Now It's Real: I'm in Print!!

There's nothing quite like holding the actual physical printed book. Finally! I'm a published author now.

Showing my age, I suppose, but somehow having an eBook to send out as an Advance Review Copy (ARC) doesn't seem much different from just printing the book out to PDF and mailing it to a potential publisher or lit agent.

It is utterly gorgeous. Kudos to Sunstone Press. High quality physical materials, really nice cover, good paper, solid-feeling construction. It feels like something that will survive on library shelves and hold up to being tossed into backpacks and knapsacks and whatnot.



Ten years ago I began writing what would eventually become GenderQueer. (I started trying to get it published in 2013)

Forty years ago I came out on UNM campus — the climactic event in the book. Long before there was any such term as "genderqueer" I described to people how the person I was inside was basically the same persona as what's more typical of girls and women, that this made me different in the same general way that gay and lesbian folks were different, but that it was something else. Not trans, either (I was physiologically male, and that wasn't the problem). I invented my own terms, created my own symbols, wrote my own manifestos and began dealing with the insinuations and innuendos and hints by dropping my own coy allusions and double-entendres into conversations, unworried about whether people could parse them or not, confident, finally, of who I was, what I was, how I was. Let other people be uncomfortable with it if they must, but I'm done with that.



I've been reviewed in a handful of college newspapers with more promised to come, and a couple have been entered on GoodReads. Amazon isn't allowing reviews to be posted until the official release date (I guess?) (3/16/20) and I don't yet have any reviews in commercial or LGBTQ publications but expect those to start appearing as well. Haven't placed any ads yet (aside from a blog tour package) but we're designing them and I do have an ad budget.

I've heard it said that this is a good time for folks to stay indoors and avoid the crowds and curl up with a good book. Read mine! Then, if you liked it, recommend it to your friends.

It's a different story than any you're likely to have read, and I want folks to hear it.



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My book is being published by Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon and now on Barnes & Noble

(paperback only for the moment).

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Singing the Sissy Femme Blues

This song could get me in trouble.



I've occasionally mentioned that at the time I was coming to the realization of my gender identity, and outed myself on campus and to the world (to the extent that I could), I was a music major at the University of New Mexico, hoping to hone my skills as a composer, songwriter, pianist, and singer.

There I was, wanting to explain being a gender invert, wanting to educate the world, wanting to communicate. So, with music among my available tools, I started writing songs about it.

This song is straight out of the blues tradition, a howl, or a whine if you prefer, bewailing what it's like to be male, femme, and attracted to women.

It's an easy target for accusations of insensitive and unwoke political incorrectness: the singer apparently wants to be congratulated for not treating women as sex objects like so many other males do (yeesh, like according women the minimal courtesy of treating them as humans instead of sex toys should win him some kind of prize?), while using objectifying language about female anatomy to do so (yeah, folks, content warning), and he dares to criticize women for reacting to male people in general based on the behavior of males as a class, as if that were somehow unreasonable.

Yeah, well that's a big part of why singing songs about it isn't the ideal mechanism. Too much of this gender situation requires careful and precisely nuanced explanation. I soon realized I needed to write about this, that I was best off depending on my skills as a writer.

I am, of course, well aware that the behaviors of both women and men are structured by the social situation, that none of us behave in a vaccuum but instead face penalties for behaviors that depart from the imposed pattern. I am, of course, complaining about those same kinds of patterns as they get imposed on male people, the whole gender polarization thing.

It's hard to express complex political analysis within the lyrics to a song.

But the blues are not about justifying the reasons for having the blues. The blues are about howling, saying that this is how it feels. And that's something people should know. Analyses of who is entitled to feel this or think that, or theories about blame and causality and so on certainly have their place, but if you want to understand social phenomena, you need to get a sense of how the people in various identities and social locations feel.


Without further ado... Another One © Allan Hunter 1981



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