The Inadequacy of Straight / Gay / Bi

"Oh, great", the gay and lesbian readers may be thinking. "First they want in, and make us expand what we call ourselves to include them, and use this ever-expanding acronym. And now they want to kick our identity out!"

Don't worry, you've got company. "Transgender / Cisgender" is inadequate too. I'm not trans. I was assigned male at birth. I identify as male. Not trans, right? I identify as femme, as girl, gal, woman. When I was assigned male, I was also assigned boy. I'm not cis. Because I'm all sissy. I'm not a man.

I'm not kicking anyone out. I'm coming out, which means I'm coming in, and for me to be in, some of the assumptions have to go out, so get used to it, because I'm not going back in, so let me in. It's complicated. Get used to that, too!


Let's start with the simple complicated. You've seen the genderbread person and the gender unicorn posters, right? The ones that give a nice simple explanation of why sexual orientation and gender identity is so much more complicated than "are you a boy or are you a girl" and "so are you straight, gay, or bi", right?





I'm male, that's my sex; I was assigned male at birth. They assigned me that way because they saw a penis. I've never dissented with that. It's the body I was born with and it's not the problem. I'm male. Male is not my gender identity, mind you. I'm one of the girls, that's my gender.

You with me so far? You see where those answers appear on those posters?

OK, then, with that in mind, let's move on to sexual orientation. I'm attracted to female folks.

Straight, gay, or bi?

Umm... sex or gender? I'm a male girlish person. Male people attracted more or less exclusively to female people are het, right? But women loving women, those are lesbians, aren't they?

This time the posters don't clarify much. Gender Unicorn gives me the choice of "physically attracted to "women", "men", or "other genders". Well, that doesn't help. I said I was attracted to female people, I didn't say anything about their gender identities!

Let's try the other poster. Genderbread says I might be "sexuallly attracted" to "women and/or feminine and/or female" people. That's a lot of and/or. The chart also gives me the option of "men and/or masculine and/or male" people. What happens if I'm attracted to masculine female people?

Both posters also address romantic (or emotional) attraction but the options are the same. And neither of them deal with the question of gay or straight or bi. It's just as well, because those terms can't handle the complexity of what's on those charts.

And the charts oversimplify matters too much.

Someone else might be attracted to feminine people, to people whose gender identity is expressed to be "woman". They might find a masculine female person uninteresting from a sexual standpoint. They might find a feminine male person to be of erotic interest. What defines sexual orientation may differ from one person to the next.

There's something else that the charts leave out about sexual orientation. Neither of them mention how the person wishes to be sexually perceived. Both charts have a space for gender expression but that's about gender, and I'm talking about sexual orientation. I'm referring to which of a person's characteristics one wishes to be found sexy on the basis of. That, for example, someone wants to be perceived as a sexually attractive woman, to be appealing to people whose attraction is towards women. It's not necessarily the same as gender or sex. I know several cisgender women who do not like being found sexually attractive as sexy female people. It's not how they prefer to market themselves in the universe of sexual orientation. I know both intersex and trans people who are revolted at the idea of "chasers", of people who are (or would be) turned on by their physical morphology. I know others who would feel very disappointed if their partner was not turned on by their physical morphology.

In my case, I'm into female boyish people who are attracted to male girls. Yeah, try to find that option on your dating app!



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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 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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Sexual Attraction and BodyShapes

"I was born this way", he says. "I know some of you think there must have been some event, or situation or whatever that made me like this, but honestly I've always been into dicks since before I knew what sex was".

I can relate; I can recall knowing the biological facts of life about how babies get made, but not knowing diddly about sexual appetite and sexual attraction. My understanding at the time was that the only time people did this behavior was when they wanted to have a baby. I had no idea that it felt good or that there was a hunger for it.

And at that age I had definite feelings for female contours, I mean yeah specifically there where they're different from male people. Their different architecture makes everything shaped differently down there, so that when they wear pants it makes shapes that are specific to their anatomy. And I liked to look at it, I liked the way it felt when I did. And oh! *blush* Was this ever kinky and perverted or what?! I mean, that's where you pee from, so I had to keep this secret lest I be mocked mercilessly by the other kids.

So anyway, yeah, I too seem to have been born this way.




In pretty much any discussion of what floats your boat and gets your motor running, sooner or later someone's likely to say that it's shallow and wrong to have the hots for slender blond people with seductive eyelashes. Or perky green-eyes freckle-faced redheads for that matter. Someone is going to say that you should care about who the person is, not what they look like, all that superficial stuff.

And now, added to that, we sometimes encounter the notion that it's shallow and wrong (and transphobic too) to care that someone has a penis instead of a clitoris, or vice versa or some other variation on that theme. We should accept someone as being of the gender with which they identify, and that goes all the way down to not imposing binary intolerant attitudes about what body parts a person has inside their underwear.

Well, I'm not without some limited experience. I've tried participating sexually with someone who had a penis. I didn't care for it. Call me shallow if you wish, judge me and find me wrong if you must, but I seem to have my sexuality wired to the physical architecture that's traditionally dubbed female.

Meanwhile, some folks don't much care to encounter people who find their physical morphology sexy. Or who find the combination of their physical morphology and their overall gender identity and expression sexy. "Chasers are disgusting. They have a fetish and that means they aren't interested in us as people. We want to be accepted as ordinary members of our gender. What's in my underwear is really nobody's business and I don't want to get involved with somebody who has a thing for that, that's creepy".

I don't mean to discredit that feeling or that attitude. Those who find chasers creepy shouldn't have to step back from saying so.

And there are people who don't opt for medical transitioning. And people who can't afford it. I'm totally on board with their gender identity not being any less valid.

But one size does not necessarily fit all. Some of us find the notion of being chased for the specific combo of our gendered self-expression and our physical morphology quite appealing. I do. I'm a girlish femme, of the starched crinolined variety, a good girl with only a modest naughty streak. I happen to be a male girlish sort, a person with physically male morphology. I present as male, expecting to be perceived as male, in hopes that those people who are attracted to feminine male people will take notice of me. The female folks among them are people I'm potentially going to enjoy connecting with.

There are intersex people who kind of like being appreciated, not merely tolerated in a non-judgmental way, for their variances, for the specifics of their physically unusual selves. Author Hida Viloria, for example, describes her own enjoyment of being able to penetrate her partners with her clitoris, and mentions several people who were pleased to find her to be a person with something extra to offer.

Is it shallow and venal? I don't know. I feel like I don't want someone to reward me for being a nice admirable person by handing out sexual access like a door prize. I feel like I want to be lusted after. I want someone to have the hots for my bod and appreciate that I'm a nice person. I get the hots for people because of their physical contours and I crave reciprocal hots for mine.

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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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REVIEWS – Will Grayson, Will Grayson (Green & Levithan) and My Razzle Dazzle (Todd Peterson)

I’ve recently read a couple books that both fall loosely under the rubric of coming-of-age / coming-out stories. Neither is a new release but they were recommended to me and sat waiting on my “to read” pile.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan (Penguin, 2010).

A lot of lesbian and gay lit offerings are effectively romances, and romances tend to emphasize the romantic relationship (hence the designation), and end happily ever after (HEA) or at least happily for now (HFN). Although Will Grayson, Will Grayson is in part about coming out and having that first sexual-romantic connection, it’s actually not a romance in the conventional sense. The emphasis is on friendship and loyalty among friends; the romantic relationships described in the book end up being in the background. This book portrays the tensions within an ongoing gay-straight friendship and the complexities in a formerly romantic-sexual relationship between the exes who still care for each other.

The “gimmick” of the book, if I may call it that, is that two boys of the exact same name take turns as the story’s narrator. One Will Grayson is gay but not out yet, and hasn’t had any meaningful sexual experiences as of the start of the book. The other Will Grayson is straight but similarly inexperienced (he’s rather introverted and has embraced a philosophy of never drawing attention to himself if he can avoid it). The authors handle the back-and-forth tradeoff between the two narrators by having one Will’s chapters all in lower case while the other uses normal start-of-sentence capitalization. It works.

The storyline and the two narrators revolve around central figure Tiny Cooper, “the world’s largest person who is really really gay”, also “the world’s gayest person who is really really large”. The exuberantly flamboyant Tiny is a theatrical creative. I coincidentally just now read a news article via a link within a Facebook group about how many gay men feel marginalized within the gay community over body image, especially the notion that to be successful in love and sex and socialization, a gay male needs to be neither skinny nor fat but perfectly sculpted instead. (It’s a complaint that mirrors those made by straight women about mainstream society). So it strikes me as healthy that we have here a heroic and popular extra-large gay person.


My Razzle Dazzle, Todd Peterson (iUniverse, 2015)


This is a period piece where the action takes place just a few short years before my own coming-of-age experience (and hence the events in my own book). Todd Peterson is just about the right age to have been my babysitter when I was a child. There are a lot of events and specific descriptions I can readily relate to as a consequence: the girls jumping rope on the playground and what it was like to play with them, the boys and the specific ways in which they were hostile to both girls and sissies, the “feel” of the school hallways and classrooms. Also, for that matter, the later career in software development, although I didn’t get into that as early in my own life as Todd Peterson did.

There are other elements of the story that are quite foreign to me though, in particular the phenomenon of roller derby, the experience of competitive skating on banked tracks and so on. Todd Peterson made the transit from enthusiastic fan to eventual team member of the Bombers, and his sense of accomplishment and belongingness among the skaters is as much a journey of identity and self-actualization as his coming out as a gay person. This is something that’s often not well-explained, that a marginalized identity on the basis of gender or sexual orientation tends to be a prominent factor in a person’s identity, but not to the exclusion of other things that may be developing concurrently in that same person’s life.

As with Will Grayson, My Razzle Dazzle alternates narration, this time between the current-era Todd Peterson who is reminiscing about his coming of age years, and the Todd Peterson he was as a child and young adult. The tradeoff this time is handled by having the historical reminiscent Todd Peterson written in the third person, while the modern Todd writes in the first person. And this works well too. The overall impression is that of Todd the author sitting in a comfortable armchair and discussing the events of the previous backstory chapter and their impact on his life overall. It gives him a way to theorize and make sense of those events and how they shaped him.

I do note that My Razzle Dazzle is yet another “exhibit a” for my discussion of gender inversion and sexual orientation, or, more specifically, why people identifying as gender inverts as I do are likely to be males attracted to females or vice versa. Todd Peterson doesn’t make a distinction between being, or being perceived as, feminine or sissified, on the one hand, and being gay, attracted to other males, on the other. In an early chapter he describes playing double dutch with the girls, turning the rope and doing his own jumping in turn, and then being harassed for that by the other boys. There is, of course, no reason why playing jump rope with the girls means that one is attracted to other guys, or why having sexual fantasies about other boys would make a fellow feminine. But Peterson doesn’t say this or explore this distinction. And why would he? The people around him don’t make make such a distinction! Sissy means gay to them, so in accepting himself as a gay male, Todd Peterson looks back at sissy characteristics and interprets them as traits of a gay male child. Similarly, in a later chapter, he muses about the possibility of coming out to his family and one of his friends points out that he crosses his legs “like a girl” and from this and other such cues and expressions says “they may already know”. Because of this phenomenon, the people I suspect are most likely to identify as gender inverts will be sissy-femme males whose attraction is not towards other males (because those that are continue to identify as gay guys not as gay gender inverted guys), and similarly so for butch-masculine female folks (because the butch gals who are lesbians tend to conflate their butch attributes with their lesbianism rather than seeing it as a separate component of marginalized identity).

One notable exception to that is Jacob Tobia, whose Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is definitely a gender-inversion testimonial, a description of being femme that is definitely not conflated with sexual orientation. I reviewed Sissy last year.

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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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The Sissy and the Stigma of Sexual Interest

I was so painfully self-conscious.

In the book I’m working on, I’m writing about dropping in at Identity House, circa 1986. So I’m conjuring up the memories. Coming up the stairs and opening the doors and then being afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“Hey there, welcome”, said a thirty-esque guy with wire-frame glasses.
“Hi”, I nodded back at him. I broke eye contact and glanced around. A woman with spiky styled blue-tipped hair and wearing snug dark blue jeans was sitting on the arm of a couch, watching a red-haired girl stapling paper to a large green sheet of construction paper. A black guy with large oval earrings was singing softly along with his radio over in the other direction.

I felt awkward, as I often did in gay and lesbian environments. Didn’t want to display overt interest in the attractive girl; lesbians presumably don’t come to gay and lesbian centers to be stared at by guys. Didn’t want to focus attention on any of the guys, lest they get the wrong idea. Stupid social clumsiness. Like they’re going to think anything faintly approaching friendliness from me is an act of sexual aggression. Yeesh.

Do you want to know where that came from, that overwhelming fear of being perceived as person with [gasp!] sexual lusts and interests and appetite? Here’s what that has to do with being a sissy –

Let’s start with the boys. As a sissy I was periodically accused of harboring sexual interest towards my male classmates and other acquaintances. I’m using the word “accused” advisedly – the notion that I had any such feelings was addressed with significant hostility, contempt, outright hatred. If I had indeed felt such feelings, these attitudes would have made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with my identity and my nature, and I would have had to wrestle with that, I think. In my case, I didn’t; if I had ever been inclined to find males sexually attractive, any such signal was rapidly drowned in the noise of being accused of it, mocked for it, having my face rubbed in it, so to speak. After a few years of that, I was less likely to be friendly, to be curious or interested, to expect to be included or welcomed. Standoffish and snobbish elicited their own forms of the same basic hostility, so I was trained to a mild and non-judgmental presence, neither recoiling from them nor paying any attention aside from getting out of their way.

Well, that left the girls. Here’s the situation with the girls: they made observations about unwanted and intrusive sexual attention from boys, observations that were the precursors of #metoo, that lots of boys were sexually creepy, with “hands problem”, selfishly pushy about sex. And also that, within relationships or on dates, boys would press for sexual activity, not caring about the girl as a person, and what self-respecting girl would want to get close to that? I, as a self-respecting sissy, most assuredly didn’t want the girls thinking of me that way. I wanted the girls to respect me as they respected themselves. Oh, I wanted sex, all right, no question about that, but I wanted it to mean something. I wanted a girlfriend. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of casual sex, but if it was going to be casual sex it had to be mutual, and it had to take place in such a way that both of us felt OK about our participation, and not like we’d been throw down into the sewer.

I go through life walking on eggshells terrified that someone’s going to think I’m sexually interested in them. That’s part of my experience as a sissy male, that people react to the possibility of me being interested in them with disgust and irritation.

In an LGBTQ context, like Identity House, you might think it would be easier, right? But although I was for once not in a context where males having sexual interest in other males would be stigmatized as something disgusting, I was walking into that situation with a lot of unease and lack of general comfort about people thinking I had sexual interest in them. I was afraid the boys, if they misread me and got the wrong idea, would later think I was being judgmental or prudish or rude; I didn’t have a well-developed repertoire for turning aside sexually interested people gracefully. Then there were the girls, of course. It was easier, to be in a situation where they’d be less likely to assume any guy they encounter was likely to be on the verge of expressing unwanted sexual interest. But on the other hand, most of them would be lesbians and I was afraid that it might be especially annoying to a lesbian to encounter some guy in a place like Identity House and pick up on him being attracted, because presumably she isn’t hanging out at gay and lesbian centers in order to be stared at or focused upon by males.


This was the situation in which I found myself as a young adult. It was very much an empowering insight to rethink that situation, for the first time, by comparing it to that of women my age. They were widely considered (and expected) to be, to varying degrees, wary and cautious about expressing their sexual interests and appetites. It was socially understood that even when they did, in fact, feel sexual interest towards a person, they might have ambivalent attitudes and feelings about acting on it, including the act of letting that interest be known and perceived. (Admittedly, they seemed to do a far better job of coping with unwanted attentions, but perhaps that came with practice)

Here was a model for accepting this kind of hesitant and uncertain sexuality without regarding it as pathetic, damaged, unhealthy. In fact, being aware of one’s own complex feelings about sexuality was often portrayed as a sign of a good healthy respect for one’s self, in contrast to which enthusiastically availing one’s self of sexual experiences whenever the opportunity held some degree of appetizing attraction was seen as a possible sign of lacking sufficient standards or appropriate boundaries. In my case, it was liberating to be able to view myself as a non-pathological sexual creature, ambivalences and wariness about my own sexual interests included. Maybe it wasn’t a very practical way to be in the world if one were male, but when I considered it this way, it looked like I would be not so far outside the normal if I had been female. Or if I considered myself to be the same kind of person that they were.

And it meshed with the rest of how I saw myself. It immediately fit. I’d always emulated the girls, admired them, measured myself against them as my role models.

I stopped feeling ashamed and stopped worrying that I was sexually broken, some kind of basket case. I liked who I was and now that could see my sexual nature from this vantage point, I liked my sexuality as it was. And I realized I wasn’t going to find a suitable expression of it within any of the behavioral models offered to men. If I were going to make it work, I would do so by looking at how women, the people who were most like me, had made a successful go of it.

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A JunePride Mea Culpa: My Homophobia

I'm constantly blogging and posting to be recognized, included, understood as a genderqueer person. But acceptance within the MOGII community is a two-way street and I haven't always been the ideal poster child for good and non-judgmental attitudes. I think I am long beyond harboring nasty feelings and thoughts towards gay people but in the interests of fairness I thought it might be appropriate to 'fess up about my past.



First off, you've got to realize I didn't grow up hearing about "LGBTQ" or "MOGII" or any other sense that there was a diverse community of gender-and-sexuality misfits. It was just gay people. That's who "they" were, and who I was widely thought to be. I did not, in fact, have same-sex sexual attraction, and so, yes, "they", and not "we", seemed to be the correct formulation. Gay guys were definitely a category of "them", and not a sense of identity I thought I shared in.

You'd think that wouldn't be much of a big deal -- I mean, I'm also not Russian, or a blue-eyed blonde, or a Muslim or a grandparent. Lots of identities out there that aren't mine, and I don't generally find it important or necessary to define myself as not one of them in conjunction to them. But people weren't assuming I was any of those other things.

And part of the problem was who I actually was -- a feminine sissy boy. This was a problem because people's definition of what it meant to be a gay guy were weirdly twisted up: if you asked for a literal definition you'd probably get "two people of the same sex who have sex with each other instead of with the opposite sex" or some similar formulation, but their behavior towards any mention of sissy-femme characteristics in a male showed how deeply they believed that this, also, meant that the person was gay. That's called equivocation, when more than one meaning is built into a word or phrase and treated as if those two meanings were really the same thing.

Being erroneously thought to be a gay guy didn't work the same way as being incorrectly assumed to be right-handed. People often did assume I was right-handed, but their reaction to being told otherwise, or to seeing me pick up a pen with my left hand and begin writing, was to say "oh!" and make a mental adjustment and that would be the end of it. In contrast to that, I found that trying to convey to people that I was a heterosexual sissy was like explaining that East West Main Street is down up from here, go directly behind in front of you and turn left right at the first last intersection.

I developed hostile and derogatory attitudes against the identity that I was pushing off from. When people said or hinted that they thought I was probably gay, I would express revulsion. Eww, yuck! That's disgusting! No, I'd say, I'm not like them at all, they're crudely promiscuous and they're not interested in forming attachment relationships, if anything they're like typical masculine hetero guys except even more so, they just want to stick it into something and pump. I repeated the most condescending and negative of stereotypes and emphasized how totally and utterly this was not my identity. Not just "nope, you've miscategorized me" but out-and-out hateful stuff. If some bigoted Bible-pounding zealot expressed the opinion that no one is naturally homosexual, that engaging in same-sex erotic behavior is against anyone's nature, I'd nod and agree that it seemed weird and twisted to me too.

With as much reason as I'd had in my life to question any widespread rejection of the Different, I was nevertheless cheerfully joining in with the hate chorus. I was so focused on establishing and defending my own peculiar sense of identity that it didn't occur to me that the things I was saying might be hurtful to the people I was pushing off from.

I came out in 1980, finally recognizing that who I was, how I was, was Different in the same general kind of way that being gay was Different. That even if there wasn't a name for the category, I was in a different identity-category than heterosexual guys were. And that meant that gay guys were potentially my allies.

My relationship with gay guys -- both in the abstract as a topic of discussion and real live ones that I actually encountered, in political discussions of gender and sexuality minority identities and in other contexts -- did not instantaneously clear up and become companionable and smooth. I was clear in my head about my identity, but explaining it, and explaining why it needed to be established in people's heads as an available identity, was complicated and problematic. Lots of gay activists at the time were promoting the position that no one should be going around denying that they were gay, that it was not an identity that their allies needed to be running away from as if it were something horrible. But from my vantage point, my identity was being socially erased by the conflation of sissyhood with homosexuality, and although I was now ashamed of how hatefully I had repulsed gay identity, I still wanted to be seen and recognized for who I was. I had to learn how to explain my situation in ways that weren't experienced as abrasive and politically objectionable to the gay activists I wanted to ally with. (It eventually helped that some gay male activists did not much appreciate being thought of as feminine, and that others, who were, thought the masculine gay guys were looking down on them and regarding them as stereotype-reinforcing. This opened a dialog that I could participate in; we could agree that it was useful and necessary to uncouple the equivocation between being gay and being feminine, and to discuss the political connections between homophobia and sissyphobia).

When I first started hanging around Identity House in Manhattan and attending my first Pride March in 1985, I found it frustrating that I wasn't encountering any similarly-identifying, similar-minded gender activists to speak with. It seemed to me that the mostly male, mostly gay participants were coming to meetings to flirt and connect with potential dating partners, which wasn't entirely untrue, but I could have made more of an effort to communicate, to talk issues and bridge gaps, and to listen and learn and be a better ally myself. I was by then mostly past the worst of my homophobic attitudes but I was still pretty selfishly immersed in my own identity politics. Most of us were, I suppose, and I felt like the people I was encountering mostly only cared about their own identity-situation, and that not much of what they were concerned about applied to me, and there was some truth to that assessment, but that was a description I could have applied to myself just as accurately.

It wasn't until I first encountered the acronym with the "Q" added -- LGBTQ -- that I stopped thinking of the community as potential allies (but still "them") and instead tentatively began to consider the community as "us". GenderQueer was a term I had been introduced to and I read the description and it fit, even if it wasn't highly specific to my circumstances.



We do need to come together, to listen to each other and be supportive of each others' struggles. I will acknowledge that I have not been a model citizen in the LGBTQ-munity, but I recognize the need to consider my own behaviors and the ways in which I have not been a good listener or a sufficiently reliable ally. I will try to do better.

"Community" is simple when it equates to "people who are just like me"; it takes more effort to extend it to "people who are different but with whom I have stuff in common". I invite you to read and listen to folks who occupy a different letter in the acronym. Read the words of bisexual activists, and intersex activists. Pick up something penned by somebody nonbinary. Learn about the experiences of folks of minority gender and orientation identities that you don't have much familiarity with. I will, too.


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BOOK REVIEW: Sissy, by Jacob Tobia

There's a brand-new genderqueer memoir out, a genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age tale going to print, and I'm jealous. Obsessively insanely jealous. I wanted mine to be the first.

Those of you who've been reading my blog regularly are aware that I didn't have such an intense reaction when I discovered Audrey MC's Life Songs: A Genderqueer Memoir. Well, there are two reasons for that: firstly, Life Songs is basically and primarily a transgender story, a tale of transitioning to female by someone assigned and regarded from birth as male, and then very late in the book the author tacks on a throwaway line about how being a transgender lesbian is "so limiting in its binary construct" and so she now identifies as genderqueer; and, secondly, Life Songs is essentially self-published. So on balance I didn't feel authentically beaten to the punch.

SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia is the genuine article. Jacob happens to be a gay male and their experiences of being a genderqueer femme were shaped by that, but this is not a gay coming-out story with a nod towards nonbinary appended. This is the real deal.

"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don't identify that way for fun. I don't identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don't identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am."

As large as being (and coming out) gay did loom in Jacob's teenage years (and how could it not?), it's pretty much incidental to the main narrative they're telling, so yes, there's finally a book being published about what it's like to grow up genderqueer, as a sissy, a feminine male who actually embraces their identity as feminine male, one of us.

And published? Putnam, baby. G. P.-freaking-Putnam's Sons. Yeesh. I have dreams of getting my book picked up by the likes of Seal Press or Sibling Rivalry or something. Compared to that, Tobia is Cinderella in a gold carriage and I aspire to a pumpkin on a skateboard that I can push down the road and call a coach. Did I mention jealous? Jacob Tobia may be in for one seriously bitchy review here.



First, though, some of the sparkly bits. Sissy has some real gemstones.

One of my favorite takeaways is Tobia's replacement of The Closet with The Shell. That being self-protective, and not being cowardly, is the reason people aren't Out yet; that when threatened, one may retreat into one's shell and that there's no reason or excuse to belittle this as if we aren't entitled to put something between us and a hostile world. That we don't owe the world an honest testimonial to our identity, as if it were our secretive lying behavior that causes the surrounding society to make hetero cisgender dyadic normative assumptions about everyone. It's not our doing that makes that the norm that we have to push off from and differentiate ourselves from in order to come out! If we owe a coming out to anyone, we owe it to ourselves, but there's really no excuse for the community to mock people who don't do that, or haven't done so yet.

Tobia at several points talks about what it's like to be in a world that has no term and no concept for who and how we are —

As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others.

... and later, starting college ...

The problem is that there are generally no lines written for people like me. There was no role for a gender nonconforming person at Duke, hardly even a role for a gay boy. Without realizing it, just by doing what they were used to, by following the rules suggested by the structure around them, my classmates had erased me

... and again in the vivid confrontation at Duke with their classmates and the organizers of a retreat called Common Ground. This time there is a specific conflation of sex and gender: the participants are told to sort themselves:

"Today we'll be talking about gender... we'd like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants"

Tobia pitches a totally appropriate hissy fit. It's frustrating living in a world that perpetually, obliviously insists that whosoever is biologically male is a man, that sex means gender, that dividing the room along this fracture line creates two groups each of which will contain the people who belong in it. Tobia starts with warning the organizers that the male group had better be focused on the male body, male morphology, and not about the experience of operating as a man in this world. "Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation."

As someone who has spent a frustrated lifetime trying to put these things into words myself, I kept on bouncing in my seat and occasionally raising my clenched fist and cheering.

The showdown with the Common Ground participants is the closing bookend to Tobia's college experiences. The opening bookend took the form of a couple weeks in the wilderness with a different campus retreat group, Project WILD, that hiked into the Appalachian mountains. In the natural setting, temporarily cut off from ongoing social reinforcements and structures, they found gender polarization withering away. "Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight." It has a lasting effect on Tobia, providing a taste of how things could be different, but less so for the others who disappointingly retreat into their gendered shells once back in the school environment.

It's appropriate and consistent that these bookend-moments are events that are designed to get people in touch with themselves and each other. Tobia is active in the church in his pre-college days and despite living in the south (North Carolina) spends most of the book's trajectory in social environments that are tolerant and open in a modern sense. This is not the Bible-thumping Alabama conservatism of Jared Eamons in Boy Erased, and the issues that Jacob Tobia had to cope with are the same ones that still plague our most issue-conscious and woke societies now. Most of Tobia's story is about a person who is out and proud as a gay person but still trying to figure out how to come out as someone who is differently gendered. It's us, and it's now. Tobia gives us the much-needed "Exhibit A" to enable society to talk about genderqueer people with some understanding and familiarity.

After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine.

I have no idea why Tobia proclaims that they never came out as genderqueer. Maybe they meant specifically to their parents?! It's a worrisome disclaimer at the time it's issued, because this is before Tobia goes off to college, and although the story up until this point includes a lot of secret femme behaviors and tastes, it seemed to me that there was still room for the story to be all about a gay guy who, now that they're writing a book, opts to identify as a sissy femme as well. But fear not, it's not so. It's a coming-out story if there ever was one. Tobia tells many people in many ways, many times. It's just more complicated because when you tell folks you're gay they don't generally get all nonplussed and stuff and ask you what that means, exactly; but coming out nonbinary or femme or genderqueer is nowhere nearly as well understood.

Now, Jacob Tobia does equivocate sometimes, and they of all people should know better! Whilst looking around for a social circle in high school that wouldn't be a badly uncomfortable fit for theirself as a still-secretly femme sissy, Tobia muses about the degree of homoerotic locker-room experiences among the jocks and compares it to the substantial amount of homoerotic anime available to the nerds. Look, hon, if you're going to write an essay about how being femme is its own thing, try not to step on the hem of your own dress. We get another misdemeanor offense like that when the college essay is being crafted — an essay about going forth in public in high heels — and Tobia refers to it as "an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on this planet." T'weren't so much as a mention in that essay of noshing on dicks or craving male sexual companionship, and just like the Common Ground people treating male as the same as man, this is a problem. Some of us sissyboy folks might like to go forth in high heels ourselves (although that's not quite my aesthetic taste) despite not also being gay guys, and we get just as erased by this conflation as by having "male" tied to being a man.

Be that as it may, gay male culture has not exactly been an unmitigated embrace of femme culture. There are scores and hordes of eligible gay guys posting personal ads and specifying "no sissies" or "no feminine nellies" or "masculine presenting only," and shrinking away from anything feminine as gross, like they think we sissies have cooties or something. There's a scene in Sissy, after Jacob has dashed across the Brooklyn Bridge in stilettos to earn money for an LGBTQ shelter where the masculine gay interviewer asks if comporting like this isn't "playing into stereotypes." So it is a politically flouncy act for a gay femme to put it out there and in your face and to underline their pride in being this way, femme, specifically as a person who is also that way, gay.


In the aftermath of Project WILD, Jacob Tobia finds themself back on a campus in the midst of fraternity and sorority rush (ugh!) and the intense gender normativity and polarization drives them away from the connections made with classmates in the Appalachians.

"In the vacuum that was left, I did what came most naturally: I started hanging out with the queers... within about a month, I'd cemented msyelf as the first-year activist queer, attending every meeting of Blue Devils United, our undergrad LGBTQ student organization… .

Yeah, well, convenient for you. To have a structure like that in place where a person like you would fit in on the basis of sexual orientation (which is almost always going to be the majority identity that brings participants in; you get a roomful of gay guys, a smattering of lesbians, a couple token transgender folks of the conventional transitioning variety, right?). I did promise bitchy, didn't I? You got a platform from this. You made social political connections where you could start off recognized as an activist gay student, something people could comprehend, and over time, even if they didn't fully get that your issues as a femme person were something other or more than an expression of gay male concerns, you could push those too, get them out there, explain them to people who started off believing you were in this group for your own legitimate reasons, marginalized for being gay.

Aww fuck, I can't win with this whine, can I? It's not exactly going to fly for me to try to claim that hetero sissies are more oppressed or that gay sissies are privileged in comparison. Well, Jacob Tobia, one thing you reinforced for me is that if I feel the need to bitch and whine, I should go ahead and be proud of being a sore loser, I should refuse to be classy even if the people I'm jealous of, who seem to have advantages I don't have, are good people with more than a compensating amount of situational detrimental oppressions to offset all that.

I aspired to this; I went to college to be an activist about this peculiar sense of identity and I tried to connect and to become part of a community. I rode into downtown New York City and hung out at Identity House and marched in parades and tried to connect there too. But mostly I met gay guys who came to such groups or events in order to meet other gay guys, or trans women who wanted to talk about surgery, hormones and passing. I even attended a bisexual support group for awhile, thinking/hoping that even though "this wasn't it," that the mindset of people in such a group would be more conducive to someone espousing sissy lib and socially interested in connecting with a butch or gender nonconforming female person who found sissy femmes attractive. No such luck: the bisexual gals tended to interact with males in a conventionally gendered way, according to the heterosexuality script I was trying to avoid. And one consequence of all that is that I didn't become a part of an environment where I could be a spokesperson. (I had similar problems when trying to hang with the feminists, by the way; they didn't regard gender issues as my issues, and saw me as a supporter only).

I suppose it's fair to say that heterosexually inclined sissies get bought off. We're not as often in situations where our queerness can't be ignored; our sissyhood doesn't get us found in bed with a same-sex partner at the motel or in the dormitory, and we don't get seen holding hands with a same-sex partner while walking down the sidewalk. We don't go to designated social scenes that would draw attention to our identities, the way the patrons at Pulse in Orlando did. So it's easier for our difference to be tucked and bound and hidden. And so far there hasn't been an "out game" for us to join so there's been no counter-temptation to offset that.



Hey world, you still need my book, too. Buy Jacob Tobia's, yes, buy it now. It's powerful. Buy it and tell everyone about it, spread the word. But an author in Tobia's situation can't directly attack and dismantle society's equation of sissy with gay. When someone comes out as a gay sissy, it corroborates the stereotype that sissies are gay and gay males are sissies, and because of that, a heterosexually inclined young sissy boy reading Sissy or watching someone like Jacob Tobia in a television interview may not feel very reassured that who they are is someone that it is okay and possible to be. Furthermore, all the gay sissies in the world, along with all the lesbian butch women, can't fully dismantle the gender-polarized scripting that constitutes heterosexual flirting and coupling behavior. Oh, they threaten it: whenever gay or lesbian people connect, it challenges the notion that sexuality requires the participants to be rigidly assigned to a sexual role by their biology. Even in a gay or lesbian relationship where one person is the butch and the other person is the femme, you don’t start out where each person is automatically assigned to being the butch or the femme because of what sex they are. It may be a negotiation between the two people, or perhaps a person comes to feel that the butch role or the femme role is the one that fits them best. And of course lots of relationships don’t use butch and femme at all. But the real challenge has to come from genderqueer people who participate in biologically heterosexual encounters, finally making it so that heterosexuality itself is no longer dependent on those binary polarized oppositional roles.

Well, also history. I came of age and came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The entire community of marginalized orientation, gender identity and intersex people (MOGII **) has an interest in learning how being gay or being trans etc. was and has been over time and in different settings. In particular, being genderqueer/nonbinary is often seen and spoken of as if it's an affectation, something that no one would come up with on their own if it wasn't already out there, trending and looking edgy and stuff. So hearing stories from people like me who came to a genderqueer sense of identity before there was such a term (trendy or otherwise) should help retaliate against that attitude.


Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and most other likely venues. Support gender-variant authors and buy a copy!



* Tobia's preferred pronouns are they, them, theirs

** As an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP acronym, MOGII is becoming a popular way of designating the community. We're together in this because our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or our physical body is different from the mainstream.

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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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REVIEW: Boy Erased

I finally got to see Boy Erased after having missed it when it was playing in a few regional theatres.

Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) has one of the stormiest coming-of-age and coming-out experiences: he's in college and [CONTENT WARNING / spoiler alert] gets raped by another religiously inclined boy, Henry (Joe Alwyn), who, like so many rapists, doesn't appear to see rape itself as a fundamental moral failure; instead, Henry is focused on the wickedness of same sex erotic behavior and whimpers to Jared afterwards about his remorse for the bad things he's done. When Jared, to Henry's apparent surprise, isn't particularly warm and friendly to him subsequently, Henry becomes worries that Jared will inform on him, so he preempts that by outing Jared to his parents and to people on campus.

You can be excused for wondering why being outed as a rape victim would cause anyone to reach any meaningful conclusion about the victim's sexual orientation, but Henry doesn't allude to his own involvement or factor in the violence involved; he simply tells everyone that Jared has been engaging in homosexual activities.

As it turns out, Jared has indeed been aware of sexual feelings towards males, and when confronted and accused decides to be honest about that.

That sets the stage for Jared's father Marshall (Russell Crowe), a socially conservative clergyman in a southern Alabama church, to arrange for Jared to attend a gay-to-straight conversion program, "Love in Action", a Christian-centric day facility operated by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton).

"Love in Action" is a total institution in the classic Erving Goffman sense; Sykes and his staff evaluate the program participants not only on their own behaviors and attitudes but on what opinions and feedback they provide to the others attending. That means they control all of the approval and disapproval that anyone can receive within the program. Denying that you have any problem, any worrisome attitude or unhealthy compensation mechanism, is itself always a symptom, proof that you aren't dealing with your issues, so no one can disagree or differ from anything that they are accused of. And of course this way of treating you is defined as therapeutic, as something you're being subjected to for your own good. It is, after all, love in action.

There is a considerable amount of internalized self-hatred and self-rejection in Boy Erased, and it is convincingly portrayed. Michael (David Joseph Craig) is a rule-worshipping martinet, bristling with disgust and contempt for Jared and the other sinful wicked people brought to the program; Henry the rapist is clearly tied up in revulsion for his own attractions and urges; Jared himself spends much of the movie accepting that he belongs here, worrying that God will condemn him to hell for being this way. There is a scene where Brandon (a camp counselor brought in to give masculinity lessons, played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) first berates Jared for going into the toilet unaccompanied and accuses him of going in there to masturbate, and then stands behind him commenting lasciviously on how Jared pees. And from the top, Victor Sykes, an "ex-gay" convert himself, gets a discernable amount of prurient delight from hearing the confessions of his fallen guilty charges; he doesn't believe Jared when Jared details his homosexual sins as consisting in their entirety of laying down next to another guy (Xavier, by Theodore Pellerin) for a spate of platonic hugging. Sykes wants to hear more juicy morsels to pass judgment on.

The scenes where Brandon gives lessons in how to be manly men, instructing the boys on how to stand and what positions to hold their wrists in, etc, are campy and silly and reminiscent of Kevin Kline's sendup in In and Out. But given how silly it actually is to aspire to this thing called masculinity by mindlessly emulation, that's probably not easily avoided.

Boy Erased subtly underscores a fundamentally Christian problem with a homophobic agenda: having already gone on record as disapproving of heterosexual sexual activity except when restricted to marriage, the conservative Christian churches have painted themselves into a bit of a corner; they can't simply run camps like "Love in Action" as boot camps for enthusiastically heterosexual activities without contradicting a lot of what they stand for. As a consequence, throughout this movie we see a somewhat anachronistic approach to the condemnation of gay sexual activity, treating it as an unpicky, polymorphously perverse way of being entirely too interested in sex in general, rather than a failure to lust sufficiently for the opposite sex.

Nicole Kidman plays the mom, Nancy, who is largely ignored and bypassed by her husband in his rush to handle the crisis of his son having gay sexual feelings. She never joins in the judgmental condemnation and later comes to Jared's rescue and stands up to husband Marshall in the process. This is consistent with conservative men being more hostile to gay males than women from the same culture are.

The most important point, though, is that "Love in Action" does not function as a straightening clinic. It's a recloseting clinic. The clients who attend are not reshaped into heterosexual people and there's very little pretense that this is happening. Instead they are told to "fake it until you make it", to go through the motions, to study what passes as normative heterosexual and gender-appropriate and exhibit those characteristics. The camp's pressure on the participants is to go along with the program, to appear to agree more than to understand and be truly motivated by it. Appearances are all. Other boys in the program advise Jared to say what will give the counselors the impression that he is making progress. It's how you get out of here.

Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley's book Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family

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