In addition to reading from Exile, I also read several poems from The Marrow’s Telling, including “How to Talk to a New Lover about Cerebral Palsy.” As folks were leaving, I got a big thank you for this poem from a woman who said she had just been having this exact conversation with her new boyfriend who has CP. I can’t think of a better compliment because it means that this poem has been of use in such a practical and possibly profound way.

During Q&A, I was asked two questions that were overwhelming in their bigness and that I am still chewing on, thinking about how I would like to answer them now. The first one was about how to get non-disabled progressive organizations to include disability in their political agendas.  I talked about three things: 1) the need to break isolation as disabled people (the material conditions of our lives are often such that many of us aren’t able to spend the time we want in communities of our own choosing, which in turn impacts the access we have to progressive activists to push them about ableism), 2) the need to talk about the ways ableism is twined at a fundamental level with other systems of oppression, and 3) the utter need for the disability rights movement to stop being a single-issue and single-identity driven movement.  There are so many more things to add to this list — strategies, ideas, philosophies, tactics.

The second question was about political and social changes  regarding social justice and disability that have happened in the last 10 years since Exile was first published.  I really fumbled this question. I talked about  queer disabled people and disabled people of color, both queer and not, finding each other, making community, and building culture. I wanted to talk about movement building work,  but all I could think of were the many barriers and walls that a lot of us have encountered in the last 10 years trying to get disability onto a broader political agenda. I’d be delighted to hear other people’s ideas about what has changed in the last decade.

Here’s an offer and a shameless plug. I still have a dozen copies of the first edition. I’m selling them autographed for $10 each (includes shipping). E-mail me at eli (at) eliclare (dot) com if you’re interested.

Eleven years ago in 1998 when I handed the finished manuscript of Exile and Pride to my editors at South End Press, I knew the gendered story I had just finished telling already trailed behind both my personal experience and the politics of the trans liberation movement. It was a true story, not one I wanted to abandon or disown, but no longer current, even then. Today do I try again, telling another, distinctly different, story about gender and race, class and violence, disability and sexuality, all crashing together in our tender, resilient bodies? Do I try to find another single, coherent narrative for myself that claims boyhood as far back as I can remember even as the doctors assigned me the categories girl and mentally retarded? Do I claim my current gender location as the most real? What happens when storytellers grow beyond stories to which they’re still connected?

I could tell you about being a white queer guy now, white privilege and men’s privilege wrapping around each other, learning what it means to be a man calling other men on their sexism…. I could explain, expose, trace the lineage of my gender as it has changed. Demonstrate how language, politics, and perception have shifted around it. Wrestle some more with nature and nurture, essentialism and social construction, rigidity and fluidity, binary and continuum, and how these ideas roil through cultures, histories, and communities. I could tell this story as if this moment, this body, this gender were an anchor.

But how do I write about change itself, a story of verbs—transform, crack, melt, resist, transmit, contradict, choose, translate, repeat, shift, yield, yearn? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying everyone’s gender is fluid, but even if your gender has stayed as steady as a boulder left behind when the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, your body has changed over time. I want a story that narrates the span between 15-year-old girl and 80-year-old woman, between 10-year-old sissy boy and 45-year-old cross dresser, between transgender butch and genderqueer trans man.

On a side note about the odd quirks of how self esteem works: The book was also nominated in the LGBT poetry category but didn’t make the finalists there. It was a much bigger, more competitive field, and my I-can’t-just-be-happy-and-assured brain wants to say, “But if the book was really good, it would have been a poetry finalist.” And I want to say to that brain, “Shut up!”

And finally, which books become Lammie finalists and which don’t has always puzzled me. This year in the trans category, neither Julia Serano’s book nor Helen Boyd’s made the cut. Both omissions make no sense.