What little boys are made of

As he and I talked, I started to understand that in his seventh-grade culture the boys either played violent video games or they played competitive sports. With all my son's uniqueness, he had no social currency unless he did those things. That started me thinking about how our culture forces boys to deny their own complexity and pushes them into this competitive fighting model. I wanted to create a book I could give to my son, to help him navigate the making of his identity, give him more room to be who he actually is.

Identity navigation seems to be a theme of your work.

True. I always want to make more space for people who suffer because we don't fit into some bullshit paradigm that we didn't make. [Laughs.] Anthologies are good for when you have questions but no answers on a subject, and you need to survey a lot of people to figure out what you think.

How'd you go about asking the questions?

I started talking to all kinds of guys: 60-year-old friends of my dad's, people I was in grad school with, my brother, random people I met on the road. I'd pull a guy aside and say, "I'm thinking about doing this book -- tell me what it was like growing up. Tell me what it's like being a man." They had all these stories of childhood abuse and humiliation, of being brutally teased out of their emotional capacity. Listening to them heightened my sensitivity to the other half of the human race.

Now for a loaded question: Why a book about masculinity from a bisexual woman?

You're not the first to ask. When I first proposed the book, my publisher said, "Why are you doing a book on men? You're a woman, you've been with women." In fact, I've actually only been with two women. For most of my life I was with men: four years with one boyfriend, five years with another, and I was going to marry a man in Africa. [Laughs.] I know a lot about men up close and personal.

I bet you couldn't have gotten away with writing this book as a lesbian. And if you were straight no one would have questioned it.

You're touching on something important. As a writer I've wanted to make it really hard for people to put me in any kind of box. I'm not comfortable with being thought of as a black writer, a Jewish writer, lesbian writer, East Coast, West Coast. I'm all of those things and I'm more.

No one likes being shoved into a box. But when you're black, white, Jewish, and bi, there are so many boxes to avoid.

I have a personal sort of resistance to limitation. But it's also about the realities of the marketplace. I want my work to reach as many people as possible. I'd hate to think someone would get to one of my books and say "This looks interesting but it's not for me -- she's a black writer, she's a bi writer." I think a book on masculinity isn't what readers of "Black, White and Jewish" are expecting. I like that. If I can keep putting books out there that complicate the question of an identity box, that'll cut through the whole conundrum.

In your intro you call on women to help men reconfigure masculinity. You say, "If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference." What do you mean?

Women say we want these integrated, beautiful, sweet men. Then we run off with the macho guy. All these years of feminism and we're still looking for the knight in shining armor. There's a way in which our impulses haven't caught up with our intellect. What I'm saying is, we know that men are often socialized in their sexuality through pornography. I can eroticize this table if I work hard enough at it. Well, women need to flex that power and begin to eroticize what's truly healthy for us and for our partners.

Nice guys finish last -- but at least they finish.

Being turned on by macho guys who aren't good for us has to do with us wanting to be the feminine über-counterpart. I like those guys 'cause I can curl up and be little. I can be pure sensuality. But those extremes only work in the realm of sexuality. Real relationships are much more multidimensional. I want a partner, male or female, who can be the cool tough guy to my damsel in distress and who can also be the damsel in distress to my cool tough guy. I want to have the full range of my humanity in a relationship. I want to experience life fully, not just a sliver of it. That's why I did this book -- because men are being allowed just this tiny part. I was interested in the ones who are breaking out of that paradigm. I'm interested in knowing what's that like for them.

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