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"To create an unconventional female protagonist, a writer taps into a part of himself that was never typically masculine.\\n\\n\\n\\nA dozen years ago, a reporter for *The New York Observer* had the idea of asking some heterosexual men how gay they consider themselves. And although we were required to choose a specific percentage of gayness, I insisted on grading myself along two different axes. Sexually, I said, I'm maybe 1 percent homosexual (which seemed a more relaxed, cosmopolitan answer than zero), but on the cultural front, I told the reporter, my gayness percentage is probably \\\"20, or maybe more.\\\"\\n\\n\\n\\nIn fact, I think, it's lots more. I am not now nor have I ever been homosexual. But in terms of sensibility and biography? I'm pretty gay.\\n\\n\\n\\nI moved from the Great Plains to live in New York City in the late 1970s\u2014and not just New York, but Greenwich Village. I have always owned cats. (Which I now know for a statistical fact actually makes me more of a lesbian.)\\n\\n\\n\\nI employ a personal shopper who is more or less my $250-an-hour Auntie Mame. She coenables a biennial personal carnival during which I abandon my native Midwestern frugality to spend thousands of dollars on luscious suits and jackets and shirts made in Italy, and blue jeans unavailable at the Gap or Old Navy. I know my European sizes by heart.\\n\\n\\n\\nI get waxed regularly\u2014only my hairy middle-aged ears, but still. To style my hair, I insist on using a particular lavender-\\u00adscented cream from Australia that costs $38 for each tiny jar. For three decades I was the primary cook in our household, and just last night I realphabetized the hundred jars of herbs and spices in the kitchen cabinet. My cocktails of choice are gin gimlets, Campari sodas, and kirs.\\n\\n\\n\\nI cofounded a gossipy, bitchy magazine, *Spy*. One of our best staff writers, the actually gay Henry Alford, revealed years later that he had \\\"always assumed\\\" that my coeditor and I were \\\"screaming queens.\\\" The only piece in *Spy* on which I had a byline I wrote with the actually gay Paul Rudnick, an article (\\\"The Irony Epidemic\\\") chronicling the heterosexual mainstream's embrace of a niche set of homosexual attitudes. One of the first books I blurbed was the gay coming-of-age memoir *Running With Scissors*. Early in the twenty-first century I worked with Andy Cohen to invent a campy little cultural cable channel called Trio, just before Andy and the Trio team moved on to make Bravo a big success. I cowrote a revue that was performed in a Greenwich Village cabaret and am now creatively involved in a Broadway-bound musical.\\n\\n\\n\\nMy closest friends are equally divided between women and men. I like to dance. I don't watch or follow sports at all. And this is not a case of adult-onset metrosexuality, a phrase and concept that didn't exist when I was young, and certainly not in Nebraska, where I grew up.\\n\\n\\n\\nAs a small child, I had a plastic baby called Boy Doll, and Boy Doll and I had matching red-and-white-striped onesie pajamas and nightcaps. Between ages 3 and 5 I insisted on wearing white rubber boots every time I left the house, abandoning them only when my grandmother persuaded me that they were too d\u00E9class\u00E9 to wear to a nice restaurant.\\n\\n\\n\\nAs a kindergartner I would regularly put on my 45 rpm record of Tchaikovsky's \\\"Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy\\\" and prance balletically around the living room. I believe I did this at least once dressed in my older sister's lace tutu. We also had the *West Side Story* cast album, which I played so often I knew the words to \\\"Maria\\\" and \\\"Jet Song\\\" by heart.\\n\\n\\n\\nThe same grandmother who made me fashion-footwear-\\u00adconscious as a toddler also taught me to bake cinnamon rolls and pies and cakes, which became a principal hobby during my lower-school years. I regularly planned and cooked elaborate Sunday dinners for my family. And I wouldn't drink Coke or Pepsi or 7-Up as a child because the carbonation hurt the tender insides of my little mouth. At age 12 I bought a silken \\\"Oriental\\\" bathrobe and the single of Frank Sinatra's \\\"Strangers in the Night.\\\" Unlike most of my suburban pals, I declined to join Little League or play golf. Instead, I was a croquet buff and took tennis lessons. My one and only participation in interscholastic sports was, yes, ninth-grade *wrestling*.\\n\\n\\n\\nMy parents were conservative Republicans, and my father had been a double-varsity sports star in his rural small town. They're both gone, so I can't ask them what they thought of my epicene inclinations. But I remember no feelings of disapproval or disappointment or concern\u2014not from them, nor from other kids\u2014that I was, to use the clinical term of art, engaging in non-sex-typed behavior.\\n\\n\\n\\nMaybe my bookish mother and lawyer father looked at the countervailing evidence\u2014the love of toy trucks and guns and electric trains and Erector Sets when I was little, the interstate firecracker smuggling and pyromania and pining for girls when I was older\u2014and decided that their Sondheim-lyric-reciting, impromptu-dance-performing, cake-baking, short-story-writing, unathletic son was unproblematic. But actually? In those days of laissez-faire parenting, I don't think they gave a moment's conscious thought to my (so to speak) gender nonconformity. I had friends; I did well in school; I wasn't effeminate; I was fine. Whereas today, I think, almost any parents of a son like me would assume they had a gay man in the making.\\n\\n\\n\\nThose parents would apparently have about a 50-50 chance of being correct. That is, as one psychology paper from a few years ago summarizes the literature, about half of boys \\\"exhibiting levels of childhood gender noncon\\u00adformity comparable to those recalled by most gay men\\\" turn out to be heterosexual.\\n\\n\\n\\nSo here we have a great irony and paradox embedded in the last half century of progress, a modest downside to the ever-increasing openness about and tolerance of same-gender sexual attraction. On the one hand, despite all the confusion and opprobrium still experienced by gay boys, it's undoubtedly preferable to be a homosexual kid today than it would have been 50 years ago. (See: *Glee*.) But to be a kid like the one I was, sexually hetero but in interests and hobbies kind of queer? I think it was easier then than now\u2014because the love that dared not speak its name is these days spoken about continuously and ubiquitously.\\n\\n\\n\\nBack when it was essentially impossible for young homosexuals to admit their homosexuality to the world, or even to themselves, before the easy public vocabulary of \\\"gay\\\" and \\\"straight\\\" existed, a straight kid like me didn't have to worry as much about being misjudged as gay. Individual people are just as quirky and complicated and inconsistent in 2012 as they were in 1962, but now we more automatically resort to binary sociological, psychological, and medical (or pseudomedical) categories\u2014not just gay versus straight but conservative versus liberal, secular versus religious, ADHD'd versus calm and focused, Asperger-y versus sociable. All of those categories are well-intended and variously useful pigeonholes, of course, and they permit lots of quirky people to feel better about and compensate for their quirks. But they also, I think, encourage us to regard people as overdetermined and fully explained representatives of categories rather than as contradictory, surprising, singular individuals.\\n\\n\\n\\nI'm grateful that as a child I was never examined by a mental-\\u00adhealth expert, never given any of the standardized tests of masculinity. During the era of my youth, for instance, the California Psychological Inventory defined social and emotional sensitivity, niceness, and a lack of interest in politics as \\\"feminine\\\" attributes. And only in 2008 did the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), still the standard American mental-health test, remove from its clinical scales the one that purports to measure masculinity and femininity. That scale defined feminine men as those who were intelligent, curious, creative, imaginative, and possessing aesthetic interests.\\n\\n\\n\\nIn the bad old days, when the MMPI and kindred tests and typologies for masculinity and femininity were created, they took as axiomatic that men ought to be masculine and women feminine. During the not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that era of the past few decades, the psychological establishment abandoned the underlying morality and, in fact, reversed the traditional midcentury judgments. But the general mania for personality profiling not only remained but increased, and leeched from the secret drawers of a professional priesthood into popular currency.\\n\\n\\n\\nConsider, for instance, the widely used Bem Sex Role Inventory, created in the 1970s by a young feminist \\u00adpsychology scholar. Instead of regarding traditionally and strictly masculine men and feminine women as the mental-health ideals, the plainly most desirable of four diagnostic categories on the Bem test is \\\"androgynous\\\"\u2014to possess both masculine and feminine traits, to be ambitious, risk-taking, and analytical (masculine), but also loyal, cheerful, and easily flattered (feminine).\\n\\n\\n\\nYou can take the 60-question Bem test online, as I did [here.](http://goo.gl/eLZ8s) Even though I'm neither athletic (manly) nor gullible (girlie), I scored high both on the masculinity (80 out of 100) and femininity (65.741) scales, and thus also high on androgyny (60.526).\\n\\n\\n\\nIt's not as simple as what Vera Farmiga's character says to George Clooney during their affair in *Up in the Air*\u2014\\\"Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina\\\"\\u00ad\u2014but I think that's an important and very twenty-first-century line of dialogue. Which gets at why I decided it wasn't a ridiculous idea to make my new novel, *True Believers*, the fictional memoir of a woman. Having spent the last three years inventing and channeling a make-believe person named Karen Hollander\u2014while my wife, as it happened, was finishing a nonfiction book about the neurobiological differences between men and women\u2014I think I've come to understand more acutely, to *feel*, the blurry bits of the gender boundaries. I've come to think that I'm not so much culturally or temperamentally quasi-gay as I am quasi-female. And that is a very different shade of gray.\\n\\n\\n\\nHaving grown up in the 1960s, Karen Hollander is not exactly a tomboy, but her two best friends are boys, and the three of them become obsessive fans of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. (Karen especially likes the stories featuring women who are intelligence operatives, like Vesper Lynd, rather than merely sexy lollapaloozas.) When she enters law school, only one in eight of her classmates are women, and only a dozen women preceded her as U.S. Supreme Court clerks. In other words, like so many ambitious professional women of her generation, she very self-consciously \\\"mans up\\\" in order to fit in and succeed.\\n\\n\\n\\nFor the novel, I had a whole team of actual women\u2014wife, daughters, agent, editors\u2014letting me know when I had Karen behaving in ways they thought a woman wouldn't. But their more frequent and inarguable advice concerned her saying or doing things this particular *character* wouldn't say or do. Her gender is a huge part of who she is, but it doesn't determine everything about her\u2014which is, I think, the difference between a female and a female impersonator.\\n\\n\\n\\nLike me, Karen grew up middle class in the Midwest, went to Harvard, moved to New York City, married, had two children. We are obviously and fundamentally different because she's a woman, but the more interesting and dispositive differences lie elsewhere\u2014she was raised Catholic by leftists, her father was an immigrant, she becomes a lawyer and has an affair and divorces and lives her life keeping one spectacular, mysterious secret. Yes, I'm a man and she's a woman. But that's just for starters. She's an idiosyncratic individual whom life dealt a particular hand and who made particular choices, for better and for worse. Just like me, and just like you. And entirely unlike either of us."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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