This one’s public but not for sharing. Thank you!
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“Phil, are you queer?”
The question confused me. I was around 12 years old at the time, and hadn’t really thought much about sex, much less about my relationship to it.
Dad clarified: “I mean, are you interested in boys instead of girls? I mean, sexually?”
I replied out loud that I didn’t really think much about that. Sure, by that time I’d begun to get “those feelings,” avoided trying to climb ropes in gym class, and nurtured fantasy crushes on Shanna the She-Devil and Katie from Valley of the Dinosaurs. I knew about the basic sex stuff from health class and talks with Dad and Mom, and felt an embarrassed fascination for the Playboy and Vampirella magazines Dad kept in the bathroom he shared with Mom. In terms of sexual identity, though, I really had no idea. In what I now recognize as the first stirrings of my kinks, I felt drawn to the half-naked barbarians and slave girls writhing in death traps and octopoid coils on the covers of pulp novels and magazines like Savage Tales. But was I queer, though? I called myself that word without knowing the sexual or decidedly negative connotations it had at the time.
In response to my confusion, Dad said the finest and most memorable remark in his long and checkered history of parenting: “Even if you are, you are still my son and I love you.”
This was a huge thing for any father to say in the mid-1970s, an era when it was still technically illegal to be gay in many parts of America. For a Sicilian military officer to say that to his only son was titanic. In hindsight, every other thing he has said to me, pro and con, over our 55-year relationship, pales in significance to that moment. At the time, I felt puzzled and annoyed and a little bit offended. As I grew older, seeing so many queer friends of mine rejected by their parents – in one case, to the point where one committed suicide after coming out to his family – I realized what an enormous act of love and acceptance my father’s conversation with me had been that night.
As I explored my identity for the next several decades, I soon realized that I was queer. Not that we used that word to define identity back then; in my teens and 20s, it was more acceptable, even in queer communities, to call someone a faggot or a dyke than to call them queer. That word got reclaimed long after I’d started going to gay bars and Gay Student Alliance meetings (“Lesbian” was added during my involvement, and “Bisexual” wasn’t added until after I left college) and NOW gatherings and Silence = Death rallies. When I drew my own takes on those nude barbarians, they were male almost as often as they were female. As far as most folks in my world were concerned, there were only two genders, too; you might be androgynous, or a transvestite, or physically intersexed, but the terminology surrounding gender identity on social media today literally did not exist during my teens and 20s. Most of it originates within the last two decades, some of it even within the last five years or so, and both my age and my sexual identity are a lot older than that.
Physically very much a guy (if only because I’m so fucking furry), I wasn’t androgynous. I preferred girls and didn’t even like most guys, so I figured I was straight. Yet I have genderfluid physicality, got crushes on dudes, and often found myself wondering what would happen if I kissed various male friends of mine on the lips. Given that most of the guys I wondered about at the time also presented as straight, I figured it would be awkward and more trouble than it was worth. I felt more in tune with the gay clubs, and with the men I knew who were bisexual and gay, than I felt with the guys who were all masculine and shit. Even so, I didn’t fit in comfortably with the stylish flamboyance of the gay and bisexual men I knew, either. I was a jeans-and-T-shirts kind of guy and had neither the money for a sharper wardrobe nor the desire to pull it off even if I could. My one experiment with early 80s “style” is best left in the dim mists of memory. On someone else, it might have looked good; on me, it… didn’t.
For the most part, I related with women more than with men. Most of my friends were girls or women, and I certainly trusted them more than I trusted any male friend I had… a trait I hold, with very few exceptions, even now. I felt fascinated by femaleness – not with playacting “femininity” as a social construct, but with the experience of being female. As anyone who’s roleplayed with me knows, I play women by default, and I typically write female characters and perspectives, too… not from the “she breasted boobily down the stairs” voyeuristic sort of way guys often write and play female characters, but from a position of fascination and, as I eventually realized, yearning. Writing in my acting journal around 1984 or early 85, I acknowledged that every character I wrote or played manifested some aspect of myself. Discovering Carl Jung’s work during the 80s, I considered that female aspect of myself my Anima… or, as I called her, my Dancer, my Huntress, my Muse. I dreamed a lot about meeting “my female self” in the woods, in mountains or on a beach, and though I initially looked for my Muse in other women, I eventually realized – as I wrote in the Author’s Notes to my 2013 short-fiction collection Wyldsight – that she was an inner aspect of me.
Ironically, my explorations outside masculine gender norms led to me becoming more comfortable with my masculinity. When I stopped giving a shit about whether or not people thought I was gay, “faggy,” “a fairy,” or whatever, most of my earlier shyness and insecurity fell away. By my late teens, I figured that any guy who was worried about being perceived as gay was insecure about his masculinity. Body-shy and easily overwhelmed by sensations as a child, I became voracious for sensation as a teen. I kept that part of myself under wraps, so to speak, while I lived at home, but threw off as much clothing and as many inhibitions as I could when I reached college. Eight years of theatre and four years of nude modeling tend to obliviate body-shame. My preference for going barefoot emerged during this period, too; many of my characters go shoeless because that attitude toward defiant sensation is so much a part of who I am. The more I got into dance, theatre, modeling, music, sensuality and sex, the less I cared about how people perceived me. The fact that theatre and the punk rock, New Wave, Renfaire and Pagan subcultures I was into at that time were pretty damn queer anyway helped a lot in that regard. My late-teen music idols were Rob Halford, Henry Rollins and Wendy O. Williams: artists who, as Rollins put it, chopped up their gender closets and used them for kindling [1]. Although I identified as male, if only out of habit and a lack of better terminology, I did the same with mine.
There are certainly worse formative influences to have than Rob Halford. 
I’ve been told I share certain characteristics with Rollins, and I kinda see that. 
Wendy O. Williams, punk’s demon queen of destruction and a huge influence on me.
Because anal sex is a non-negotiable no-go zone for me with partners of any gender [2], I limited my sexual explorations with other guys to make-out sessions and manual or oral stimulation. That must mean I wasn’t actually gay or bisexual, right? And despite those explorations and crushes, all my meaningful romantic and erotic connections were with women, and so I was “just fooling around,” I guess? Sure, right, whatever.
During college, I referred to myself as “straight but not narrow” with regards to my sexual identity. After I discovered a button stating, “Don’t assume I’m straight,” I stuck that pin into my favorite jackets and started referring to myself as bi. Although the word polyamory wasn’t in common usage then, my first wife and I were essentially polyamorous and had experiences with “both” genders.
By the time we divorced, and I joined the White Wolf staff in my mid-late 20s, I was in full-on Whatever Works mode. Kink, previously theoretical, became part of my surroundings. Soon, however, I set all of that aside to enter a monogamous relationship with my second wife between 1994 and 2001. After our marriage broke down, I discovered and embraced ethical polyamory, renamed myself Satyr, defined myself as a pansexual ethical slut (thank you, Dossie and Janet!), and did whatever I felt like doing with whichever intriguing adults were interested in doing it with me. During that period, I learned that “queer” was now considered a catch-all term for non-mainstream sexual identity, so yay – I finally had a name for all those confounding identity issues.
During a short but intense relationship within a poly quad, I began embracing that interest in men; sadly, a traumatic violation – combined with knowing a bunch of predatory unethical sluts of various genders – led to me distrusting not only my partners in that relationship but most other people in general. Between the emotional vortex of that period, a post-divorce/ post-rape depression, and a series of exciting but exhausting partnerships, I paired up monogamously with my friend Ann in 2004-2005. When that partnership broke up, I went back to my Satyrian ways, albeit with a bit more restraint than I’d used between 2001 and 2004.
When I looked back on my increasingly prolific sexual history, I realized I was hearing variations on a certain phrase a lot from my partners: “You’re the most female man I’ve ever met.” Not “feminine” – female. It wasn’t always a compliment but was said more often in a positive way than in a negative sense. That observation, combined with my explorations into shadow-work, demi-Jungian “aspecting” [3], and recognizing and redefining masculine experience and identity, inspired me to view my “self” as a tapestry of identities. Several of them were decidedly androgynous and outright female. After considering the experiment of a female social-media persona (and then rejecting the idea as too much work), I created Cedar Blake: the female aspect I’ve written and published under since around 2005.
Initially, I’d intended Cedar to be a pseudonym for romantic and erotic fiction, and I approached a friend of mine about becoming the “face” of Cedar on social media and author biographies. Eventually, though, I decided Cedar was a significant aspect of me: the conscious psychic construct of that Muse I’d been writing about and roleplaying since the late 1970s. After an ugly break with a now-former friend and creative collaborator, I worked around the resulting writer’s block by consciously aspecting Cedar Blake while I was writing. “She” wrote the novella Dream Along the Edge [4], and the experiment succeeded so well I repeated it years later in order to get past a similar block in 2018’s book Gods & Monsters, giving Cedar a byline each time.
(A related aspect, Silk, came out of that period, too; she doesn’t write, though – she’s a literally psychotic character I’ve played in World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Grand Theft Auto, as well as a feral autistic werecreature in Werewolf and Monsterhearts.)
To be clear: I do not have Multiple Personality Disorder or Disassociative Personality Disorder. For me, these aspects are conscious imaginary constructions. Essentially, I give names and physical descriptions to characters that reflect elements of my personality which I choose to emphasize at certain times and set aside at others. I don’t dress as these characters, speak in their voices (much), or say things like, “Cedar is talking now”; those could be valid tools for aspecting, but I don’t employ them except in certain roleplaying situations. It’s a mind-game I play with myself, and it works for me, so I stick with it. Although I began doing this sort of thing long before I read her work, I refined the technique from Debbie Ford’s book The Dark Side of the Life Chasers, and it has worked for me for over 20 years.
By the time I met Sandi in 2007, I’d established that Satyr, my “default everyday aspect,” is pangender, but I’d stopped referring to myself as pansexual because I had hurt a few guys’ feelings by being interested in playtime but not in relationships with them. The term genderqueer was starting to make the rounds by the mid-2000s, but I was trying to redefine what a man could be and so I still asserted a masculine identity, if only to show that men didn’t have to be raging assholes. Exploring why so many men, including me, could so often be raging assholes became the subject of several posts and essays I published around that time-period [5]. The term nonbinary was still on the linguistic horizon, but my interest in conscious aspecting, plus sexual and gender experience and identity, was leading me in that direction. My long relationship with Coyote Ward – who identified as a pangender pansexual autistic person with multiple personalities – involved a lot of discussions about multiple identities (conscious and otherwise), gender constructs, autistic experiences, and other related topics. The fact that I’d been fascinated since childhood with shape-changing, identified so strongly with werecreatures, and wrote extensively about shape-shifting in various media should have made all of this stuff obvious to me a long time ago. Even with a metaphysical artist’s mindset, though, I still kept thinking of myself as a guy.
Old habits die hard, especially when they’re enforced by a larger society.
And let’s be honest here: mainstream society is not the only culture that enforces its ideas about identity.
When I began, several years ago, to toss out references to being nonbinary myself, I got repeatedly and aggressively queer-and-gender-policed by folks who probably hadn’t even been born yet when I first began kissing boys and going to gay bars. The notion that I might be in some sense female was even more harshly attacked, with several people telling me to “stay in your lane” and “stop being so performative” when “discussing queer spaces and experiences.” The fact that I’d been involved with the GSA, ACT-Up and NOW during Reagan’s reign isn’t obvious when you look at photos of me. When folks see me, they see a dude, and as a now-ex-friend of mine phrased it, “No one cares about why you think your life story is important.” Yes, I get the white-guy pass and privileges, and I’m neither young nor pretty enough to fit 21st century notions of what “nonbinary” is supposed to look like. Thus, “you can’t be queer, so shut the fuck up and stop looking for cookies” has been a common enough response that I haven’t bothered coming out about this stuff until now.
If I seem agitated about it here, that’s because I’m expecting similar responses to this post.
After discussing this pushback with various trans and nonbinary friends of mine (including Raven Bond, who likewise transcended conventional ideas about gender even though Raven defaulted to “he/him” pronouns as well), I’d decided it was too much effort to discuss my gender identity in public. Especially in the years following Raven’s and Coyote’s deaths, Trump’s rise, and my ensuing furious depression, I really haven’t had the emotional bandwidth to deal with getting cross-checked by “warriors” on my own team for whom everything’s a fight and everyone’s the enemy. Besides, I’m not going to start wearing makeup and dressing differently; those manifestations of gender don’t suit my female aspects any more than they suit my male ones. I am who I am, and I have been that way my entire adult life. New insights and terminology give me deeper perceptions about who I am, and influence the ways in which I communicate who I am, but they don’t change the person I manifest in this world even though I’m more conscious of the people I can manifest in other ones.
(Consciously manifesting psychic reality through artistic and metaphysical practices is a whole other topic, and this essay is long enough already.)
It’s not accurate to say I feel “like a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Physically and otherwise, I’m a guy. In many regards, I like being a guy; what I don’t like is getting stuck being only a guy. My fascination with shape-changing is sincere; if I could swap out bodies to suit my various aspects, and shift between those aspects physically at will, I would do that in a second. I can’t do that physically, however, so I do it through my art and my roleplaying. In hindsight, I realize that my interests in acting, psychology, RPGs, modeling, writing, and magic originate at least in part from my desire to be more than one “me.” Gender and sexuality are elements of that desire, but the desire is bigger than sex, art, gender, or identity. A few years ago, I commented to Sandi that I resent being stuck in just one body. Thoreau’s words “I am infinite; I contain multitudes” always rang true for me.
Because I’m temperamentally incapable of doing anything simply [6], these recent insights and conversations have coincided with a degree of physical dysphoria that goes beyond gender. The person I feel inside doesn’t match the person I see in reflections these days, not because he’s male but because he no longer looks like the Me I’d gotten to know. Grief-eating, aging, chronic pain, quarantine, depression, social isolation, social-media aggravation, virtual-only contact with most people I know, and a dramatic weight-gain crossed with a drastic reduction in vitality have conspired to mess with my perceptions about my self. This body doesn’t feel like me anymore, and to be honest I don’t like it much. Adding that sensation to recent discussions about gender identity just throws my established center of balance even more off-kilter, and the fact that so many people think they know me (pro and con) because of their perceptions about my work just increases that sense of dislocation in my own skin. I feel paradoxically more than and yet less than I was a few years ago – more conscious about my self/ selves, yet less comfortable with the aging furry meat sack I wear in this incarnation.
And so (finally!), I made my decision to “come out” with such an uncomfortably intimate presentation about my gender and sexual identity – a gesture of solidarity to other nonbinary folks who physically present in an apparently binary way, and an assertion of my fuck-you attitude toward folks who think they get to determine who I am.
This essays is an absurdly long way of saying, “I’m here, I’m queer, I always have been both, and anyone who has a problem with those facts can go take a flying fuck at the moon, and miss.”
I am who I am.
You are who you are.
Labels are just society’s window-dressing on infinitely complex selves.
Thanks for reading.
Take care of yourselves, be whomever you are, and respect other people on their own journeys. There’s room enough here for us all.
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1. Rollins was referring to rumors that he was gay; although he’s ostensibly heterosexual in practice, Hank’s onstage physicality is aggressively genderqueer. As for Halford’s closet, it had been kindling long before he officially discarded it. Anyone who understood enough of the lyrics to “Raw Deal” (which I did), and enough of the subtext to “Jawbreaker,” “Evil Fantasies” and “Breaking the Law” (likewise), already knew Rob was into other boys.
2. Sorry, butt-enthusiasts – it just squicks me. I don’t care what other consenting adults find arousing, but the poop chute has always grossed me out. I know about the prostate and extra stimulation and all, and I’m not interested. Thank you – butt, no.
3. See these articles, as well as references to aspecting in various RPG books I’ve written:
https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/aspecting-song-of-my-selves/
https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/gaming-the-magic-avatar-part-1-of-3/
https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/gaming-serious-fun-part-2-of-3/
4. Initially published in 2014, reprinted in my 2020 collection Valhalla with a Twist of Lethe.
5. See the following essays:
https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/thoughts-about-being-a-man/
https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/6-points-to-understanding-conflicts-with-men/
6. This essay, for example, was supposed to have run 500 words or so.
Satyros Phil Brucato 
It takes guts, and a certain amount of “balls” in the figurative sense, to come out and make it so clear and precise.
I applaud you, and await the day when people can meet other people in public spaces, and do people things, because I’m cooking you the best damn meal you’ve ever eaten.
Hi Phil. I know we haven’t met in meatspace but I love what you wrote. I fear the woke “warriors” to the extent that I just keep quiet about that whole part of myself. I’m a private extrovert so I’ll never write something that exposes myself like you did, there are too many knives out from every direction. But Go You. I hope you make friends with your today-self (I’m 60 so I get the challenge) and treat him/them well. I’d love to hear that you looked in the mirror and were happy to see a beautiful friend. Take care.
Bright blessings! Just a note in solidarity and acceptance for you!
Hey Satyros. We met at DragonCon long ago, the year when you injured your leg and had a bad cold. Instead of running a game, which you did not want to give us a bad experience due to your pain and misery. You sat for a discussion. two players stayed for only the first hour, then it was only my best friend Paul. You talked with us about game (Mage) for the full 4 hour block. It is one of the best and most insightful ones I have ever had with a game developer.
I identify as straight. Over the years I have had many, gay, queer, lesbian and transgender friends. It isn’t what want.in a relationship. But my sexuality does not define anyone around me.We are all a diverse people with different likes, wants and needs. i also understand and agree with exploring different aspects of yourself through role-playing or fiction.
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s you are right there were things that weren’t talked about by your parents or society. I am a big heavy metal fan. A comment about the band Manowar and how gay/queer appealing they were up on stage – all shirtless (often in furs and leather), muscular, oiled up in front a tens of thousands of screaming and cheering men is humorous now. At the time I didn’t see it that way, they were the epitome of maniiness. I think I became more self aware the day Rob Halford spoke out. He said he had never been hiding his sexuality, “Hello Leatherboy!”. It brought new meaning to me to the song, ‘Hell Bent for Leather.” And you know what, I didn’t care.I still like the music and that song.
I have gay friends come out to me, They were shocked when I said, “I know, I have known for years. I have been and will still be your friend.” Another friend has begun the process of changing their gender. After a dozen years of knowing them as male, she is moved forward with surgery, had her gender changed on her driver’s license. Last time when I went to where she lives we went out to dinner and caught up. I didn’t care. Because she is a human being and a friend.
The lifestyle, choices and feelings are not mine. But I respect them, accept them and still without any prejudice or judgement accept them. Beyond one long and fond remembered meeting and a few online comments you and I are not close. But I am honored and happy to know you. Thank You for what you as a person have done for me. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to acknowledge your differences especially in these past 4 years of hate spreading and discontent.
If we ever meet again, I would be honored to raise a glass with you. To use a line from a favored movie (Dead Poet’s Society) which originally comes from poet Walt Whitman. “Oh Captain, My Captain.”
– Kevin
Wow. Thank you, Kevin. I remember you guys, I’m glad that was a good experience for you, and I’d be glad to share that toast with you anytime. You rawk!
My spouse is agender and in a similar boat – they look stereotypically masculine but aren’t and have never really been. Sometimes they say they don’t feel trans enough, but that’s the thing.
The children spouting the terf rhetoric about what makes someone queer or trans? They’re insecure, and projecting, and often times straight up brainwashed by cishet folks (like terfs) into thinking queerness is separate, little boxes for us to stick to and never leave.
But in the immortal words of Miles Jai, “there is no box.”
I’m sorry for your trauma and pain. I’m sorry for every asshole who made you feel like you weren’t enough. And I’m sorry for your losses.
I adore you, and I’m proud of you. You’ve always been here. It’s no one’s place to tell you otherwise.
Thank you. I appreciate that, I appreciate you, I’m sorry about your spouse’s pain, and I’m glad you have each other. ❤
Thank you for writing this and sharing. Your experience speaks volumes to me.
Thanks! I’m glad it does. ❤
I am in the midst of doing some research for a piece that is currently NDA, and I stumbled upon this perspective. It is a fascinating take and I believe it’s gotten me to rethink some of my perspectives.
Hey, Satyr–thank you for sharing this. I know I’m a few years late to the party, but I figured I’d add my thoughts and response anyway, because the topic of identity, including gender, is evergreen and isn’t really something you decide to write about once and then dust off your hands and go “well, that’s that, time to never think about it again!”
(Man, if only.)
Writing about this stuff can be scary, especially when you’ve been attacked, especially by people in the community that’s supposed to actually *get it.* It’s a long-standing problem that masculine-looking nonbinary people get dismissed, but it’s not as prevalent as it can seem–there’s immense pushback on the idea that nonbinary is “woman lite” or looks any particular way. I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences talking about who you are and your gender before–it’s awful, it’s inexcusable, and it’s just nasty how people treated you. That wouldn’t be the case in a lot of spaces, thankfully, so I hope it helps to know that at least some of the “kids” are alright. I’m in my mid-twenties (yikes, it’s as bad as it sounds with the world the way it is at the moment) and familiar with spaces primarily occupied by people around my own age, often a bit younger, and don’t see a lot of stuff written by people who were out there being queer for longer than we *had* a lot of the terms we use today, so reading this was a really informative and meaningful experience for me.
I’m nonbinary, myself–transmasculine and struggling to pull it off, not quite fitting into the box or label of “man” but often being shoved into it by people that don’t want to listen to me when I say that I’m a “guy” but not a “man” and don’t get that their experiences of those being one and the same aren’t universal. Labels are a nightmare, I’ve found–the deeper you dig and the longer you look, the less they apply, and sure, they’re useful to communicate an idea to people and give them a basic understanding of what’s going on under the hood, but they just don’t make labels for people like me in some ways–a masculine but not male dragon that likes all genders equally but is asexual most of the time except when he’s not, and semi-aromantic some months but mostly in the winter–typing it out, I sound and feel ridiculous, but it’s my truth and sometimes I feel like it’s the people who came before all of the labels and microlabels that will get it, instead of the ones trying to neatly put me in a handful of boxes. I guess I’m trying to say that you writing and sharing this makes me feel a little braver about who I am, and I wanted to thank you for that. No shade to those who find a label and fit it perfectly and love and adore it for all of their days, but that will never, ever be me in all aspects of my identity, and it hurts some days but seeing someone that I look up to that really *gets* it takes some of the sting out.
Identity’s a hell of a ride. Gender, sexuality, mental illness or other weirdness, hell, *species*–I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term “alterhuman,” or maybe “otherkind,” but you’d probably find it interesting if not–basically, a feeling of being either not human or something similar but “different” from human, sometimes in *addition* to humanity, other times as a replacement to it. Talk about something that’s hard to say out loud, nevermind in most company–I don’t usually mention it because, outside of alterhuman circles, I’d get laughed out of the room or told I’m “making fun of trans identities.” (A real, genuine thing I’ve heard–as if I’m not trans myself, and as if I’m not totally serious about who I am.)
I guess my point is “fuck what everyone else thinks.” Who and what you are, where all of it came from, how you feel about it–it’s all important, vital, an integral piece of you, and that makes it infinitely important. Everyone’s got something, and everyone’s a piece of the world, a part of this universe we all inhabit, and, hell, if people aren’t going to be nice about it, they can buzz off and talk to their fellow mean bastards and leave the rest of us alone. Be as open as you want to be and don’t take shit from anybody–nonbinary and queer don’t look certain ways, nothing does, and anyone who says otherwise is honestly just not worth the time. That’s not the opinion of the majority, just a loud, bitchy minority that doesn’t know how to mind their own business. I can’t tell you how much reading this rewired a bit of my brain, in a good way, and how happy I am to have found it. Life and identity are messy; this is truth in words, even if it’s not pretty and poetic. And this is all something I have to remember, too, and internalize, and I sure as hell need to be brave about it, and I guess reading this has helped a little with that.
Thank you for sharing. Thank you for your words of wisdom, too, and for everything else you write–you provide a beacon of hope, I think, for a good number of people, and that’s desperately needed in these times. If ever I get the chance, drinks or snacks are on me.
Keep rocking,
Percy
Thank you SO MUCH, Percy. That’s all beautifully said and beautifully put. More than anything else in this life, I want to help people feel seen, inspired, and empowered in their own. If my words have helped you, I’m glad to have helped, and I really appreciate you letting me know about that. ❤