A Change of Title / New Query Letter, Too
I've changed the title of my book.
Well, the portion after the colon-is that more properly referred to as its subtitle?
OLD: The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale
NEW: The Story of Q: From a Queerly Different Closet
To explain why, I am going to have to drop back and explain why the original title. As I said in my introductory post on this blog, I've taken to using the term "genderqueer" but it doesn't really explain much. That the term exists seems to me a good thing. A single-word method of saying "different in some other as-of-yet unspecified way". That's useful in and of itself, although it's akin to saying "etcetera" is a specific type of expense in my budget. The implication is that you'd have to dig deeper and bring it into sharper focus before the finer, more granular categories will appear on your screen, and that worked for me as a premise for the book since it delivers on that.
But more to the point (he confesses), it's a trendy new term. It's a current phenomenon, people using that term as description of themselves. So my thinking was that literary agents and publishers might be alert for an inside story from such a person and hence would seize my cover letter and say "Aha!" when they read my pitch for the story.
Well, 200 query letters later, I found myself having serious second thoughts about that. My pitch isn't bad and it definitely conveys what the book's going to be about, so if agents were actively looking for a genderqueer memoir or coming-out story, it seems like more of them would have requested a peek at the manuscript.
OR, perhaps, those who are indeed on the lookout for a story of that ilk are being turned away by the realization that I am not a twenty-something. (My cover letter does make that apparent). As I said, it's a trendy new term. Most of the people using it to refer to themselves are young. I can visualize an agent scanning my letter and tossing it into the slush pile, thinking "Yeah, I could go with a story like that, but it has to be from the target audience of genderqueer folks who would buy it and read it, and they are not going to want to read about a middle-aged guy who says he's one of them".
Then there's this: as I've sought out people to be early readers or people with whom to discuss these issues, the ones whose personal stories are the most like mine do not call themselves "genderqueer". Some say "transgender", some say "it's complicated, it's something else, I don't have a name for it", much as I've said all my life. The people who actually call themselves "genderqueer", although none have said "No, you shouldn't call yourself that", are more likely to be "anti-gender" people, "I do not have a gender" people, or "sometimes I am this, sometimes I am that" gendered people.
Here's the new version of the query letter I'm using (it's not very different, actually):
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: FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET.
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.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
Well, the portion after the colon-is that more properly referred to as its subtitle?
OLD: The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale
NEW: The Story of Q: From a Queerly Different Closet
To explain why, I am going to have to drop back and explain why the original title. As I said in my introductory post on this blog, I've taken to using the term "genderqueer" but it doesn't really explain much. That the term exists seems to me a good thing. A single-word method of saying "different in some other as-of-yet unspecified way". That's useful in and of itself, although it's akin to saying "etcetera" is a specific type of expense in my budget. The implication is that you'd have to dig deeper and bring it into sharper focus before the finer, more granular categories will appear on your screen, and that worked for me as a premise for the book since it delivers on that.
But more to the point (he confesses), it's a trendy new term. It's a current phenomenon, people using that term as description of themselves. So my thinking was that literary agents and publishers might be alert for an inside story from such a person and hence would seize my cover letter and say "Aha!" when they read my pitch for the story.
Well, 200 query letters later, I found myself having serious second thoughts about that. My pitch isn't bad and it definitely conveys what the book's going to be about, so if agents were actively looking for a genderqueer memoir or coming-out story, it seems like more of them would have requested a peek at the manuscript.
OR, perhaps, those who are indeed on the lookout for a story of that ilk are being turned away by the realization that I am not a twenty-something. (My cover letter does make that apparent). As I said, it's a trendy new term. Most of the people using it to refer to themselves are young. I can visualize an agent scanning my letter and tossing it into the slush pile, thinking "Yeah, I could go with a story like that, but it has to be from the target audience of genderqueer folks who would buy it and read it, and they are not going to want to read about a middle-aged guy who says he's one of them".
Then there's this: as I've sought out people to be early readers or people with whom to discuss these issues, the ones whose personal stories are the most like mine do not call themselves "genderqueer". Some say "transgender", some say "it's complicated, it's something else, I don't have a name for it", much as I've said all my life. The people who actually call themselves "genderqueer", although none have said "No, you shouldn't call yourself that", are more likely to be "anti-gender" people, "I do not have a gender" people, or "sometimes I am this, sometimes I am that" gendered people.
Here's the new version of the query letter I'm using (it's not very different, actually):
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: FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET.
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.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts