Hawthorne Books

Scott Nadelson writes well and he’s genuinely funny as well as sensitive. It seems rare to read about anyone, especially a man, who has so much trouble becoming angry and who automatically puts all the blame for mishaps upon himself. This quality makes reading this book inherently refreshing.

Melissa ShookI grew up in a time when the boundaries of gender were less fluid, or at least not displayed as such so readily. It’s been fascinating to watch the change—the frail young student who was a woman a few years earlier, before surgery, or the teacher who had been female, and now identified as male. You write so easily about being a man in his thirties with friends and lovers who were bisexual or lesbians. I imagine editors were particularly interested in your pieces because of this, though I could be wrong. Do you imagine that your relaxed attitude will slowly spread across this country? Do you have a lot of friends or acquaintances who share your perceptions? And writers?

Scott NadelsonIt really is amazing how much has changed over the past twenty years. Certainly when I was in college in the early nineties—my first experience having queer friends—things were a lot different: people had to be careful about who they outed themselves to and often kept a closed circle out of fear of straight people’s reactions and attitudes. Now, especially in urban centers—and maybe especially on the West Coast—it seems that most people have become not only more open-minded but generally less interested in broad categorization than in dealing with individuals on their own terms. And given how much support there has been for same-sex marriage across the country over the past few years, I am quite sure that attitudes really are relaxing. I’m guessing that our understanding of gender will become based increasingly less on expectations that are imposed on us than on what we experience around us.