Well, I've finished rewriting it from scratch from the ground up at any rate. It's still a rough draft, and at the same time I didn't just compose it, either.
It existed previously. The raw material text for both GenderQueer and for That Guy in our Women's Studies Class was generated as part of my autobiographical tome that I wrote between 2010 and 2013. I extracted and edited and named That Guy in our Women's Studies Class as long ago as 2014. I even sent out some query letters!
But honestly it just wasn't a very good book. Whereas I would proofread and edit GenderQueer with pride, Guy in WS kept making me wince. And at some point I recognized that it belonged in a trunk, perhaps to be revised and redone at some future point, and I focused on getting GenderQueer published.
I came back to it in May of 2019. At the time, I was mired down in my efforts with the main book, and I needed a project, something to give me a sense of progress and accomplishment.
In my writer's group, Amateur Writers of Long Island, I quit bringing in excerpts from GenderQueer, which I considered to be a finished book, and began bringing in my work in progress, Guy in WS, the way the other authors were doing, so that I'd get feedback on what I was currently focusing on as a writer.
GenderQueer was accepted for publication in September and for a lot of the following four months I was pretty narrowly focused on that. But during the Coronavirus era, with my book out but no prospect for addressing audiences as a guest speaker, I dove back into it.
That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class (second beta version)
95,000 words in three large units. Chapter divisions to be created later. A mostly autobiographical account of my years in college trying to utilize women's studies as a means to speak and write about my different gender / experience with society's notions about what it means to be male / being a sissy, etc.
It's not quite as absolutely nonfictional as GenderQueer is. In broad strokes, it is, but I took more liberties with moving conversations and discussions into contexts where they made a more interesting story line. Where GenderQueer is about 98 % truth (or as much so as I'm capable of remembering it), Guy in WS is around 85 %.
If you have any interest in being a beta reader of what is still really a work in progress, shoot me a personal message or email and let me know.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
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.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
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Showing posts with label autobiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autobiography. Show all posts
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Thursday, March 12, 2020
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.
———————
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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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.
———————
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————————
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.
———————
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————————
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Saturday, June 22, 2019
Seventh Grade
My book effectively starts with eighth grade, but I covered my earlier life in my initial autobiography, the tome from which my book was taken. I've done blog posts about earlier segments in my life -- third grade; sixth grade.
I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.
Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.
The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.
It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.
Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.
Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.
"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"
"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".
"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"
That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).
"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".
I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.
"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"
I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"
"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"
"Eww"
"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"
"Umm no, yuck"
"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".
"Umm, no, no thanks".
After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.
I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.
I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.
The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.
Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.
———————
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've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.
Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.
The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.
It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.
Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.
Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.
"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"
"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".
"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"
That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).
"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".
I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.
"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"
I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"
"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"
"Eww"
"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"
"Umm no, yuck"
"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".
"Umm, no, no thanks".
After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.
I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.
I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.
The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.
Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.
———————
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
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Brushing the Dust off Book #2
Most of the others who are working on long, novel-length books are bringing in their latest chapters and therefore picking up where we were left off at the previous meeting. That has got me thinking about returning to work on my second book, provisionally titled That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, about my undergrad and graduate school experiences as a women's studies major and about trying to explain my peculiar sense of identity within the framework of feminist theory.
It's been a long time since I worked on it. The autobiography certainly covered that portion of my life, but it's less easily lifted and edited and repurposed as a book than the eighth-grade-through-coming-out portion that became the first book. To render it as an interesting entertaining read, and to tell the story I want to tell, I'm going to need to rewrite it from the ground up and just rely on the autobio as a reminder of events and situations I might otherwise not think to use.
I started doing that, briefly, back in 2015 but didn't get very far because I've been so immersed in trying to get this book, GenderQueer (aka The Story of Q), into print.
I'm hoping the discipline imposed by wanting to have a new selection to read to the group will keep me going this time.
* MOGII = marginalized (or minority) orientations, gender identities, and intersex; an alternative formulation I prefer over LGBTQIA+ or QUILTBAG (queer/questioning, uncertain, intersex, lesbian, trans*, bisexual, asexual, and gay)
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Monday, November 5, 2018
Summarizing a Life
As a consequence of my mother dying and an unusually high volume of other friends', relatives', and associates' lives coming to an end within the last year or so, I've heard a lot of summaries of people's lives, condensations of who those people were around some ongoing themes or primary accomplishments.
I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.
Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.
I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.
I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.
When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.
Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.
Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.
From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and at it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.
Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.
I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party
Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.
I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.
And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.
Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.
So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.
———————
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've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.
Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.
I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.
I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.
When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.
Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.
Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.
From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and at it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.
Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.
I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party
Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.
I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.
And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.
Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.
So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.
———————
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
Sunday, August 5, 2018
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:
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.
———————
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
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.
———————
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
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