That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class

Allan D. Hunter

• Publisher: Sunstone Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781611396584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this nonfiction memoir, Derek, a genderqueer sissy male, decides that a women's studies class in college would be a good place to engage people in discussions about gender. Derek has reason to worry that he's invading women's space by attending women's studies classes. At the same time, he's a minority within that space, and, as a gender-nonconforming sissy in the 1980s, a person with a gender identity that wasn't acknowledged and recognized yet, he's been somewhat marginalized by gender himself. This narrative tale illustrates the complexities of intersectionality, the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender and so forth. The main character is male, the privileged sex in the patriarchal context. The story follows Derek down Oklahoma highways and into heroin dens in Harlem and then into the homeless shelters of 1980s New York City, as the determined but not always practical Derek pursues his dream. Along the way, the story delves into the complexities of privilege and social identity in ways that challenge assumptions about power and marginalization-not in primary-color simplicity but by exploring privilege and deprivation along a number of different dimensions and showing it in all of its native complexity, all while still respecting a concern for empowering the voice of those left out.

That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class

Allan D. Hunter

Praise for Genderqueer: A Story From A Different Closet

“GenderQueer will resonate in a special way with people in Los Alamos because it’s the setting for Derek’s story. The story takes off from eighth grade, the year his family moved to a certain quirky town in New Mexico...

“When Derek came to Los Alamos, he was on the cusp of puberty and the discovery that he was attracted to girls... Inside, he felt like a girl, but his body was telling him that his sexuality was directed toward other girls (the female kind). The struggle was on to find a place for himself and an identity that truly represented him.

“As Derek matures, what perhaps strikes the reader most is his strength and courage. He absolutely refuses to be someone he is not in the face of all kinds of pressure, from hostility to misunderstanding of him by those who are close. A few good friends and his loving family see Derek through, but it’s a very rocky road.”

—Bonnie Gordon, The Los Alamos Daily Post

“Allan D. Hunter’s GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is an eye-opening first-person account of Derek, born male, who identifies as a girl. While this hardly raises an eyebrow in the 21st century, in the 1970s, Derek had no role models and no points of reference...

“You may not be able to read the book in one sitting—it takes time to absorb.”

—Sherri Rase, Out in Jersey

“...a time capsule of queer life in the late seventies. True to the time period, the book has some problematic aspects, and may be at odds with some of our queer values today. This seems to be by design, conveying a much different world for queer people.”

—Rachel Lange, Senior Editor. QueerPGH

“When Derek Hunter moves to Los Alamos from Valdosta, Georgia, in eighth grade, he is bullied mercilessly. A tall, thin boy with glasses, who likes to wear stovepipe pants and slicked-back hair instead of bell-bottoms and long tresses (this is 1974), he embraces nonconformism mostly because he has nothing in common with boys his age.

“What he knows about boys is “ribald and crude” and a “constant undercurrent of threat.” He favors the company of girls, who are more accepting and physically attractive. Boys he begins to think of as “them,” as the enemy. And they return the favor in terms of verbal and physical bullying.

“In this tortured litany of harassment mostly set in Northern New Mexico, author Hunter, who lived in New Mexico until the mid-1980s, before moving to New York to become an activist in gender theory, presents a coming-of-age novel of ambivalent identity that the protagonist ultimately figures out on his own.”

—María Dolores Gonzales, Taos News

The people and events described in this memoir were all quite real, but to streamline and optimize the narrative flow, I have sometimes combined several characters into one composite character, so as to not have to develop so many characters; and on occasions I’ve also condensed multiple similar events and described them as single events.

The names have all been changed.

Dedication

To my professors: Rosalyn Baxandall, Elizabeth Ewen, Naomi Rosenthal, Laura Anker, Deborah D’Amico-Saunders, Charshee McIntyre, Hedva Lewittes, Tom DelGiudice, Luis Camnitzer, Judy Walsh, Eileen Landy, and others whose names escape me, Thank you.

Preface

In 1980, at the age of 21, I came out as a sissy. I was reclaiming the term the same way that proud lesbians referred to themselves as “dykes” or the way that many gay folks were reclaiming the word “queer.”

“Sissy” comes from the word “sister” and so it seemed like the right word: a sisterlike, i.e., feminine or girlish, male person.

1980 may seem like the distant past, but the Stonewall riots were already ten years behind us then. We had gay rights activists. We even had trans activists. A lot of people didn’t understand why I was using a new and different term. But I wasn’t trans. It was something else.

Trans women, both back then and today, tend to say “Don’t see me as a trans woman. See me as a woman.” That wasn’t me. I didn’t consider myself female. I considered myself femme. I had been one of the girls when I was a child, and I had not been ashamed of it and hadn’t tried to hide it. But until now, I hadn’t made a point of telling the world I was proud of it. Until now, I hadn’t fully realized how much of the world’s not-very-warm reaction to me was all about this—that having difficulty making friends, being taunted and bullied and harassed, and being left out from consideration as a romantic or sexual possibility were all strongly predicted by me being a sissy femme.

An identity as a male femme, as opposed to an identity as transgender woman, existed in our culture, but only as a gay male identity. I didn’t identify with the gay rights movement: my sexuality wasn’t same-sex attraction and I saw a need to untangle gender from either physical sex or sexual orientation.

The activists I identified with the most were feminists. They were the ones who said having different behavioral standards and polarized social roles for the sexes was sexist.

So I headed off to the university to major in women’s studies.

That Guy in our Women’s Studies Class is a rare thing in the world of memoirs: a sequel. In March 2020, my book GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet was published by Sunstone Press (Santa Fe, New Mexico).

GenderQueer tells the coming-of-age and coming-out story of realizing I had a different gender identity and of giving it a name. At the end of it, I vow to confront the world about how sissy males are treated. In That Guy in our Women’s Studies Class, I set out to do exactly that, choosing the world of academic women’s studies as my platform.

I am a blogger and a theorist, writing about gender, the experience of writing and trying to get published, and other relevant subjects. My theory papers are available on my web site, https://www.genderkitten.com, along with reviews of my books; the blog posts are available in identical form on these platforms:

LiveJournal: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com

WordPress: https://genderkitten.wordpress.com

DreamWidth: https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org

I can also be reached by email: [email protected]

I want to express my fond gratitude to Cassandra Lems for reading over two million words’ worth of the original autobiography from which the two books were condensed, for finding many of my errors and inconsistencies, and for being very patient with my self-immersion throughout this process. I’d also like to thank my publicist John Sherman for his assistance in getting these words in front of people, and Alice Klugherz for her encouragement and her participation in creating the cover art.

—Allan Hunter, 2021

Part One: Commuter Student

Fall Semester 1985

I had to find Professor Baxwood and get her okay for me to be in her Women’s Studies course.

The course catalog entry for Intro to Women’s Studies listed a required prerequisite: “instructor approval.” That could be a problem. What if she didn’t allow males in her classroom? It wouldn’t even have to be anti-male sentiment. It could simply be that the department felt that women needed a space of their own to discuss things as women, which wasn’t exactly a rare perspective among feminists.

I hoped not. I’d come a long way to get to this point and already I’d encountered barriers to my plans to become a women’s studies major; although so far none of those had been feminist barriers, just pragmatic and procedural difficulties. Would I have to plead my case at this point to be allowed in?

I am one of those male people who always got tagged by other people as being more like a girl than like the other boys. One of the ones who, instead of butching up defensively, said “Yeah, so? The girls are doing it right!”

Five years ago, after being plagued and tormented by questions about my sexual identity and trying to sort out who I was and who I wasn’t, I had finally come out. What I had come out as was something entirely different from anything or anyone I’d ever heard or read about: a “heterosexual sissy.” I had declared that my male body was not wrong but neither was my feminine nature. I had made my first attempts to communicate all that to people. I wasn’t a regular straight guy but neither was I gay or transsexual; it was something else.

After several years of frustration it had finally occurred to me that if I wanted to have conversations about such things, women’s studies was probably a good place for it. They would be used to talking about sexist expectations and oppressive rules and social roles.

Corridors of white brick, with fliers and posters every twenty yards stapled to corkboards advertising upcoming theatrical events, concerts, handlettered requests for rides or someone selling a camera or a guest speaker to discuss the violations of Native American sovereignty as covered in American history. The busy clatter of shoes, the babble of conversation as students pass en route between class periods. A cluster of young people in bright colors in a sunken semicircle gathered around a boom box cassette player. This was Academic Village, the main building for both classrooms and faculty offices.

I followed the signs for American Studies, which was the home of the Women’s Studies program. A young black woman with beautiful textured braids sat at the departmental receptionist desk, typing on an IBM Selectric from handwritten notes attached to a clipboard stand. “Hello, may I help you?” I nodded and asked if Professor Baxwood was available. “I think she’s in her office. Down that hall and up the stairs where it says ‘Tower One,’” she told me.

I found her door, standing open. The luxuriously dark smell of good coffee greeted me. Professor Baxwood had a square jaw, brick-red hair. On her wall was a poster declaring that equality is not when a female genius can do as well as a male genius; equality is when a female nebbish can get by as easily as a male nebbish. Baxwood was reading from a book and scribbling something on a ...

Table of contents

• Preface