How did you come to write this thing?
It was a combination of boredom and irritation, really. During 1996, as part of my employment contract, I had to spend six hours a week staffing the undergraduate writing center at the university where I was getting my degree. This meant I had a lot of down time, and access to the Internet. For various reasons I have spent a lot of time being the token gay person in a predominantly straight social coterie, and there had been many a moment when I had just wanted to haul off and say, "You know what, I know you mean well, but what you're doing right now is REALLY obnoxious." I was at the time on a discussion list called the Star Trek Women's Terrorist Task Force, whose members were primarily straight or bisexual women, and they expressed interest in reading the guide as I wrote it. So I started drafting the chapters at work at the writing center and emailing them to the list. That's why some chapters are so much longer than others--I did occasionally have to do some work there.
Are you a gay man, or a lesbian, or bi, or what?
All is revealed on my personal site. Well, not all, but some.
How come the guide is up at the WWWomen site and not at The Adder's Lair with the rest of your writing?
When I was writing the manual I didn't know enough about HTML to turn it into a website. However, Janis Cortese was on the list at the time, and she was helping put together the WWWomen site, and I asked if they would be interested in hosting it. She and Sidra graciously agreed to do that, and did all the work of HTMLing it and maintaining it on the web. I think it gets more exposure there than it would on my personal site, and anyhow the design and layout and so on really belongs to them.
Your personal site is friggin' huge. How do I get directly to the other stuff you've written about GBLT issues?
OK, lazybones, here are direct links to the Adder's Lair's gay content:
Humor
Song Of The Promiscuous Bisexuals
Homo For the Holidays: Coming Out in the Christmas Season
The Sith Academy
Karaoke Night at the Slash Cafe
Essays
Matthew Shepard
Columbine and Homophobia
The Queer Cardassian: The Case For a Gay Garak
A Gynocentric Approach To Driving A Standard Transmission
Reviews
Indigo Girls
Show Me Love
Rejoined (The "lesbian kiss" episode of Deep Space Nine.)
Champions On Ice, 2001 Because it's got Rudy Galindo in it.
Original Fiction
Women On Fire My original fantasy series. If the demise of Xena has left a void in your life, this may be what you're looking for.
Juniper Tea The last short story I wrote as a straight woman. You can see what's coming around the bend, though.
Is the etiquette guide meant to be taken seriously?
Well, yes and no. I get two kinds of mail about the etiquette manual: one kind from straight people saying, "Wow, this is really informative and helpful! I am mailing the URL to everyone in the Human Resources department I work in!" or words to that effect, and one kind from queer people, which usually reads something like "I just found your etiquette guide for straight people. It's a good thing I'm out at work, because otherwise it would be hard to explain why I'm rolling on the floor laughing my ass off."
Both responses are valid. To me, the etiquette guide is primarily a humor piece; but like most satirists I'm dead serious when I'm being funny. On the one hand, this thing is pitched toward a queer audience who will enjoy seeing themselves and their emotions validated through that annoying and yet oddly authoritative etiquette-maven voice, and who will get a vicarious charge out of seeing someone else tell Straight America how it's gonna be. On the other, I did make a serious effort to explain why the things that bother us bother us, and how people might be able to avoid repeating their mistakes.
The one thing I hope that everyone remembers when they read the guide is that nobody died and left me king of the Queer Consensus. I do what I can, but of course not everyone is going to agree with me, and I fear for what will happen if people read the etiquette guide as if it represents objective truth rather than my own subjective observations.
Do you really have a staff of well-bred and highly trained etiquette mavens at your beck and call?
Sure I do!
Nah, not really. To paraphrase France's immortal Louis XIV, le staff, c'est moi.
What would you do differently if you were writing it now?
For one thing, I think I would have spent more time on the section about children whose parents come out to them; although I have no children of my own I think I know a little more now about the issues involved. I would also heavily revise the section on transgendered coming-out; I still don't know very much about that area of experience but I know more than I did in 1996. I'm proud to have discovered that there are a couple sites out there maintained by transgendered women that link to the etiquette guide, but that also makes me more self-conscious about the limitations of that section. And my feelings about gay marriage and gay adoption have become a little more vehement since I wrote the guide.
Hey, you say in your introduction that "Miss Manners has remained silent on the subject," but actually Miss Manners says--
I know. I KNOW.
You must get flamed a lot over this, huh?
Actually, hardly ever. Almost all of the mail has been positive. Every once in a while some nimrod tries to ruin my day, but at my age I'm pretty nimrod-proof. I have been richly flamed in other contexts for other things, but that's a whole different story.
I think I may be gay or bisexual, but I'm not sure. Can you help me?
Every once in a while someone emails me asking me to tell them whether they're gay, whether their boyfriend/girlfriend is gay, whether the fact that they fantasize about anal sex sometimes means they're not heterosexual, and so on. I do what I can to help the community, but I'm really not qualified to deal with problems like this--I'm not a therapist, a counselor, or any kind of mental health professional, or indeed an expert of any kind. Ultimately, the only person who knows whether you are gay, bi, straight or transgendered is you. If you think you need help figuring this out, you would be a lot better off talking to people who actually know you, or to a competent queer-friendly therapist, than to some total stranger whose site you found on the Web. If, on the other hand, you have a specific question about sexual practices, well, I'm even less qualified to handle those. Instead let me refer you to Dan Savage, who will be more than happy to help.
Oh no! I read your section on strategies for not pissing your gay friends off and discovered that I have occasionally done some of these things. Do all my gay friends secretly hate me?
This guide is designed for people who are too clueless or too insensitive to be able to figure out on their own how not to offend people. If you do not fall into this category, then you should probably use your own judgment and not worry too much about individual rules. If you suspect that you may be a clueless/insensitive type, you should still be aware that not all queer people will agree with all of these rules, and it's quite possible that they don't care about the ones you're breaking. But if it's really bugging you, then why not ask them whether your doing these things bother them, and see what happens. Mainly, though, you should remember that people who are really your friends will give you the benefit of the doubt and cut you slack because they know you are good-hearted and mean well. Even if you have occasionally been a lunkhead, they probably do not secretly hate you.
Are you going to publish this in print someday?
Maybe. Check this space for details. Until then, I will continue to make it available online for the delectation of net addicts everywhere.
I've added below a list of all the pages I've found that link to the etiquette manual. They represent a wide range of nationalities, ethnicities, sexualities, and age brackets; and I really like that. It appears to have reached people I would never have thought would care about the thing--I'm especially proud of the two links to the feminist cyberpunk sites, since I am about the most un-punk woman you could want to meet. I hope people will continue to read the manual as long as it's useful, and that it will be retired when homophobia is finally a thing of the past. If you have linked to the manual and would like me to add the link to this page, email it to me at plaidder@mindspring.com.
GBLT Organizations
Lakeside School
bglad.com
University of Birmingham LGB Organization
Alma College Official Homepage
Michigan State University's Alliance of Les-bi-gay and Transgendered Students
Rochester Institute of Technology's Gay Alliance
University of Cincinatti Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Alliance
Washington State University Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual and Allies Program
Feminist Sites
Planes of Women
University of Cincinatti Women's Center
Body Count/FEM-UH-NIST Zine
Riot Grrrrl Cincinnatti
Cress's feminism page
Pioneer Grrrrl's liberal page
X-Womyn Collective
Personal Pages
Surf Sessions on the Netsucker
Miska's Loft
Bex's International Hall of Crap
Wadjet
Stories:Kerry Weaver
Heather's Ginchy Page
Ashera's Archive
Geekiness.com
Quiara's journal on Diaryland.com
My Bi Page
Cinderella's Closet
Nocturne
would you die?
fnw2
Grail: Erika Maria Lacey
Claudel
Didi, Demigoddess
Strange Pursuit
Johnne's Queer World
prosaic's weblog
Welcome To My World
Tonya's Pride Pages
Pip
Katisha
Craig's Cybercolumn
As The Crow Flies
Josh's Gay Teen Resource Site
The Doorway
www.xydexx.com
Zoe's New Improved Homepage
Geekiness.com
Sean Robert Christie
Anna's homepage
David's Information Zone
Radical Lesbian Feminist on the Loose
Bluehaven
Coming Out In Mississippi
Straight But Not Narrow
Sledgecramp's bisexuality links
Sue's Home Page/Sex Reassignment for Transsexual Women
Andi's Links
Audrey Stein's homepage
Cynthia's Little Hole in the Wall
Kat's Homepage
Jauteria
a face in the crowd
Jeremy's Homepage
International
Interventions For Support Healing and Awakening
Czech Xena
Gay Delhi
Länkar och smått
4 Gays UK
Miscellaneous
net4TV.com
www.gradeschools.com
Ya,Foo! at Amuseyourself.com
Welcoming Everyone
Queer Christianity
Mate: Guide to Sex on the Web
Mind Caviar
Bisexual Women of Toronto
Financial Resources for Same-Sex Couples
Dyke Web Directory
LesbiansClick
Open Directory Project
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