My Query-letter, or Pitch: the short and hopefully catchy description of the book
I'm a girl, that's my gender; I'm male, that's my sex; I'm attracted to females, that's my orientation.
I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
In 1980 there was no book I could find by anyone like that. Still isn't. I've written a 95,000-word coming-out memoir, THE STORY OF Q: A GENDERQUEER TALE.
As a child, I admired the girls so I emulated them and competed with them and played with them. By puberty I was being called "faggot" and "queerbait" and beaten up for my presumed sexual preference.
By the age of 21 I was under a lot of pressure to identify myself as something, but there was no term for it at the time. When I did try to come out, the result was incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Newly confident that I was OK, I started a mental patients' uprising and was kicked out for disrupting the facility. I went on to get a college degree in Women's Studies, where same ideas that got me locked up were published in peer-reviewed journals as feminist theory articles.
This story will appeal to fans of Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Chaz Bono's BECOMING CHAZ, and it will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.
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Index of all Blog Posts
I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
In 1980 there was no book I could find by anyone like that. Still isn't. I've written a 95,000-word coming-out memoir, THE STORY OF Q: A GENDERQUEER TALE.
As a child, I admired the girls so I emulated them and competed with them and played with them. By puberty I was being called "faggot" and "queerbait" and beaten up for my presumed sexual preference.
By the age of 21 I was under a lot of pressure to identify myself as something, but there was no term for it at the time. When I did try to come out, the result was incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Newly confident that I was OK, I started a mental patients' uprising and was kicked out for disrupting the facility. I went on to get a college degree in Women's Studies, where same ideas that got me locked up were published in peer-reviewed journals as feminist theory articles.
This story will appeal to fans of Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Chaz Bono's BECOMING CHAZ, and it will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.
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Index of all Blog Posts