Category Archives: GLBT

“Two Natures” Book Trailer, E-book Sale, New Reviews

Romantic suspense author Zara West (Beneath the Skin) created this stylish book trailer for Two Natures using my storyboard, stock photos, and public domain archival photos from the New York Public Library.

Now through September 28, the e-book of Two Natures is on sale on Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks for 99 cents! Julian may never be this cheap again…unless you’re a cute boy and buy him another rum and Coke…

I appreciated this insightful review from Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love Blog, “Two Natures explores sexuality and spirituality during AIDS crisis”.  Art That Dares, Cherry’s book of feminist and LGBT-themed religious art, helped me envision a God who could accept Julian and me. She writes:

The dense and varied literary coming-of-age novel ranges from comic scenes that could easily become a hit movie to the explicitly sexual and the touchingly tragic. Reiter brings alive LGBTQ touchstones of the era: the visit from out-of-town and out-of-it parents to their closeted son, the AIDS death and awkward funeral, and so on…

…As art historian, I especially enjoyed the way that some of Julian’s spiritual reflections were provoked by art. For instance, Julian’s inner spiritual conflict is portrayed at first through his responses to “Piss Christ,” a controversial photograph by Andres Serrano.

The novel is also significant as an example of how a new generation tries to make sense of an AIDS crisis that they were too young to experience firsthand. I happened to read “Two Natures” at the same time that I was rereading my own journals for an oral history interview about doing AIDS ministry at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco in the late 1980s. Perhaps no novel can capture the agony, ecstasy and desperate intensity of those times.

Julian never found the kind of LGBTQ-affirming church home that we provided at MCC-SF. Sadly that may be true for many young gay men in the early 1990s, and even now. But there’s good news: Reiter is already working on a sequel. Julian will have another chance to find long-term love and a gay-positive spiritual community, with readers invited along for the ride.

And here’s my latest Goodreads review from T Christopher:

A marvelous book. I enjoyed Julian’s story so much and found it very relatable. There were so many beautiful, little surprises (“Spring Chicken Perfume”) and a great many laugh out loud moments. It brought up a lot of memories for me—young men who had to shoulder more responsibility and grief than was reasonable for their years, and too many who never got to grow up and old. Too many losses. I really appreciate the characterization of Julian—so on the ball in so many ways, and yet so readily apt to drop it. Very realistic.

Reiter is a marvelous writer and this is a rich, wonderful, and heartbreaking, story. I enjoyed reading it very much.

Book Reader Magazine, an e-book promotion site in the Awesomegang affiliate network, ran a brief interview with me this month.

Save the date: My book launch reading will take place on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 PM, at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division bookstore in the LGBT Center, 208 W. 13th Street, New York City. I’m honored to share the stage with Charlie Bondhus, winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. See the event listing in Gay City News. RSVP on Facebook.

August Links Roundup: The Negative in Sex-Positive

This past March I attended the 5 College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference at Hampshire College. One of the best workshops was “Sex-Negativity Never Happened”, led by Skramz Geist, a radical philosophy professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. We talked about how the “sex-positive” norm in queer communities can be exploited to push people’s sexual boundaries or create an uncomfortably sexualized environment. A theme that emerged was that no community rules are immune to subversion by a determined predator, whether they’re the consent and communication scripts of queer and kink spaces, or the rigid sexual boundaries in conservative churches, where I once sought protection from an emotionally numb and risky hookup culture. I read very little theology anymore, because it failed to perform what for me was its prime function: identifying safe people and creating safe spaces.

Very few hits come up when I Google “compulsory sexuality”, which is sad because this concept would have taught my 20-year-old self that feminism was about more than the right to get drunk at frat parties and have abortions. This 2010 review of Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, from the feminist blog Fannie’s Room, provided a rare moment of validation for my motives in becoming a Young Republican:

Dworkin argues that, for good reason, Rightwing women fear the Left. The Left of the sixties was “a dream of sexual transcendence…. It was- for the girls- a dream of being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling equality, not male domination” (91). What this meant in practice, however, was that it essentially freed men to fuck women “without bourgeois constraints” (91). What this meant for women was “an intensification of the experience of being sexually female- the precise opposite of what these girls had envisioned for themselves….freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere” (93). The Left, that is, continued to construct women as sex, while men continued to be constructed as the Doers Of Important Things.

Further, “sexual liberation” created an expectation that the sexually liberated were ready for sex at any time, effectively negating the concept of consent. Those who were not ready for sex were considered “repressed,” not liberated. For women, for whom pregnancy was sometimes an outcome of this sex free-for-all and for whom abortion was illegal, the consequences of sex were higher than for men. Rightwing women feared sexual liberation as it meant unfettered male sexual access to women, and possibly pregnancy, without the expectation of male support via traditional marriage.

This scenario was all too true for the many women who were mentored and sexually harassed by prominent theologian John Howard Yoder in the 1970s-90s, as history professor Rachel Waltner Goossen details in “Mennonite Bodies, Sexual Ethics”, a recent essay from the Journal of Mennonite Studies, reprinted at the sexual abuse survivor blog Our Stories Untold. Yoder is still widely cited and revered for his theology of pacifism, despite brave dissenters who point out that we should be skeptical of nonresistance preached by a sexual predator. Goossen observes:

For several decades, through the 1970s and 1980s, Yoder approached women with sexual invitations and intimidating behavior at the seminary, at academic and church conferences, and in homes, cars, and gathering places across the U.S., Canada, and a host of international settings. The women’s experiences varied widely. While each was acquainted with Yoder in some way, most of these women were not known to one another nor aware of Yoder’s sexual aggressiveness toward others. (One woman, married and much younger than Yoder, whom he surprised in the mid- 1970s with sexualized physical touching and who reacted with instant rebuke, later remembered the incident as deeply troubling: “It messes with the mind. I wondered, am I special to him? Is he lonely?”10)

Yoder justified his sexual approaches to women as theologically driven. He solicited help from female students and others, describing his entreaties as part of an “experiment” in sexual ethics in which he and a circle of “sisters” tested ideas about sexual intimacy outside marriage. For approximately eight years, over the objections of his supervisor at the seminary, president Marlin Miller, Yoder offered biblical justifications for his behavior based on Jesus’ ministry to women and what Yoder termed “the freedom of the Gospel.”11 Yoder argued that his ministrations to women were potentially therapeutic, and although he lacked formal training in psychological counseling, maintained that he wanted to help women overcome feelings of taboo. He intended to “defang” (or tame) “the beast,” he said, helping Christians to reject notions of sexuality as “a beast or a slippery slope which is … uncontrollable.”12

Yoder’s speculative project, arising as part of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, coincided with widening societal expectations about consensual sex. Although sexualized violence against women in the United States did not intensify markedly during the sexual revolution, one leading historian of the era notes that “In the new sexual order, the standard for consent had to be renegotiated. Why would a woman say no if sex presumably resulted in no harm? And who would believe that a woman had withheld consent, given new expectations of participation in the sexual revolution?”13 At a historical moment when lines were blurring about what constituted permissible sex, Yoder exploited notions that loosening sexual boundaries portended no harm.

The historian being cited in footnote 13 is Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Hat tip to @GrumpyTheology for this article. Follow her for truth and cat pictures.

Consent and Altsex Culture is another recent gem of a post from Thing of Things, a funny and thought-provoking blog about philosophy, neurodivergence, gender, and nerdy special interests.

…[I]n our culture sex-positivity has a distressing tendency to collapse into compulsory sexuality.

What happens in a lot of cases is something like this: in conventional patriarchal culture, there are people women are supposed to fuck (their husbands) and people women are not supposed to fuck (everyone else). There is a socially legitimate reason for a woman to say ‘no’ to sex to anyone who isn’t her husband. And while there might not be much concept that women can say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands (remember that marital rape only became illegal in every US state in the nineties), most husbands are not rapists, genuinely love and care about their partners, and have no desire to have sex with their wife when she doesn’t want sex. While this is a terrible system in a lot of respects, it did reduce the harm of compulsory sexuality for many women.

Unfortunately, in this system, the natural way to do sex-positivity is to expand the set of people women are supposed to fuck. It is limiting to only have one person you’re supposed to fuck! Now you are supposed to fuck all your friends, or all the people in this intentional community, or everyone! Isn’t that great? We’re helping!

And, of course, if you’re supposed to have sex with a lot more people, then you’re much more likely to have sex with a rapist, or with someone who grew up in a culture that doesn’t give a shit about consent and who doesn’t have any reason to care about your emotional well-being. You’re a stranger, after all.

The worst excesses of the free love movement in the sixties birthed radical feminism, which instituted the rule that sex that one person involved did not want is rape. Most alternative sexuality communities seem to work under a similar rule today. This is a serious improvement, which I am not going to criticize.

However, I worry that a lot of alternative sexuality culture lends itself well to compulsory sexuality in more subtle ways…

…How can we fix this problem? I think part of the solution is just talking about it and trying to be aware of the pressures in our communities and the way that they make some people feel unwelcome. Another part is to explicitly work on including not just the sluts but the prudes in sex positivity– not just the people who want sex more or in different ways than society approves of, but the people who want sex less or don’t like some of the socially accepted kinds of sex. (Not, of course, that these are mutually exclusive.) And I do wonder if there are any simple changes we could make in communities dominated by kinky, poly, slutty, cuddle-prone etc. people to make them more welcoming to vanilla, asexual, monogamous, low-libido, not-in-favor-of-cuddling-strangers etc. people, without sacrificing our own needs and values.

Ozy’s blog is an unusual place: the comments are intelligent, and trolling is swiftly stopped. The ones below this post are worth a read. And of course feel free to share your own experiences and suggested solutions in my comments box too.

Julian Gets Around: New “Two Natures” Reviews and Author Interviews

The countdown continues to the launch of Two Natures on September 15! Readings are scheduled for New York City, Northampton, and Greenfield, MA this fall. Watch this space or visit our Facebook page for exact times and directions. With guidance from The Frugal Book Promoter, I’ve garnered some encouraging pre-publication reviews and author interviews online. Here are the latest stops on Julian’s PR tour.

Our Queer Art, a project of Canada’s QueerDeer Media, profiled me on July 27. An excerpt from the interview:

What do you define yourself as? Or do you not? Why/Why not?
I define myself as a creative artist whose medium is writing. A revelatory and sometimes painful aspect of writing Two Natures was facing the truth that this identity is more fundamental than other labels that I thought would fit me forever, including “Christian” and “female”.

How long have you been practicing?
I’ve been a writer since before I could write! I dictated my first poems to my parents when I was about 4. They were about fairy princesses, of course.

What interests you about your medium or why do you use this medium?
I grew up in a family that loved books. The magic of communing with characters from an intangible world was my first, and (I’m finally realizing) my most formative, spiritual experience. It’s a great honor to be able to practice that magic myself.

What kind of work do you want to create, or what work are you inspired by that you would like to strive for/emulate?
I am inspired by artists who challenge binary thinking, whose work offers both sensual pleasure and an intelligent perspective on the human condition. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and The Goldfinch are ambitious in this way: action melodramas that are also philosophical treatises on the troubled relationship between art and morality. So are some of my favorite works of fiction that blend horror and political critique, such as George Saunders’ Pastoralia, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (a Cthulhu Mythos pastiche set in the Jim Crow South), and Jenna Leigh Evans’ Prosperity (an American dystopia set in debtor’s prison, winner of our 2015 Winning Writers North Street Book Prize for genre fiction). The poetry collections that are touchstones for me include Atlantis by Mark Doty, The Cow by Ariana Reines, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and Live or Die by Anne Sexton.

Trudie Barreras, a popular Amazon Vine reviewer, gave Two Natures a 5-star review on Goodreads:

…[T]his book offers an amazing level of honesty and insight. Like the earlier work of Patricia Nell Warren, Reiter’s representation of gay male psychology and eroticism is clear-eyed and unabashed. Although her descriptions of male-male sexual encounters are no more explicit than the similar descriptions of heterosexual lovemaking in many modern-day romances, some readers may find this unpalatable. To them, I can only say, “Get over it, people!”

Although Reiter is investigating the link between sexuality and spirituality in this narrative, as well as presenting a deeply incisive exploration of the social and cultural aspects of the urban LGBTQ community during the AIDS crisis, she is not heavy-handed or in any way “preachy”. Her main characters and many of the peripheral cast members are sympathetically and vividly described. Julian himself is voiced with wry and biting humor.

A trigger warning: for those who, like me, have “been there and done that” with respect to losing dear ones to AIDS, and who have experienced the anger, disgust and grief resulting from the vicious and callous rejection of gays – especially those stricken with HIV – by the so-called Christian establishment, the honesty of this book is stark…

Book blogger Amos Lassen wrote in this July 13 review:

It is a pleasure to read a novel that is literary in all of its aspects. I also found that the issue of faith that is so important to me is beautifully handled here… We all know someone like Julian and many of us see ourselves in him. The highest praise that I can give this book is to say that ‘I love it’ and I do. Julian is an everyman and in that he is a composite of so many gay personalities. You owe to yourselves to read this wonderful novel.

A.M. Leibowitz, author of the excellent gay Christian novel Passing on Faith and many others, scored Two Natures 10 out of 10 fountain pens in this Aug. 1 review and author interview. She doesn’t let Julian off the hook for his moral failings, though!

This is a difficult book for me to review. On the one hand, despite its length, it’s surprisingly fast-paced. There isn’t a lot of wasted space; everything has a purpose, so it doesn’t feel as though it’s lagging anywhere in terms of moving forward. The writing style is superior, in the style of the best literary fiction. At the same time, my reaction to it is very much along those lines—I’m not here to be entertained by this book. It’s not a feel-good love story or a tale of tragedy-to-triumph. It’s meant to be appreciated mainly for its historical value and technically skilled craftsmanship. For a number of reasons (the heavy topics, the highly literary style, the depth of the psychology), this is one to read with a group for the purpose of discussion.

There’s a lot covered in this novel, and the title says it best. Everything in Julian’s life is split, and he spends most of the story trying to make whole the things he sees as fractured. Despite the fact that there’s a sub-thread about the religion of his youth, it actually doesn’t factor in much beyond his musings until near the end. However, his broken trust in his faith and family of origin drive nearly every other relationship he has. It’s vital for people of faith to read this with the understanding of how religious institutions create and contribute to the oppression specifically of the LGBT community…

…Ultimately, I could probably talk for days about this book because it’s impossible to capture everything about such a dense read in a short review. My own personal grievances with the characters aside, I do think this is a phenomenal work, and I highly recommend it. It should be required reading if for no other reason than that we’ve already forgotten what life was like in those days.

Love Julian or hate him? Pick up a free copy and find out. Join the Goodreads M/M Romance Group and sign up for the “Don’t Buy My Love” giveaway starting August 25! Fifteen e-book copies of Two Natures are on offer in exchange for an honest review.

Nonbinary Femme Thoughts

Coming out is peculiar when you don’t know what you are yet. I’ve been having a lot of conversations like this: “Um… I wanted to tell you… I’m decided I’m genderqueer now? But I’m not going to do anything about it? Like, I still use female pronouns and my husband likes boobs, so…” At which point my patient and understanding friends (because I’ve fired all of the other kind) smile and say that’s cool, and we go back to eating our fried rice.

The confusion is mainly in my own mind. I am certain of the reality of my masculine other self (he wrote a whole novel, after all) and my lifelong discomfort with assumptions that I should feel at home in women-only spaces. Beyond that, though, I struggle with the fear that this is all ridiculous unless I operationalize it somehow.

One problem is my limited imagination about what non-surgical genderqueerness looks like. I picture slender, androgynous, man-tailored women like these Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s. I’d love to be them, but I don’t have that kind of body. I’d rather be a man who’s masculine enough to wear purple ruffles and eyeliner, like the late great musician Prince. That wasn’t in the cards for this lifetime either. When I dress femme, with a curvy female figure, I brace myself for being challenged that my queer identity isn’t real. But I don’t want to split the difference and wear asexual clothing, as I was pressured to do as a teenager because my mother didn’t think I was pretty enough to show my body. If I never see another plaid flannel shirt, it’ll be too soon.

And don’t get me started on the pronouns issue. I respect whatever anyone wants to be called, but for me it’s not worth the effort to insist on something different when people perceive me as a “she/her”. I’m not a “he”, and although I have a lot of personalities, “they” feels too neuter for me. Does that make me less queer? Am I a sell-out for passing?

There’s no getting away from sexism, however one identifies. Androgyny and masculine-of-center styles will be seen as cooler, and more represented in the media, because we’re still struggling with the second-wave feminist critique of femme fashion as inauthentic and oppressive. Magazines and TV prefer to show female-born bodies that are slim enough to get away with flat-chested male clothing, because women are better when they’re smaller, right? Don’t get me wrong, I have a serious crush on Emma from “Once Upon a Time”, but I’d like some gender-bending fashion role models in my size too.

The intersectional feminist website Wear Your Voice offers a fresh perspective. Ashleigh Shackelford writes about reclaiming femme beauty as a plus-size woman of color in “Why I’m Nonbinary But Don’t Use ‘They/Them'”:

Long before I came out as nonbinary, for most of my life, I struggled with gender and gender performance. I spent most of my childhood, adolescence and adulthood being violated for being a Black fat girl. I was often treated as if I was “one of the boys” or an “it” because I wasn’t feminine or girl-enough to be seen as attractive, worthy of being treating like a human, or seen as innocent/controllable. My blackness and fatness and proximity to girlhood was always othered in a way that most others did not experience.

As we see in the media and within our interpersonal spaces, femininity is significantly scripted through whiteness and thinness. I am none of those things. So my body being bigger, being Black and being read as cisgender/ or being assumed to be DFAB (designated “female” at birth) but not being seen as a girl/woman has forced me to grapple with gender in specific and violent ways. As I was growing up, I couldn’t fit into the girl clothing most of the time, so I was forced to shop in the boys’/men’s department to find attire. This alone is a queering of gender, incorporating a lens of fatness as a gender non-conforming quality, because girls’ bodies are supposed to be petite and small, be seen as controllable (fatness reads as “overpowering” to the gaze of masculinity), for consumption but only when you fit within certain beauty and humanity standards. My body was none of those things. And my only opportunity to find ways to present my gender in ways that would allow me to be seen as “more feminine” were denied to me because the clothes that would affirm my girlhood/womanhood were not available in my size…

…I don’t like using they/them pronouns because it feels so foreign to me. It’s really no shade to those who have found a home in they/them, but more so calling into question the terms “gender neutral” and “neutrality” in a world where nothing is neutral or objective, and often all defaults are based in masculinity and whiteness.

Shackelford’s piece reminds us that femme presentation doesn’t mean the same thing to all women. It’s forced on some of us and denied to others. Like Shackelford, I got all the downside of being perceived as female (body-policing, tone-policing, constant threat of harassment) without any validation that my gender performance was successful. When I put on lipstick and skirts, I thought I looked like Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie”: my body was too clunky, assertive, and large to be pretty. When I put on button-down shirts and corduroy pants, I felt childish and drab next to the other girls in high school. I was afraid I’d be mistaken for a lesbian and never get married. (Life’s little ironies.)

S.E. Smith, who blogs about gender and disability issues, expands on the topic of sexism and identity role models in the 2015 post “Beyond the Binary: Yes, Nonbinary Femmes Exist” . The piece takes aim at some of my negative self-talk about passing and femininity:

[I]t’s troubling that in general culture, only a very narrow range of people are treated and presented as nonbinary. If we’re to believe things like art projects that claim to be documenting nonbinary lives, nonbinary people aren’t fat, they don’t have breasts and hips. They present mostly masculine, perhaps with a slightly fey appearance. Perhaps some look vaguely like butchy women — but nonbinary femmes are nowhere to be seen, and when they try to assert themselves and speak out about their identities, they’re often treated very harshly.

In other words, they’re caught in the same antifemininity trap that women have to deal with, where feminine gender performance and expression is sneered at and deemed lesser. Which is incredibly misogynist — it’s effectively saying that women who are interested in makeup or who wear dresses or who like heels are somehow less worthy by nature of their femininity. This should trouble people who think this way and claim to be concerned about gender politics, but it doesn’t.

Nonbinary femmes are misgendered constantly, forcibly labeled as women even when people are corrected. Their preferred pronouns are ignored and people treat them as women in social and political settings. People attempt to suppress their work and personal expression, exclude them from trans spaces, and erase their very presence, which is incredibly isolating for nonbinary femmes, who are left struggling with their gender entirely on their own. If you don’t see any people who look like you talking about the things you’re trying to deal with, it’s really difficult to come to terms with them.

If you’re uneasy in an identity as a woman but everyone calls you a woman, you might have trouble thinking  of yourself as nonbinary — and when you turn to resources for the trans community to explore gender identity, you might see that none of the bodies represented there are like yours. In a community that’s allegedly diverse and complex, you’re tossed aside and treated like garbage, or even a pretender. Nonbinary femmes, you see, are just special snowflakes who want to have their cake and eat it too, dressing up like women and enjoying ‘passing privilege’ but still claiming a marginalised identity.

Things are much more complicated than that, as nonbinary femmes know. It can be incredibly stressful to live, move, and act on the margins of a society that repeatedly tells you that you don’t exist, and repeatedly erases your identity.

I’m unusually lucky to live in the Five Colleges region, whose culture is on the cutting edge of gender diversity issues. For me, most of the erasure is self-inflicted and internalized. At queer and transgender community events, I’ve seen plus-sized femme people wearing flamboyantly sexy, tight, wonderful clothing that I would never have dared to wear when I was their age. They make me feel I’ve found a place without body-policing, which is almost like a place without sexism.

I like the word “bigender” even though my eyes keep reading it as “big gender”. Or maybe that’s why. I have BIG gender. Too much to pick only one. Ekundayo Afolayan talks about this in their entertaining article for The Establishment, “My Genderqueer Quest for the Perfect Detachable Penis”:

From childhood into my teens, I learned that I had to be “feminine”—meaning big-breasted, with a flat belly, straight hair, and light skin. I kept myself clean-shaven, and stayed out of the sun so my brown skin wouldn’t get darker. I feared being seen as “butch,” or even expressing my interest in girls. I tied myself down with misogyny, and my sexual freedom went with it.

Being Black made my feelings about femininity even more complex. Viewed as a fat Black woman, I was both hypersexualized and desexualized by my peers. I was also keenly aware that my recent ancestors were never granted the right to be seen as feminine, so avoiding femininity made me feel guilty. I felt like I was throwing away something precious.

When I turned 14, my hold on gender norms broke. I developed chronic hirsutism. That meant thick tufts of hair all over my chin, a full mustache and thick sideburns and hard-to-lose weight. Not Western society’s ideal of “ladylike.” I felt ashamed. It wasn’t until I was in my last year of high school that I started to accept who I was. I was never completely a woman—I felt like a man, too, sometimes. Accepting myself as multi-gendered meant that my relationship with femininity became simpler. Still, my complicated relationship with detachable dicks was only beginning…

…[W]ith the discovery of Tumblr and my move to college, I was able to name who I was: bigender. I felt free!

Still, something was missing. I struggled with dysphoria, the sense that my body is fundamentally “wrong.” I’ve been taught all my life that I have to be soft and hairless, “feminine” in all the obvious physical ways. Men are supposed to be tall, muscular, with penises, flat chests and full of machismo. I didn’t know how I could break free of those norms. How could I, a person with wide hips, big breasts and long, flowing hair, ever been seen as a man?

I tried to hide. I tried costuming myself in ultra-femme clothes, cat-like nail tips and rouge lipstick, but it made me feel like people saw me as a joke: a “man” with not only a pussy, but also long nails and meticulous eyeliner. Sometimes I layered my clothes to hide my curves, but I couldn’t perform enough to convince people I wasn’t a woman. Finally, I realized that I needed to stop costuming and performing for cis-het folks, seeking their validation, trying to conform to their rules. I decided only I could validate myself. I don’t have to be anything for anyone but myself.

Some days I feel like my breasts don’t “fit” me, and other days they’re the perfect accessory; maybe I want to wear a binder one day and a push-up bra the next. Now that I know who I am, that doesn’t feel like a contradiction. These are all parts of my self-definition, which comes from within. I’m more than a man, and I’m more than a woman: I’m a singular experience. Some days I want be penetrated, and other days I want to top with the perfect dick. Which is why I now know that I have to push forward and find the perfect dick for me.

It feels like an act of rebellion to even search for the perfect dick—to know that one day, I will earn it. I will hand-select every single part of that dick and treat it right. I don’t need to show that I have a penis in order to be validated as a man, but I want one, for myself, in order to feel whole.

Read the whole thing for tips on how to find your missing piece. I recommend Toys of Eros in P-Town. (Of course I’m such a size queen that my new buddy doesn’t fit in my jeans. Time to try wearing skirts again?)

Book Notes: Queering Sexual Violence

The new anthology Queering Sexual Violence (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016), edited by Jennifer Patterson, is a must-read for social service providers, activists, policymakers, and anyone who studies child abuse and intimate partner violence. It includes personal essays, poems, artwork, and hybrid-genre pieces by Sinclair Sexsmith, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sassafras Lowrey, the late Chloe Dzubilo, and 32 others.

The book fills a gap in the common understanding of abuse as something that men do to women and children, and as a social problem best solved through legislation and policing. This familiar picture excludes survivors for whom the carceral state does not routinely offer justice: people of color, the disabled and neurodiverse, and of course the many LGBTQ people who hesitate to out themselves to the police and the courts, fearing that their victimization will only be compounded. (Think, for instance, of the Orlando Pulse shooting victim whose homophobic father refused to claim his body.) QSV is first of all intersectional, with a diverse list of contributors who explore the ways that both victims and perpetrators may need liberation from the web of oppression that binds them together.

Some of my favorite pieces confronted the question, taboo in mainstream “Born This Way” LGBTQ discourse, of causal links between trauma and sexual orientation/gender identity. Lately I’m haunted by the question of whether I’d be genderqueer if I hadn’t been abused by my mother, particularly her controlling and shaming of my gender presentation and sexual maturation. Who is that mythical woman I might have become in a happy family? Am I allowing my mother to steal my womanhood along with my childhood? Is my lifelong wish for my uterus to wander away forever a self-harming trauma reaction?

Funny thing, though, I never ask myself (nor am I asked by anyone else) whether I’m legitimately heterosexual, or whether my disinterest in sex with women is a trigger that I should overcome. Both trauma and queerness are stigmatized, deemed to be in need of explanation, and so I’m always tempted to split or disclaim these parts of myself. As Pam Mack writes in her piece on “Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse”:

While I believe that my personal development was harmed by the abuse [by her mother and grandmother], I can still claim as mine the preferences I have evolved, whatever combination of innate, abuse-conditioned and the product of growth and healing they may be. And I can let them change over time, if I want. Knowing this hopefully provides another way of moving towards a culture in which a wide range of choices are seen as valid, even ones that may have been shaped by abuse… It is freeing not to feel I have a responsibility to make myself as normal as possible. Aren’t we all shaped by pain? (pg.57)

Jennifer Patterson’s essay “These Bones” also showed me I wasn’t alone in this struggle:

The conscious and unconscious ways people pervert sexual and gender identity through the lens of abuse has been something I have experienced consistently since I began identifying as queer and a survivor. Those who wish to render me deviant search for sources of my “illness,” a root for my queerness. They quickly find it when they learn I am a survivor. Not only is my queerness “understood,” then, it is sometimes challenged for validity. As in: maybe I am not really queer, maybe I am just damaged. I reject all of the judgments placed on my body and my relationships. The need to validate my sexual identity did not exist when I was in “straight” relationships with cisgender men…

…To believe that people “become” queer by way of violent exposure also informs a false idea of safety within our queer communities. When people imagine that I “became” queer because of the violence I experienced, not only do they believe that violence made me queer, it’s as if they believe that queer people don’t experience or perpetuate violence. This is not even close to being true. (pg.105)

(I think she means “perpetrate” rather than “perpetuate”; the book could have benefited from more careful copyediting and proofreading.)

Amita Yalgi Swadhin’s essay “Queering Child Sexual Abuse” considers flipping the causation around:

…[Q]ueer people who are willing to be out about our sexual orientation are already seen as non-normative. In a way, we have less to lose by also coming out as survivors of child sexual abuse than straight people do, since survivorship is in and of itself a queer (non-normative) identity.

And therein lie our opportunities.

We now know that, regardless of sexual orientation, people who exhibited gender non-conforming (or genderqueer) behavior in childhood were at a much higher risk of sexual abuse to begin with… The risk of experiencing sexual abuse for gender-non-conforming boys is especially alarming, at rates two to six times higher than gender conforming boys… If more queer survivors tell our stories publicly, we may be able to bring this data to life and pressure prevention and intervention efforts to account for the higher risk of sexual abuse that genderqueer youth (many of whom are not straight) face. (pg.219)

Meanwhile, Jen LaBarbera’s essay “Welcome Effects: When Sexual Violence Turns Girls Queer” embraces her attraction to women as one of the good things that came out of her abuse by her brother. She challenges both LGBTQ and survivor communities to drop the respectability politics that de-legitimize her experience.

The anthology includes many other good pieces on the healing aspects of kink/BDSM, alternatives to the prison-industrial complex, the intersection of personal and societal trauma from racism and poverty, and how we can keep ourselves safe without handing over our perpetrators to an oppressive system. Follow @QSVAnthology on Twitter for related articles, giveaways, and news of upcoming readings.

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “High School in the Fifties”

Reiter’s Block subscriber Donal Mahoney offers us this thoughtful poem prompted by this weekend’s hate crime against queer Latin@ clubgoers in Orlando.

High School in the Fifties

In my all-boys school
sixty years ago there were
two boys who were different.
All four years they walked
to classes together, books
clasped to their chests
the way girls walked home
carrying theirs.

I never saw another
classmate talk to them,
perhaps because like me
they didn’t know what to say
or they had nothing to say.
But I never heard anyone
talk about them either.
It was as if they weren’t there.

Now 60 years later
the school sends out
alumni updates and lists
the two of them as missing
and asks if anyone might
know where they are.
I doubt that anyone does.
We didn’t know where
they were back then.

***

Author’s note: “Donal Mahoney attended a Roman Catholic boys-only high school in the early fifties. The Orlando massacre reminded him of two apparently gay classmates from six decades ago. There were probably other gays in the school as well who did not fit the same stereotype. These two classmates were never picked on to his knowledge and they were not shunned, either. He feels to this day straight kids at that time simply did not know how to communicate with them nor had any interest in doing so just as there were some straight kids who did not ‘fit in’ as well. There was no bullying because neither the administration nor the students would have tolerated that kind of behavior. If you wanted to heckle someone, he had to appear to be your equal physically. It was not a good time for anyone who was different but maybe just a little better than today.”

I wonder about that last claim. Speaking for myself, even in the 1980s, in a liberal arts school in Brooklyn, I didn’t know any students who were “out”, though in retrospect I can guess at a few. That didn’t make it a safe space from bullies, by any means. One could argue that with greater visibility comes greater backlash, but perhaps there were just as many hate crimes that were not reported as such, because sexual and gender identities were not an acceptable discussion topic. Our erasure from history is a loss that continues to affect the current generation of LGBTQ kids. In any case, I appreciate this poem’s effort to bring those long-ago boys into the light of acceptance and truth.

No More Queer Martyrs: Mourning the Orlando Nightclub Shooting

In the early hours of Sunday morning, a gunman massacred 50 people and critically wounded 53 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, during Latin@ Night. News reports are calling it the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the worst terrorist attack since 9/11. There is preliminary evidence suggesting that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was a sympathizer of the radical Islamist group ISIS. Other articles mention his ex-wife’s allegations that he violently abused her, which raises the question of how he passed a background check to own assault weapons. (The answer being that this is America.)

I can’t stay silent, yet I can’t find the words.

The script we follow for these never-ending gun homicides is tedious and heartbreaking. Everyone seeks to harness this deadly energy for political change, in some cases by scapegoating another victimized group (Muslim-Americans, the mentally ill), in other cases by hoping that this time the suffering will be great enough to strengthen gun control laws and end the hateful rhetoric against Latin@ immigrants and LGBTQ people.

I just don’t believe it anymore. I don’t see hate being turned to love, or even to repentance, by our spilled blood. I start to gag when I read yet another gay Christian blogger pleading with their conservative brethren, “Won’t you care about us now?” This appeal assumes that those who preach a death sentence against homosexuals don’t really mean it. That they are only negligent and not intentional in dreaming of a world where queer brown people are wiped out. No, take them at their word. People who’ve made peace with the prospect of eternal conscious torment for nonbelievers are too numb, or worse, to notice a few more bodies lying in the street.

We all look for patterns to extrapolate from these shattering traumas, for life lessons that could keep us safe from another terrible surprise. This instant de-centering of the actual victims is part of what bothers me about the heated conversations in my Facebook and Twitter feeds today. I’m hesitant to write the next lines because I don’t want to co-opt this tragedy for my own agenda, either.

This is my personal struggle, in the aftermath of Orlando: It feels like another nail in the coffin of my belief in the Christian God. The moral logic of the Cross seems to have failed. The suffering of innocents is not effective to awaken the conscience of the persecutors. There is not some guaranteed maximum number of lives lost or ruined, past which no wrongdoer’s heart can stay hardened.

Prove me wrong, America.

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June Links Roundup: Bathroom Walls

Bathrooms and discrimination have a long history together in America. Restricting bathroom access is a way to limit a minority group’s freedom of movement and their ability to exist in the public sphere. The debate over access can taint the minority group by association with the taboo subject of bodily functions, reinforcing the prejudice that these bodies are contaminated or inappropriately visible.

Kathryn Stockett’s popular novel The Help has been fairly criticized for centering a white-savior character, but my eyes and heart were opened by its depiction of the everyday indignities suffered by African-American domestic workers in the South in the 1960s. A flash point in the novel is one bigoted white woman’s campaign to make her Junior League cronies build separate outdoor toilets for their nonwhite employees. This arbitrary rule served no purpose but to signal the unworthiness of certain bodies, to punish them for having the most basic human needs.

Similarly, in Matt Ruff’s excellent new horror/satire novel Lovecraft Country, set in the Jim Crow 1950s, one of the main characters publishes The Safe Negro Travel Guide, the product of sometimes life-threatening research into which towns, motels, gas station bathrooms, and restaurants will tolerate African-American travelers. The protagonists’ run-ins with a secret society of white occultists are less troublesome than the effort to find a safe place to pee on a road trip between Florida and Illinois. The rules are set up to make it physically impossible for a black person to not break the law: either you’re arrested for using a white bathroom, or for loitering when you pull over to use the bushes.

This history should make us skeptical of the current manufactured panic over transgender bathroom use. I personally would prefer not to pee in bathrooms where anyone, of whatever gender expression, is using a urinal without walls around it, but I think it’s ridiculous and offensive to suggest that gendered bathrooms protect people from rapists. See, for example, this anonymous guest column for the British blog The Queerness, “Toilet transphobia: Sexual assault is not your weapon to wield” (trigger warning for rape description). The author was victimized in the public restroom of a bar:

I am a cisgender gay man. I was attacked by another man. This means that I am forced to undergo an incredibly painful process of re-adaptation to what should be the very banal everyday task of relieving myself when not in the comfort of my own home.

This is why I am so angry at those that would seek to deny trans people the right to use the appropriate toilets. It infuriates me that transphobes would effectively appropriate the trauma of sexual assault for their own nefarious purposes…

…The bottom line is this: I do not have the option of banning other men from public toilets on the grounds that men sometimes sexually assault other men there. Even if there were documented incidents of trans women assaulting cisgender women in such environments (there are literally none), the heinous actions of a minority should never lead to the collective punishment of an entire group. Terrible deeds are perpetrated by terrible people in a variety of scenarios and in all manner of circumstances.

Meanwhile, Buzzfeed columnist Shannon Keating connects the dots between civil rights issues then and now, in the recent piece “The Past Hundred Years of Gender-Segregated Public Restrooms”. Keating notes that separate women’s facilities (often inadequate compared to the number of men’s toilets in the same workplace) were first added to public buildings in the late 19th century because of Victorian paternalism towards white women in particular:

As women became more active in various aspects of public life, they had to be fitted into the interstitial spaces of a world that had not been built for them. (Male) architects and (male) city planners began to section off areas for them to exist out in the world, but without radically disrupting the precious social fabric of Man’s Land. These male decision-makers created separate spaces for women in everything from railroad cars to department stores to post offices…

…But of course, these comfortable, domestic, and hygienic safe havens were only ever afforded to white women. Decades before the “men in dresses will attack vulnerable ladies” ruse would be used to justify anti-trans bathroom discrimination, insinuations that racially desegregating public restrooms would harm white women proved a formidable barrier to achieving civil rights for black Americans. Today’s bugbear of the queer sexual deviant is directly preceded by the profoundly racist assumption, popularized after World War II, that black men would prey on white women should racial parity be established in public restrooms. As Gillian Frank detailed last November for Slate, the perceived sexual threat of sharing bathrooms with black people was coupled with a sanitary one — white women “emphasized that contact with black women in bathrooms would infect them with venereal diseases.” While separate women’s restrooms were indeed the product of sexist beliefs regarding women’s fragility and (lack of) power, white women were still afforded far more favorable restroom conditions than women of color — conditions they maintained for themselves through racist fearmongering.

Keating goes on to observe that our current bathroom arrangements also protect traditional masculinity at the expense of women and queer people. Our favorite movies reinforce the problem:

Public restrooms — and, perhaps even more strongly so, locker rooms — have always operated in the cultural imagination as sites of strict gender roles and compulsive heterosexuality…

…popular culture has long established tropes associated with each restroom. The men’s room is a place for aggressive macho posturing, bullying the weak, and artfully avoiding eye contact; women’s rooms, meanwhile, are hyper-feminine places for girls to get primped, gossip, cry, and avoid boys — boys who, in turn, fantasize about what goes on behind the closed girls’ room door. A number of ’80s teen movies, from Pretty in Pink to Porky’s to Fame, include scenes (which have inspired countless others) involving guys attempting to see into or enter the girls’ bathroom — and they either play the attempt for laughs or treat deeply creepy peeping Tom behavior with a cavalier “boys will be boys” shrug. While queer men in bathrooms are a threat, straight men are just guys doing what guys do.

In the shift from drama and comedy to horror, the bathroom becomes ground zero for violence against women. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho,the most famous bathroom scene in cinematic history involves a woman in the shower getting stabbed to death by Norman Bates, a notoriously genderqueer bad guy. In what’s arguably the other most famous bathroom scene of all time, The Shining’s Jack corners Wendy in the bathroom and proceeds to hack his way in. David Cronenberg’s Shivers, from 1975, features an absolutely repulsive scene involving a parasite that crawls up the bathroom drain and between a woman’s legs. And speaking of ’80s teen movies again, Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street gets an unwelcome visit from Freddy Krueger while she’s in the bath. If they want to avoid spiders and grudge monsters, women in horror films would do best to avoid the bathroom altogether. These scenes manage to sexualize the vulnerable and violated female body, while also suggesting that the Victorian paternalism of yore might still apply according to the fantastical versions of our modern conceptions: Women still need protecting.

Hollywood’s depiction of the bathroom reveals it to be one of the most powerful physical and social spaces when it comes to both revealing and informing our cultural anxieties around gender, bodily shame, abjection, disease, and sexual deviance. Just as the Equal Rights Amendment lost essential footing in the ’70s due to infamous counterprotestsclaiming that banning gender discrimination would result in unisex toilets (which, protesters cried, would enable sexual predators), so, too, have today’s social conservatives driven anti-trans panic by insisting that gender-neutral bathrooms would give (queer/trans) aggressors free rein to prey on girls. The mixing of genders in bathrooms, so our pop-cultural scripts go, results in awkward gags at best and rape and murder at worst. Anti-trans bathroom bills are, in part, the product of pop culture’s queerphobic and transphobic scripts…

…What we actually take for granted is why, exactly, public restrooms are segregated in the first place. We assume building codes are purely objective, rooted in science and dictated by function. Separated restrooms, in their guise of objectivity, only manage to reinforce age-old essentialist notions of binary gender difference. What would it mean to break down those walls?

The predator bogeyman — the impetus behind a million anti-trans petition signatures; a villain as potent, and as pretend, as Freddy Krueger — is not at the true heart of the bathroom maelstrom. Those who oppose equitable bathrooms are presumably far more afraid of what trans people represent than the nonexistent physical threat they pose. The expansive, complex, never-ending potential of gender, which separated bathrooms have veiled with the lie of their form-follows-function objectivity, is arguably what anti-trans protesters are trying to suppress — along with, of course, the fundamental fact of trans people’s humanity. Under the pretense of “privacy” and “safety,” social conservatives are stoking cultural anxieties around bodily privacy, genitalia, and sexual deviance in order to keep trans people from participating in the public sphere, a fate of bathroom exclusion that befell women, people of color, families, and disabled people before them. The bogus fear of an aggressor is, at root, most likely the fear of the Other gaining power.

Right now in my home state of Massachusetts, the Senate has passed an important bill to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity in public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, stores, hospitals, transportation, etc.). The House will hear debate on this legislation on June 1. Look for #TransBillMA on Twitter and visit the Freedom Massachusetts website for updates. If you live in MA and are transgender or gender-nonconforming, Freedom Massachusetts can use your stories of how you’ve been affected by discrimination in public places. Please contact them. Everyone else, talk to your legislators, and donate to support this historic campaign.

 

Winners of the 2016 ASPS David Kato Prize for LGBT-Themed Poetry

David Kato was an Ugandan activist for the rights of sexual minorities, who was killed in a probable hate crime in 2011. For several years since then, I’ve sponsored this prize for poems on the theme of LGBT human rights, as part of the Alabama State Poetry Society award series. Thanks to award coordinator Jerri Hardesty, 2016 First Prize winner Christine Riddle, and Third Prize winner Lynn Veach Sadler, for permission to reprint these winning entries. (The last line of each stanza of Christine’s poem is indented; apologies if that does not show up properly on this blog template.)

Defixio in the Heartland
by Christine Riddle

A curse tablet or binding spell (‘defixio’ in Latin) is a type of curse found throughout the Graeco-Roman world, in which someone would ask the gods to do harm to others. These texts were typically scratched on very thin sheets of lead in tiny letters, then placed in tombs or nailed to the walls of temples. Some texts do not invoke the gods, but merely list the target of the curse, the crime and the intended ill to befall them.

Elvis is dead,
and Barney and Floyd,
Bella, Princess, and Ethel.
And Buddy, still wobbly on legs one week old,
and Love, ironically, full with foal.

Epona alone the vigil kept
that Paschal eve. As Lucifer crept
from stall to stall,
she crafted from her cloak nine palls.
With roses white she plaited manes,
anointed with her tears each blaze,
fed them apples from her lap,
and stroked the cat.

But where was god that Easter morn
when daybreak found the stable door,
when dawn exposed the binding spell,
seared and scorched but legible,
“FAGGOTS ARE FREAKS” “BURN IN HELL”,
when loving a man was deemed the sin
that sparked the blaze made starlight dim,
and trapped the innocents within?

I’d like to think that at sunrise,
to consecrate the sacrifice,
as feathered cantors’ chants arose
he joined the blessed requiem
amid the smoldering skeletons,
and sang their spirits home again.
And sang their spirits home.

****

He/She
by Lynn Veach Sadler

He was my mentee in poetry.
A brilliant nerd, IT Specialist.
I was the first to cotton to the coming change,
had some small part in helping prepare the way,
was proud that a computer whiz would be female,
that a poet would have the opportunity
to live and sing the lives of male and female.

People talked, pointed fingers,
Though he had been appreciated, even loved,
for his long hours, individual help,
extraordinary expertise…

He/She was quiet, dignified,
kept all under wraps as those in power cautioned
until consent was gained to show herself
in heels, wig, dress…And she was (is) beautiful.

All seemed well when my husband and I moved away.
Then I heard that she’d been fired. I quested,
learned the story from her, was pledged to secrecy
but know the hurt, the plunge not just to ignominy
but poverty. She’s doing whatever job she can find,
now wearing Stoic, intent upon surviving
(will survive if worth and goodness have their day).
Will funding be found to complete the change?

We received a Christmas card from a friend
at the place we moved from,
the place where He/She used to work.
Among the enclosed messages was this:
He/She “got fired because of her alleged
inclination to watch porno on the computer.”
Not so!

“Two Natures” Cover Reveal!

AppleMark

Many thanks to Don Mitchell at Saddle Road Press for creating this gorgeous photo montage and patiently working with me through a dozen revisions.

From the publisher’s website: “This big, genre-bending, spiritual coming-of-age novel focuses on Julian Selkirk, a young gay fashion photographer in New York City in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Vivid social realism, enriched by unforgettable characters, eroticism, and wit, make this a satisfying read of the highest sort.”

Want an advance reading copy? Email me or contact the publisher. Print and Kindle editions available.