We’re talking today with Alan D. Hunter, Went to New York to become a gender activist. He received a degree in women’s studies and a graduate degree in sociology and social work and worked with psychiatric patients, right groups and gender identity support groups later served as an elder abuse caseworker in the Bronx. We reviewed your book during our November 2021 book club, Genderqueer, and absolutely loved it. We’re so glad you came to chat with us.
My first question Genderqueer was such a personal work, did it exceed your expectations as a novel?
Allan: The writing itself, what I ended up with on paper at least, met my most optimistic expectations. It felt like it really encapsulated what it was like. I had a tool of communication at my disposal. I wish I could say it’s reception in the world subsequent to that, also exceeded my expectations. It has not so far. The specific techniques that propel somebody to successfully publicize something to draw attention to it seems to involve a skill set that I don’t have.
How did it feel writing something so personal? I understand that all of us who write fiction; we put ourselves in a lot of our characters or our life experience, chances, but to white write something so personal. How did that feel?
Allen: I know this probably seems counterintuitive, because I can certainly see how from the outside, it would mostly look like you just peeled yourself completely showing aspects of yourself that most people would be horrified to not be able to keep private and you put it all out there and so on. But I felt like all my life that I was forbidden to say who I was. To explain that this is what my life was like to draw attention to this. In one way or another, I was perpetually being silenced all the time. So it felt very empowering to have this to rip a hole in that silence. To make some noise, and say, what it felt like was grabbing the world by its collective lapel, giving a good hard shake and say. Alright, damn it let’s have a conversation.
Personal material was necessary to convey to people what this identity is, like, from the inside to draw them in with me and say, from this sequence of answers, you’re not going to have a lot of difficulty imagining how you would feel if it were you.
And that should be testimony enough to make you understand why I’m trying to bring this to your attention. So in short, it feels very empowering to have said something so personal.
You’ve mentioned that you usually are trying to talk people into reading this book. What has that been like giving talks on from that point of view?
Allan: People that show up are usually excited to hear that somebody has written a book on this topic. The general topic of gender identity and being gender queer or otherwise, gender variant is very much on a lot of people’s minds in the last handful of years, because it’s sort of come to the foreground. And in that sense, people come thinking of my book as interchangeable with a whole slew of other books on the subject. And they are there with equal enthusiasm to hear about subjects made famous by other people that have also written about their experiences as a marginalized, gender variant person. And they listen attentively while I try to sketch out what the underlying issues are that I bring up in my book. They ask some interesting questions and say, Oh, this is very brave, and the world needs such books and things like that, you know. So it’s been mostly a good experience. I don’t think I’ve ever run into any hostility. I’ve actually expected more than I’ve gotten. I have experienced it online and in the text space medium, where it’s posted extensively. All throughout Facebook groups that are focused on either gender or feminist issues. My book has drawn some flack at times. I think people I’m more inclined to express hostility when people post something, and it’s occupying a lot of space on their screen, and they may feel more comfortable saying something in response to that, than they would in person and in a discussion.
Sadly, that is something we have to deal with in the internet age.
Allen: Okay, well at least we’re having this conversation if this makes you feel hostile if you’re threatened, if you want to call me, you know, trans trender. Or telling me I don’t qualify, that I’m just trying to jump on the bandwagon because other people are making a big deal about gender. But what I have gone through or my sense of identity is strictly special snowflake stuff that should be dismissed with a roll of the eyeballs. That I’m giving ammunition to people that are attacking certain populations. By saying some of the things I saying, I’m making them more vulnerable to further assaults or that I’m not understanding why I shouldn’t say things using the exact terms I’ve used because it makes somebody else feel more marginalized or misgendered. This long slew of ways in which things that I have had the opportunity to say to people will occasionally strike people as problematic. And that’s actually a good thing to engage with people who think that instead of having the sense that might be happening, but no, you can’t confront something if nobody will confront you, you know what I mean?
Yeah, very true.
Allan: So I’ve tried to do my best when things like that have happened. To bring these things up, as well as the other people reading along into a further more nuanced conversation to look at all the different sides of it and consider it from all different angles. I think I sometimes come across as a histrionic guy always on my soapbox. Some people are tired of that just not because of any specific thing that I’ve posted. But the fact that I keep coming back and doing it over and over again in their group at great length. I am rather verbose.
So are you hoping that your work will end up in schools to give younger people an opportunity to read a work of the age in which you were growing up? And the age in which you were at the piece of work?
Allan: Oh, yeah, definitely. That would be very nice. Anyone who does general counseling with middle school and high school aged people, whether it’s within a school setting, or outside of school, and some either voluntary or professional setting, but people that are there to listen and help people sort stuff like this out, I would love to think that my book will draw some attention from those kinds of people and that they’ll find it a resource. Give them a sense of understanding of yet another possible gender identity in a way that I didn’t before. Now, I’m prepared if I run into someone whose tale seems to fall along those lines, you know?
Yeah. So is there anything you would do differently with the book now that it’s out in the world?
Allan: I had a nice agent who worked hard, but may not have been the best fit for the material. I think in retrospect, the person I worked with was probably more familiar with promoting an author or a speaker who
has had success with a new community venture that has resulted in better streets for the community. More mainstream-ish. I hesitate to say corporate necessarily. But I think I possibly would have liked to have a publicist who had more experience with trying to throw something out there like it’s a lit firecracker and get some attention and go about it perhaps with a little less politeness. Then we might have drawn more people to pay attention to the existence of this book. I don’t know what else I could have done in terms of trying to get a more mainstream publisher or anything of that ilk I was grateful to finally get a publisher who would put it into print, but it’s a very small, niche sized publisher, and they don’t have any budget to promote books. So the promotion was in my own lap. And like I said before, it’s not something I’m good at.
Yeah, a lot of us independent authors have to wear that hat ourselves and are helping each other boost each other’s knowledge in that area.
Allan: I created a database and tracked it, to get a literary agent. Everyone said, try to get a literary agent first. Because once you start doing your own pitching of the book to publishers, the agents won’t want to have anything to do with you, they’ll feel like you’ve already muddied the water. And Let. agents have all these connections, they can talk to publishers that won’t give you the time of day to publishers that won’t accept queries directly from authors at all.
And by the time I hung that up and went to query small publishing houses, it’s was all in something like 1400, query letters, and would occasionally get a few sample chapters or even send me the whole book in PDF format. But nobody ever said, yeah, we would like to have you as a client, I never got one. It’s exhausting and as fun as cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station. No, thank you very much.
Are you planning on doing any other works in this subject, that are like this that are very personalized.
Allan: Matter of fact, just this week I sent the final edited manuscript back to the same publisher to get my second book in print, it’s titled, That guy, you’re in our Women’s Studies class, it picks up where the first book leaves off, were having figured out a sense of identity and had everything kind of click into place. So I look around for how best to go about being a social activist.
It’s not something that’s immediately obvious how one becomes a social activist on something like this. And it crossed my mind, I could go into women’s studies in college and nine classrooms are going to have discussions about this. And the reading material I’ll be reading will be other people who write on this and I could get a reputation and get connected up with other people of similar mindset.
So that’s what the second book is about is trying to pursue this back in the 1980s. It wasn’t really what you would call an LGBTQ+ community. It was gay and lesbian rights and sort of a vague idea that transgender issues might somehow appropriately be connected with that, but that wasn’t like an established notion, really. Feminism and feminist theory was actually the largest developed body of critical thought then that really addressed sexist expectations that would be foisted onto a person on the basis of what sex they are. So I thought, well, that’s where I’ll go.
So do you only write in nonfiction in this way? Or do you write any other genres or sub genres?
Allan: I haven’t written fiction in a long time. I used to as a young adult and as a teenager, especially back in my high school days, where a lot of short stories never wrote a novel that belonged anywhere outside of a trunk, but I think I’m not as good at it. But I might go back to it someday.
Thank you, Allan, for letting On the Wings for Writers interview you. We enjoyed having you with us. If you would like to read Genderqueer
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Allan D. Hunter
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