"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that makes it sound like they're scared of us the way people get scared of heights or cats or something".

But although I've seen this sentiment quite a few times, there doesn't seem to be any consensus emerging about what else to call it, so 'homophobia' is still the word that's in use.

Besides, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think of it as a phobia. As being about fear.

I've got a scene in my book Within the Box where Derek is at risk of being locked up as a dangerous involuntary patient despite not having done anything threatening to anyone. He finds this bewildering.

But he's always found the anger and hostility bewildering, too. People so upset just because he has behavior patterns that are more like those of the girls, that he acts like a girl instead of acting like a boy.

But then he turns the question to a different angle:

What if they felt threatened by me? I never did anything to hurt anyone, but I broke some unspoken codes of conduct, how boy children are expected to behave, how other boys like us are supposed to be, how one’s students can be expected to act. If somebody doesn’t act the way you thought they would, you end up not having much confidence about your sense of what they might do next.

And of course if there’s a right way to be a boy child student, and we all know what it is, we’re secure in thinking we know how it’s supposed to be, but if there’s one who isn’t like that, then either he’s wrong or our thinking is wrong. Our thinking includes the notion that it matters, having everyone being the way they’re supposed to be, so there isn’t even any room for ‘he isn’t the way he’s supposed to be but it doesn’t matter’. So that’s a different kind of threat, but yeah, that too.

This is actually about sissyphobia, since the provoking behavior is gender noncompliant behavior and not same-sex attraction. Not that the hateful fearful violent people were making that distinction.

I do come to the topic of homophobia partly as an insider and partly as an outsider, being a heterosexual femme. I have had my own fears that could be considered homophobic fears, and I have been on the receiving end of the violence and hate that may be partially fear-driven too.

So what's so scary?

Girls and women have a significant excuse for heterophobia. Decade after decade they've gone on marches and addressed classrooms, trying to get a cultural consensus that "no means no". That it is not tolerable that just because someone is interested in having sexual contact with you, they might impose it on your whether you want it or not.

If there were a similar significant risk of gay people pushing their sexual attentions onto people who didn't want to have sex with them, violating their "no", sexually assaulting them, I could clearly see that that would be a legitimate source of homophobia. But I've never had anything like that happen to me, I've never had any of my friends or colleagues tell me it's happened to them, and the overwhelming majority of the cases where same-sex sexual contact has been imposed has been ostensibly heterosexual male people calling another male homosexual and making intrusive sexual contact while angrily yelling that this is what the victim of the violence obviously wants. I had variations on that theme take place in junior high and high school but mostly it was confined to threats and verbal assaults and the destruction of personal property like books and clothing and whatnot.


Then there's the specter of somehow being stalked by "being gay", as if the sexual orientation itself were somehow predatory and involved in chasing people down and converting them against their will. This is something that needs to be distinguished from the notion of a person crossing the line and imposing themself sexually. It's usually painted as a threat due to the difficulty of negotiating a good heterosexual situation. Sort of like hungry people at a restaurant being barred from getting the food they want, so they're threatened with the prospect of settling for something else that's more readily available.

The cisgender version of heterosexuality has very polarized rules and roles. Obtaining a string of heterosexual encounters with a wide range of different partners is something that is perceived and treated very differently when one is female than when one is male. Sex is portrayed as a conquest, as something that the male person makes happen and the female person says "yes" or "no" to, and to say "yes" too often or too easily obtains for her a set of unpleasant labels and epithets. So sex is set up as an adversarial contest of wills and he wins if he makes sex happen. Therefore it is against that backdrop that same-sex opportunities are positioned as a threat: "You're such a loser that you can't conquer any female partners, therefore this is all that's available to you".

That's a pretty hollow threat though. One might face the prospect of being a loser and failing to secure heterosexual contact with any female people, but unlike the hungry person in the restaurant, sexual appetite isn't the kind of imperative that one dies from absence, and there's autoerotic release available and nonsexual friendship and companionship.

But another form it takes is the fear of being perceived as gay. What's interesting about that is that the most emphatic and noisiest homophobes are nearly always males, but as I just discussed, the ensconced roles and rules of cisgender heterosexuality cast it as the boy-role to make sex happen. So why would it matter particularly if a lot of female people were to perceive one as gay? The suspicion here is that it's actually mostly a concern about what other male people think that's the driving force in this fear.


Of my own fears, my own homophobic responses and hangups, the one that it would be most logical for me to have would be the fear of being perceived as gay and harassed and violently attacked for it. That's certainly happened a lot in my life! But my reaction has been indignation and outrage, and I haven't been much inclined to modify my appearance or behavior to make the queer-bashers less likely to think I'm an appropriate target.

I have at times in my life worried that female people in general might dismiss me from consideration due to thinking I'm gay. That's in part because I'm not cisgender. I'm femme. I'm girl. And I'm very alienated by that whole cisgender heterosexual expectation that as the male person I'm the one who's supposed to be trying to make sex happen and wear down a female person's resistance and reluctance and all that. That totally doesn't fit who I am or how I want to be with someone in a sexual or romantic relationship or encounter. Through most of my life, I've held onto the hope that women would find me interesting and sexually fascinating and would do things to make sex happen between us, that they'd choose me and communicate that to me.

But in the long run, faced with what was painted as a pretty binary choice between being thought of as femme and gay or being thought of as masculine and cis and straight, I decided of the two, being considered a typical boy creature was the worse of the alternatives. When my article "Same Door, Different Closet" was being considered for publication back in the early 1990s, one of the academic reviewers said my model of heterosexuality "didn't depend on a committed effort to avoid sexual feelings and experiences with men". Or perhaps more to the point, wasn't anchored in the need to avoid appearing gay to others.

The world doesn't get to dispose of me or decide for me what my sexual orientation is. Thousands of people thinking of me in a certain way doesn't conjure it up as my reality. And as far as the prospect of other males having a sexual interest in me and misreading the signals, well, as one of my lesbian friends pointed out, it's hardly just heterosexual males who occasionally have to cope with someone being sexually interested in you and you don't reciprocate, and it's not exactly the end of the world. No big deal. Get over it.


To get back to the role of fear in this hatred and violence, though, I'll end with this additional snippet from Within the Box:

You try to get a handle on why people would be hateful and oppressive and you just end up finding them guilty of being horrible people with no justification, and there’s no understanding for that. But I can understand scared. I don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a starting point.

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


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

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






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

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(an outsider ponders male heterosexuality)

I haven't often made any attempt to answer the above question. I don't answer on behalf of men because I don't identify as a man. When young, I would not have spoken on behalf of the boys in general either. Other boys made it plain that they didn't consider me to be a valid representative. As for me, I found them largely inexplicable and strange anyway.

Unlike the parallel question of what women want, famously posed with some perplexity by Sigmund Freud, it's apparently not a question that most folks find difficult to answer. Judging from the things I've heard people say on the subject, men are considered to be simple straightforward uncomplicated beings.

Sex, they say.

They say that as if that were a simple straightforward and uncomplicated answer. Which I have always found odd, since I find boys and men, and this answer, far from self-explanatory. The more I heard, the less I felt like it applied to me, although I wanted sex too but it certainly wasn't simple, straightforward, or uncomplicated in the least. "What, exactly, do you mean, men just want sex?"

Men just want to get their rocks off, I'm told.

Oh... orgasms? I understand orgasms. I discovered my capacity for them when I was a child in the one-digit age range. The presence of another person isn't really necessary. I trust you are aware of this. You're trying to explain men's behavior by saying it's all about this?

Oh, they say, no, not masturbation. Yeah men wank, they jerk off, but men are hard-wired to want to have sex with women, with as many women as possible, as often and as fast as possible. Because they want to spread their seed around. That's what we mean about it all being about sex, about men wanting to get their rocks off.

(What about the ones who want sex but not with women?, I ask. They shrug. We dunno, something went haywire. We don't think of them as men. They don't count)

Hmm, well, I have no doubt that we all have the desire for sex because of reproduction, but the blueprint doesn't appear to require us individually and locally to crave pregnancies and babies as part and parcel of desiring sex. Instead, it would appear that a general appetite for sex tends to result in enough pregnancy and childbirth as an outcome. So we don't need to crave pregnancy or to hunger for babies in order to want sex. I've been in many a situation where we had a rather strong interest in not having pregnancy result, and believe me, it didn't interfere with being interested in sex at all. You saying men in general crave the causing of pregnancies and that's causing them to display the sexual behavior you've been describing, of trying to have sex as quickly as they can with as many women as they can?

No, they admit, not a direct conscious desire for pregnancy to occur. They concede that I am right, that evolution may desire that outcome but individual people's lust for sex has a somewhat separate existence. But, they go on to add, subconsciously that's still the agenda. Men want to plow all those fields and stick their seeds in, even if they don't consciously want their girlfriends to get inconveniently pregnant and maybe stick them with child support and pressure to settle down and stuff. See, women, especially when pregnant, are hard-wired to want a pair-bonding thing and make him the provider, that's how she best passes along her own genes by making sure her baby survives and stuff. But he don't want that, it's in his nature to fertilize as many as he can. So they have a little conflict of interest, you might say.

Aah, I nod sagely. Well, that explains why men hold women who are readily sexually available in such high esteem, since they can make the circuit of such women and have sex with a great number of them. They get to spread their little seeds all over the place that way. Never mind that in actuality there may not be a lot of actual pregnancies resulting in the modern era, with birth control, but as we've already established it's not directly about trying to make actual pregnancies, but rather is a subconscious agenda, as you said, a carryover from our past. Umm, but actually men don't have very good opinions of sexually available women. Why the nasty hostile contempt for sluts? And isn't it true that men tend to end up waging a long protracted campaign to obtain sex from less slutty women, taking up a lot of time to get to the same point they could get to with the slutty women, at the conclusion of which they often end up committing themselves to a monogamous relationship that keeps those little seeds from going into any other fertile furrows? How does that square with your portrait of men being all about sex as quickly as possible with as many women as possible?

So then they usually start babbling on about men needing the thrill of the chase and the triumph of conquest, and paternity and property and passing on his name, and my eyes glaze over. Men are so complicated, and weird and inconsistent.


Well, I admitted that I want sex myself, but that I didn't see it as simple and straightforward and uncomplicated. So I guess I can't then point fingers at men and say they are different because they are not simple, straightforward and uncomplicated, can I? Well, it does seem different from how men and their sexuality are described, whether we're equally complicated or not. Now maybe the description is inaccurate and how it is for me isn't so different from how it is for these men-people. Let me explain what I understand of my own and see where that takes us.

Sexual appetite for me is also not just the craving for orgasm — just like with the men, I don't find masturbation satisfying. Likewise for it not being directly about wanting babies. What it is about is connection, the yummy being-in-love emotional high, the deliciousness of full intimacy.

And it's somehow inherently about idealizing it, sort of making a fetish out of the ideal sexual-girlfriend relationship, spending a lot of time and energy thinking about it and fantasizing about it and, on some level, not quite obsessive but always sort of watching out for the possibilities, seeking that out. Looking for it. And even bigger, beyond even that, of trying to create the conditions under which that ideal relationship could and would occur.

It's like the greatest most wonderful thing ever would be an ideal relationship taking place in a context where it would thrive. And that means making yourself the person capable of being in such a relationship, and it means cleaning up and getting your life working so that things are running on an even keel so that you could make use of an opportunity. Writ large, it even means improving the entirety of society until the social environment is such that the happiest and most satisfying sexual and romantic connection can take place and thrive.

Now, lots of people through time have talked about sex being some kind of sacrament, some holy thing you're not supposed to trample into the mud. Some shiny thing you're not supposed to profane. I'm not sure if that's the same thing I'm driving at or not. A lot of the time it does not seem to be. Much of the conversation about sex being holy and special and all that seems to have to do with restricting when it can happen and defining really narrow "OK zones" for sex and saying sex outside of those definitions means you're doing the mud-tramping thing. And frankly that sounds to me no different from sex-hating, sex-fearing condemnation of sexual pleasure and appetite, all that fault-finding and attempting to define sacred untrammelled sex.

In fact, I have come to think that sexual appetite is powerful and revolutionary and for this reason institutionalized social structures fear it and have sought to erase it, constrain it, define it narrowly while prohibiting outside-definition expressions; they've sought to attach its glamour to other items, they've attempted to harness it and make it motivate people to do the institution's bidding, and they've sought to bottle it and market it as a commodity.

In its resulting distorted forms, sexual appetite has often been experienced by people as the enemy of their self-determination and freedom. History has not been without radicals who have sought to free themselves of institutional control by transcending sexual desire.

But ultimately it is more radical to embrace it, pay attention to it, and let it lead the mind as well as the heart, because of what it intrinsically seeks.


Now, back to the men thing, men and their sexuality. I mean, yeah, I could just dismiss all that descriptive stuff and say men probably aren't like that to begin with. But it's so often men themselves saying those things about men's sexuality and what drives men and so on. Me, I've spent a lifetime being defined, both by myself and by others, as someone on the outside of the whole being-a-man thing, so take this with as many grains of salt as you find appropriate, but here's my outsider's take on it, OK?

First off, there's this game, the game I call "Heterosexuality", which is played according to these game-rules:

1. The females want to "fall in love" and be loved in return by a cute guy who will be the boyfriend, and, within that context, they want good sex (in earlier times, marriage was necessary first). The males don't really like most females that much, unless they are in love, and they aren't necessarily trying to fall in love at all, and, so, in or outside of that context, they want good sex. Therefore...

2. Males come on to females, usually because they are physically attracted to them, since their main interest is physical and appearance is a physical phenomenon. Sometimes they come on to a female because she has a reputation for being sexually available to males whether they love her or not. Either way, the females can reject the guys they don't have any interest in at all, but the other males have to be kept interested but slowed down so that proximity and time creates the possibility that he will really start to like her, perhaps fall in love. Females do not overtly come on to males.

3. Males who are rejected are allowed to keep on trying, since males who think they are not really being rejected, just slowed down a bit, are supposed to keep on trying, and sometimes you can't tell which is which anyway. But if a male thinks a female is being too hard to get, so that it isn't fun for him any more, he can quit paying attention to her - he doesn't have to keep on trying. Females are not supposed to pursue the matter. It is up to him to press the issue.

from "Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party, 1992

Now, not all men are playing the Heterosexuality game, but a great many of the male people who don't are either defined by others as not-men, or define themselves as other than men, or (as has been the case for me) both of those things.

So you have to understand men in the context of the Heterosexuality game that most of them are playing. Suppose they want the connection-thing and the ideal-relationship-thing too, as their first and foremost real desire, so that they're basically just like me? That would mean that the folks who say men just want sex as quickly and as often with as many women as possible are wrong, but just suppose. Go along with me here. Let's say this is what the men want even if they aren't consciously aware of it, that it is what they want even if they themselves believe they just want sex as quickly as often etc etc. Well, how are they going to get there within the context of the Heterosexuality game as described? Well, by losing. By finding the woman who will successfully trap him, catch him, and "domesticate" him into the ongoing emotionally-connected relationship he craves and needs. In other words, this is the flip side of the conventional notion about sex described so well by Robin Thicke: the nice good girl really wanting to be seized and done unto masterfully by the bad boy who knows she wants it. On this other level, the level of ongoing intimate connection, she's the one who knows what he really wants and makes it happen. Which sex is doing the more meaningful steering?

There's nothing new about identifying the establishment of a long-term relationship as some kind of female win, or even evoking an image of the conquered man shackled. But now we are negating the notion that he wanted something different. This is what he wants, but he's in denial; he believes he just wants sex as often and as quickly and with as many women as he can. So in the Heterosexuality Game he's actually being set up to be brought down. A need for conquest, indeed!

Oh, did I ever mention that what I, as a male girl, want is that I not be deprived of the powers and privileges that female people have, both within sexual liaisons and within relationships, and during initial courting and flirting and negotiations for any and all of that to occur?

Self-identified real men may dissent.



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As I mention in my query letter (see previous post), my first attempt to come out to people got me locked up in the nuthouse. That was mostly just miscommunication: I'd done such a piss-poor job of putting things into words that personnel at the university thought I was either threatening folks or coming unraveled. So with that as a baseline, any future attempts to explain this mess were likely to be an improvement.


But (you may well be wondering), why was I bothering to explain myself to other people in the first place? That's a fair enough question. The thing is, for the first two decades of my life, it was not me who was making a big deal about me being a girl, or being girl-like, or not appropriately boy-like. And it was not me who was making a big deal about who I wanted to have sex with. Nope, I was getting an earful on those subjects, some of it very hostile and some of it liberally tolerant, and nearly all of it based on assumptions that didn't link up very closely with how I felt inside.


So when I figured myself out in 1980, I was all full of enthusiasm and relief and joy as well as more than a little righteous anger, because understanding myself also meant understanding the prejudices and expectations that I'd been up against all that time.


My first serious attempt to get something in writing and out there where it could be read was in 1982. I had a short book that was a combination of personal experiences and my own brand of gender and feminist theory and tried to find a publisher, but got nowhere with it.


After a couple of years, I got the idea of going back to college and majoring in women's studies, where this kind of thing would fit right in as relevant subject matter, and where my professors would maybe be interested in what I was trying to say. I did well as an undergraduate this time around, getting my BA in women's studies in 3 years, but the materials we studied in class were more at the introductory level and it wasn't really appropriate for me to make the classroom experience about me; as for my professors, they were supportive and wrote warmly encouraging comments on my papers and suggested that I go on to graduate school to pursue my interests, but they didn't exactly take up my cause as their own or anything.


Grad school didn't go as smoothly. I went into the Sociology department as a self-labeled radical feminist theorist, still seething with my own ideas and wanting to use theory and academia as my platform (aha! I'm using the word myself now!). I expected some caution and some friction from feminist women, and I expected the mainstream Sociology department to be somewhat resistant to a student espousing radical feminist perspectives, but I thought I'd prevail. I didn't. I was still looking for someone to care about my experiences and help me express them, and instead graduate school was more about professionalizing us and getting us to follow in the academic footsteps of our faculty advisors.


I did, however, finally get into print with my central ideas, in an academic journal article, "Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party", printed in 1992. Not long after that, though, I ran out of funding and had burned too many bridges; I had to find a job and didn't have a good working relationship with anyone on faculty, so I never finished up.


I haven't done much with the idea of explaining this material to the world since then, until this new book.

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