Before you write a book, do you heavily outline and plan it or do you sort of wing it and figure it out as you go along? by Kyle Phoenix

The Spherical Stages of the construction of a novel.

No, heavily outlined work, is generally an amateur writing design. Which isn’t a bad thing but after 30+ years of writing thousands of stories, over a hundred books, a screenplay I directed into a 2 hour film and countless work related projects plus thousands of articles/ blogs, reviews—-I “turn on the faucet” is the best way to explain my automaticity.

Automaticity is essentially knowing a thing on such a fundamental level that you can simply “do it”. Like walking—-at one point we all had to learn how to walk—-we watched others, did balancing acts, used objects to achieve balance and then kept trying it—-eventually standing and then walking and finally running. This is also mental in reading or math or thinking about things you know how to do mentally that had to be taught. Pretty much everything but your automatic bodily functions were taught t you and engrained so deeply that you can do it withiest thinking consciously.

I can write, near anything, without having to think about it.

To planning a short story or novel—-what I do is I sort of encompass the entirety of the idea.

I wrote a book Tranny—-about a transsexual character. My thought bubble was from my counseling students as an LGBTSGL Coordinator and several of them playing with sexuality, sex and gender presentation. The majority were Black/Latino and instead of being males they found it easier to be female—-even when they weren’t attractive enough to be in drag/trans. But it was easier, they garnered more positive sexual attention from men (technically those men are called skoliosexuals) because they were trying to distance themselves from being Black/Latino males who were NOT heterosexual. And to some degree, most being raised in single sex households that were female led, they identified and were mentored more by women and saw the (sexual attraction) privilege women to over men, especially as people of color. I’ll further this point to the weight of race and non-heterosexuality being a laborious burden to young men, men, older men—-it’s a twofer hard punch to the psyche, to one’s life, especially here in America, and people, young people do things to mitigate the impacts.

In the course of conceiving the idea for the novel and teaching, I met lots of trans folk and even got to watch some evolve and some not. I got to see, deeply personally, the trans identity—-and even got certified in counseling trans folk. I had a clear picture of the identity and its’ origin/manifestation.

My razor edge on the bubble idea—-the push I wanted to engage——was that culture/sex/sexuality question because it was a fascinating posit/question/conundrum.

That’s the totality of my “outline” mentally.

Now, the first time I’ve seen this expanded upon deeply was by Anders Ericsson, the expert on mastery (he is the “creator” of the posit of 10,000 hours leading to mastery—-which was popularized by Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers) in his own book Peak. Anders talked about how he actually wrote the book with a partner (Robert Pool) and that they did what he would call something similar to mental models/representations.

For me, it would look like this for Tranny:

1. What is transsexuality vs. transgenderism vs. homosexuality? (Foundational concept)
2. A Black male decides to transition. (Central character)
3. How do they know or not know about their sexuality/how and are they “confused”? (Question/conflict)

then from experience/expertise mentally outline the physical template of the book—-I make decisions:

1. I’ll write it in the 1st person. Why? It’s more immediate, more personal.
2. It will be short—-under 300 pages, there has to be an immediacy and intimacy and an intensity, to the book itself.
3. Physically it will be slightly larger font size (I experimented with using a font that looked like handwriting but it wasn’t clear enough)—-however I knew that it was a book that the constant/huge-personal “I-ness” suggested was a faux journal.
4. I physically experimented with the Header/Footer for my template and even tried to incorporate images and color—-but the size and colors were too price prohibitive—-to create interior pages that looked like a journal.
5. Chapters-how many? Now I’m having all of these thoughts/plans/mental representations in a smoosh===not in such a lined order, so I knew I would do about 10 chapters. I knew that limitation in the Word document would force me to maintain within a certain amount of pages—-there was no space or time to drone on. In this constructed mental form, I then know where I’m going to enter the story and exit—-approximately. By that, I have my opening line and further ideas to Chapter 1 and segmenting the chapters to points in Nicky K’s life—good, bad, men, money, work, all the areas a human, particularly, a trans person, has to navigate.
6. I also started looking for pictures for the cover. I played with one that was a gawky physical body in a dress, no head—-then I found a stock photo of a big head. But what I was looking for was something——off. It’s one of the ways trans folk who are trying to “pass” for female, generally—-get spooked. There is something off about their presentation—-so the cover pic had to have an odd quality to it that could be projected into the space of this person is presenting as female now but that wasn’t their sex of birth. (As an interesting aside from talking to so many trans folk—-Black and Latino trans people are spooked more often by their cultural kin and therefore gravitate into spaces with more White people. It seems that White people, less accustomed to seeing people of color often exhibit a sort of race blindness—-I can attest to this—-White people learn to blur us out unless we’re in a context they're interested in—-the advantage for a trans person of color is that focusing on them, White people tend to see what is presented to them.. I’ve seen it happen in person with a White man and trans person of color—-he couldn’t quite place what he was seeing of the person and asked lots of questions, eventually even hitting on had he seen her in a magazine or along 12th Avenue (the notorious NYC prostitution stroll—-but certain areas are trans heavy.) Which ironically said a lot about him too.)

And then I consider tone (I can only compare this to how when you’re making something you decide if it will be a sweet BBQ sauce, spicy hot with cayenne, a dry rub, etc.). I’m considering the texture, the way it will be received by the way I get into it, the story, the character, the other characters. The sound, the tune of the voices, the narrative, which one of my writing Voices will I use, which style?—-I’ve developed a few. Hard, soft, sharp, smart, dumb?

1. I knew the title Tranny for this idea, one because in the city and my workshops, so many of my charges-students used the word. And then in clubs and so on and so forth—-but I also, well educated, know the divide in the world between street-slang lingua and formalized language. I know this also because I own Dick Gregory’s Nigger book and know that Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians was originally titled Ten Little Niggers. But in the writing I knew that trans is subversive and I’m not so much of trying to explain being trans—-more of elucidate this character Nicky K’s experience and the huge conflicting questions and external conflicts.
2. I heard the first line of the novel ten years prior to its’ publication, sitting in the room of a transsexual, with two of her trans friends—-her explaining having her testicles removed, illegally: “I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” (Baby, what else is there to say to open a novel, to lead the blurb? I held that line like a diamond in the back of my mind for years it was so raw, so treasure laden to unearthing a character.)
3. Following it being in the 1st person and “I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” —- I knew it had to be motherfucking raw. I’m talking Donald Goines, Zane, Iceberg Slim raw. Which meant Nicky K had to tell you, me, the reader, the writer, a harsh unvarnished truth even in their own self-delusions. I figured if it was going to be cut off, the balls to the wall, had to be unapologetic. I knew that it had be somewhere between X-rated to NC 17—-graphic, advanced, sexually provocative, which meant that I had to really think about how descriptive I would be—-what would be the line? Would there be any lines?
4. In that studio apartment room near Times Square, the trans person, Valencia, explained sitting in that apartment staring at the pilot light of the oven with a bottle of Vicodin, contemplating suicide after the illegal, back alley testicle removal. She was actively warning the other two trans folk with me that they lacked the mental fortitude and resilience that she possessed to have testicles removed illegally—-they were all doing illegal silicone injections and black market hormones—-they should follow the steps—-psychiatric care, psychologists therapy, medical/hospital surgeries by board certified doctors. To Valencia's underhanded credited, she presented with deep narcissitic, malignant, mentality, which perhaps lent to her resilience. The others were extreme narcissists but more from their identities over time than what seemed to be almost a birthed trait from Valencia. (Yes, she was extremely odd.) But her scenario framed the first chapter—-what if Nicky K were in this studio, on that bed, clutching the pills, crotch piled high with bloody bandages, looking at the pilot light of the oven—-reviewing the irrevocable decision, the life circumstances, that had gotten her/him to this point?
5. I knew I wanted the final chapter to be experimental and contain a picture of glitter filled pill capsules. If Nicky K had 100 Vicodin at the beginning of the novel——what did each one of those represent? And if I listed each individual pill as a representation—-Body, Love, An ex boyfriend, family, work, breasts, women, men—-could the reader infer that I was implying Nicky K was measuring the pills out on the bed, assigning them labels. Was Nicky K taking these pills?

To this point—-I still haven’t written a thing—-this is all still mental, nothing written down, but I have started a digital file folder for the cover pictures I’m considering and the master MS Word template. I tend to handwrite 80% of my work first so there are pads of each chapter generally. 1 fifty page legal pad generally types up to 30+ pages so I know by pad count how many pads to get to my ideal page count.

(All of the above is in a mental egg-bubble, Anders in Peak, being one of the first places I’ve seen it so accurately described——so that when I get to the page/writing I can flow out (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s writing in his amazing book Flow of how certain actions and creativity take place.) 20, 30, 50 pages at a time because I literally know the chords, music, notes, arrangement—-I’m just filling in some lyrics, tightening some of the transitions, adding a bridge).

Tranny came out in maybe a dozen writing sessions, across several states, and I completed it a few hours after my mother died. Ironically in the editing, I showed some pages to a friend and their sister, who is trans (possibly), mentioned a term said to her by a man—-a “Kabuki nigger”—-I damn near pissed on myself, stopping the (editorial) presses, going back and finding a delicious space for that slur in the book. It resonated so fundamentally with Nicky K’s self insights and attacks.

I generally write for a handful of hours at a time, so I would call it one of my fastest Draft #1 to Draft #12 and then edits, projects ever—-call it 15 sessions—-which is about 60 to 100 hours in total. It took less time, by a third to a fifth, than other novels because it was so obsessively focused on one character and it was a stream of consciousness, relating of experiences and ideas——the main other characters being other trans folk, along the spectrum, in a therapy group—-to give breadth of experience. At the end is a glossary/explanatory framework that I generally teach, but I thought someone might pick this up and need to have a clear picture of this for themselves or someone else. Ironically, it’s like my 4th highest selling book.

A (Spherical) Process

To backwards design tracking to how I construct a protect—-most of them happen in the above way—-what tends to get me to constructions beyond simply mental representation constructions are when it’s a larger project (more characters, more pages, research needed) or some sort of collaborative effort where I have to gather data from other people/places.

I mostly though have chunks of the work mentally “worked out” and then I simply write down those chunks—-which is why in examining my process, the process is not linear, it’s spherical.

Stage 1:

By “spherical” I mean the 5 Stage process above. First a global idea—-transsexuality/sexuality/race/conflict—-that’s the first Stage.

Stage 2:

is finding a locality, a central workable point in that—-individual identity in regards to race and sexuality and how that is eased or complicated by homosexuality vs. transsexuality.

Stage 3:

Is comprised of all of the individual segments that comprise race, sexuality, identity more acutely identified in either scenes or perspectives or characters. Each one of those segments are scenes that I’m sewing into a cohesive narrative.

Stage 4:

Is laying the pattern-segments against/onto the Stage 1/2 goals or foundation. I know I want a character to go through this, I know that the character has to represent these things as it will be first person, so I need the character to have:

• a beginning point—-discovery of this state of being, and then
• a conflict point—-why aren’t they happy with this state of being?, and then
• a final end point—-what challenges this happiness and can it be overcome?

In Beginner writer lessons/classes/books it is often simplistically reduced to the conflict point being resolved in the final end point. But for different works, for varying reasons, I often decide no, I’m going to leave this open ended.

Another novel Stay With Me—-I had some back and forth editorial discussions with how I was going to end the novel—-Kirk is awaiting his husbands return from China with two adopted babies and discussing with his therapist how all of love is faith based and there are no guarantees except that it will end in divorce, death, separation.

I thought that was an excellent faith based ending so that like life, the story is without resolution—-as so many other characters in this exploration of five different parallel relationship multiverses—-both ended, resolved and were left, unresolved. It was also the first novel where so much (600+ pages) had moved/evolved these characters, that I wanted sort an ending where we thought we knew a possible ending, a happy ending, and it was not guaranteed—-much like the therapy session. Then it was pointed out to me that there was an undercurrent story to the book in all of this multiverse jumping that I could snag to several other books (S, Hush and the forthcoming Myriad)

which would be connective tissue and still a treat for the reader, if I extended a bit farther, and then put in a chapter from the forthcoming Myriad series. I liked the linking in direct and circumspect ways so I did it. Creating spherical novels.

One of my over-goals in writing, in each novel, is that it be different in some way—-in the sex, sexuality, gender of the main character (s), and/or, in that it be sci-fi, magical realism, straight thriller, horror, drama, first person, third person, experimental, mixed forms, news articles as meta-fiction, and/or, that I do something experimental with the form, the format, of the book itself with design, layout, graphics. I, Kyle, must be challenged. Tranny’s challenge was first person, inside the mind of a trans person who is confused and build her perceptions and world on what is a disfiguring day, that potentially ends in death.

Stage 5:

is the summation of all of the above elements, both fleshed out and connected across space and writing space-time. I may not write, rewriting or edit in chronological sequence—-Chapter 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.

Chapter 10 I wrote after Chapter 1, then I re-did 7,8,9 after I’d completed 1 to 6 because I needed to get to Nicky K sitting in the City Center auditorium—-where I've been many times—-watching the Alvin Ailey dancers perform and seeing bodies move—-male, female, athletic, pronounced and supremely comfortable. people of color centered in, enjoying and expressing their bodies in such a direct, spectacularized way—-much like a trans presentation to the world——to someone who is not comfortable in their body, who has been accepted and rejected and rejected and accepted and questioned, to the point of a form of madness—-so that the reader understands they’ve read through to Chapter 9——and that the next chapter—-chronologically (upended to when you the reader entered—-you truly entered the novel at the decision from Chapter 9, so that the movement to Chapter 10 is logical and you have all of the information to understand it—-because you now understand and have experienced a spherical sequencing of Nicky K’s reality—-you know completely how and now, in and out of time, when Nicky K got to the decision that led to Chapter 1) would be Chapter 1 and Chapter 1 is a call and response

(In music, call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually written in different parts of the music, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or in response to the first. This can take form as commentary to a statement, an answer to a question or repetition of a phrase following or slightly overlapping the initial speaker(s). It corresponds to the call and response pattern in human communication and is found as a basic element of musical form, such as verse-chorus form, in many traditions. ——Wikipedia)

so that when you turn to Chapter 10—-you, the reader understand glittery pills and 100 “Reasons”. And then the reader decides (response), because they now see into and across and through the novel.

(Yes, I’m consciously playing with the form of how you receive and perceive the text itself in your mind. Yeah, that’s when you’re really writing at a higher level—-when you understand how to manipulate unwritten text/responses.)

I would offer that the pedantic writer/writing comes from following the cliché linear design, especially when trying to envelop a reader into a character-world.

Almost like a physical globe one should be able to hold a book—-in it’s written form—-as the writer and see how every portion—-or space connects across the novel to the next—-this character to that, that one to that idea, that idea to that outcome.

To me, at this point in my writer “career”, it would be a form of limiting to think of a work as directly linear-chronological because I’m constructing it as large patches of connectable real estate—-like assembling a bookshelf or a musical piece or a gourmet dinner.

The Inevitable Change

It never is at it is imagined into the ending that I first conceived. I think this is because in a novel there are more time gaps of writing. I might get to a conclusion, an end, but it’s never how I thought I would get there or what I thought the end would be. It’s always different. I didn’t know Chapter 10 of Tranny until writing Chapter 1 and the clutching of that bottle of Vicodin—-and I was like: this is the ending, the conclusion, the choice, the precipice. BUT how do I design it so that I have an ending in mind, you, the reader, have one too——and we’re BOTH right?

There’s my Writing Construction Challenge raising like a slumbering phoenix—-how you gonna make this different, make it dance, make it unique, Kyle?

Then I discover that and I have these two buttresses that allow me to play in the center. I get to play with a character living or dying, pro or con, yes or no, maybe, maybe not——and I’m not going to answer what I think happens or I know, doesn’t happen.

Or even what became of Valencia, in real life, a decade ago, because we’re now in Fiction Land.

https://amzn.to/48QA9SN

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenix

Why does it feel so good to be fucked in the ass even if I’m a guy? by Kyle Phoenix

 

Because that Drum is being beat.

I teach a workshop called Beating The Drum.

The finger, dildo, vibrator, penis, Popsicle is rubbing, grazing against your prostate which is one of the main buttons around your genitalia of sexual nerves/pleasure.

I teach all the techniques in my book

Multiple Orgasm Training for Men…since you know I can’t show you what I show on the models here online.

https://amzn.to/48QA9SN

What can poor people learn from rich people? by Kyle Phoenix

There must be effort into change and a consciousness hat one is making an extreme change into one’s content and context.

I read a lot of answers and was thinking about this in relationship to a pet peeve I have.

1. Patience. I travel twice a month as part of work projects and I stay at two different hotels but the same ones pretty much twice a month. Because the projects have been ongoing and will be ongoing for a couple more years I’ve been able to bounce around to hotels and figure out which is the best for my expenditure budget in terms of comfort, space, safety, convenience. One of the hotels I stay at has some sort of contract with the City so it accepts lower income people who are going through issues. It’s about $2000 a month for a single room. I’m in and out twice a day—-to the project and then to go exercise when weather permits with a 4–5 mile power walk.

I have noticed this on elevators from when I’m in this concentrated environment with more people of poverty, visibly and when I’m in Manhattan at skyscrapers. Patience. I watch adults and their children press the call button, frantically over and over and over. There are two elevators, it’s not a particularly crowded place weekdays but even on the elevator I see people get on, the less prosperous—-there’s a visible difference between those of us there for work or vacation and frantically continue to press their floor buttons as the elevator is moving, after another passenger has boarded. They’re near frantic and often on their cell phones textign and scrolling and rushing for more stimuli, answers, information, speed, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, I have to get to…the vending machine.

So a few months ago I started really watching this trend, seeing if it was just a human thing that some of us do and some of us don’t but sure enough I was seeing this impatience. A lot of my poorer students have this which leads into the next point.

2. Time Perception. I wandered into CVS and one of the associates greeted me, he’s seen me often from the office building area and recently after a year of going there and a longer discussion with several of the other associates, I told them my name and they looked me up online and now they greet me as soon as I come with whatever you call it when you’re smart and people announce it when you walk in—-it’s been happening since I was a child, sometimes positively, sometimes not, I don’t know what it is, it does no ego aggrandizement but people do it. I ask how he’s doing and he asks, demands an answer from me about how he can change his life. He asks how he can get out of the ghetto he lives in, he, like most people—-this goes to Point 3, expresses disdain at his work. My goal was lemonade but okay, here I am and as a young Black man, in the circumstances he’s expressing he has less access to someone like me, regardless of my race but particularly of my race so if possible, and since I see him at least weekly, I try to start laying some inceptions infections of change (I’d been thinking for the past couple of months of some materials to give the staff about financial management—-its a delicate thing so I’ve been gently strengthening my personal connections to them identifying them by name without looking at their badges, being convivial, congenial, etc.)

One of the things I point out is that he’s about 25. There was a study that children born after 2000 have a mortality lifespan of 125 years because of the advancements in medical technology so I said to him that’s your first place to start. Drugs, drinking, unsafe sex—-you have to stay on the right sides of those, be in control of those. Then food intake, try to reasonably exercise. This will give you more healthy time. He wanted Point 4 but we went back and forth with him asking me what was the lifespan expectancy of Black men and I was like well, it’s shifted. An actuary, I explained what that was, would approximate at least 78 years but that’s longer one, for his generation and two, if you manage the factors I was mentioning. He thought his life expectancy was about 46 to 50 years old, he didn’t think he’d live any longer than that. I was shocked, I thought we were going to quibble about the 78.

3. Work. I work several jobs/projects because it’s just easier or some of my work overlaps or external laps or school is expensive and there are some work projects that absorb tuition costs, it’s a scene. Anyway. I come into contact with 3 distinct social classes every week—-Poor/Working Class, Middle Class and Rich/Wealthy. I get to distinctly hear and see how all three experience their work lives, whether separate or integrated. Poor through Middle Class kvetch, complain, hate, distress, stress, worry and are pretty close to paranoid about other workers, managers, changes, etc.. There’s a sense of almost prison like fatalism about work rather than an engagement. I don’t mean that they necessarily do the job badly but they language hating the job/work they do. Then there are other Middle Class to Rich people who seem pleased, interested, invested, intense and engaged in the work they do, even when not self employed or owners of the business. There’s one lawyer who works 7 days a week, 8-12 hours a day, his wife often meeting him to leave midday on weekends, getting in at 6am. He teases me about my work hours being wacky and seeing each other in passing and I do the same to him.

4. The Magic Pill.

When I’m teaching often my students want the Magic Pill, no matter their age. My point about the Magic Pill is that it’s slow acting. A college degree is slow acting. It takes about 10 years to be activated and used but in that 10–14 year period your brain has been changed by education deeply so that you can think far better, more efficiently, broader and deeper than the non-educated. It’s the difference between being able to walk and not being able to walk.

However as I told the CVS associate, change will take time. Your ability though is to figure out what to do with Time. To plan Time and not just have Time pass. When pressed I talk about not watching TV, rarely going to the movies and The Poor to Middle Class RAGE as if I’m talking about leaving God in a ditch—-what do you do then? They often lack the self reflection to look at the panacea entertainment is used as so if I say I don’t take the video pills (digital Vicodin) then people can’t understand why I’m voluntarily in “pain”. The pain being the experience of an existence that doesn’t have billions of dollars to distract me., which is Point 5. Nope, haven’t seen Wonder Woman, nor Black Panther, nor Avengers, nor Star Wars——now breathe. Really only a small number of people have seen it. To make $100 million at the box office is only about 10 million people in a weekend. The larger the studio investment, the greater amount of screens it’s shown on. Most movies play on 2000–3000, the above played on 4500+, it would literally have to go black in the middle to not be a financial hit.

Poor to Middle Class people often talk to and around me about the conspiracy about propaganda but like a brainwashed hooker chatter on about it then tell you excuse me, they have to go service that biker gang over there. One coworker, whom I have no idea how he’s still alive at 60, scraping along, literally the epitome of Uncle Ruckus rails about his poverty and White influence and subjugation, yet has two cable boxes at home, $250 a month and no pension nor 401k though the company offers it on his $8 after taxes job. He’s stuck. No, really, he looks like Uncle Ruckus…except for the eye and has the same mentality.

5. Either Entertainment or Money is seen as a distraction from reality. I sit on trains and buses and planes, far too many and watch poor people feverishly working on their smart phones and I lean over…and it’s video games and now the new more dullard action, movies/TV shows on phones. Two things I’ve learned form this—invest in phone tech, it is legal drugs and two, it crosses all ages, all races but concentrates in the poor to middle class.

I’m often watching this Impatience, distorted view of Time, Disdain of Work as the first tree and I think about how they mass together to outcome. Impatience and Time Issues mean you can’t plan. If you can’t stand patiently, sometimes I count, for three seconds, as an elevator door closes without erroneously thinking if YOU press the button the Universe will speed up then how are you going to look at 4 years of investment time to 10 years of educational outcome. It seems very basic, as if I’m pointing out elements of a sneeze to how that gets you to brain cancer but Patience and Time, are required to change an overall situation and I say that as someone deeply invested and aware of both who is constantly pushing myself to do more, thinking that I should be doing more, that when I take a day off have I failed all of my plans. That I should petition to take a few more classes, finances be damned.

Then hating your Work, which I’ve never understood. But then I think I haven’t understood it because I’ve always engaged my work from a happy Middle Class to Rich perspective. So even when it hasn’t been right hand to the President of the USA, or has been some lower skill or no skill job that I’ve taken throughout my entire college career to make ends meet or make sure that school wasn’t interrupted. But the disdain at work I think narrows what you absorb from it, what you give off, who notices you. If I’m pissed at the Concierge desk and you’re looking for a receptionist at $5 more dollars an hour, will you scoop me up or pass me by? People are always watching you. And listening to you. Are they watching you be pissed at your circumstances or putting on your professional face.. and yes, maybe reading tech manuals in the bathroom or taking free online classes on your phone—-you know I’m the only one I’ve ever seen doing that on the train, when I’m not reading a book? Coursera courses are downloadable and transferable to phones—-if I can figure out how to do it, anyone can.

The Magic Pill. I’ve never thought there was a Magic Pill. I have thought with my work and watching it increase in range and value that it will take Patience, Time, Enjoyment of the Work itself and eventually over decades it will manifest as I envision as long as I have critical benchmarks and keep infusing new abilities and ideas into it. Tending the garden.

I have Netflix and Hulu and I lost all reason in my book and on my day off, Monday to Tuesday night, I watched all of Homeland Season 7. I watched it in one day because I have this thing about preferring to see things in a long range time frame availability like that, rather than wait for an episode a week. I like to see it like a book that I can whizz through in a day. Entertainment in Moderation is fine, refreshing, useful, pushes to new creative boundaries. But here’s how I look at it.

Am I creating as well?

When I watch something, a movie, a film, a TV show, a play, a music convert, a musical, do I then go back to my life and create or do I just pay to see other people create. And if I just pay to see others create, what does that make me?

I write. I try to write a minimum of 25,000 words every couple of days. Really hot years I get up to 10,000,000 a year, average is about 5,000,000. Some of it good, some published, some online, it’s a mix. Some is just stacked up to be used later. Some is work/teaching related—emails, curriculum, etc..

I’m not just Consuming. I’m also Producing. Something. And amazingly I put it out on market and they keep bringing back revenue 24/7 from all around the world. Hmmm, with a little patience and time…

Uncle Ruckus often pontificates about America the great, racism, capitalism and consumerism in a hodge podge ball of vitriol, confusion and lower educational perception of things far beyond his capacity to reason through. I asked the CVS associates, several of them, did the company offer them the ability t purchase CVS stock at lower prices because of the AETNA merger. They said yes, but one said, rather condescendingly that he couldn’t think about that because he was paying school loans. He proudly thinks that paying a bill is “having money” or maybe moving money is money. Or what I often find in poor young people when they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about they flash arrogance rather than the humility of I don’t know or how or what is that?

The deeper juxtapositions of these 5 thought-frames, ways of being are what I think the Rich—-hell, the happier Middle class have to teach Poorer people and the unhappy Middle Class.

Further poverty based strategies to get out of poverty that I regularly teach and learned to identify in myself are in Ruby Payne's’ Bridges Out of Poverty. While I don’t agree with absolutely everything, and you’re not supposed to, I don’t know why people think ONE thing (The Magic Pill) is the absolute answer, this is one of the collected, concise pieces of learning to how to shift from poverty mindset.

What does your family think about your sexual orientation? by Kyle Phoenix

This is really weird, to me. I’m not sure if it’s for everyone and when I share my own coming out story in workshops and such it’s odd.

It has never occurred to me to check in with my family, to ask them, to poll them. They know, I’m sure they discuss it but I don’t see it as open for that kind of discussion.

When I came out it was a big dramatic thing that ended up with a high school relationship from best friends to lovers to mash up and then I almost tried to kill myself over it, then I freaked out and ran to the hospital and so you sit in a hospital room and a thousand doctors of the physical and psychological variety interview you for days and they surmised that my best friend and one school counselor were not enough people in my life for me to be talking to about my identity. My mother had been “warned” can you warn someone from a family therapist that I might not be entirely straight after our sessions when I was 13–14 after my parents cataclysmic divorce.

After a week in the hospital, basically sitting there reading books and looking at the really screwed up folk I get home and my family tells me that I’m not allowed to be my sexuality, whatever I’m going through. I have to reset or there will be repercussions. And I was like Oh, ok. And I went to my room and started packing, this will then be the last day of our acquaintance. I was half way packed when my mother came in and restarted negotiations because they got in that moment that I was more important to me than they were.

I think my closest aunt may’ve asked a question or two but I told her to go buy a book. Unless we were openly discussing her sex life. But she just wanted to know. I just wanted to know when was the last time you were eaten out, how you let a husband beat you for a decade and then fuck you, how does your sexuality jive to that?

My father’s realized I think when he tried to get near this arena that I’d erected reasonable boundaries and landmines. I went wild and put a Chippendale's calendar on my walls for a couple of years and then I dated first from a phone line and then from online. I went to clubs. I went to an LGBT Center for youth in Manhattan then went off to college and did workshops, made the newspaper, wrote lots of articles and stories, gay, straight, lesbian, trans. I think he realized that it wasn’t anything different or more importantly up for inspection.

A few years after undergrad I worked from corporate world to LGBT non profit world and when I asked could I consider maybe bringing a serious partner to the house from Thanksgiving I was met with my stepfather might find the fact that we weren’t married offensive in a Christian household. I told my mother, and invited her to share this with him too, to go fuck themselves. They’d both been alcoholics, drug addicts, morally bankrupt, living in sin for a decade, wasted millions and assumed that I would want to bring a partner home for the holidays, as my stepfather’s daughter was bringing her husband, when I couldn’t get legally married then. So I don’t have a legal right so I’m the sinner. I told them that they were cut off and it took about 6 months before I spoke to them again. They’d gone all PFlag by then but I felt it was a deep sleight against what my legal rights were and the fact that I’d been out for over a decade by then to sort of try and ostracize me with that.

Those boundaries have made it as normal as discussing anyone else’s relationships. Are you seeing anyone, is politely asked of me sometimes. But a lot of my family is dead, almost two decades after coming out so I expect the remainder discuss it. But I’m extremely different than my family. I’m also extremely different in what I allow and tolerate from other people and I’ve been out from work to social life to jail to traveling to everywhere in those 20 years. It’s never occurred to me to be anything else or to be disclosing about the details. I don’t lay myself open for inspection in that way that I notice and cringe and think is the negative fuel of a lot of LGBT people into shame, disappointment, pain.

Ironically I started doing this LGBT work and workshops to thousands, online, on TV so I’m OUT. Like on the street sometimes folk know me and come up and talk to me about their issues from a TV show they saw. Those venues have pushed me further than even my coworkers from the agencies I think feel comfortable because I’m just me and there’s outness but there’s not permissiveness about it unless it’s for work or there’s a quid pro quo, an exchanging dialogue going on. I’m not up from analysis. I do recognize how that’s weird to the general engagement of LGBT people, I’m not obtuse.

I’m just sovereign unto myself so I really don’t consider you or anyone else as privy to my inner self unless we’re sharing. privately or I’m doing so for work, or bluntly, fucking.

What do I think of myself when I self analyze the above attitude?

I’ve had less shame, guilt, fear over my lifetime about my sexuality. That teenage if I can’t have love then I want to die—-ooops, wait, that’s not what I meant incident was really the last time I've had that co mingling of shame, guilt, fear, pain about myself and loving the same or opposite sex. If you want to go, go. I even introduced my HS ex to a girl he said he fancied. I’m like if not you, get going because you’re standing in the way of someone better for me. (I’m often thinking this on bad dates and when other people think they’re breaking up with or letting me down easily. It’s funny.)

I don’t care about it sometimes in ways that make me feel disingenuous when I’m doing very specific LGBT work.

I don’t think it’s that interesting. About me, about you.

It causes difficulties in an odd way in relationships that I think have to do with race, social class, maturity, age. Most gay, MSM, same gender loving men are going through stages, there are actually 6 stages of issues, the Cass Model around identity. Guys have bee like I want to be with you be close to you love that about you but for a relationship I need a reflective shame based partner, I need the fear, the guilt, the secretiveness. I’ve just stared at them.

I disagree with several points of the Cass Model, it’s below and in good faith outline my disagreement but I still think it’s a good base outline, but I agree with the Stages itself. Maybe in a way my own prodigiousness and my introvertedness and my intrapersonal high aptitude allowed me to work through my stuff faster. I think in my LGBT work it allows me, particularly being of color, to present and represent an ideal. That was never my intention but to be able to honestly say, hey you don’t have to crucify yourself over this, I don’t.

I have also studied A Course in Miracles for two decades and when first picked it up, it reflected some of my beliefs about spirituality, existence, the Universe so I don’t identify with my body in the same way I think you have to in some stages of LGBT identity stuff or trans stuff. I had a trans friend who was really upset at the fact that her being trans mattered very little to me because she was deeply seeped in being trans. And I’m like I don’t believe the body exists so what you do with your body is one, your choice and two, to me like redecorating your house. Am I suppose to have an existential co-crisis with you over changing the drapes? She thought this was a deep denial of my wanting to be trans and I was like no, one can feel, and express feminine energy and spirituality and soul expression without wanting to physically change the flesh. And if she wanted her trans freedom she had to allow my non-trans freedom. Amazingly enough, but I’ve foudn this with other LGBT folk as well, she couldn’t. It’s like be oppressed, feel the pain and oppression and in pain with us or you’re an alien!

Lastly, as a complete left field over analysis of myself and my family using Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamics. Most of my family, with the exception of my parents, were/are Level 3 and Level 4s—-focused in tribalism and authoritarian structures. My parents were 5–6s so they, as generations can, pushed me a level further in consciousness and even a bit in social class, to 7—a more holistic vision of myself, humanity, the world. When I compare myself to my cousins, despite education, I come back to my parents being “ahead”, further along, odd for African Americans, than their parents so I got accelerated in some ways differently than the rest and eventually even different than my parents.

I have found fragments of a “tribe” a family that I’ve knitted together, mostly older people than myself by 20+ years, the natural issue: they die out in a shorter span of time in our engagement. But I’m rarely completely comfortable with the pain or the let’s do something to be distracted from the pain or how our family perceives us, groupings in LGBT groups.

Cass Identity Model

Stage

State

Explanation

Stage 1

Identity Confusion

In the first stage, Identity Confusion, the person is amazed to think of themselves as a gay person. "Could I be gay?" This stage begins with the person's first awareness of gay or lesbian thoughts, feelings, and attractions. The people typically feel confused and experience turmoil.

To the question "Who am I?” the answers can be acceptance, psychological self-denial and repression, or rejection.

Possible responses can be: to avoid information about lesbians and gays; inhibited behavior; self-denial of homosexuality ("experimenting", "an accident", "just drunk", "just looking"). Males may keep emotional involvement separated from sexual contact; females may have deep relationships that are non-sexual, though strongly emotional.

The possible needs can be: the person may explore internal positive and negative judgments. Will be allowed to be uncertain regarding sexual identity. May find support in knowing that sexual behavior occurs along a spectrum. May receive permission and encouragement to explore sexual identity as a normal experience (like career identity and social identity).

Stage 2

Identity Comparison.

In this stage, the person accepts the possibility of being gay or lesbian and examines the wider implications of that tentative commitment. "Maybe this does apply to me." The self-alienation becomes isolation. The task is to deal with the social alienation.

Possible responses can be: the person may begin to grieve for losses and the things they give up by embracing their sexual orientation (marriage, children). They may compartmentalize their own sexuality—accept lesbian/gay definition of behavior but maintain "heterosexual" identity. Tells oneself, "It's only temporary"; "I'm just in love with this particular woman/man"; etc.

The possible needs can be:

·

will be very important that the person develops own definitions;

·

l need information about sexual identity, lesbian, gay community resources, encouragement to talk about loss of heterosexual life expectations;

may be permitted to keep some "heterosexual" identity (as "not an all or none" issue).

Stage 3

Identity Tolerance

The person comes to the understanding they are "not the only one". The person acknowledges they are likely gay or lesbian and seeks out other gay and lesbian people to combat feelings of isolation. Increased commitment to being lesbian or gay. The task is to decrease social alienation by seeking out lesbians and gays.

Possible responses can be: beginning to have language to talk and think about the issue. Recognition that being lesbian or gay does not preclude other options. Accentuate difference between self and heterosexuals. Seek out lesbian and gay culture (positive contact leads to more positive sense of self, negative contact leads to devaluation of the culture, stops growth). The person may try out variety of stereotypical roles.

The possible needs can be: to be supported in exploring own shame feelings derived from heterosexism, as well as internalized homophobia. Receive support in finding positive lesbian, gay community connections. It is particularly important for the person to know community resources.

Stage 4

Identity Acceptance

The Identity Acceptance stage means the person accepts themselves. "I will be okay." The person attaches a positive connotation to their gay or lesbian identity and accepts rather than tolerates it. There is continuing and increased contact with the gay and lesbian culture. The task is to deal with inner tension of no longer subscribing to society's norm, attempt to bring congruence between private and public view of self.

Possible responses can be: accepts gay or lesbian self-identification. May compartmentalize "gay life". Maintain less and less contact with heterosexual community. Attempt to "fit in" and "not make waves" within the gay and lesbian community. Begin some selective disclosures of sexual identity. More social coming out; more comfortable being seen with groups of men or women that are identified as "gay". More realistic evaluation of situation.

The possible needs can be: continue exploring grief and loss of heterosexual life expectation, continue exploring internalized homophobia (learned shame from heterosexist society). Find support in making decisions about where, when, and to whom to disclose.

Stage 5

Identity Pride

In the identity pride stage, while sometimes the coming out of the closet arrives, and the main thinking is "I've got to let people know who I am!". The person divides the world into heterosexuals and homosexuals, and is immersed in gay and lesbian culture while minimizing contact with heterosexuals. Us-them quality to political/social viewpoint. The task is to deal with the incongruent views of heterosexuals.

Possible responses include: splits world into "gay" (good) and "straight" (bad)—experiences disclosure crises with heterosexuals as they are less willing to "blend in"—identify gay culture as sole source of support, acquiring all gay friends, business connections, social connections. The possible needs can be: to receive support for exploring anger issues, to find support for exploring issues of heterosexism, to develop skills for coping with reactions and responses to disclosure to sexual identity, and to resist being defensive.

Stage 6

Identity Synthesis

The last stage in Cass' model is identity synthesis: the person integrates their sexual identity with all other aspects of self, and sexual orientation becomes only one aspect of self rather than the entire identity. The task is to integrate gay and lesbian identity so that instead of being the identity, it is an aspect of self.

Possible responses can be: continues to be angry at heterosexism, but with decreased intensity, or allows trust of others to increase and build. Gay and lesbian identity is integrated with all aspects of "self". The person feels "all right" to move out into the community and not simply define space according to sexual orientation

---

[1]The Cass Identity Model is one of the fundamental theories of gay and lesbian identity development, developed in 1979 by Vivienne Cass. This model was one of the first to treat gay people as "normal" in a heterosexist society and in a climate of homophobia instead of treating homosexuality itself as a problem. Cass described a process of six stages of gay and lesbian identity development. While these stages are sequential, some people might revisit stages at different points in their lives.

First, honestly, my problems and concerns with the Cass Model overall, is that it doesn't account for how cultural experiences of race, ethnicity and sexuality vary in Asians, Native Peoples, Africans, African Americans and Latinos throughout the Diaspora and the world That being said, we're going to see it as not one size fits all but more as general GPS, this blanket covers thegeneral identities and stages of MSM, who fit under it, but not snugly, okay?

The problem in sexuality/identity work is that people of color have generally had race as their primary issue to examine identity through and not sexuality. We’re just coming into a space where we can identify that our sexuality perspectives are broader and not just default use White structured and tested cultural indices like the Cass Model as the absolute. It will take time To put this into a context, I will tell you that in workshops for years many men and women of color have talked about their sexuality as broader than simply gay or lesbian; have experiences and feelings that are either singular or experimentation or leave themselves open to have more of them in the future. Yes, some of these fall into the misnomer of DL or Down Low behavior but what I think that really represents are people of color sexually experimenting, trying things out, having the right, agency and congress to start using their bodies outside of a White dominated framework and coming up with a multitude of explanations and experiences that are broader than simply and LGBT scaffold. That includes self-nomination such as same gender loving (SGL).

This causes strife and problems when someone, a partner, has completely internalized the scaffolding of LGBT identity and tries to apply it to say someone who had a same gender relationship as a teen, in jail, in their youth or older.

Does that mean there is no biological component for sexuality or that melanin makes folk confused?

We don’t know. The reason why we, science, I mean, do not know is that the interest in people of colors’ sexuality has been more prurient than curious and genuinely interested in surveying and listening to the lived experience of. The mythology of brown folk and sexuality overshadows true scholarship in this area for men and women who aren’t exclusively heterosexual to identify by.

Hence why I suggest you use something like the Cass Model for a sense, not a definitive definition of identity and sexuality because you or a partner may experience overlapping stages because of the influence of race and ethnicity in and from the dominant culture.

Secondly, a man or woman might not experience all of these stages in order. What someone is in their youth or their 30s might vary in later years,going back or forth along this continuum.