title: GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary
author: Joan Nestle
description: Gay and Lesbian StudiesWhether it's a 14-year-old waiting for her first Transexual Menace T-shirt in the mail, a lesbian in a butch-femme relationship reflecting on the subversive power of being an "invisible" femme, or a female-to-male transsexual singing the praises of his Colt .45, the contributors to GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary report on life in the gray area between genders and suggest that those genders aren't as self-evident as they appear. Edited by writer Joan Nestle (A Restricted Country); Riki Wilchins (Read My Lips), director of the gender advocacy group GenderPAC; and Brooklyn Public Library librarian Clare Howell, the anthology includes 30 first-person testimonies from writers and activists like Sylvia Rivera, Cheryl Chase and Ethan Zimmerman.<br />Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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  **_CHAPTER ONE_**
  
  
  CORT GRIER WAS disillusioned with life. He owned a huge Santa Gertrudis
  breeding stud ranch in West Texas. He was thirty-three now, in his prime, and
  he wanted to have a family. His father had remarried and moved to Vermont. His
  brothers, except for the second youngest, were all married with families. He
  wanted one of his own. But every woman he thought might be the one turned out
  to be after his money. The last one, a singer, had laughed when he mentioned
  children. She was in her own prime, she told him, and she had a career as a
  rising star. No way was she giving that up to live on some smelly ranch in
  Texas and start having babies. She wasn’t certain that she was ever going to
  want a child.
  
  
  And so it went. Women had been a permissible pleasure for many years, and
  while no playboy, he’d had his share of beautiful, cultured lovers. The
  problem was that after a time, they all looked alike, felt alike, sounded
  alike. Perhaps, he told himself, he was jaded. Ce