Thoughts on Meeting and Hearing and Chatting with Amy Bloom

First off, Amy Bloom wore a conservative dress. Charcoal wool skirt, turtle neck and hose. Tasteful gold earrings. Well, yes it’s politically incorrect to describe a woman whose ideas are what’s important by what she wears, but when clothing is somewhat at the root of things, and I’m trying to avoid wearing a conservative dress myself....it does seem worth noting.

Second, I like or want to like Ms. Bloom a lot. She has the intent listening skills of a deeply trained therapist . She described having to write up detailed process notes for every case transaction for a demanding mentor as part of her training. She has eyes that seem to see into you without boring in, rather drawing you out. And she seems quite fearless, despite the confessions of her own uncertainties. What’s not to like?

So I found myself, after the presentation, struggling one-on-one, with few by-standers present and dinner pressing to express the concerns that I had about her essay "Conservative men in Conservative Dresses".

Why was the only expert quoted Blanchard? She didn’t see it that way, just thought he was a provocative opposite of the Fairfaxes (and perhaps the Rudds and the rest of Tri-Ess), and besides she had referred to IFGE earlier in the book. About the gleam in the eye and tacit heteronormativity she quickly corrected me and said that heterosexual gleams in the eye weren’t just accepted but encouraged....and candidly said that her discomfort with the sly denials and gleaming eyes of patently sexual crossdressers was how she felt, and thus (implied) what she wrote. We both agreed as writers that readers getting the meaning we intend from what we write is a great problem.

So maybe what we have here is a failure to communicate, that we come from different literary cultures. I have cited Blanchard myself, but I always make it clear that alternative, authoritative viewpoints exist. I don’t assume a reader makes allowances for my subjectivity, or that I’m entitled to it. I wish that I had the time to sit down and line-by-line talk about how I read what she writes and see if what I read is what she meant. So in the end...who knows? She doesn’t like what she saw of a lot of crossdressers or their marriages. She’s an acute observer. I think, given the overall tone of things I’d be happier if she’d said that crossdressers and their marriages aren’t "normal" and many aren’t "good" and they are not like everybody else, but they were part of nature’s variety and not inherently pathological or worse than other bad marriages. That I could have lived with.

I did do something that is my job, but that I hate to do. As the meeting closed down, I did stand up and indicate that people who were interested in knowing about support groups and other information for their clients could avail themselves of literature that I brought. One case professor asked if I’d come talk at a human sexuality class. A grad student wants to use me for a class project in some other kind of class. We’ll see on that one. And I did pass out some literature to people who had clearly never heard of us. And no, my dress wasn’t conservative. -Diane