, and again taking up the querying process.

The experience has changed my attitude and approach somewhat, though, as well as having at least netted me a good solid editing job from EC's Susan Edwards as part of the process. Firstly, I now stand at nearly 800 queries to literary agents, culminating in my query to Sheree Bykofsky Associates post-EC, all of which have failed to land me a lit agent. In contrast, I've queried 12 small publishers and received one publication offer. It may be a mildly tainted offer insofar as it came from a publisher on its last legs and in its dying throes, but any way you cut it, the math speaks for itself. I will continue to query lit agents, mainly because publishers tend to want exclusive consideration while they look at one's manuscript, so I can query lit agents as a way of twiddling my thumbs. But my main effort will go towards querying publishers.

Meanwhile, since I have a publicist — John Sherman & Co, hired to promote my book — I'm diverting his focus towards getting me exposure, speaking gigs, media coverage. I've given some well-received presentations to the kink community, which has been wonderfully supportive of me so far, and I do not wish to denigrate that in any way, but it's a somewhat self-limiting audience: people are relatively unlikely to talk to folks outside the BDSM world about this interesting presentation they heard in a BDSM venue. It is still a world in which privacy is highly valued by most, where people know each other by their FetLife nicknames and may not know a participant's real name or, if they do, would by default assume it is NOT ok to mention it elsewhere. In short, although I apologize for the ingratitude that may attach to expressing it this way, I need to do some of my presentations outside of the BDSM ghetto in order to get more traction. Kinky folks have been extremely welcoming, not only to me but to other identity-marginalized people whose peculiarities are not really a form of erotic fetish — google up "pony play", "puppy play", and "littles" in conjunction with BDSM for instance — but yeah, genderqueerness isn't really a fetish and the people I really need to reach are only sprinkles in moderate levels at BDSM events.

Speaking of making presentations etc, I read a 10 minute segment adapted for outloud reading and venue purposes, at WORD: THE STORY TELLING SHOW on October 19. It was fun, was well-received and well-applauded, and came at a very good time for my frame of mind. I need to do more of this, and more of the drier more abstract material presentations such as I did at EPIC and Baltimore Playhouse and LIFE in Nassau, and perhaps more personal-anecdote of the non-humourous variety sharing, and so on, in order to build my platform and widen my exposure, and because doing so is communication, which is the end in itself, the entire reason for writing the book in the first place.

I am currently working with John Sherman to blanket the world of academic women's studies and gender studies programs, letting them know of my availability to do presentations. We will soon be expanding that to campus and non-campus LGBTetc organizations including student associations on campuses and non-university-affiliated groups.

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I do tend to whine a bit. In here, and on the topic in general. Comes with the territory: when atypical female people set out to draw attention to social feminization and the expectations and roles and whatnot that they have to cope with, it's widely perceived as aggressive belligerent ranting; when we do our version, it's naturally going to be experienced as narcissistic whining.

I do a lot of my whining about the difficulty of getting more people to listen to me whine.

I was out for one of my long walks last Sunday and wondering how I'd feel about this obsession, and about my life in general, if I never get any significant traction. Would I feel like I had wasted my life and my time? I've occasionally said that in my life I really only set out to do one thing, take on one serious project, and this is it. Now that I've passed the midlife marker, it's a question worthy of consideration: how will I feel if I wake up on one of my last days as an old old person and look back and realize, if such is the case, that I set out to do one thing in my life and failed at it?

Mostly I think I'd feel like I gave it my best shot. And that I had done what I felt driven to do, and was true to what felt right for me. I think if it comes to that, I will feel good about myself for having believed in myself and made the attempt. And I will consider it a life far better spent than if instead I found myself looking back and realizing I had set aside something that I considered an important mission or calling simply because the doing of it turned out not to be easy or swift.

So in light of all that, I should acknowledge that although I complain a lot about how frustrating this all is, I am doing what I have selected for myself; i chose it and it is what I want. I get some measure of satisfaction from it even when it resembles beating my head against a wall.



Meanwhile, I have some news-bits, some morsels that are all flavored up with success instead of that perennial head-against-wall stuff for a change.

• Thanks to musicman, who recommended me to them and encouraged me to keep following up with them, it appears that I will be a presenter at Baltimore Playhouse, most likely on January 22. This will be another performance of the basic talk I gave at LIFE in Nassau last March.

• I finally met with the woman who manages the campus Women's Center and also teaches introductory Women's Studies at my alma mater SUNY at Old Westbury -- Professor Carol Quirke. After what happened with the personnel at the Nassau County LGBT Center, who kept not returning my phone calls and then indicated a nearly-complete lack of interest when I finally got more pushy with them about it, I was mostly starting to think that the Old Westbury people were similarly hoping I'd simply go away before they had to tell me I'm nowhere near as interesting as I think I am. But I made an appointment to drop in on her during her regular office hours, and it went well. I left off some additional materials (including a printout of my blog posting) and we talked about socialization and gender and how we felt about biological essentialism and coercive political correctness and I think we're very much on the same channel as far as how we view such things; I definitely went away thinking she was receptive to my ideas and really is interested in having me come to speak there.

• I'm immersed in a slow shift from mostly querying literary agents to querying independent editors (for feedback, actual content editing, and potential referrals whether they officially refer authors or not) and querying small publishers. One editor, Nikki Busch, has recommended that I find an independent editor who specializes in developmental edit, i.e., "the big picture stuff: organization, narrative voice, pacing, character development, and so on". She's aimed me at the Editorial Freelancers Association to find someone who specializes in memoirs and nonfiction narratives and I'll probably do that. Meanwhile, I have a query in at Neuroqueer Books, an enterprise that I believe Old Cutter John's son started, and I should be hearing back from them any day now. And I'm about to query Manic D Press, another possibility.



Whilst out walking and thinking last Sunday, I processed some other related notions and ideas:

• Some of my difficulties with networking are actually tied to my tendency to speak to people who happen to be members of an organization or participants in some movement-related activity as if they, personally, WERE the movement incarnate. I caused problems for myself back in 1980 when I tried to correspond with the Director of the on-campus Rape Crisis Center as if she were radical feminism incarnate and poised to consider my perspective on behalf of radical feminist thinkers everywhere. It was more recently a behavor causing confusion and miscommunication when I contacted the Programming Director at the Nassau Country LGBT Center to suggest that I present to them there: I spoke to her as malebodied sissyfem genderqueer liberation addressing the existing LBGTQ establishment and not as a potential presenter speaking to an organization official in charge of booking speakers and arranging events.

I do that, I realized, because I am mostly doing my own socio-political activism all by myself, so none of my behavior is supported or reinforced by being a person in a position doing a task or job, or of being a part of a group or organization and therefore experiencing the little social perks of belonging and participating and being engaged in a shared activity.

I usually see my isolation as a limiting factor (and a source of frustration). But there's a sense in which it means that nearly all of it that I do involves a cerebral connection to the cause qua cause; I'm never immersed in it because my friends are there, or because I like the wine and cheese and music at the receptions, or because it's an ideal socioppolitical venue to meet interesting new people, or because it's my job or my career.

Oh, it's still mostly a limiting factor, and yeah you can be forgiven for pinching your nose at the intellectual snobbery residing in the previous paragraph, don't get me wrong on either account, I know and I know. (The latter is a compensation for the former). But it's still relevant here. If there's a useful takeaway from this observation, it's that I will probably have my most satisfying conversations with the most fervently committed extremists, and that I need to nurture a more pragmatic streak within myself for having conversations with the rest of the folks I encounter along the way.

• When I speak of being a sissy or a male girl or describe that I was always one of the girls despite male body, one of the common misconstruals I get is that people visualize flamboyant emotive dramatic people, people for whom the feminine is centrally about "look at me". That's not it. Actually it was all about "approve of me". More explicitly, it was "obey the rules, be the teacher's pet, show us what a good citizen you can be". There's a not-so-nice element to it which I should probably emphasize more often, if only because it offsets some of the sickeningly-sweet aspects that may be hard for some to swallow: we who bought into that thought ourselves superior, were often smug snobby kids who were sure that we were going to be the ones to end up in charge of things. Because we were doing it right, were doing what adults valued.

Women's studies courses often observe that the "good girl" mystique sets girls up: it turns them into approval-seekers, pleasers of others. What sometimes gets lost is that the girls who embraced it believed in the same tradeoff that I did: they thought they, and not the undisciplined weak childish people who lacked self-control and who did not play nicely with others, would be the ones who would run the world.

At any rate, I was not initially alone among the children. What happened to the rest of the good boys, the nice guys? How did the other ones feel about the bad boys, the disruptive and disobedient boys, calling them girls and calling them sissies and taunting us with the claim that they were doing "boy" right and we were the weak ones, afraid to risk disapproval? I know what happened with many of them: they became convinced and got defensive about it. They stopped caring more about what other goody-goody people (mostly girls) and teachers and other adults thought and started to care about what the bad boys and tough boys thought of them. But what about the others?

Anyway, yeah, we wanted to be better than others. Little Lord Fauntleroy aloof from the riffraff. Tattletale Boy glad to see the misbehaving children get what they deserve. Sure, I'll confess to it. So OK, the world is fully entitled to be wary of our reappearance on the stage to claim once again to be some flavor of better, a new and more sexually liberated way of doing male and all that squeakyclean gender smugness.

How about merely "as good"?, though? You figure people can admire us some if we stand up for ourselves and assert that we like being who we are?

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Seal Press will not be publishing my book. I received the rejection letter on 9/8.

I was originally planning on querying Cleis Press next: "Cleis Press publishes provocative, intelligent books across genres. Whether literary fiction, human rights, mystery, romance, erotica, LGBTQ studies, sex guides, pulp fiction, or memoir, you know that if it's outside the ordinary, it's Cleis Press."

But then I read some things other authors have written about them in recent months that made them sound like a bad idea.

I've been contemplating Thorntree, publishers of the polyamory guide More Than Two, and in fact I sat down at my desk tonight to review their submissions policy:


To submit a proposal, please first send an email with the following information:

A one-paragraph biography, including any published works

A one-paragraph summary of the proposed work, including your intended audience

Links to your social media and Web presences

If your submission appears appropriate for our list, we will invite you to submit a complete proposal.

We will accept queries and proposals on a rolling basis.



Whether it's the mood I've been in lately or not, I can't say for sure, but right now their submission process is very discouraging. It comes across to me very much as "we might be interested in your book if you've already got a track record of publication and, in particular, if you've got a strong active platform already; outside of that, just summarize your book and its intended audience in one paragraph and we'll let you know".


I have of course continued to send query letters to literary agents. It seems to me that public attention is more focused on gender issues and gender identity than ever before, so my book is squarely located in the midst of a trendy topic. So I keep telling myself that any day now some agent could decide to represent my book and get it published. Well, here's how that's shaping up at the moment:


Total queries to date: 680
Rejections: 613
Outstanding: 67
Under Consideration: 0

As Nonfiction, specifically, total queries: 467
Rejections: 414
Outstanding: 53

As Fiction, total queries: 213
Rejections: 199
Outstanding: 14



I've been trying to make a public ripple, explain the phenomenon of being a male girl or non-transitioning transgender or heterosexual sissy or gender invert or any of the other things I've attempted to call it over the years. I've been trying to do so because once upon a time, a long long time ago, I promised myself that if I *EVER* found out why people treated me this way, if I *EVER* found out why these things were happening to me, I was going to do something about it. I've been trying to do so because once I did, in fact, figure it out, I promised myself that I'd make it so that anyone like me growing up would not have to figure it all out for themselves. I've been trying to do this as my primary avocation and purpose in life, my mission, since 1980.

You could say I've only seriously set out to do one thing in my life and I've been a pretty pathetic failure at it.

That's not entirely fair, I tell myself. Once I figured this stuff out, I also set out to actually live my life, to not merely preach these ideas but to put them into practice. And to my relief and surprise, that's been the easier part. It took decades but I got better and better at communicating up close and personal, I learned from experience how to find what I was looking for, and I found personal solutions. I get to live my everyday life not at all closeted or isolated but instead loved and understood and cared for and appreciated for who I am, and I in turn get to hold and love and cherish and have togetherness and meaningful connection in my life.

Which is to say that I've got damn little to complain about, and also to acknowledge that it is grossly insulting to people who love me for me to characterize my life as a failure.

I get to be me, and not merely in isolation. (Can anyone be themselves without connection and accepting companionship?) But there is "be" and there is "do". I set out to do something. Nothing else I have ever set out to do has held anything akin to the same kind of importance; every other activity or accomplishment has basically been distraction and entertainment along the way, including artistic accomplishments, job and career, and the acquisition of skills. This one thing is where I've invested all my determination. I am stubborn, intelligent, passionate about my issue, and I'm good with words and skilled at explaining complicated concepts, and I can't believe I've accomplished so damn little in so much time!

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