Los Alamos NM is where the first third of my story takes place, covering the critical years of puberty and adolescence when questions of gender and sexual orientation emerge from a person’s negotiations towards adult sexual expression.
This weekend, my high school held its 40th reunion. I had not been back to Los Alamos since my parents retired and moved elsewhere, and I hadn’t been to a reunion since the 10th in 1987; so from a combination of nostalgia, a desire to see some people I hadn’t seen in eons, and an opportunistic interest in promoting my book to people who were there for the events portrayed in Part One, I opted in for this one and made the journey.
Hey, it doesn’t take much to get the author of an autobiographical account to start talking about themselves, we’re admittedly rather self-immersed!
I made arrangements to have an author’s table to receive interested visitors and discuss gender issues, growing my genderqueer in Los Alamos, and my forthcoming book specifically, to sign folks up to be alerted when it becomes available for order. And I posted to various relevant Facebook groups so the class of 77 knew about the book and were invited to drop in at the author’s table.
My girlfriend A1 (one of my partners) flew out with me to Albuquerque and we hopped into a rental car. I think I would have managed the journey using the dusty rusty memories of making the drive back in the day, but I was glad to have our GPS along. Northern New Mexico, and the Jemez Mountains in particular, are still heartbreakingly beautiful. Our rental economy car chugged and gasped its way up the road, desperately trying to burn gasoline at 7200 feet; we weren’t doing a whole lot better ourselves, with our six-decades-old, sea-level-acclimated lungs and hearts. I rejoiced in the dryness, mostly, but my lips and my nose were dissenters, chapping up and otherwise protesting the lack of moisture.
•There was an interestingly varied reaction on the part of my former schoolmates to my coming out + book project, but by an overwhelming margin the most common reaction was supportive and congratulatory. People said “you are doing a good thing” or “thank you for this” or “I thought I was the only person who was a gender or orientation minority in Los Alamos, no one talked about it back then”. People said “I remember you and I always thought you were very brave. You were your own person and you stood up for yourself”. People said “Congratulations! When is it coming out? Can I order it yet? Oh, I’m definitely going to buy a copy, I’m looking forward to reading your book”.
•I received one heartfelt apology in private from someone who remembered having participated in harassing me back in the day. He said that looking back on it he viewed his behavior at the time as ignorant and hateful. I found the gesture healing and I did my best to extend the same to him, noting that I hadn’t been very tolerant of masculine boys and their ways and behaviors either, at the time, and my own hostility and judgmental attitude didn’t make me an entirely innocent victim.
• Another person recalled a specific incident from back in 8th grade at Cumbres Junior High: “I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn’t react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head.” I remembered the incident well – I think it was a rather famous incident, in fact, as my neighbor told me when reminiscing a couple years later: “Some people even saved fragments of that lunch tray as souvenirs”. Anyway, I explained to the guy that by the time of the squirt-gun incident I had been bullied and harassed so often that my reactions were pretty shut down, but when I did react it was all out of proportion because it wasn’t about him, it was about the whole ongoing phenomenon, and because he wasn’t stopping. We shook hands, and later he came over to hang out at our table. I hadn’t included that event in the final version of the book but now I’m thinking I should reinsert it: it’s a good example of the way in which all the advice to “not let them see that they’re getting to you” started to show up as me not reacting when things like this happened.
•Perhaps understandably, the event organizers weren’t 100% comfortable with the prospect of a bullying victim returning to the scene and attending an event that would also be attended by some of the participants in my erstwhile victimization. One person wrote, “Please consider that our committee has worked really hard to try to make this a fun reunion, and conjuring up bad feelings about high school or junior high events that were unpleasant puts or efforts in jeopardy.” I had to grin to myself at the image it conjured up, of me returning to settle up 40-45 year old scores as my fellow alumni backed away in horror. “Don’t worry”, I said (reassuringly, I hope), “I’m not going to descend like Maleficent to point my bony finger at people and curse the proceedings. Like everyone else, I’m looking forward to seeing people I haven’t seen in years; this isn’t a vengeance and retribution visit, I promise!”
• People did ask me about the book, not merely at the author’s table but as they came by and (re)introduced themselves. “So I hear you wrote a book?” One couple asked enough questions to get me started (hey, it doesn’t take much to get the author of an autobiographical account to start talking about themselves, we’re admittedly rather self-immersed); in as abbreviated and encapsulated form as I could, I summarized an early life in which I’d identified with the girls and made efforts to not be seen as one of the boys, and had protected myself from hostility and harassment by being a teacher’s pet and embracing adult protection; then had come to Los Alamos in 8th grade just around time time that hormones were kicking in, and I was attracted to the girls. “So the book really revolves around the question of how to negotiate sexual relationships with girls when I had modeled myself as someone just like them, a girlish person myself”. The guy half of the couple didn’t really get it: “So… would you say you’re more gay, then?” Well, there’s a reason I wrote a full-sized book, a representative memoir. It doesn’t encapsulate easily into a quick overview that everyone can follow. In our society we see and interpret things through the lens of how we understand the world, and the world does not have an understanding of how a male person can be a feminine and yet function as a heterosexual person, a male person who would have sexual experiences with female people – any more than I myself did.
• A majority of the people who expressed interest in the book did so in passing rather than at the author’s table I’d booked, so I did not harvest their email addresses. In a separate post to the various FaceBook groups I will invite them to send me their email address and that way I can let them know when the book becomes available and include a direct link to where they can place an order for it.
This a reposting of a blog post, cleared in advance with the moderators.
These echoes of my blog posts do not seem to be of interest on the Dope lately. My inclination is to keep cc’ing IMHO until the end of the year, but if the trend continues I’ll probably recognize the clue and cease and desist at that point. (I do have a tendency to think I’m more interesting than folks around me might consider me to be. It’s quite appalling, actually, that their tastes should lag behind my expectations in that fashion)
Thanks for letting me know!