The Arrogance of Claiming to Be a Social Change Activist

On an authors' message board someone started a thread asking if we authors were perhaps an arrogant lot.

I replied,

Damn right I'm arrogant. I have a story to tell. I'd prefer that folks fork over the cover price and voluntarily submit themselves to my thoroughly entertaining written word, but I would strongly consider chaining each and every member of my species to a convenient chair and prying their eyelids open with toothpicks and reading it out loud to them. I haven't worked out the logistics of that yet but morally and intellectually I have no intervening compunctions. (You have been forewarned). Hmm, now if I just went after the literary agents, maybe...

Before long, another author answered that with

Yeah..... admirable confidence. I can't help but want to applaud it.

But... nah... we don't all deserve to be read. We are not entitled. I hope you understand. We all have our causes.

Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.

But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...

* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?

* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?

You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?

Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?

So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:

* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.

* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.

* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.

As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.

The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.


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Sexually Predatory Males, Gender Inversion, and the #MeToo Movement

The #MeToo movement has revealed a cognitive disconnect in our society between people who think sexually predatory behavior is inherently and inexcusably wrong and people who think it is only wrong when it crosses certain thresholds or boundaries.

In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.

Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.

Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.

But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?



Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".

Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.



But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.

And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.

#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.



Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.



Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?

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A Lit Agent Considers My Book — LIVE!

The literary agency Redhammer is one I ran across awhile back; until recently, their page on submissions said they didn't accept unsolicited queries and then went on to say that if you're looking for a lit agency that does ... and then they supplied a rather long list of UK literary agencies.

It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.

Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.

But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.

So I opted to participate.


The whole August 5 program

Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words




In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.

I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.

Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.

And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.


Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.


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More Plastic Surgery on the Book

I'd intended that splicing in a better set of scenes to describe when Derek meets the girl of his dreams in high school (recounted here) was the only real editing I was going to do. But apparently doing that kicked me into a critical editing mode. That's kind of rare for me once a written work has taken form and the first few rounds of edits have ceased: after a certain point I've gotten it the way I want it and I also cease to really see it because I already know what I've said and how I said it and that I like it.

So to find myself having a sudden unexpected rebirth of "fresh eyes" was a gift of fortune. And I took advantage of it.



Narrative Ambiguities

It's an autobiographical tale; I wrote down what happened to me and then carved out a good narrative entertaining story from that source material. But because it had its origins in my recollections, the story was originally chock-full of generalities (I often tended to do this; such-and-such periodically happened to me), most of which I later replaced with actual "scenes" (it was Monday; he said this, I did that, the bell sounded like this, the smoke smelled like that); but one form of that generalizing kind of writing persisted, in the form of short little ambiguities within my sentences:

She brought me back a Sprite or a 7-Up and one of those lunch sandwiches...

... I went out to fetch my sister for supper and she was giggling with Chuck or whispering to Tina...

... then he said "Whoa", or "Ho" or something like that, and the other guy relaxed...

Twigs, and Pruning

At this point, most of the scenes and scenelets in the story do something that connects with the story as a whole, and aren't just isolated events. Either they prefigure some later situations or events or they propel some aspect of the storyline forward, telling part of the tale I set out to tell. But I still found several paragraphs or descriptions that didn't do that and hence were not necessary. Stephen King famously advised authors to "kill your darlings"; I've never fully understood the advice since very few if any of the scenes and paragraphs in my story that are precious to me ("darling") are irrelevant to the story line, and the ones that were got killed off pretty early in the editing process. But these twigs, these pieces that don't presage or propel the plot or its subplots but just branch off briefly and then don't go anywhere, they weren't adding anything useful. And with my reborn case of fresh eyes, I pruned them.

Many of the paragraphs that do connect don't do so in a way that's obvious on first read. There's a scene in 9th grade where Derek stands up to a pair of boys harassing him on the school activity bus and they back down; it's not irrelevant to begin with, but it has the additional utilitarian value that Derek recalls that event when deciding to deal with a pair of guys harassing him at the Vo-Tech auto mechanics school when he's 20. And there's the account of him writing a poem in 9th grade English class in iambic pentameter and tetrameter which might not seem very necessary although it adds to the portrayal of his attitudes and interests at the time, but then at 21 in college he's in a poetry class and writing much more personal and heartfelt stuff, expressing emotional content and not just rattling off words in an established rhythm and rhyming pattern.

But other little pieces were just twigs.


The manuscript is down roughly 1500 words, bringing it from just short of 97,500 to just barely over 96,000 words. It's cleaner, tighter, and less rambly.


Oh, and I changed the working title once again. I really like The Story of Q but unfortunately so do a lot of other authors. I'm amenable to changing it back (or considering an entirely different title) based on the advice of my eventual publisher, but for now I'm fielding it as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET.

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