A Couple More Reviews

My book was featured by two book bloggers this week, both of whom drew attention to the purpose for which I wrote it in the first place --


"Society has gotten better at describing and acknowledging the many differences in people where sex, gender, and sexual preferences are concerned, but I realized that I didn’t have as good a handle on some of those possibilities. LGBT, I get, but if you’re in that Q+ that gets appended by some people, what does it mean? After reading GenderQueer, I feel like I’ve got a better handle on it."

— Big Al, at Big Al's Books & Pals






"Gender has gotten to be a pretty complicated subject. Personally, I was born female and I identify as female. I know or have met many other people for whom their gender does not match their biological sex. This may result in them deciding to alter their physical form to match their gender identity, as is the case with those who are trans. However, some may not feel out of place in their given body even though it doesn’t match their gender identity. That is the case for Allan D. Hunter, or as they go by in the book, Derek.

This is what is now referred to as “gender queer.” It’s the Q in LGBTQIA...

GenderQueer is very well written. It is not just any memoir that somebody threw together. This one took years of passion and it shows."

— Amanja, at Amanja Reads Too Much



Of the two of them, Big Al was stepping a bit outside his typical reading fare when he chose to read my book, whereas Amanja often reviews books with LGBTQIA themes. So it's reassuring that both reviewers got that sense of my narrated life as "Example A" of a phenomenon that still is not discussed anywhere near as clearly or as often as being transgender is.


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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, 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

BOOK REVIEW: Ciel, by Sophie Labelle

When I saw that Sophie Labelle, author-cartoonist of Assigned Male Comics, had published a book, I ordered a copy. It was described as featuring a gender nonconforming main character coping with high school, and I'm addicted to stories of how people formulate their unconventional gender identities and how they experience themselves during these formative years.

I wanted to see what Labelle would do with more space to expand into, the opportunity to dive deeper into things with more nuance and complexity than a four-panel strip provides.

(Ciel is NOT a graphic novel, by the way. It's concise at 188 pages but it's made up of text, just so you know).

The early part of the book left me feeling a little bit like everything about gender and identity was still being painted in primary colors, all platitudes and overly simplified viewpoints that imply more agreement among LGBTQIA people than actually exists. Labelle's Ciel refers to "another gender...than the one the doctors gave me at birth when they looked at my genitals (which are nobody's business, by the way!)" and goes on to complain that for children in many societies, "they're designated a girl or a boy, their room are painted a certain color, and they're given certain kinds of toys to play with".

But Sophie Labelle shifts to more politically complicated territory later on in the story. Tensions are explored around questions of sexual orientation and how they collide awkwardly with nonbinary gender identities, with characters such as Frank, who is involved with Ciel's best friend Stephie, a trans girl. Frank is starting to get facial hair and unclear on whether or not Stephie, who was assigned male, will also.

"You know, she wouldn't be any less a girl if she had a beard like a Viking, or an Adam's apple, or a low voice", Ciel tells him.

"But it would be a little weird."

"Why?"

"People might think I was going out with a guy, or something."

"And that would be a real tragedy, right?"

"That's not what I mean! Some of my friends say I'm gay becasue I'm going out with Stephie, and I don't care."

"Good."

This conversation gets Ciel wondering about facial hair. Ciel doesn't identify as a boy or a girl. And although Ciel is taking puberty hormone blockers, they're not firmly committed to continuing to do so.

Over and over again, the characters in Labelle's book, in pondering their own identities and their expressions of them, find themselves considering how they are viewed by others. It's an unavoidable part of identity. Sociologists sometimes call it "altercasting" — the act of assigning identities to other people. We all do it, not always with bad intentions, not always with narrowly limited categories, but even when we are aware of all this diversity, we still tend to listen and watch and then regard a person as a trans woman or a genderfluid nonbinary person or a lesbian trans girl or whatever. And we all also spend time and energy imagining how we are perceived, and we take it into account when choosing how to interact, how to present.

In Ciel's case, there is the matter of what name to use. The school's records have Ciel's proper name down as "Alessandro". Ciel is somewhat awkward about asking to be referred to as "Alessandra" instead, more comfortable about asking ahead of time than correcting a teacher who started using the other name. Ciel is even more open and out on their YouTube channel, where videos openly explore what it is like to be trans and gender-nonconforming.

That provokes the most polarized and antagonistically hostile reaction that Ciel experiences in the book — from another transgender person. A video blogger named Bettie Bobbie posts: "Hi everyboy! Today I watched a video that made me want to puke, about a gay boy who invented a gender for himself by saying he's neither a boy nor a girl...if you ask me, this video harms real trans people like me."

Sophie Labelle shows us that the world of LGBTQIA identities is intricate and that we struggle with identification and expression, and that there are hurt feelings and resentments and anger sometimes. This is honest and fair.

Through Ciel's tale, Labelle does a slow exploration of presentation by a gender nonconforming person (I would describe Ciel as genderfluid, myself, but the term isn't embraced in this story). Ciel's choice of clothing is presented as an internal dialog, facing the closet several mornings and deciding against the ostentatiously colorful apparel they're drawn to and instead putting on more drab and mundane garments. Only towards the end of the book does Labelle pull back and let us see that choice against the backdrop of Ciel's expectation of their classmates' attitudes and reactions.


Ciel, by Sophie Labelle, Second Story Press 2020 Toronto CA

https://secondstorypress.ca/kids/ciel


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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, 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Thoughts From a Song: Running Up That Hill

In gender outlaw and other LGBTQIA Facebook groups and internet forums, someone will occasionally ask "What songs really reached out to you and made you feel recognized and understood?"

I need to remember to nominate Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" the next time someone asks.

It may not have a giant billboard sign on it proclaiming it to be relevant to gender inversion and being genderqueer, but that's where my head went when I first heard it, and how I interpret any time I've heard it since. "If only I could", Kate sings, "I'd make a deal with God and I'd get him to swap our places". Many of my trans friends, who have often plaintively wished that the transgender women who didn't want their penises could donate them to the transgender men who did, and receive a uterus and fallopian tubes and vagina in exchange, should be able to relate.

But that's not quite how Kate came to wish for the exchange of positions, to be sure. Her angle of approach has more to do with a concern specific to sexuality of the non-same-sex variety: "It doesn't hurt me; do you want to feel how it feels? Do you want to know that it doesn't hurt me?" Not every listener seems to immediately think that the "it" she speaks of is sex, but that's totally where my head went. She's conversing with a male lover who is concerned about how this is for her. Because he doesn't know, never having been female.

My feminist women friends are ready to hoot in derision. "Men don't spend much time worrying about whether any sex practice hurts women. They think that's what we're there for. And that whatever gets done to us must be hot for us if they find it hot, whether it's the joy of gagging on a dick or being raped and choked or just the everyday joy of being objectified and catcalled to by strangers, men never try to put themselves in our position and imagine what it must be like to be us. Or if they do, they have pathetically impaired imaginations!"

But not everyone who is male of body is a man, and not all sexuality involving a male person and a female person is heterosexuality. Because heterosexuality is an institution, one that is defined by and depends on seeing the sexual partner as Other, as utterly alien, one whose feelings and thoughts can't be approached by imagining what it would be like, because, well, because It's Different For Them. Because They're Different. And reciprocally, for people whose interactions and attractions are not defined around that alienating difference, there is likely to be that fervent wish to understand, to know what it's like.

"Let's exchange the experience", Kate says. That's intimacy. It's empathy.

Our current social politics often teaches us that empathy isn't real, that it's illusory. "Don't speak for them. You aren't them and you don't know what it's like". It is entirely valid to say "You should not speak for people when they can speak for themselves, especially if they've been kept voiceless by their marginalization". I agree with that. But some go on to say "Don't think that you know what it's like. You don't. You can't. It is arrogant of you to think that you do. You aren't them". It's not a nuanced position, as stated; and if it discourages people from thinking it possible to know what it's like, it can turn away their inclination to try. To imagine, to wonder, to watch from the outside and attempt to conjure up an awareness of what it must be like from the inside.

We can't even identify as part of a group without empathy. Transgender feminist author Julia Serano acknowledges the legitimacy of the statement that some have made to her: "How do you know you are 'a woman'? How do you know that who you are is the person that women are? You've never been one, you've only been yourself!" Serano agrees that she's never been anyone but herself, but, well, that's true for the person directing the question. How does a cisgender woman know she's a woman in the sense of having an identity in common with other women? She's never been any of those other women either, how does she know what it's like to be any of them, and to claim a commonality of identity? Only by observation from the outside. Which is how Serano knows the same thing. It's how I know I'm a femme; it's how I knew I was one of the girls (despite being male) when I was in grade school. It's empathy. The power to look across the divide and bridge the gaps and recognize and relate.

"We both matter, don't we?", Kate Bush asks.

Yeah, we do.


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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, 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Review / Interview in QueerPGH!

"...the book has some problematic aspects, and may be at odds with some of our queer values today. This seems to be by design, conveying a much different world for queer people."

— Rachel Lange, Senior Editor, QueerPGH

If you were ever part of a children's classroom drama group or were in a choir or rock band as a 4th grader, you may have encountered the "review that isn't really a review". The kind where the writer discusses how adorable your group was and how earnest you all were up there on that stage, and how cute your costumes were. The names of the lead singers or the performers in the primary roles are all dutifully mentioned, and the writer will generally find some nice things to say about the precision of the delivery or how nicely all in tune you were. But you don't get scathing criticism or a pointed comment on how your group chose to stage it, because the writer figures that no one goes to those things to hear the music or watch the dramatic tale unfold.


So-called "third party" politicians often get the same treatment when they run for office. If they get interviewed and covered at all, the questions are softball questions: "Tell me about your main issues", or "What made you decide to run for office?"; the interviewer rarely probes the marginal candidate's most politically vulnerable spot to see if the candidate has a good answer, like "You say you would close the town widget factory because of the toxicity levels. Seven hundred local citizens have jobs there; what's going to happen to them? And where will the airplane industry get their greasy widgets from, won't the cost of air travel jump through the roof if you do that?" They don't ask because the writer doesn't assume it matters to the voters, because this candidate isn't going to win the election anyway so who cares?


Rachel Lange of the queer publication QueerPGH apparently takes me seriously. Not only that I have something to say to the LGBTQIA community but that people might pay attention to it, that it might have some impact. In her interview with me, she asked some of the most provocative and probing questions I've faced.

She isn't wrong in her summary statement: I wrote GenderQueer not to add my voice to the chorus of voices that were already out there, but to add a different voice. To tell a story about an identity that was not already being explained and given a name. And she's quite right—I have often found myself at odds with activists who represent some of the other shades of the queer coalition rainbow, because some of the concepts they use are injurious to the identity I'm writing about. Some of the rhetoric they like to use erases people like me. I'm not unaware of the existing social dialog, so in rising to my feet to present my tale, my dissent with them is indeed by design. Not that I'm out to antagonize or deliberately cause dissent in the community, but because that erasure of which I spoke needs to end. I'm not out to negate anyone else's identity, and I hope readers of my book will see that. But I very much appreciate the candor and seriousness of the questions.

Book Review: Gender Queer: A Story from a Different Closet

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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, 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I Get Reviewed by the Taos News!

After months and months of getting nice reviews in college newspapers and, at a lower volume, LGBTQIA press publications, I'm finally getting some reviews published in mainstream newspapers. Two weeks ago I made the Los Alamos Daily Post and now, extending my coverage in the New Mexican press, I'm in the Taos News.

Taos, like Los Alamos, is an eclectic little village, with a diverse and culturally savvy population and many farflung former residents who may still subscribe to the local paper.

"When Derek Hunter moves to Los Alamos from Valdosta, Georgia, in eighth grade, he is bullied mercilessly. A tall, thin boy with glasses, who likes to wear stovepipe pants and slicked-back hair instead of bell-bottoms and long tresses (this is 1974), he embraces nonconformism mostly because he has nothing in common with boys his age.

What he knows about boys is "ribald and crude" and a "constant undercurrent of threat." He favors the company of girls, who are more accepting and physically attractive. Boys he begins to think of as "them," as the enemy. And they return the favor in terms of verbal and physical bullying.

In this tortured litany of harassment mostly set in Northern New Mexico, author Hunter, who lived in New Mexico until the mid-1980s, before moving to New York to become an activist in gender theory, presents a coming-of-age novel of ambivalent identity that the protagonist ultimately figures out on his own."

— María Dolores Gonzales, Taos News https://www.taosnews.com/tempo/dont-forget-we-are-mexican/article_0b71eca2-1303-5733-b2b1-3d5a2c5151e1.html

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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, 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Los Alamos Home Town Newspaper Reviews My Book

I have had many nice reviews printed in college newspapers and I've been reviewed in the LGBTQIA press. And I've had notices and interviews in mainstream papers that speak to the existence of the book, but which weren't actually reviews of it. But until this week I did not have an actual review of GenderQueer printed in a mainstream municipal newspaper.

So it seems utterly appropriate that the first to do so would be the Los Alamos Daily Post, the newspaper from the town where I attended junior high and high school. The newspaper from the town where most of the action in the book takes place.

Lifestyles Editor Bonne Gordon was a great interviewer; when she called me to ask questions about my book and my experiences, it was obvious that she had not only been giving the book a close read but was also familiar on a deep level with the relevant backdrop issues. We discussed gender from the standpoint of LGBTQIA experiences and feminism, and how things have changed (and how they haven't) over the forty years since the events described in the book.

Los Alamos is both a small community and a special, well-known one. It's received far more literary attention than a typical village of 12,000 inhabitants would, but not so much that the people who live there don't become interested when a book about living there goes to press. So with any luck, the article will spark some local interest in reading my book.


Putting the Q in LGBTQ: Growing Up 'Different' In Los Alamos — Bonnie Gordon, The Los Alamos Daily Post


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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, 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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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Two New Reviews from Book Bloggers

A couple of really nice reviews of GenderQueer were posted this week by book bloggers, with any luck drawing some more attention to my book and luring more people to read it!


"In a world which is still conservative at large and prejudiced for the most part, Derek's story is agonizing despite being inspirational. I say this because it shows us just how hurtful and indifferent people can be, especially if you are trying to tell the truth about something that they'd much rather pretend doesn't exist...

No amount of research into theoretical assumptions and claims can replace the experience of reading someone's life story and knowing what they've been through. The narrative style is simple yet powerful. By the time you reach the final page, you'll feel like you've had quite the journey...

Characters: This is obviously about the main character or the author himself. I don't think its necessary to mention again how moved I was by his story. I, however, would like to talk about the brilliant way in which the others are depicted. Some characters represent a particular way of thinking. No matter what we think about stereotyping, it's true that some people share the same sort of antagonism and hatred when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community and this group appears pretty frequently in the book, needless to say. The author has merged several like minded people into a few characters because they are significant only because of their point of view. This has resulted in a story not overcrowded with characters and has left enough space for Derek to reveal himself to the reader...

Genderqueer succeeds greatly as a memoir because it excels in every sub-category."

Saradia Chatterjee (Blogger: Crazy Curious Sara) Crazy Curious Reader




"I guess I'd shot my mouth off. - First Sentence, Part One: School. At A Party: 1979

This is who I am, how I am. Get used to it! I will never again tolerate people being mean and nasty to me and acting like I deserve it because I don't act like a guy. From now on being all worried about that is gonna be their problem. - Memorable Moment, Page 166

I ...had thought to use the metaphor 'like a round peg in a square hole' but somehow that didn't feel strong enough so, abnormal, there I've said it - the author was made to feel abnormal, for the most part this wasn't comfortable reading and arguably the former portions spent on the author's early life experiences were a tad too drawn out, and yet that said ...

Not always a journey easily travelled (and especially not then) I think that not to have chronicled these events and, perhaps more importantly, the feelings they gave rise to, in such detail would have been to do a disservice to the experiences of not only Derek but also to generations of people who have rarely been represented; whose stories have never been told.

A very human story but one that provides an important insight into gender and identity."

Felicity Grace Terry (Blogger) Pen and Paper



More reviews and book purchase information available here on my author web site


In other news, I've begun querying lit agents and small publishers about my second book, That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, and next week I'm thinking I'll post the query letter than I'm using for it. On the one hand, I think it will be a more difficult sell: the topic of being genderqueer is about as hot at the moment as its ever been, whereas the second book, while still tangentially about that (the main character, i.e., me, is genderqueer, and that both informs a lot of the character's interactions with the other characters and also is the reason for majoring in women's studies in the first place), is a lot more focused on the presence of a male person (or man, or person perceived to be male or a man at any rate) within feminism and the larger questions of privilege and marginalization... and that's probably going to be perceived by lit agents and publishers as a lot more intellectual and less mainstream. On the other hand, I'll have the advantage of being a published author already this time around. The author of a book that's being nominated by the publisher as their entry for the Aspen Prize, in fact!

*preen*

So I may be able to pull it off, to get my second book published.

I'm still soliciting beta readers, by the way. It's only recently out of the oven and I want to get some folks to do taste tests, so if you're up for a novel-length nonfiction book about a sissy who hitches to New York to major in women's studies, give me a holler.


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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, 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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

My Book's First Review in an LGBTQIA+ Publication

From Sherri Rase, Out In Jersey:

Allan D. Hunter’s GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is an eye-opening first-person account of Derek, born male, who identifies as a girl. While this hardly raises an eyebrow in the 21st century, in the 1970s, Derek had no role models and no points of reference.

If you are of a generation with Derek, give or take, you thrill with him at his first car, put wings on his heart. You feel the rush of first love, and first touch, when attraction becomes physical. You feel the pain of rejection and being misunderstood.

You may not be able to read the book in one sitting—it takes time to absorb.

"Three Great Books for LGBTQ Summer Reading"




I've had nice reviews in college newspapers and an interview in the mainstream press (Newsday), but this is my first review in an LGBTQIA-centric publication, and I'm excited about it!



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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, 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

———————

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

BOOK REVIEW: XOXY by Kimberley Zeiselman

These are the ladies who lunch and strategize about intersex policy changes. Kimberley Zeiselman writes as a person who is aware of her generally privileged social location; she describes a life in which she's been at ease to move comfortably from Boston to Manhattan and back, and to journey with her husband to China and stay for a month in order to adopt children. I think sometimes the juxtaposition, of a life otherwise unencumbered with stress, against the specific experience of a marginalized identity, can make it easier to focus on the difference that having such an experience makes in a life.

Zeiselman is intersex. She is an example of CAIS, where the body's structure is completely impervious to the androgen hormones that, for most people with XY chromosomes, causes their body to develop with male morphology. She was regarded and raised as a girl, perceived as a female person with no questions raised by doctors, parents, or herself until the day when a persistent abdominal pain led to a poorly-explained operation. An operation where the particulars of what the surgeon was going to do were cloaked in euphemisms and lies.

Our culture has oscillated back and forth between an attitude that doctors know best so we should trust their judgment and a respect for patient self-determination and the importance of doctors explaining the options and letting the patient decide. In June of 1983, when Kimberley Zeiselman and her parents were asked to consent to abdominal surgery, the pendulum was strongly towards fully informed consent. But the fifteen-year old Kimberley and her family were told that she was at risk for cancer and that her ovaries needed to be removed for her health and safety.

But those weren't ovaries. Nor, as Zeiselman points out in a later chapter, was the risk of medical complications anywhere near as clear-cut as that. The surgeons removed Kimberley's undescended testicles, and put her on a lifetime regimen of hormone treatments. Why? Because it's what doctors thought they should do in cases like this. Eek, oh how embarrassing, got to get rid of those at once, hide this shameful fact so no one can find out. Cloak everything in lies and silence.

Kimberley Zeiselman learned the classic Yankee emotional inscrutability as part of her cultural inheritance. It was a world where internal turmoils aren't expected to be shared, just endured. The scene in the book where she discovers what had been done to her, and the fact of her difference, is stark and cold. The doctor writes her a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, then suggests "maybe it's time we dig out your old medical records so that you can better understand the surgery performed and put your fears of cancer to rest". Then the doctor leaves her alone in the room to read the account of how her testes were removed and found to be healthy and with no signs of malignancy.


We often learn shame by being protected from shame. When people whisper to us and wait until there's no one to overhear, the need for secrecy and the fear of exposure are taught to us. Zeiselman struggles with the shadow of inferiority and inadequacy. So much of her experience is expressed in the negative, in the things she doesn't participate in. In the years before the medical procedure, her best friends got their menarche but she was left behind wondering why she never got her period. After the operation, still not knowing anything about her intersex condition, she knows she will not be able to get pregnant and give birth.

Zeiselman's emotional habits carry over into her writing. She often skitters away from immersing the reader fully in what she was feeling at the time. She often summarizes events in places where, as reader, I wanted fully fleshed-out scenes, a more immersive experience. When her intersex condition is first revealed to her, Zeiselman gives us glimpses of the shock, and the intensity of her curiosity and being haunted about the impact of her stunning discovery. Tellingly, she wants the news to be shocking to the other people in her life, for them to react as if a bombshell had gone off in their midst, as if unless someone is willing to scream on her behalf there can be no screaming.


Kimberley Zeiselman becomes a policy activist, leveraging her connections in society to make a difference for intersex children. Sometimes the weariness of policy defeats and fighting the same battles recurrently make it sound like Sisyphus rolling his boulders. The medical policy on clitoris reductions for CAH intersex babies is the most formidable boulder. CAH — Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia — is a phenomenon affecting XX people in which the adrenal gland releases high levels of hormones that prompt the body to develop male attributes. The tissue that constitutes a clitoris tends to be larger, anywhere on a continuum from typical clitoris size to the size of a penis. And as Zeiselman added her voice to that of other intersex activists to outlaw nonconsensual surgery and leave the decision in the hands of the patients, she found the medical establishment insistent on their right to pare down or remove this tissue in the name of normalizaton.

Kimberley Zeiselman learned advocacy of behalf of others from raising her children, fighting for their right to a tailored and appropriate course of education. She took her skills and experience into the intersex rights fray, fighting her own fight, only to eventually end up largely immersed in a specific battle that centrally affects CAH intersex children. The identity called intersex is actually a constellation of several different situations, and enunciating the identity intersex is not only a rejection of the medical terminoligy that calls these conditions disorders, it's also a commitment to solidarity. Not all intersex people are identically situated but they can be unified politically as a marginalized community of people finally demanding a voice.

XOXY: A Memoir, Kimberly M. Zeiselman. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2020. Available from Amazon and other retailers; Facebook author's page



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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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I'm in Newsday! (aka Mainstream Press Coverage); + More Reviews

Newsday, Long Island's primary newspaper, Sunday circulation 495,000, is featuring an interview with me as the lead in Arts & Entertainment section of tomorrow's (Sunday May 3) issue. Author: Brian Alessandro, literary critic

Link goes to the online copy of the article, but it's behind a paywall which will put it out of reach for most people who aren't subscribers of Newsday or one of its partners.

It's not a review of the book. The questions were about my motivations as an author and the political situation of genderqueer people within LGBTQIA and how I feel about putting such personal information about the events in my life out there for public consumption -- most of which I've discussed at length in these blog posts.

Getting a spread in Newsday is excellent publicity and I hope it will direct a significant amount of local and regional attention to my book. Public awareness is very much a snowball phenomenon. When people think something is happening that other people in their community are paying attention to, they want to be at least somewhat acquainted with it and what it's about in case someone asks them.


Meanwhile, I'm continuing to get college newspaper reviews. The corona virus has of course delayed many such endeavors so they are being spread out over the course of months instead of being more closely packed together. That has the beneficial effect of lengthening the time when I'm popping up in print and affecting search engines and whatnot. That works in my favor, ameliorating the effect of being unable to make guest-speaker appearances and do book signings etc.

Here are the reviews that have come in since my April 3 post:

"First and foremost, what this book does really well is testify to the importance of the 'Q' in LGBTQ. When many people furrowed their eyebrows at the addition to another letter in the acronym, people like this author were fighting to show how necessary it was. Derek’s story takes place in a time way before the 'Q' was introduced, way before most began to understand or care about gender issues.



However, even though Genderqueer takes place in the 70s, there are many parallels to today’s world that will make the story resonate with today’s LGBTQ youth. Derek’s confusion and desperation to understand who he is is so palpable that anyone who has gone through anything similar, or is currently going through anything similar, will be able to relate. With this story, Alan D. Hunter sheds light on a gender identity that is relatively unknown to the general public while also giving others who share a similar story to him validation that there is nothing wrong with who they are."

— Anna Vanseveran. St. Norbert Times — St. Norbert College

"The discussion around gender identity and sexual orientation has progressed exponentially in the past decade. Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide only five years ago, and the LGBTQ community continues to fight for equal rights. With this constant push for change, some can only imagine the struggles of coming to terms with your gender identity during the late 1960s and 1970s.



GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet offers an eye-opening view into the upbringing of a gender-nonconforming person in an era when many people didn’t know such an identity existed..."

— Camryn DeLuca. The Diamondback — University of Maryland

"This is a novel that is bracingly raw and personal, yet always feels authentic in its sense of place and voice. Its visibility gives an insight into a point of view that doesn’t live in the “traditional” gender boxes...




It is in the last half of the book, when Derek starts to realize the whole person he is inside where the book reaches its peak...it is incredibly satisfying to see Derek hit his stride and finally find his sense of place and belonging in the world. "

— Josh Rittberg The Snapper — Millersville University

"...it’s clear from the beginning of the novel where the story is heading. Hunter introduces their ideas of gender at the start of the novel when they talk about their personality as a child – how they don’t identify with the rough behavior usually prescribed to the male gender – and these thoughts stay with them and influence their growing up.



When the revelation is made, it’s not something that comes out of left field. Because of course it’s not – these things don’t just appear one day like a magic trick. It’s always there, even if it’s not super obvious at first."

— Celia Brockert The Times-Delphic — Drake University

"...a treacherous and often realistic tale that’s packed with frustration, desperation and yearning. Hunter does an amazing job of captivating the raw emotions of a person seeking their own truths in a world where everyone else seems to know who they are and what their place is in the world...



We see Derek from a very young age get picked on and beat up. He tries time and time again not to let the bullies get into his head, but it proves more and more difficult. All the while he starts to believe the things they say about him. He seeks out answers in both healthy and unhealthy ways, often getting him in all sorts of trouble...



Overall this book is very eye-opening. It puts into words a story for people that are almost never represented. It shakes its metaphoric fist in the face of erasure, saying, 'I’m here and I will not be forgotten.'"

— Zarqua Ansari The Beacon — Wilkes University



I've also gradually accumulated reviews on GoodReads, with eight readers leaving review comments behind.


———————

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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

A Bouquet of Reviews of My Book

Because I figured that my book would be of particular relevance to the college communities, both students and faculty, I solicited reviews from student newspapers. Several college newspapers have now posted reviews of GenderQueer online!



Here are some choice comments, with links to the full reviews.

"The book makes it plain that the 'Q' recently added to the LGBTQIA+ is necessary because the "T" for transgender doesn’t necessarily cover all of the individuals in the category of 'anyone whose gender is different from what people originally assumed it to be...' "

— Noah Young. The Clock — Plymouth State Univerity

"Allan Hunter’s debut book Genderqueer: A Story from a Different Closet takes a personal look at the topic of gender and the dilemma that comes from not conforming to gender norms. The book brings up an important conversation that needs to be addressed while taking a deep dive into the term genderqueer."

— Arielle Gulley. Daily Utah Chronicle — University of Utah

"This memoir is a personal journey about a person who has lived a life struggling to accept who they are based on the reactions of those around them. A lot of the book is hard to read, hearing how cruel people can be. But I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand gender and sexuality on a deeper and more intimate level."

— Never Retallack. The Western Howl — Western Oregon University

"Although the book is described as a memoir, it reads like fiction. This makes the book compelling and enjoyable to read, and it is far more effective than if the author had approached the topic as a textbook might...GenderQueer is honest, intimate and at times, uncomfortable. The protagonist is extremely vulnerable, bringing the audience into private moments and personal thoughts."

— Jaime Fields. The Whitman Wire — Whitman College

"The discussion around gender identity and sexual orientation has progressed exponentially in the past decade. Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide only five years ago, and the LGBTQ community continues to fight for equal rights. With this constant push for change, some can only imagine the struggles of coming to terms with your gender identity during the late 1960s and 1970s.





GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet offers an eye-opening view into the upbringing of a gender-nonconforming person in an era when many people didn’t know such an identity existed..."

— Camryn DeLuca. The Diamondback — University of Maryland

"Derek says he came out of a different closet, but the same door. The “door” represents the struggle one faces about discovering his identity and/or his sexual orientation. The “closet” represents the harboring of one’s gender identity and/or sexual orientation, a secret that is not meant to be a secret. Derek’s decision to wear a denim wraparound skirt showcased he had come to terms with his identity and was no longer inside the closet"

— Aazan Ahmad. The Pinnacle — Berea College

"GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is a coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender non-conforming individual...the story takes place during the 1970s and 1980s, a time period in which many individuals of the LGBT community were treated with more hostility than today...





[One] group that was not necessarily included was the genderqueer community, now commonly symbolized as the “Q” in LGBTQ, and this is precisely what this book focuses on. Many people are not familiar with the genderqueer identity and this book gives a first-hand account of what someone with this identity experiences. Hunter delves into serious and intimate topics throughout the book, making it very realistic and raw, which was overwhelming at times...despite the fact it may make some of us uncomfortable, it is crucial to aiding our understanding of Hunter’s experience "

— Maryam Javed The Lake Forest Stentor — Lake Forest College





--





There are also a handful of reviews on GoodReads and Amazon as well.







———————



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



———————



This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.



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Index of all Blog Posts

Anatomy of a Review: Karen Bernard's LAKESIDE

Event: Salon: Karen Bernard's LAKESIDE
Date: February 06, 2020 8:00 PM
Douglas Dunn's Studio
541 Broadway
New York, NY 10012


My friend and I share our guilty secret: we prefer narrative forms of dance and performance art, where there is a message or a plot line. It's akin to admitting you mostly like representational art when you're coming back from a show of abstract oil paintings. It tends to brand one as less sophisticated.

I find that the lack of a defined meaning creates a challenge for someone seeking to do a review. One could restrict one's self to how the performer moved, their talent and grace on stage. But that dismisses the performance itself as exercise. The problem is that my mind wants the piece to be "about something" and so it seizes on a message, a "something" that may originate entirely in my own head, making any review more about me and what I made out of this Rorschach choreography than about the performance that anyone else may have seen.

Hence the title "Anatomy of a Review".

I bring with me to the audience member seat a pair of tools, if you will, my main everyday obsessions: feminist theory and gender theory. When the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say. Well, here's what I saw:


A garment is in view in front of a kneeling performer (K. Bernard) under a tightly focused light. She and it. She stays that way for a prolonged duration, and doesn't react. Then very very slowly extends her hand, until the elbow is completely straightened, the arm as distant from the core of her body as she can make it, before she slowly pinches the fabric between fingertips and with agonizing slowness lifts it towards her.

Do I see a facial expression, or am I imagining it? I interpret something repellent, a displeasure, that makes the slow approach shot through with reluctance.

The outfit turns out to be a skirt and blouse. I see: gendered clothing. It has pastel colors, lacy ruffles, and once she (slowly) dons it, I see it is cut in a style that draws visual attention to legs and breasts, curve of torso, neck, and arms.

Once she's finally in the thing, she strikes poses and begins to move in it. I see: mockery, revulsion. I see: mincing and prancing, acting out in overstated compliance that which is expected of her. I see: resistance to femininization, trivialization, sexual fetishism and objectification. Her costume is a garment that renders one as an object for others' visual consumption, and it's not designed primarily for the wearer's convenience and comfort. These aren't, I think, interpretations that the clothing in and of itself would conjure for me, but by her body language as she interacted with it.

Due to my gender identity activities, I'm quick to attach the extreme reluctance and disgust that I see to the act of being misgendered. An expression not so much of resentment towards the costume per se as towards the package of feelings and attitudes towards anyone who would wear it, a rejection of femme. "Yes, that's it", I nod affirmatively in my seat. I imagine the cartoon thought-balloons over her head: "I don't want to wear this girly-girl thing, this so is not me. I'm supposed to be in this and prance around like this and pretend I'm eye candy and shit. Fuck this, gimme a goddam suit and a tie and a fedora, willya?"


The piece was presented without program notes, and was not followed by one of those "talkbacks" where the audience or a panel of people discuss the piece and what they got out of it, so we made our exit with only each other to consult.

We agreed that the dancing, the timing, the expressiveness were superb. She creates suspense and delivers an almost nerve-wracking intensity at times in her performance.

Had I seen anything that the artist had intended? Had the things that I did see reside at all in the performance piece, or strictly within my head as a gender-variant person and a feminist theory junkie?

"I saw an earlier version", my companion told me. "There were things she took out. I always thought it was about a murder. But that could have just been me, that's what I thought the piece was about, and she took out the parts that made me think so, so who knows?



Now to be fair, we do that to everyday life. The events of the real world aren't written with a plot, a clear storyline. We weren't handed a program explaining what the life we're about to experience is supposed to be about.
(Or, for those of us who were, we came to doubt the authority of the ushers who handed it to us). Some of us embraced a viewpoint, a political social theory about what's going on in life. We have come to use concepts of gender and identity and narrow confining gender-boxes that people are imprisoned in and struggle with. We embraced the concepts because they explained a lot to us, they clicked into place inside our heads and caused a lot of what we saw on the stage called World to make sense to us.

I believe in theory. I believe in the process of analyzing things. For the record, I don't think it leads to seeing things that your theoretical model say are there when it really all comes from you, the person observing life, inventing meaning where none actually exists. We share these analyses as communities of people who believe these explanations fit well, that they make sense of life. If they didn't offer us much explanatory power, it wouldn't be very satisfying to use them and we'd switch to one that did.

But I do think a lot of it is involves filling in a lot of everyday blank spots with what our theory says is going on. We see a behavior and without access to the thoughts in the behaving person's head, we make assumptions about their attitudes and intentions.

Being self-aware means reminding ourselves occasionally that we do that.



———————

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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

That's Not Very Nice

One of the early reviews of GenderQueer noted that my thoughts and attitudes during my later teenage years in my book reminded her of the Nice Guys™.

It's an accurate call. When I first encountered the send-up of Nice Guys and their behaviors, I winced in recognition. Yes, I was definitely on that trajectory for awhile. The Nice Guys overtones in my book are acknowledged as intentional. In my own personal life, I didn't descend very far into blaming women, or considering the gender-polarized dating environment to be women's fault, but I had a lot of frustration and irritation; and in one important scene in the book you can see me expressing those feelings internally as resentment towards girls, and experimenting with the kind of behavior that is often advocated by so-called pickup artists.

I'm about to do something that many folks would say is ill-advised. I'm going to defend the Nice Guys (god help me). Well, sort of. I'm not about to make a positive case for being a men's rights advocate or explain why it really is all the fault of the women. But all the material about the Nice Guys describes them with eye-rolling dismissive contempt for exhibiting behaviors that we're encouraged to think of as manifestations of character flaws. I'm going to challenge you to perceive them (well, us, actually, since I'm reluctantly claiming the mantle) as people whose behaviors take place in a context, and look at the context long enough to see how it elicits those behaviors.


We are considered creepy. Creepy because we often have a hidden agenda of wanting sex. Creepy because we allegedly act nice thinking that we'll get sex as a reward for being nice. Creepy because our reasons for behaving "nice" are all about obtaining sex. Creepy because we think that by being nice, we somehow deserve sex.

So let's examine all that -- removing any gendered double standards in order to do that exam. I may be projecting my own experiences onto the Nice Guy™ debate, but it's not like there's an organized body of Nice Guys™ with a spokesperson and a position paper -- it's an identity largely created from the outside by folks who were tired of the Nice Guy shtick, and I confess that I recognize myself in a lot of the description so I may as well wear it.



a) Is it OK to want sex? Is it OK to expect or anticipate that someone would want to have sex with you?

This is a question that many a nice girl has found it necessary to contend with, so let's not dismiss it too quickly. Female people have often encountered judgmental hostility if it were thought that they wanted sex. They have often found themselves laughed at with derisive contempt connected to the idea that they did. And they've been told that if it were true, it meant they were not nice.

Now what (you may be asking) does that have to do with Nice Guys™, who, as males, would presumably not be facing those attitudes? Well, yeah, the boys are indeed sort of expected to want sex and to seek sex. But that confirms that they are Bad Boys™, not Nice Guys™.

Bad, bad, bad, bad boys
Make me feel so gooood...

-- Miami Sound Machine

Bad Boys aren't Nice Guys™. The fact that there isn't a massive social pressure on males to be Nice Guys™ instead of Bad Boys™ is particularly relevant -- somehow these particular male folks embraced an identity as Nice Guys anyhow, and overtly wanting sex isn't compatible with that. Displaying interest in sex would get the girls, the Nice Girls™, kicked out of the Nice category. Being overtly focused on the chance of sex happening is, in fact, a central part of what affirms a male person as a Bad Boy™.

That's not to say that interest in sex is entirely incompatible with Niceness, whether as manifested in Nice Girls™ or in Nice Guys™. In sitcom TV shows and romcom movies as well as in real life, we often hear the female characters complain that they'd really like to meet some guys who aren't married and aren't gay. There's no real reason for them to care whether interesting guys are single or to be concerned with their sexual orientation unless they wish to have sex take place in their lives occasionally, if you see what I mean.

But those female characters don't move around proclaiming to likely prospects that they want sex. That would not be considered Nice™.

How do the Nice Girls™ conventionally handle it? By bundling sex into a larger constellation of experiences and opting to partake of the bundle. To want a romantic relationship. To want a personal and emotional connection and within that context to be sexually active. Not otherwise.

Obviously you and I may not be at all inclined to sign on to the notion that female people should be shoehorned into this notion, this social construct that we call Nice Girls™, but you aren't unaware of the historical presence of this notion. You aren't unaware that it still has some social clout even in 2020. That even now, even after all the questionings and discardings of sexist and gender-polarized notions about how female folks should behave, a girl growing up in a randomly-selected American town is likely to have an easier time of it socially within the parameters of Nice Girl™ than she would if she were to utterly disregard it.


b) Well, is it OK to put on a "nice act" in order to get sex? Is it OK to go around thinking that because you're nice you somehow deserve sex?

I have to question the assumptions on that first one. The common derisive attitude towards Nice Guys™ accuses us of adopting a fake "nice" persona as a means of getting sex, but we are as we are -- this thing called "nice" -- despite a cultural push to be more of a Bad Boy™ and very little pressure on us as males to be Nice™ -- and we deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is who, and how, we are. We may expect things (including sex) as acknowledgment or reward for being Nice™, expectations that folks may have contempt for (and more on that shortly), but that doesn't make the "being nice" some kind of phony act.

Let's again glance across the aisle at the Nice Girls™. People don't tend to assume that they are being Nice™ in order to get sex to happen. People don't tend to assume that they are putting on a "nice act".

There is a belief about Nice Girls™ that is worth bringing up, though. They are often believed to have a high opinion of themselves, a high opinion that leads them to think and say hostile and disparaging things about boys who would rather devote their attention to considerably less-nice girls. The Nice Girls™ also may be expected to occasionally say uncomplimentary things about the not-so-nice girls themselves.

The Nice Girls™, in other words, regard themselves as a "catch", as worthy of admiration and value as potential partners. This is part of the understanding that people have of Nice Girls™, that they may tend to have this attitude about themselves.

Note that this is not characterized as them thinking that they "deserve sex". As I said before, the Nice Girls™ are taught to bundle sex along with emotional connection and think in terms of romantic relationship. So it's not that they think they "deserve sex" for being Nice Girls™, it is that they think they deserve consideration as good girlfriends for being Nice Girls™.

But as we've also already discussed, yeah, that formulation does include sex.

I think Nice Guys™ are basically doing the same thing. We tend to think we shoud be regarded as good romantic prospects. We start off putting a lot of energy into being good companions, connecting with the female people who are in our lives, thinking that sooner or later one of them will find the interactions enticing, will appreciate our value as potential boyfriend material, and if they also happen to find us physically attractive, then hey, things should progress from there, shouldn't they? It's not a materially different expectation than what the Nice Girls™ expect.

But in this gender-polarized world, we operate in a different context than they do.

Incidentally, no, I don't think we (Nice™ people of either sex) are intrinsically better than other people. It's just how we identify, how we think of ourselves and comport ourselves in the world. I'm proud of how and who I am. It's in the face of a lot of disapproval and so I don't feel apologetic about that.


c) So is it somehow OK to go moping around and getting all pissy and hostile because the girls don't appreciate your virtue as a Nice Guy™ and don't find you such a hot prospect? And WTF is with the Nice Guys™ bitterly pursuing an aggressive Pickup Artist approach and treating women like garbage while continuing to complain about things?

No it isn't OK. It isn't appropriate, it isn't politically legitimate, and, incidentally, it also isn't Nice™.

So why does it occur? I mean, look across the aisle again: the Nice Girls™ aren't doing anything equivalent to that, and I've spend the last few paragraphs comparing Nice Guys™ to Nice Girls™ to shed light on other Nice Guy™ behavior. So what's up with this bitter hostility?

We all operate in a social context, the Nice Girls™ and the Bad Boys™ and the Nice Guys™ and everyone else. There is a courtship dance established, and it has a role for the Bad Boys™ and it has a role for the Nice Girls™. The courtship dance calls for the Bad Boys™ to try to make sex happen and the Nice Girls™ to decline that and assert that they don't do that kind of thing outside of the context of an emotional connection and the prospect of an ongoing romantic relationship -- the "bundle" of which I spoke earlier -- and the dance goes on from there. They each know their lines and they anticipate the behavior of the other. But there's no courtship-dance role for the Nice Guy™. He isn't doing the Bad Boy™ dance steps that the Nice Girl™ expects and knows how to respond to. Whether she finds him physically attractive or not, whether she finds herself liking him as a person or not, whether she appreciates his personal qualities (Niceness included) or not, her own role instructions don't give her any lines or provide her with any dance steps that would make it easy for her to act on that interest if it were to occur.

Not that he, the Nice Boy™, has a clearer idea of what he should be doing. His bitter accusations are all focused on the Bad Boy™ stuff that he is not doing, Bad Boy™ stuff that the Nice Girls™ vocally complain about. He says that despite their complaints that's still where things progress, whereas affairs with the girls don't progress with a Nice Guy™ like him, and (he says) "that's unfair!"

Fair or unfair, his observations are accurate: the dance calls for the Nice Girl™ to protest the unbridled raw male expression of sexual interest as crude and demeaning and for her to assert her lack of interest in that. The dance sets them up as opponents, adversaries, with him trying to make sex happen and her disdaining that but seeing if perhaps he seriously likes her as a person and not just a sexual possibility; with him seeing if he can get past her defenses by studying her reactions and tuning into her thoughts and concerns and paying stragetic attention to her feelings. Maybe proximity and time causes him to develop real feelings for her. Maybe proximity and time causes her sexual appetite to kick into overdrive and she consents to doing more and more sexual stuff. They each have lines and dance steps and they know them. They know them the same way you know them. We all do. We've been to the movies, we've read the books, we've listened to the songs, we've heard and sometimes laughed at the jokes. Many folks dance very loosely instead of being rigidly bound to the dance steps, but the known pattern of the established dance still forms a structure.

But not for us.

Nice Guys™ are a type of gender misfit. Because Niceness is gendered and the males are the wrong sex to be embodying Nice. Nice Guys™ may not conceptualize themselves as feminine, as sissy, as trans, as nonbinary, as gender inverted people. In fact, I think they mostly don't. But in a nutshell their complaints do boil down to saying that they approached the whole sex-and-romance thing the same way girls do but that the world didn't play nice with them and left them out in the cold, with no girlfriend, no romance, no sex.

And if and when a Nice Guy™ decides to emulate the Bad Boys™ because the Bad Boys™ seem to be getting all the action he's missing out on, he may do so with contempt and hostility and bitter resentment. You want to know where else I've seen that emotional combination? Certain women who have observed "what works" with guys and have adopted the expected behaviors with scornful hate that they should have to do such demeaning and dishonest things. Yeah, hello.


———————

My book is being published by Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon (paperback only for the moment).

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I've Been Reviewed!

The Whitman Wire, student newspaper of Whitman College (Walla Walla WA) has published a review of GenderQueer!



“GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet” explores the complexity of gender

Because I figured that my book would be of particular relevance to the college communities, both students and faculty, I solicited reviews from student newspapers. The Whitman Wire is the first to publish a review of my book.

I am very happy with the column, written by Jaime Fields, their Arts & Entertainment reporter. It's an analysis of the writing itself, including character development and pacing and readability (she compares it favorably to fiction novels and describes it as "compelling and enjoyable to read"), of the story line, and of the book's social relevance to potential readers.

I'm particularly pleased that the review characterizes the book as being intense and verging on overwhelming. After a long querying odyssey in which I was told over and over by literary agents and publishers that the writing didn't move them, that it left them wanting to know more about what my character was feeling, that it was dull, static, and lacked emotion *, it is nice to read that my book actually packs an emotional punch!



* e.g, Jason Bradley, editor at NineStar, with whom I had a publishing contract for this book back in 2017. Backstory available here

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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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REVIEW -- Britten & Crozier's ALBERT HERRING, performed by Utopia Opera

The premise of this opera lured me to think it might have edgy things to say about gender. A small town wants to anoint a May Queen but has issues with the lax morals of the female residents who would otherwise be the candidates for the position, and they decide to select a chaste and virginal male and dub him May King instead.

The tale is based on "Le Rosier de Madame Husson" by Guy de Maupassant, and the opera itself was written in 1947, which is generally not an era from which sharp-edged points on the subject of gender inequities and unduly gendered assumptions tended to emanate, but I was still curious.

I regretfully have to report that the tale tends to bolster and recapitulate traditional views on gender considerably more than it brings them into question. The eponymous Albert Herring [Cory Gross], the beforementioned chaste and virginal fellow, turns out to be an object of pity and condescending scorn from the more sexually experienced people of his age within the village (represented by Sid [Luke MacMillan], the butcher's son and Nancy [Stephanie Feigenbaum], who works at the bakery, who are in the process of flirting and fooling around a bit) and the village's children (in the form of Emmie, Cis, and Harry [Hannah Madeline Goodman, Zoe Marie Hart, and Jen Wu, respectively], who are prone to singing mocking children's songs about Albert within earshot). The doyenne of Loxford, Lady Billows [Marie Masters Webb], admires him, as does her housemaid Florence Pike [Caroline Tye], but they themselves are more than a little bit set up within the opera as targets for our ridicule. Somewhere in the middle are the various village leaders and authorities (Miss Wordsworth, schoolteacher [Rebecca Richardson], Mayor Upfold [Ethan Fran], Vicar Gedge [Glenn Friedman], and Police Superintendent Budd [Jonathan Harris] who do not dare to contradict Lady Billows in any affair but may or may not share her perspective on all things until they learn what her perspective is. They suggest one female candidate after another, for instance, before bowing to her assessment that none of them is suitable.

Basically the upshot of the plot is that Sid and Nancy (no resemblance to any latter-day punk rockers, just a coincidence) decide it would be cute to impinge a bit upon Albert's spotless moral fibre by slipping some rum into his beverage at the acceptance dinner, and once inebriated by it Albert rebels and, fortified by his drunkenness, goes into the town to revel, perchance to fornicate. This frees him from the apron strings of his domineering controlling Freudian mommy, Mrs Herring [Sarah Marvel Bleasdale], whose strict control, rather than any intrinsic moral backbone, is the real reason that Albert is as pure as he is. The experience permanently changes him and empowers him to seek his own course, while offending and dismaying Lady Billows and Mrs. Herring and Florence Pike.

In short, as is so often the case where males exhibiting characteristics more commonly associated with females are depicted at all, Albert is presented to us as pathetic and controlled by emasculating female people, and the remedy is a big dose of coarse crude masculinity to cure him of his feminine maladies.

A prolonged glance at Nancy gives us--if not the play itself--some perspective. If you examine Nancy's own attitudes, behaviors and feelings, especially drawing on the timeframe when she's feeling remorseful about her role in setting up Albert (which, incidentally, consisted entirely of going along with Sid's initiative) and combining that with her behavior when Sid is trying to kiss her while she demurs because "the windows have eyes," you end up with a Nancy who has a whole lot in common with Albert; both of them would be virginal and pure except that Nancy has Sid in her life, and Sid (as Albert himself later observed) gets what he wants by being direct and going after what he wants. Sid pressures Nancy and doesn't readily take "no" for an answer (he gets the kiss he seeks, windows and their eyes be damned). So Nancy is neither blessed nor cursed by the spectre (or mantle) of the chastity for which Albert is being recognized by Lady Billows and taunted and pranked by Sid, Nancy herself, and the children.

The opera isn't actually titled "The Deflowering of Albert Herring," nor is it explicitly stated that he comes home a nonvirgin. This garners points from me, albeit reluctantly, on the basis of accuracy, insofar as I once wanted to loosen up and let nice naughty things happen as they would, and to that end did attend parties and consume intoxicants, only to find that just as behaving more or less like Nancy doesn't result in a Nancy-like fate when you're male, going forth and consuming substances that lower inhibitions doesn't conjure up the people who would take advantage of your uninhibited receptivities. But if the tale doesn't say so, it equivocates and presents an overall message that if Albert is to loosen up and avail himself of less corseted ways of being in the world, sexual favors as well as the gutter of drunkenness will, in some undisclosed fashion, be his. The crown of flowers with which he is coronated is found before he is, trammeled and abandoned during the course of his escapades, leaving the villagers to think he's dead. You can't symbolize defloration much more directly than that.


The show displays Utopia Opera's usual strengths: there's no wasted investment in glitzy state-of-the-art pyrotechnics of the stage (they've been known to use flashlights with colored cellophane for some special effects); what you get instead is an assortment of spectacular voices singing at you from such close range that if you had a bouquet in hand to present to one of the singers, you could throw it from where you sit in the audience and whack the performer in the head. They convey an exuberant delight at what they're doing, along with a somewhat conspiratorial sense of fun, a company of outstanding opera singers who clearly enjoy doing what they're doing. William Remmers, the person who makes all this happen, is a show unto himself, great entertainment as a conductor and master of ceremonies. The pocket-sized orchestra is very impressive; I'd buy solo albums from either last night's french horn or bassoon player.

A true review of the operatic delivery of the Utopia Opera cast is beyond my level of sufficiently educated assessment. They deserve one and I hope someone better situated than I am will provide it. Benjamin Britten's score does not give the performers equal opportunity to show off their vocal acumen, but, having said that, I'll attest to the rafter-bending power exhibited by Marie Masters Webb as Lady Billows, as well as that of Caroline Tye in her role as housemaid Florence Pike, and Hannah Madeleine Goodman gets off some impressive prolonged shouts as the juvenile Emmie.

There's a nine-part complex vocal tableaux late in the piece, in Act III, that's just mind-blowing. Benjamin Britten is one of those composers who don't stay confined to the conventional restrictions of major and minor and augmented seventh and whatnot, while at the same time managing not to sound like pretentious random clashy white noise; his harmonies and entertwined melodies and countermelodies have a history and a destination, a sense of direction and resolution that one's ears can follow and appreciate, but the individual intervals and chords represent significant obstacles. This ensemble performance would challenge any vocal group.

The show has lots of delightful lighter moments that are well-carried by the Utopia team. You don't want to miss the three schoolchildren being tutored on their choral arrangement by Miss Wordsworth during a rehearsal; Florence the maid practically steals the show with a repertoire of small funny deadpan behaviors; and you'll love the mayor as he takes the opportunity, while ostensibly praising Albert at the award ceremony, to remind us all of his own civic accomplishments.

The pacing and delivery overall is spot-on, as is typical of Utopia's offerings. They know how to tell a tale and keep you involved.


Utopia Opera presents Albert Herring, an opera by Benjamin Britten & Eric Crozier, at Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, NY

(the south side of Park Ave between Park and Lex, 4th floor).

Remaining performances April 12th and 13th, 2019.

Tickets and other inquiries: info@utopiaopera.org

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