I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.
This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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Showing posts with label amazon's brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon's brother. Show all posts
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Progress on THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS (Book II)
I'm still plugging away on the second book to be extracted from my autobiographical tome. This is a complete rewrite; the original text of the autobio is not directly usable, unlike the portion I used for the first book, so I just reference it for notes and reminders. With the scene that I wrote yesterday, I'm up to 96 pages, which should come out to be roughly a third of the final manuscript.
I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.
Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.
In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.
The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.
By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.
The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.
I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.
And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.
The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.
Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.
In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.
The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.
By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.
The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.
I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.
And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.
The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Revisiting the Wydens: The Assault on Sissyhood
"Many of these ["prehomosexual"] boys tend to be overpolite and obedient, anxious to please adults, to be charming and witty and cute...
"In Tommy's case, his teacher decided to employ her full talents and sympathies at once, right on the first day of school...only Betty J.[the teacher] came to know...that he was a prehomosexual child...
When regular classes started the day after the open house, Miss J. thought that Tommy would find the separation very difficult. Nothing of the kind proved to be true...Tommy left her side quickly and without fussing. Miss J. was delighted. In amazement she wondered whether Tommy was perhaps less of a 'Mama's boy' than he had seemed to be the day before...however, his prehomosexual orientation quickly asserted itself.
"Clearly and pleasantly, Tommy chatted with the new teacher about his age and where he lived. He did not seem the least unsure of himself. But just as soon as he was invited to join one of the groups of other children, or to take part in class activities, he refused -- in the same careful, polite tone...
"When he did strike up a friendship, it was with one of the girls...He used a crayon and chalk, but just as soon as he finished he did something no normal boy would dream of doing: he washed his hands.
'His excessive daintyness reminded me of the fastidiously kept apartments of adult homosexuals...', Miss J. told us..."
-- Peter and Barbara Wyden,
Growing Up Straight, What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know
(Stein and Day), 1969, pgs 104, 116-117, 119
The Wydens might find themselves criticized these days for openly giving advice on how to keep their children from contracting homosexuality as if it were leprosy or something, because a quasiliberal tolerance of gays and lesbians is "in" right now, but there is still a widespread social acceptance of a direct correlation between sex role nonconformity (which the Wydens would probably call "gender-inappropriate conduct") and homosexual orientation. In Tommy's case, the "prehomosexual" label was applied not because Tommy was known or thought to have eventually grown up gay, but solely on the basis of his "unmasculine" conduct as a kindergartener. I chose this example because it is so unsubtle, but it is quite common for adults to claim to know who is gay on the basis of similarly sexually-unrelated observations.
This is prevalent enough to double-define the term through usage, much as fuck has come to simultaneously mean both sex and destruction. What is gay? Is it the way you are, or something you do?
And what do you do if you are, but don't? The question of heterosexual viability, which caused me to wonder if the orientation I was accused of was the only thing available for me, tries to work as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
* * *
All of the above is a "guest post" -- from my 22 year old self. It comes from chapter 8 of The Amazon's Brother, my first serious attempt to write about these issues, which I wrote in 1982. The chapter title was "That Peculiar Sense of Identity". (Yes, I have been doing this for a long time) (Yes, I am that old) (No, I was never able to get it published)
When I first read the Wydens' book, I immediately and strongly identified with their description. It was definitely me they were talking about!
The boys in my classroom mocked me for refusing to use what we called "dirty words", and for not joining in with them in their obsessing about bathroom functions, and especially for openly disapproving of them for doing so. And I, too, preferred the company of girls, and definitely put a great deal of effort and energy into getting adult approval.
So the Wydens were totally talking about me and they made it sound like being who I was was something very bad. They had the sheer effrontery to disparage something as intrinsically good as the way I was!
And all because it supposedly meant I would turn out gay... or was it?
Let's begin with the obvious: it is blatantly homophobic to express such hostility to the idea of being a femme sissy by saying boys like that grow up to be gay men, as if that outcome were so self-apparently horrible that the prosecution can rest their case, sissyhood is bad. And it is a powerful act when sissy femme gay males reclaim their identity with pride and reply "Yeah, and? Your point being?"
But I think there's more to the issue of conflating the two things.
I'm not authorized to complain on behalf of gay guys, I guess, but the notion that a person is femme in order to attract the attention of males seems to me to be insulting to gay males. Think about it. It conjures up the notion that the males who are attracted to feminine gay guys are basically really stupid heterosexual males, stupid enough to be attracted to other male people if those male people appear to be like female people. Attracted to femininity in appearance and expression and nuance but too oblivious to realize or too horny and unpicky to care that the person in question is actually male. And if we shift our attention to the feminine gay guys themselves, we see the notion that they aren't interested in each other, that they abhor gay guys, feminine guys, that they want those beforementioned stupid heterosexual men. There's a lack of mutuality and equality, and a lack of pride.
Meanwhile, as long as being a sissy femme male is thought of as coterminous with being gay, the sissy femme identity is erased. We aren't thought of as a gender. The fact that this is our identity is masked and hidden because people interpret it all as an expression of gay sexual orientation. We get reduced to a set of mannerisms.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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