• Meet John, who not only missed his daughter's recital, but later on an anniversary dinner, all because he was secretly meeting in women's clothes with other crossdressers. His ultimate undoing was a weekend binge, buying expensive dresses, shaving off his body hair, and paying for an expensive photo session, all with his wife, Muriel, and kids due home Sunday night.
• And then there's Gregory, who hangs out with skinhead friends at bar at one end of a block, and goes out in drag to pick up men for anonymous sex at a gay bar at the other end of the same block. His biggest problem, just ask him, was finding makup that would cover his Nazi tattoos when wearing revealing dresses.
• Don't leave out Susan's surgeon for gender reassignment, who took lessons from Picasso; he had his own imaginative ideas about how female genitalia "should have been" designed.
• Proving that ordinary people can mess up in transgender ways, meet Denise, a Catholic woman whose husband tried to get an anullment by claiming to be a crossdresser. She got even by making him wear women's clothes at home while he proved his femininity by doing the housework and caring for their young children.

 

An inconsequential lad stuck in the most disgusting, humiliating and dangerous job on the planet Landis flees to find a future at sea.

By accident, he signs on to the Fisher King, a run down, undercrewed, oversized, interstellar cargo ship, where he starts out by learning firsthand that being in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit makes his tongue itch, fending off a pirate attack with a mining tool, killing a crewmate, and making new best friends who poison him and cut his throat, but not without apologizing profusely.

Every day aboard ship brings a new discovery and a new, puzzling dream. But his old life won’t let go of him. Troopers try too hard to drag him back for a murder he didn't commit, creating a technical state of war between the Fisher King and the governments of Landis.