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Here's a short bite from Within the Box where Derek is thinking back to some interactions with one of his LPN classmates earlier in the spring.

I like this section because it fleshes out and explains some things about Derek, including shedding some light on his current attraction to April, another patient here in the rehab facility. It also lets me insert some complicated stuff about the intersection of gender identity and sexual orientation, hopefully without it feeling like a lecture or breaking up the narrative flow

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The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about 35 students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. MacDonald and Ms. Jackson, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.

I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. MacDonald spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called turpin hydrate. But then there was the TURP operation procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). In one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.

I liked my classmates and our cameraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Penny said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.

I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband”. Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.

“Where’s Marjorie?”

“Well, she’s not coming”.

I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.

Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally go in that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.

How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem for them too, the same way? Where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also attracted to them and you want that to happen too, some of the time? Do lesbians also not start off making a distinction, like “potential lover material, this one” or “I like her as a friend but only as”, and instead just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.

Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.

The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part.

So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning male courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.

Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices.

It’s all rather complicated. I long ago reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. What I really really wanted, though, was to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.

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

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

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

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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

In the matter of being a gender nonconforming person, I've heard it said that we need to rally to make it okay for boys (or males) to cry and be soft and wear pink, to wear earrings and skirts and dance ballet.

But mostly that's never been an issue for me. I could already cry: who was going to stop me? I bought my first skirt at a thrift store; there may have been many people who didn't think male people should wear skirts but short of them tackling me and beating me up and taking it off my body, it's not like there was a lot they could do about it. I don't mean to belittle the real occurrences of violence towards gender transgressors. I've been assaulted a few times during my life. But in general, broadly speaking, I don't need other folks' cooperation in order for me to do things that are considered feminine. Instead, the disapproving factions would need my cooperation in order to have things their way.

The place where I found myself vulnerable to the impressions and opinions of others was sexuality. Sexuality is a need, a hunger for a participation. To have access to another person's body, to be found attractive and to be wanted, to play and fondle and nibble and hug... all this requires the active cooperation of others.

As I left childhood behind and came into adolescence, I suddenly needed for there to be a pattern change in the world. Among the delightful sea of attractive and interesting female people, I needed there to be some who would find a sissy femme male person like me to be attractive and interesting in return.

The conventionally masculine boys tended to have that. Some individuals more than others, of course, but in general they could look around and see attractive girls who seemed to be attracted to boys who were similar to themselves, and this would encourage them to think this would happen for them personally.

Me, I looked around and was faced with the sense that what I wanted, what I hoped for, just wasn't done. Wasn't how it was.

And that is how it came to be that I started to think I shared a situation with gay and lesbian people. My gender being different meant my sexuality was different. I was still male and still hetero but none of the observable patterns of heterosexuality matched up with me being a sissy femme kind of male.

Like gay and lesbian people learning that they probably won't find what they crave until they look beyond the conventional looking-places and outside of the conventional flirting behavior patterns, I came to realize I was different, I was queer, and I had to approach this all differently from what I saw other people doing.

You hear people saying over and over that sexual orientation and gender identity are two entirely different things. Yes and no. What people usually mean by that is that being femme, as a male, is not the same thing as being gay. Or that being a transgender woman if you were designated male when you were born is not the same thing as being a gay male. And mirror-image for the lesbians and gender-atypical female people. That being butch isn't identical to being a lesbian, and neither is being a transgender man. All that is true.

But where having an atypical gender identity for a person of my sex has made all the difference has been in the world of courting and kissing and flirting, the world of trying to meet possible partners.

Because all I need in order to wear my hair long and put in earrings and so on is that you refrain from physical attacks on me, and most people, even the disapproving sort, aren't predisposed to do that. But the coupling-up stuff intrinsically requires a lot more from people. It won't work if I'm not understood. It won't work if I'm not seen and recognized. It won't work if my identity is invisible to people and they've never imagined any such person.

And understanding is a much larger ask than "just leave me alone", if you see what I mean.

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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, hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

My initial reaction to this book, formed when I was less than a third of the way into it, was that it's rare for someone to speak or write about a political affiliation of the social-change-seeking variety that centralizes the passion of the connection to the others instead of the intellectually reasoned rationales for embracing the principles. And Lise Weil does so.

Even among feminists -- the people who have "the personal is political" emblazoned on their t-shirts -- I think there's still the attitude that to have a commitment of this sort because of how belonging to the movement makes you feel is doing it for illegitimate or infantile reasons. So it is radical, and brave, to do this as Weil does here, and without an apologetic preface at that.

Some would say I am in no position to write a review of this book. It's very specifically about lesbianism and lesbian feminism, the loving of women on every level, giving one's energies and all of one's focus to women as a woman who loves women.

I am not a lesbian; I am not female. That doesn't mean I've never had my nose pressed to that window. I'm a sissy femme and I grew up admiring and emulating the girls in my class, and -- in contrast to conventional legend and expectation -- I also found myself attracted to them. So...people who love women as one of the same, and who find women's form erotic and desirable? Mutuality and mirror?

There do exist other people much like myself, people whose mom's obstetricians also marked down "male" when filling out their birth certificates, but who, unlike me, do consider themselves female. Some of them do identify as lesbians.

If there's a second theme that perhaps eventually looms larger than the first, it's the divisiveness and polarization of identity politics. Not that Weil is saying that the politics of identity necessarily has to be that way, but there are perennially recurrent "you are either with us or against us" attitudes that she finds so frustrating and hurtful. The "whose side are you on anyway" antagonism and the polarization into warring camps. All that either-or stuff. In Search of Pure Lust isn't a screed or a polemic about divisiveness. It's a personal testimonial about how it feels, when you love the participants on all sides of these divides and hate to see the division.

I nodded; I know that one firsthand, too. Lise Weil's colleagues Mary Daly and Jan Raymond would probably agree that I don't belong at a Cris Williamson concert. My transgender sisters would be appalled that I'd be willing to attend one. And I'm left sad and crying that we can't transcend long enough to have a conversation even if we subsequently walk out of the truce tent in separate directions.

Closely kin to the divisiveness issue is the notion that anything has a single inevitable meaning. Weil describes how it was decided that Daly's book Gyn/Ecology was racist and therfore did not deserve to be read by feminists who care about racial equality. Discussion over, end of story, as if all the important and relevant people had weighed in on the subject and you would now be recognized as a racist yourself if you were to see matters differently.

Maybe we all need to retain some sympathy for people who need absolutes and simple answers and certainty. I'm not entirely a stranger to embracing an ideology as if it were a light that could shine into every corner and make utter sense of the world. Lise Weil takes us along with her on the winding path of actual experience and how real life -- and its real politics -- is messy and complicated and entwined with nuance.

Love and desire and ideological commitment, it turns out, may be necessary preconditions or acceleratives that make a relationship of the purest and lustiest variety possible, but they may not be sufficient. Not unto themselves.

Weil describes the vulnerability that comes with involvements of this intensity, and how power enters in whether one is seeking it and rejoicing in having it, or instead is trying to forge relationships where its oppressive presence isn't intruding. The frighteningly short path that sometimes links ecstatic devotion and pathetic dependency and neediness. The agony of needing, the threatening coerciveness of being needed.

When we define ourselves as only doing respectful equal consensual and mutual it can be difficult to speak of the ways in which that is not always how it actually is. Whips and chains are overt about unequal power but when one lover is more desperately craving more from the relationship than the other, who feels trapped or unable to give what is demanded, that's unequal too.

Against the everyday-life backdrop of the rising and falling fortunes of passionate relationships, Weil talks about the division between the sex-positive feminists who were inclined to accept and embrace S & M and the feminists appalled at the patriarchal presence of dominance and submission in what was supposed to be an egalitarian lesbian community. Again, the divisions and the polarization and the "whose side are you on" questions.

I do not feel gleeful that the ones I have envied have to work at it too. A little relief, perhaps. We all bring ourselves to every interaction and so to some extent the resulting experience is our experience of ourselves and not just our experience of what we love. Real passion is chaotic and doesn't color inside the lines. The ideals and clear visionary understandings are important and real as well -- they are part of what we're passionate about, after all -- but if we were the children of patriarchy yesterday we are still children today and we will stumble and fumble as we learn, and need to be able to do so, to be in the process and not to declare ourselves to have already arrived at the solution.

In Search of Pure Lust, Lise Weil, SheWrites Press 2018 (with purchase links)

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

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

It's a trope of both literature and film. We have two protagonists thrown together by circumstances, allies working together. They don't particularly react to each other as attractive romantic possibilities, and instead we find them interacting as people with skills and talents, areas of expertise and passionately held principles. And they come to regard each other very highly for this, to respect each other as a colleague who is a formidable force to be reckoned with. Then there's that moment when they've just pulled off a triumph or gotten past a major hurdle and they look at each other for the first time with erotic interest; their eyes meet and their lips meet and things get all sexy and steamy.

Raise your hand if you have no idea what I'm talking about. No one? Good... so hang on to that image, if you will...

So: the Nice Guys thing -- I first ran into the complaint about Nice Guys from a website called Heartless Bitches International, back in the 1990s. I'm under the impression that HBI were the folks who publicized the concept and made it a part of our shared social repertoire. They said Nice Guys were the ones always complaining that women don't really want nice guys, that women gravitate towards sexually predatory jerks. Or to be more specific about it, they complain that women don't really want to date nice guys. That nice guys get "friend zoned", treated as friends who aren't heterosexually eligible. The Heartless Bitches' complaint about us (yes, us, because for presumably obvious reasons -- if you've been reading my blog -- that description certainly hit home so far) was that we only pretend to like them, that our real motivation is to worm our way into their affections by being nice to them, in hopes that they'll dispense sex to us. And that when that doesn't happen, we get all bitter and hostile. And this all means that we really just viewed the women as sexual opportunities, as sex objects, and were only being nice as a ploy to make them like us, and think we're entitled to have sex happen as a consequence of being nice, which, when you sum it all up isn't very nice at all, now is it?

Well, look, Ms. Heartless... may I refer to you as HB? (It's one thing for you to refer to yourself as a bitch, but...) Look, HB, I wasn't pretending to like you as a person. I really do, I admire you and greatly enjoy your company, and no, it's not a calculated attempt to sneak my way into your pants. Do I hope that some percent of my associations with women I like and admire will develop like the romantic films and stories, where one day a moment will come...? Oh hell yeah. Sure I do. I'm attracted in your direction, why wouldn't I hope for such things? Frankly, I think that for a lot of people who have never thought of themselves as genderqueer, or as nice guys for that matter, they'd like for more of that kind of thing to happen in their lives, so it's not just us.

But somehow it's creepy to hope that one day she'll decide I'm kind of hot and that she wants to kiss me and make out? "She" isn't a specific person; it doesn't have to be you, personally. This trajectory doesn't have to be how all my nice warm collegial friendships with female people end up going, and I don't expect them to. I'm certainly not thinking about it every moment of the time we spend together.

Let's revisit: I grew up with girls saying they were tired of being treated and regarded as sexual opportunities instead of as people. And we Nice Guys, perhaps we are the males who grew up liking girls as people, like their company, share their values, and want their approval as a person, as well as being attracted to them. That's certainly where I'm at. So -- Ms. HB, over here, she says she prefers the bluntly honest horndog, the fellow who clearly signals that his interest in her is of a sexual nature.

What's the complaint here? Oh yeah, that we Nice Guys go around claiming that you prefer the bluntly honest horndog aka sexually predatory jerks and don't want really want to date nice guys, although you're fine with having us as friends. Sounds like we're pretty much in agreement with how things are.

Oh, but we're bitter and hostile about the situation. That we act like we're entitled to have it play out differently, that we deserve better. Hmm, yeah, I can see how that impression could develop. Mind you, when I do my complaining, I complain about the overall situation, not about one individual woman or her sexual preferences. I've heard some of the bitter and hostile guys, incels and all that, making it sound like we, the nice guys, are the victims of a social situation that puts us in double-binds where we're damned if we do and damned if we don't, but that you, Ms. HB, and your sisters, are free to act in a different pattern if you so chose, and that since you don't so choose this is somehow all your doing. I'm personally going to plead Not Guilty on that one, but I concede that there's a lot of that behavior coming off the Nice Guys in general. It's not nice and it's not fair, but people are often hostile towards individuals when what they're actually angry and frustrated about is how things are set up socially. A lot of us Nice Guy types don't like aspects of our gender role, that's what it comes down to, and we complain about it being unfair, and sometimes we get downright adversarial and confrontational about it. Sometimes we act like the individual person in front of us is somehow personally responsible for setting it up that way. And is free in a way that we are not. That's just wrong.

(Hell, it's a patriarchy, and women, including you, Ms. HB, have been complaining about the unfairness to women of these rigid roles and pointing out how you're constrained by them, so it's quite amazing that Nice Guys can be so opaque about how no, you and your sisters didn't personally set it up this way. But the whining Nice Guy who is doing this didn't personally set it up this way either, and neither, for that matter did the bluntly honest horndog fellow, whose bluntly honest tendency to treat you like a sexual bonbon right from the outset is only preferable under some circumstances).

Let me explain a couple things from a personal vantage point, if I may.

First off, some women do prefer Nice Guys. You personally, Ms. HB, are free not to, and I'm still on board with being your friend. But the sexist courting and dating scenario paints the honest horndog fellow as the male who is doing it right, so it's harder for us to figure out how to make our situation work.

Second, let's posit for the sake of example that I'm attracted to you from the outset when we first meet. That's not special. I'm attracted to an incredibly large percent of your very cute morphological variety, and at the stage where I've only just met you that isn't any more personal for me than it is for you, you see what I'm saying? And just like a lot of nice girls, I tend to want to feel personally appreciated for who I am and treated individually and not like an interchangeable Tab A, and even if that were not true, I've heard all the nice-girl complaints about being treated like sex objects and sexual targets and opportunities, so no, of course I'm not going to express to you the fact that I find you sexually attractive, I don't even know you!

Thirdly, let's assume some time goes by and we do get to know each other, and I'm liking you. I'm liking you on many levels. Well, when that happens to you, do you, umm, find it awkward to express a type of interest that would move the connection in a romantic direction? I sure do, so I wait. Not only is it not my responsibility as the person with the male anatomy to be more blunt and honest in saying so, I'm totally into being less so precisely because of how it's all set up.

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All of the above set of notions and concepts are things I more often express as "I am of a different gender than the one that is conventionally assumed of male people". You do need to realize that there is more than one way of putting things into words. If you never before thought of Nice Guys as people unhappy with sexist expectations, or as people whose assumed gender is a bad fit for who they actually are, it may be because they aren't being called that, aren't typically discussed that way.

You do, I assume, realize that Nice Guys, in the sense promulgated by the Heartless Bitches International characterization, is labeling from the outside, right?

Well, that was true of the label "bitches" too, wasn't it? Good on you for reclaiming it.

I'm following your example.

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

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

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

———————

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

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/90157.html

When you're a sissy femme male, you learn that indicating sexual interest in anyone is risky and can conjure hostility and contempt. If it happens to be male-bodied people that you like that way, you learn that not only the straight ones but the gay ones as well may regard you as creepy and pathetic and perverted and disgusting. If, on the other hand, your sexual inclination is to find female-bodied humans to be the enticing ones, you soon realize that you're expected to be boylike and to have boylike sexual priorities and attitudes, and to the extent that you don't, you're considered inferior, pathetic, creepy, and loathsomely disgusting.

You may notice a theme here.

So. I wrote a coming-out tale that details what it was like to be me, from age 13 to 21. It included a lot of pining and hoping and wishing and lusting for the possibility of a girlfriend in my life. Because, yeah, that happens to be how I was wired, I was a femme male who found female folk attractive. My narrative included a lot of confusion and frustration, because that's what it's like to be a pubescent sissy male with that attraction.

Among the reactions and feedback that I successfully solicited from people willing to review my book were comments that my sexuality was creepy.

a) "I was creeped out by how the author saw every female character as a possible sexual partner"

My last girlfriend had been back when I was in 3rd grade. It had been wonderful. We had loved each other, shared, talked, held hands, defied hostile classmates and even an occasional hostile teacher to be together. In the intervening years I'd developed a much stronger and emphatic interest in girls' bodies. Not that I hadn't felt some of that in 3rd grade but I was ignorant and thought I was a pervert back then.

You want to call me a pervert at 13, or 17? Fine. Maybe I was. I wanted a girlfriend. I was seriously into girls. It wasn't happening but I wanted it to. When I had girls who were friends or associates or colleagues, I fantasized that maybe what I wanted could develop with them.

Since it wasn't happening, hadn't happened, and I was feeling left out, I read advice columns and stuff of that nature, and several writers said I should not restrict my potential availability to the ultrahot sexiest girls but should realize that the average ordinary girl in the next row might be a good prospect if I didn't restrict myself to considering only the sexiest hottest ones that I saw. Well, nearly every female person I saw looked hot to me anyhow, but yeah I took that advice into serious consideration. It could be her. Or it could be her. Or her. I was totally girl-crazy.

Maybe that's creepy. If so, I don't think it's massively different from how a lot of adolescent girls at that age were about the boys.

b) "The author creeped me out with how much he thought he deserved sex, he sounds like an incel or something"

I never thought or wrote that I thought that I deserved sexual attention from this girl or that girl. I did admittedly think that sooner or later, someone would look upon me and think "Ooh, nice! Cute and not at all like the other boys" and would want to do me. Around me, I heard and saw that other males were being pushy about sex. I thought that was creepy.

I was a person who'd grown up thinking of myself as a boy who was like the girls. I valued their opinion and wanted their understanding now that sexual feelings were involved. I wanted to know how it was for them. I wanted it to be mutual. I wanted honesty. And yeah I expected to be a valued commodity, sooner or later, and yes I got a bit indignant when that did not seem to be happening. The pushy, sexually aggressive boys were not only experiencing sex but also having girlfriends.

I saw how the game was played. If I acted like I only wanted to have sex and had no reservations about it, the girl towards whom I acted that out could protest that she wasn't that kind of girl and we could banter. But that wasn't honest, that wasn't me, that role did not fit me, it was written for someone else.

Incels...I am not an incel. They harbor offensively sexist ideologies towards women, attitudes that are chock-full of hostility. But incels are people and some human experiences gave rise to that viewpoint, however twisted it may be. Yes, I was on that path. Feeling unfairly isolated, deprived.

When African natives were forcibly extracted from their homes in the 1600s and beyond and shoved into slavery, they felt the urge to turn to each other and sexuality inflected that, where applicable, and there was mating despite the fact that their children would have this institution of slavery inflicted upon them. That is powerful. That puts the desire to mate on a very high plane of priorities in life. So it is unfair to denigrate the desire to have that in one's life as if it were some dismissable trivial concern. It is a human thing to want, with relative degree of desperation, a connection, a love, a sexual joining.

To find one's self in a category where you don't get to have that? Yeah, there's going to be anger, resentment. The incels don't get it. They are wrong. They theorize as if female people have complete autonomy and that they, the males in this position, are controlled by that. That's ignorant and oblivious. Feminists have been writing and speaking for years and years about the coervice social pressures that control young women's sexual choices.

I grew up with feminism. I expected my female classmates to be liberated, feminist, nonsexist. I expected them to deal with me as a person who was fundamentally like they were, other than physically male. They didn't. They had expectations. They bought into beliefs. They also of course became necessarily wary and guarded and suspicious. All of that put a wall between them and me.

My sense that I was a person who was desirable? That I should logically have been a catch? Call it creepy if you must, but I found it liberating to shove aside the value judgments and the notions of what constitutes heterosexual viability.

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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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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!

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

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

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

———————

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

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/81860.html

I’ve recently read a couple books that both fall loosely under the rubric of coming-of-age / coming-out stories. Neither is a new release but they were recommended to me and sat waiting on my “to read” pile.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan (Penguin, 2010).

A lot of lesbian and gay lit offerings are effectively romances, and romances tend to emphasize the romantic relationship (hence the designation), and end happily ever after (HEA) or at least happily for now (HFN). Although Will Grayson, Will Grayson is in part about coming out and having that first sexual-romantic connection, it’s actually not a romance in the conventional sense. The emphasis is on friendship and loyalty among friends; the romantic relationships described in the book end up being in the background. This book portrays the tensions within an ongoing gay-straight friendship and the complexities in a formerly romantic-sexual relationship between the exes who still care for each other.

The “gimmick” of the book, if I may call it that, is that two boys of the exact same name take turns as the story’s narrator. One Will Grayson is gay but not out yet, and hasn’t had any meaningful sexual experiences as of the start of the book. The other Will Grayson is straight but similarly inexperienced (he’s rather introverted and has embraced a philosophy of never drawing attention to himself if he can avoid it). The authors handle the back-and-forth tradeoff between the two narrators by having one Will’s chapters all in lower case while the other uses normal start-of-sentence capitalization. It works.

The storyline and the two narrators revolve around central figure Tiny Cooper, “the world’s largest person who is really really gay”, also “the world’s gayest person who is really really large”. The exuberantly flamboyant Tiny is a theatrical creative. I coincidentally just now read a news article via a link within a Facebook group about how many gay men feel marginalized within the gay community over body image, especially the notion that to be successful in love and sex and socialization, a gay male needs to be neither skinny nor fat but perfectly sculpted instead. (It’s a complaint that mirrors those made by straight women about mainstream society). So it strikes me as healthy that we have here a heroic and popular extra-large gay person.

My Razzle Dazzle, Todd Peterson (iUniverse, 2015)

This is a period piece where the action takes place just a few short years before my own coming-of-age experience (and hence the events in my own book). Todd Peterson is just about the right age to have been my babysitter when I was a child. There are a lot of events and specific descriptions I can readily relate to as a consequence: the girls jumping rope on the playground and what it was like to play with them, the boys and the specific ways in which they were hostile to both girls and sissies, the “feel” of the school hallways and classrooms. Also, for that matter, the later career in software development, although I didn’t get into that as early in my own life as Todd Peterson did.

There are other elements of the story that are quite foreign to me though, in particular the phenomenon of roller derby, the experience of competitive skating on banked tracks and so on. Todd Peterson made the transit from enthusiastic fan to eventual team member of the Bombers, and his sense of accomplishment and belongingness among the skaters is as much a journey of identity and self-actualization as his coming out as a gay person. This is something that’s often not well-explained, that a marginalized identity on the basis of gender or sexual orientation tends to be a prominent factor in a person’s identity, but not to the exclusion of other things that may be developing concurrently in that same person’s life.

As with Will Grayson, My Razzle Dazzle alternates narration, this time between the current-era Todd Peterson who is reminiscing about his coming of age years, and the Todd Peterson he was as a child and young adult. The tradeoff this time is handled by having the historical reminiscent Todd Peterson written in the third person, while the modern Todd writes in the first person. And this works well too. The overall impression is that of Todd the author sitting in a comfortable armchair and discussing the events of the previous backstory chapter and their impact on his life overall. It gives him a way to theorize and make sense of those events and how they shaped him.

I do note that My Razzle Dazzle is yet another “exhibit a” for my discussion of gender inversion and sexual orientation, or, more specifically, why people identifying as gender inverts as I do are likely to be males attracted to females or vice versa. Todd Peterson doesn’t make a distinction between being, or being perceived as, feminine or sissified, on the one hand, and being gay, attracted to other males, on the other. In an early chapter he describes playing double dutch with the girls, turning the rope and doing his own jumping in turn, and then being harassed for that by the other boys. There is, of course, no reason why playing jump rope with the girls means that one is attracted to other guys, or why having sexual fantasies about other boys would make a fellow feminine. But Peterson doesn’t say this or explore this distinction. And why would he? The people around him don’t make make such a distinction! Sissy means gay to them, so in accepting himself as a gay male, Todd Peterson looks back at sissy characteristics and interprets them as traits of a gay male child. Similarly, in a later chapter, he muses about the possibility of coming out to his family and one of his friends points out that he crosses his legs “like a girl” and from this and other such cues and expressions says “they may already know”. Because of this phenomenon, the people I suspect are most likely to identify as gender inverts will be sissy-femme males whose attraction is not towards other males (because those that are continue to identify as gay guys not as gay gender inverted guys), and similarly so for butch-masculine female folks (because the butch gals who are lesbians tend to conflate their butch attributes with their lesbianism rather than seeing it as a separate component of marginalized identity).

One notable exception to that is Jacob Tobia, whose Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is definitely a gender-inversion testimonial, a description of being femme that is definitely not conflated with sexual orientation. I reviewed Sissy last year.

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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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Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know.

But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.

The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.

The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.

If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.

There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?

Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?

If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.

One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.

That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:

De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well.

-- from Radiator Heaven

I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.

I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.

Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.

Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.

Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".

Submission Stats as of October 2019:

Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12

Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1

* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.

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Occasionally it comes out in conversation that I am polyamorous and have had multiple simultaneous partners. This is a fact that often gets misconstrued:

Jake: Whoo, well, sissy or no, I see we have some stuff in common. Rock on! You may not be in to all that masculinity be-a-man stuff but when it comes down to the important things you know how to get what you need, huh?

Maud: Is this like a compensation thing, to make up for being left out and pushed to the sidelines while the manly men were getting all the girls?

Now, I like occasionally having a moment of solidarity and experience-in-common with the non-hostile incarnations of the conventional male, and it may in fact have some element of compensatory pleasure or “making up for lost time” associated with it, I suppose, but I feel like most folks miss an important connection between being poly and being sissy.

Polarization versus Unification

The conventional portrait of sexuality, gender, and companionship looks something like this. I’ll work from the cis hetero male model since I am male and perceived as male and hence compared to this more often, regardless of how I identify. Ready? He has a cluster of same-sex friends, his “group” or his “buddies”, his “crowd”, and some are closer friends than others; these are easy informal relationships, without definitional structures. They are certainly multiple in nature and he may become closer to one friend over time or more distant with another, all without any need to redefine the relationships (since they don’t have formal definitions anyhow). Meanwhile, entirely separate from that, he has erotic interests in women, and is predisposed to form long-term pair-bonding with one if there is a sufficiently strong emotional attachment formed. Outside (or prior to) such a pair-bond, he may pursue sexual activity with multiple different partners, and may in fact behave in such a way as to preserve this sexual freedom by doing things to postpone or reduce the likelihood of pair-bond emotional passions forming. But it is still assumed that eventually he wants that to occur and that when it does he will be sexually exclusive. Even if not, it is assumed that he will not form similar deep emotionally connected pair-bonds with someone else, that the pair-bond relationship is at least exclusive in its own domain.

I am not going to critique this model for its inherent healthiness or desirability, at least not at the moment. Instead, let’s just toss this masculine model out of the way and bring myself in, a sissy male, and examine what changes from that alone. Well, first of all, instead of all my friends being same-sex, I tend to form friendships with women. Second, in contrast to some notion of a separate “friend zone” versus a “romantic possibility” classification, it’s not a separate phenomenon for me: the people I like as friends, being of the sex that I’m attracted to, are the people with whom there’s a potential for a sexual connection, a romantic connection. At the time that the connections are forming, I don’t know where they’re headed. Sexuality isn’t something foreign to friendship for me. Thirdly, just as the cis hetero guy’s friendships change over time, with him getting closer to some and farther apart from others, my relationships shift, and those shifts include into and out of sexual and romantic expression and feelings. So not only do I not know where they’re headed when they’re starting up, they may change.

That’s what it means, what it’s like, to be a person who is “like” rather than heterodifferent from the sex to whom I feel sexual attraction. It doesn’t make sense to “break up” with someone or to attempt sexual exclusivity or to expect or request it of someone else.

Works for Me

When I describe this to people, they sometimes say that it's a sad and inferior version of sexuality. They also sometimes say that it's a sad and creepy version of friendship. For my part, I think it would be sad and kind of pathological to be unable to be friends with someone you're strongly sexually attracted to. To be unable to feel that attraction without erupting into sexual aggression, sexual harassment, rape, molestation, sexual intrusiveness, etc; to find it necessary to attain that person sexually or else to run for the hills, to get away from them. I don't have that problem. I mean, yeah, I want sex and romantic love to be in my life, with someone, at least now and then; I need to experience that, and it's quite painful to be completely isolated from it. But as long as that's happening now and then in my life, I don't need it to be happening with this particular person, and it's OK to find them exquisitely delicious and not have anything develop out of that. And also, I don't think of sexual feelings as some kind of filthy things that are going to pollute a friendship.

There are people who practice a narrowly constrained form of pseudo-polyamory, wherein a person (nearly always male) is OK with his partner(s) having other partners of their own but only partners that are not of his sex. In other words, a “one penis policy”. In essence, he is isn’t seeing other female partners of his partners as competitive threats, but would see another male as such.

I don’t think I’m particularly inclined to see the sexual realm of life as all about competition, although I suppose some competitive aspects may be inevitable. But there’s another factor there for me, which is that I don’t tend to see other male partners of my partners as direct competition. Female partners either, for that matter. If there’s one flip side to sissyhood as a marginalized and rarefied identity, a structural advantage for a change, it’s the sense of veritable uniqueness. If someone likes being with me, they may also like being with other male people or other femme people but neither of those categories is going to be a snap-in replacement for me, so anyone with a taste for someone like me is going to be inclined to keep me around! I guess the closest approximation to a “one penis policy” in my case would be a “one SISSY policy”, but hey, we don’t exactly grow like weeds, with sissy suitors lurking around every corner, so I’ve never felt the need for that kind of protection either.

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"I think you have a misconception", my women's studies professor told me. "Feminism is not 'for women who step away from traditional feminine expectations and roles'", she said, making air quotes. "Feminism is for all women. We want to support women's freedom to choose their own options, and that includes being a mother, or a receptionist. It even includes being a sex object". She paused and sighed. "In my day we were trying to get away from that, but now lots of women are seeking it. Anyway, my point is, feminism isn't about telling women how they're supposed to be. It's fine to not conform to the expectations that are projected onto women but it's also fine if you do, if it's what you want for yourself".

I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!

I just finished rereading 166126

Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.

The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?

Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.

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

Consider this paragraph:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melanie, from the inside cover of the album Gather Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I rewrote the section of my book where I (aka my "main character") meets the girl from the Massachusetts family that's vacationing out west, and falls in love. He takes her to a deserted overlook at the edge of a cliff and for a moment she thinks she may have put herself in a dangerous situation; the communications misfire leaves them shaken but that in turn gets them talking openly and honestly while they sit side by side pitching stones off the cliff.

As originally written, it was a description of the event, not a fully fleshed out scene with full dialogue and internal monologues and whatnot, and I needed it to pop a lot more, to be as emotionally moving to the readers as the event itself was to the characters.

I read the results to my authors' group, the Amateur Writers of Long Island, to favorable reception:

"Good balance of action and contemplation"

"Beautifully written. You have a wonderful flow to your writing — it seems to come so effortlessly. "
"Very honest and real."

"So glad to hear you express the boy's point of view on sexual domination."

"This is a great description of a best-on-earth sitch to be in. Well done."
" & Wow! A reversal of emotional fortunes. Cool!"

"I like their comfort with each other."

"Excellent. The pebbles were a great touch. You convey the mood, and the nature of the interaction, the internal emotions at work, all in such a gentle but real, relatable fashion. The development is so well paced. Fantastic analysis. Well told, particularly as it can be delicate subject matter. Very honest as well."

"Very revealing story, different fresh, mind altering -- thanks"

"Very genuine! Realistic, subtle."

"Great dialog, super flow. Love how you write! SO sweet!"

Now, it is a very warm and supportive group. We don't tend to tear each other down in our critiques. Even so, the feedback I'm getting from the group reinforces my sense that yes, dammit, I can write.

I actually do have a good book. One that is vivid and emotionally moving. I'm so weary of the process of trying to get it published, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Just hit a milestone, by the way:

The Story of Q — total queries to Lit Agents = 1200
Rejections: 1178
Outstanding: 22

As NonFiction—total queries = 970
Rejections: 951
Outstanding: 19

As Fiction—total queries=230
Rejections:227
Outstanding:3

The Story of Q — total queries to Publishers=41
Rejections:26
Outstanding:7
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, Publisher Went Out of Business:1
Pub Contract Signed, Rights Reverted (creative diffs):1

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It has been a very long time since I've done any rewrite in The Story of Q beyond a little superficial surgery here and there. It's mostly been a stable and complete-feeling book.

I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.

The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.

Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.

I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.

Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.

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