This will probably be controversial with some people, but today I’ve mulled over these thoughts without ceasing. Now it’s 9:30 at night and I realize if I want to post for International Day Against Homophobia, I’ll have to do it about this.

I think some people would be shocked how much homophobia still exists in the GLBT romantic fiction community.

Do you believe that a porn film featuring two female actors performing sexual acts on each other–when written, directed, and edited by men for a primarily male audience–is always going to present an accurate portrayal of lesbians? Might there still be sexism or homophobia evinced by those men who find themselves aroused by the sight of two women loving each other? Is the production and consumption of F/F pornography inherently of benefit to real lesbians?

There are definitely those men who truly love lesbians and are genuine allies, who staunchly defend their rights to marry one another, have children together, and live as a couple with every right accorded to a heterosexual couple.

Compare that to M/M romance writers and readers. There are definitely women who truly love gays in that same staunch, admiring way, but someone being aroused by something does not in any way imply they respect it. It does not necessarily imply acceptance. It does not necessarily accord dignity to the object of desire.

My only contribution to today’s dialogue is this: Consider why you read what you do. Consider what your responses, reactions, and biases are as you read. And then remember that it is one thing to want two men in a novel to live happily ever after and another to fight to make it happen for real GLBT persons in this world we all share.

It’s not enough to find it sexy or beautiful. It’s not enough to buy the stories and applaud your tolerance. Make it real. Make a difference.

I’ve been strangely raw since I wrote my last post. Maybe not strange, considering what that was about. This weekend was Mother’s Day, and it’s probably my least favorite holiday. I have two daughters, bright and beautiful little ladies, but I was never meant to be a mother. I’m a father to them, devoted but distant, and the persistent wrongness I’ve felt since finding out I was pregnant the first time has never left me. After the nightmare of giving birth to my older daughter, I was so depressed and sick that I almost died. The second time around, the stress of it all nearly killed me. Not long after that, my husband abandoned us, and whatever was left of me crumbled into pieces. I’m not wired for this. I’m not good at this. But I love those children, and I feel fiercely protective of them. I’m possessive of them despite how wrong it feels to be Mother. They’re mine, goddamn it all, and no one will ever take them from me.

As rough as that part always is to untangle, it’s not the real pain. The real horror of Mother’s Day for me is that as a child I was so very close to my mother. She was weak and fragile and needy, and I was lonely and broken and wrong, and taking care of her made me feel invincible, and telling her it would be okay convinced me that it would be. I fought for her when my father was dangerous and paranoid, his untreated schizophrenia turning him into some kind of painfully familiar weapon against his own, and I became something fearless in those fights. When I marked myself last line of defense between my parents, I became animal with fury, strong with the conviction of my right to survive, and because I was still a child, there was nothing of gender to hold me back. There was no confusion of identity. I was pure of purpose. I was Wrath. I was holy fire.

Now my mother–once-beloved Mommy, someone I would have died over and over to keep safe, to make feel cherished–doesn’t know me. She can’t see me. There’s no recognition between us. She flinches away from me, fears me, perhaps perceives in me some taint her religion has persuaded her resides in me to make me what I am. She hasn’t belonged to me since I hit puberty and everything fell apart in my world. Something changed when I realized how the world had lied to me. God does make mistakes. In her inner narrative, I am some monster, something destructive and awful, something perhaps infused with the demonic. And in that inner narrative, I believe she still kind of loves me and praises herself as a martyr of selflessness for that pale love. Oh, she is a righteous woman to love something like me, something twisted and ruined. On Mother’s Day, she is smug in her holiness. On that day, she is long-suffering and anointed by Heaven, a good woman wronged by the Devil that corrupted her firstborn.

So I spent the day watching a movie (The Reunion, with Boyd Holbrook, who never gets less adorable) with Clancy and followed it up with a hearty dose of Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe (who I will love forever, stfu), Game of Thrones, and Mad Men. Eh. Life goes on, right? It’s far from an It Gets Better moment, but you know, perspective matters. My life sucks, but it’s tremendously full of thought and passion and delicious angst that can be turned on its ear and warped into even more delicious ironic amusement with the world and my own flawed self. It beats a Stepford existence. Maybe telling people “it gets better” is deceptive. Maybe we should be saying “you’ll grow into yourself” or “you’ll come to value your unique worldview someday” or “with a little perspective, this is all gonna be rich fodder for creativity and personal growth.”

Nah. Kids don’t care about that shit.

It gets better.

Tom Gabel of Against Me recently came out as transgender, prompting a media frenzy around this declaration of personal independence. It was, I gotta say, a very punk rock move coming from a band I always thought of as Not Very Punk. It earned my respect.

I should confess that I can be a punk purist. I wanna know what kind of cred someone is bringing to an album. I look down my nose on Green Day. I don’t like “sell-outs.” I learned about punk from a homeless guy on Westheimer named Justin who was so dedicated to his punk beliefs that he wouldn’t work for The Man, wouldn’t do anything against his credo, and he was willing to sleep by a dumpster for that belief. He had homemade tattoos and piercings, had done a lot of drugs, and was–at the time–attending a street mission targeted at teaching God’s word to street people. When we met, I thought Justin was terrifying–I was 15, he was…God knows how old, beneath all the dirt, but maybe 30–and possibly the only genuine person I’d ever known in my life. He treated me with a brand of gruff kindness that blew my mind, called me Rapunzel for my knack of climbing onto roofs and up trees, and would talk philosophy with me like I was an adult. I loved him fiercely, but I don’t think he ever knew it. He’s been my standard of what a punk should be ever since.

So Against Me… Eh. They were all right. I didn’t feel like there was any of the “fuck the man” mentality to their music that I crave from punk. I didn’t feel the outsider vibe, the world-shaking rage or deep philosophical frustration. But now…well, now I think that Laura Jane Grace, formerly known as Tom Gabel, is one badass babe. I want to know what songs are in her soul now she’s living an authentic life free of societal constructs, free to express a real pain, a real anger with the world. I didn’t believe Tom Gabel could rock, but I sure as hell think Laura Jane Grace will.

I could stop here, but I don’t think it would be honest. I don’t think I’d be expressing my own authentic self. I can’t laud Laura for speaking out when I don’t do the same.

If I’m gonna have a true, “fuck the man” punk moment here… I should out myself as transgender too. I should confess that I have mental problems associated with being female-bodied when everything inside me protests it. I tried, like Tom Gabel, to make do with half-measures and fake-it-til-you-make-it attitudes my entire life. I don’t believe at all that Tom Gabel just wanted publicity. She could have achieved it any number of less extreme ways.

Tell me honestly… Do you think a rock star would cut off his penis to be more famous? I don’t think even Spencer Pratt wanted to be famous that badly.

It’s not about publicity. It’s not even about sex. Sure, sex can be…awkward and feel wrong when you’re working with the wrong kind of plumbing, but the real reason anyone is transgender is that something is horribly wrong with their meatsuit. Something is so wrong with their body that they can never shake the feeling. Something like a gross tumor is there that should not be or, for me, missing.

For me, my absent cock is like a phantom limb. I can feel where it should be, feel sensations there with my mind in a place that can’t be touched. When I sleep, it’s there in my dreams, if they’re good ones. My brain believes it’s there, but my flesh lacks that particular part. Nothing will ever feel right without it. Fuck masculinity, fuck gender roles, fuck whether or not I ever have another sexual partner. None of it matters.

It isn’t about sex. It isn’t even about gender. It’s about feeling a pervasive, unshakable, unremitting wrongness that makes caring for my own body a loathsome chore. I hate this body. I hate it with such a passion that it defies description. It’s hard to inhabit this shell, hard to bathe it and dress it and care if it’s sick. It feels foreign, repulsive, hateful. I struggle to take the medicine that I need to be well. I struggle to joke and shrug off things like menstruation, which feel like a nightmare from Hell. I struggle to lose weight, to exercise, to do anything which acknowledges this flesh is real, because all I want is to be free of it, to be a disembodied soul who no longer feels suffocated by that misshapen cage.

There are several self-identified FTM transgender people in the writing community, but I’ve shied away from them. I’ve avoided ever coming out like this. I don’t want to be painted with that brush or branded with their label. I do not reveal this to titillate. I do not want to discuss my sexual escapades.

There is an air of…fetishism, almost, that surrounds some self-identified FTMs. If that is the life they want to lead, more power to them, but it is not the life I want. It is not who I am. I’m not going to be the bottom unless I know a man well enough to feel respected, and I’m not going to let him use my “bonus hole” because it should not exist. If you’re FTM and you don’t mind letting guys plow your pussy, if you can do that and still feel like a man, good for you. I can’t. I sure as hell wouldn’t talk about it like I was some prize uke from a genderfuck yaoi, and I see a hell of a lot of that around the internet.

I talk to people who think FTMs are fangirls who let the slash fiction go to their heads. I talk to people who think FTMs are girls who feel repressed by femininity and want to “play at” being a man so they can be dirty and promiscuous. I talk to people who think that FTMs hate women, are anti-feminist, are brainwashed by the male-establishment, and need to just embrace their lesbianism. So yeah, it comes from both sides. It comes from all sides. It makes me hesitate to publish this blog post.

I love women. I love men. I love humanity, for all its faults. Life is beautiful, indescribably so, and precious. Love is infinite and more powerful than most people comprehend. There’s such a heartbreaking wonderfulness just to surviving day to day that despite all the wrong in my everyday life, I cannot help feeling the most profound gratitude and joy that this is my life, that I am alive. I do not hate myself, not at all. I hate this fleshy cage in which I’m trapped, but I love who I am underneath. I love the man beneath all this meaty ruin that hides from a world that misunderstands him and fights it without ceasing, waiting for a way to be integrated into a world with no room for him.

It’s funny how when we wrote Black Gold, it seemed like a long shot to me that it’d ever be published. I’d never submitted anything, and though Clancy was published by then, it didn’t seem like I’d ever make it. I make a habit of not wanting things I can’t have, and I didn’t allow myself to hope for too much. Then we got the news that Jules Robin believed in the MS, despite it being kind of a mess, and wanted to take it on.

Since then Clancy and I have learned a lot about writing together for an audience and not just each other’s amusement. We’ve developed a groove, and I have enough confidence now to formulate ideas and suggest things instead of leaning on her so hard. I think I finally can look at my career and say, “I’m a writer, too,” and mean it. I feel like I’ve grown. It’s exhilarating.

In working on the sequel to Black Gold, I find myself comparing it to that first MS and thinking how much more sophisticated our plotting strategy has become, how much smoother our transitions are, and how much more capably we handle hand-offs. The first draft is already nearing its end, and it feels like we just started writing a week ago. If I thought Clancy appreciated such things, this post would turn into a love letter of gratitude for her driven, goal-oriented, indefatigable attitude. (Of course, Clancy never knows what to say if I get schmoopy, so I won’t, but it’s Understood.)

I could write another love letter to Jules, our badass editor, who’s gearing up to do corrections on Celibacy Now, the next novel we have forthcoming from Loose Id (slated for mid-June, I think). As strange as Clancy and I can be, and as much of a handful as the pair of us undoubtedly are, I know Jules will get us. And when she doesn’t, she’ll ask in her self-deprecating way what part of our private joke she’s missing.

We have another novel MS, Gemini, submitted elsewhere right now that we’re waiting to hear back on. Yet another completed rough draft, one I like to refer to as Secret Agent/Rockstar Guy for lack of an actual title, is awaiting polishing before submission. We have at least two other rough manuscripts we could rework to submit for publishing. I have a couple of solo projects I will probably take ten years to finish but can see in my head so clearly.

When I was in college, my English professor told me that she’d met some great writers who had just one story in them, and they felt driven to write until they got it out, then never recaptured that magic. I feel like I’m the opposite. The more stories I tell, the more stories I want to tell. If it wasn’t for Clancy, they’d never see the light of day, but I’m working on that.

If that wasn’t enough, my 6500 word story for the Love Is Always Write event will be posted in the coming months. I’ll be sure to update the blog when it’s up. And when you read Clancy’s LIAW, I defy you not to spontaneously combust. It’s that hot. Keep your eyes peeled, and we’ll bombard you with more sexay manlove very soon.