Wilde Oats Issue 20

Wilde Oats issue 20 is up, here.  It includes a new story from me, I am Sidhe.  There are six stories in the issues and three non-fiction pieces.

Saturday night thoughts

For thirty years after I married my lady, I considered myself a gay married bloke who loved just one woman, his wife.  It never seemed plausible to me that I might be bisexual.  I believed (foolishly) that bisexuals were dishonest, pretending to be half-straight when they were really gay.  And after all, I wasn't attracted to other women.  My emotional and sexual attraction was exclusively to men.  I was faithful to my wife (as I still am!) and didn't pick up men.  To most people I would have appeared completely straight.

Seven years ago I started writing gay-shaded fiction. My motives were several.  I had been through hell when I realised I was gay, and I wanted to write about gay and bisexual characters in a way that celebrated their gayness, not denigrated it.  I hoped that that would help young blokes who were struggling to accept their sexuality to be happier, and to believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay.  To be honest, I also hoped to make some money.  At the time my children were at pricey private schools and uni, and I wasn't earning much.  Untold wealth hasn't happened, sadly!  So far, I've made a princely $80, for my story Redhead. 

I had lived a life quite outside the gay networks which exist.  I knew no gay or bi men -- that I knew of; as with me, perhaps there were many that I didn't know of because they were closeted or "straight-acting".  But the essence of a network is that it is known, if not necessarily obviously visible.  What gay fiction I read didn't resonate with me.   I travelled along, occasionally attracted to a man, always, so far as I could tell straight, never talking about what I thought I was or what I felt, and never acting on my attractions.

And then I started writing, and started posting my stories in online groups.  And I started talking via email with other blokes out there, many of whom were bisexual, had been or were still married, who thought it quite ordinary that a man might be attracted to both genders even if he preferred one or the other.  And I found that my own definitions shifted as I learned more.  Remember, I'd been very ignorant.  I'd had sex with a few men, fallen in love with one, and then met my wife and married her.  But it became perfectly clear to me that I too was bisexual.  Oh, I was for the most part emotionally and sexually attracted to men, but once I allowed myself to feel it, I was often attracted to women too.  The labels and the boxes were too rigid and confining.

These days I have come to believe that whether you are gay or straight is absolutely unimportant.  Of course, I'm not saying gay rights don't have to be fought for.  Gays in many countries are still persecuted and murdered, and vile laws which discriminate still exist.  And that should stop.  But in most Western countries, gays if not yet equal, are certainly accepted in ways I never thought of 30 years ago.  I'm not talking about the law and custom, though, I'm talking about my perceptions.  I have gone through a transformation, where my intellectual acceptance of gayness has translated into a spiritual and emotional acceptance of my straight-shadedness, if I can call it that.  A bizarre journey,  but when you come to think about it, perfectly logical.  Acceptance does that.  It's liberating.

I feel tremendously free, free to think and feel what I want, untrammelled by convention or custom.  I hope one day the whole world will regard it as irrelevant and insignificant as I now do, and accept that people will run the gamut from gay through all different bisexualities to straight and it won't matter to anybody.  We shall overcome.  And it will be wonderful.

Wilde Oats

The latest issue of Wilde Oats, issue 15 (we've been going for 5 years now!) has been published.

Eight stories, four book reviews, one reminiscence, one obituary.

You can read it here.

[Illustrated by the late and much missed Linda Laaksonen]

Bisexualities

Image from this intriguing blog

When I first fell in love with a man, I thought there was straight (most people) and gay (a very few).  I belonged to the gay contingent. And I believed that a person was either straight or gay, no Mr In Between.  Bisexuals were straights on the road to being gay, and meanwhile, were hypocritical, because how could you be both straight and gay at the same time?  Of course, I knew nothing about gay, except what I deduced or found out from the guys I had sex with, and the one guy who could have helped me because we were in a sort of relationship for a while, knew as little as I did.  Actually, I knew nothing about straight either!

I thought that as a gay man who loved his wife that there was something wrong about what I was, even something shameful.  I was letting the side down.  I knew that gay men were being bullied, beaten up and discriminated against.  I knew that gay rights were vital.  Yet I loved my wife, I found her sexy and desirable.  But I was also attracted to men.  I was ashamed of these desires, and I tried to suppress them, for after all there was no such thing as bisexuality, was there?  You had to be one or the other.

I didn't tell people I met that I considered myself gay but was married to a woman.  It was none of their business.  My lady knew; she has always known, right from the beginning.  But to most people I appeared straight.  I was married with kids, didn't sleep around with men, lived pretty much the straight married life.  But I wanted to write about being gay, about finding out you were attracted to men. because I had some very unhappy times as I found out about myself and how the world disliked gayness and dismissed bisexuality.  I wanted to explain to others going through the same traumatic discoveries that I did that it was OK.

"Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds" -- and Shakespeare wrote that to a man he was in love with.  I suppose that exemplifies how society wants bisexuality to be hidden.  Shakespeare was in love with a young man.  He wrote poetry to that young man, some of the most sublime poetry written in English.  Yet no one is told.  It is a dirty little secret.  How about this, folks: Shakespeare was bi. So was Alexander the great and Voltaire and Caesar and Catullus and Plato and Frederick the Great.  So were millions and millions of people throughout history, because being bi is wired into us by our genes. It's normal.

In my stories, my characters were a mixture of straight and gay and bi, of male and female; and their relationships were more complicated than sex for sex's sake.   They were friends and lovers, and sometimes they were even in love.

I talked to other writers I met on line, and got to know about their own lives, and it became obvious that my neat orderly taxonomy was wrong.  Bisexuality isn't hypocritical.  People do quite legitimately find both men and women attractive, sexy, desirable.  I did.  I do.  I finally admitted it to myself.  And guys who are mostly straight, in the sense that they respond mostly to women, can love and even fall in love with another man.  It doesn't make them gay. Some married men find that they are unable to live without having sex with men.  Others know and accept their gay component but are happy to remain faithful to their wives.  Looking, after all, is not being unfaithful.  And even my own kink is OK:  my "gayness" is not about sex, really.  It's about affection and love; it's about romance.  I can live without the sex, easily.  I find it hard to live without love.

Some men are straight, irredeemably straight.  Sex with men doesn't interest them at all.  They may even be repelled by the very idea.  Yet that doesn't mean that they can't love other men.  Love doesn't have to involve sex.  Duh!.  Of course, as I've often commented, their fear of appearing "gay" often stops them fully expressing their non-sexual love for their friends, which is both sad and silly.  Other men, equally, are one hundred percent gay, and have no interest in having sex with women.  And in between there are a huge range of possibilities.  There is no one bisexuality, someone who is equally attracted to male and female.  There are bisexualities.  Hundreds of them, which come down in the end to our common humanity.  We find people sexy and lovable.  Not types.  Not categories.  Individuals.

We are hard-wired to love, to interrelate, to have compassion, to feel empathy, to care.  The genders of those you love, whether it be one or ten, are utterly irrelevant.

It's taken me a long time to get here, to a place where I can truly say about my own sexuality: it doesn't matter.  So much of my life has been dedicated to worrying about what I am, where I fit in, whether I am 80% gay or 90% gay or bisexual or whatever.  And I don't care any more.  I am me, and so much more than a penis on legs, gay or straight.  I have a brain.  I have a heart.  I can love, have loved, both men and women.

I'm not sure where that leaves my writing.  For the past 8 years I've been writing about gay-shaded blokes and how they might live happily in contemporary Melbourne or in one of the mythical worlds I've invented.  I want to experience via my imagination, my writing, so much more than just one aspect of human sexuality, of human nature.  Just like me, my writing doesn't easily fit into a neat little box, and that bothers some people.

We'll see.  Change is inevitable.  But I feel now a great confidence in myself and where I am; and in my writing, and in the end I'll keep on writing even if I am the only reader.

Writing

I haven't written anything, really, for a while.  Lots of reasons; health, depression, time.  But I am in writing mode again, have written several episodes of Majorca Flats, enough to post one a day for week, and in fact I'll be posting one later today.  Thanks for your patience.

Plus I'm working on another writerly project which has me really enthused.  I'll keep you posted.

Fume of sighs

Love is a smoke and is made with the fume of sighs.

(Shakespeare)

Lament

This is the 1000th post to this blog.  The first post was in March 2006, almost exactly 6 years ago.

I started writing gay-shaded stories because I wanted to change the world (and maybe make some money too!)  I had such a miserable experience when I found out about myself that I wanted to  try and help other youngsters going through the same thing.  I thought I was the only queer in the world.  It was very lonely.  By writing stories which treated gay-shadedness as ordinary and normal, I thought I could help.  But the gay world had moved on from when I was going through my own hell.  In many places, being gay has gone from being worse than murder or rape or treason to being pretty much accepted.  One by one, countries have accepted gay marriage and gay adoption.  Yeah, you still can't kiss another bloke in public except in a few small endroits, but in 30 short years so much else has changed.  Hugely.  And for the better.






But I had a secondary goal in my writing too.  I wanted to show that sex is just part of a spectrum of love, running from the casual pick-up through to profound emotional and sexual intimacy.  It seemed to me that too many gay men were stuck at the lust end of the spectrum and not enough along the middle (friends with benefits) or the end (deep love).  And the more I looked at it, the more it became obvious that straight men needed to be liberated too.  The proscriptions of the church and the psychiatrists which so poisoned our lives, also stopped straight men from expressing their love for each other.  I don't for one minute think that all straight men are closet homos.  I think profound love can be felt without needing to fuck.  But I think fear of being seen as "gay" stopped and stops many straight men from loving other men even in the way what is misleadingly described as "platonic", let alone sexually.  That hasn't changed much in 30 years.  And perhaps it never will.  I am just tilting at windmills.


It became clear to me too that bisexuals were being shabbily treated by both sides of the great divide.  Gays maintained that bi's were hypocrites at worst and "in transition" to homo happiness at best.  Straights just thought bi's were really gays, if they thought at all.  I used to think along these lines too.  And I don't any more. I think bisexuality is programmed into our genes, because it helped bind otherwise competitive men within a hunter-gatherer group together, and that even with guys who in almost every respect might be labelled "straight", it is possible that they can grow to love another man, without necessarily finding men other than their best friend/lover desirable.  And this reluctance to acknowledge our innate bisexuality isn't going to change,  essentially because you run into the whole concept of fidelity.  Wives do not on the whole welcome their husband's male lover.  So bisexual guys become (to outside observers) het, just as I, married for more than 32 years, appear to others.  Other sub groups (Jews, Blacks, Muslims) have obvious membership.  But I, and other bi-ish blokes like me, don't know who out there is bi.  We're all "passing" as het.  And that isn't going to change either.  And it's ... lonely.

I feel weary and worn.  My prime motivation for writing gay-shaded stories has become irrelevant.  Gayness is accepted more and more by young ppl.  The trogs are mostly old and bitter. ( Funny, that.  A bit like me, really.  Just on different ice floes.)  And trying to make gay and straight men understand that love is what matters, and that sex is secondary, is a tedious struggle.  It's become clear to me that my conception of male friendship doesn't have much in common with the way other men see friendship.  I am like Jude Fawley, seeing Christminster's towers rising over the hill, living in hope but ultimately coming to realise that those golden towers are forever unreachable.

I am a natural optimist, and someone who innately likes other people.  But I don't believe I will change the world, and I've gone off gay and straight men.  It's made it hard for me to write.  Will I keep on writing?  I don't know.  I used to love writing, when I thought it was important.  Now, it's obvious to me that I am irrelevant, and also inept and useless.

A dreary post.  You will be rightly put off by my melancholy and depression.  Alas, sometimes I get sick of Mr Jolly, and lock him away in a cupboard.

Wilde Oats, Issue 9

Well, at last it's finished.  The final sprint to the finishing line always takes longer and is harder than I remember it.  But it's up!

I may be biassed, but I reckon Wilde Oats is the premier gay-shaded fiction magazine on the web.  In this issue we have ten new stories; reviews; opinion; and an interview with .... me!

You can read it here.

Busy

I'm working on the latest edition of Wilde Oats.  There's masses to do:  an interview with Rick R Reed, the gay horror author; editing my own submission The Wolf (the other WO editors liked it but said it needed a lot of rewriting, and they were right!); and converting stories, bios etc into HTML for upload to the Wilde Oats website.

I've had particular problems with the last task.  For a long time I used Kompozer but it's full of bugs, ranging from weird problems when you copy and paste to the fact that it "gets tired" after you've worked on a few pages and you are forced to close it down and start it up again.  So I switched to the WYSIWYG component of SeaMonkey, which is a successor to Kompozer from the same Mozilla community, which is relatively bug free and robust except for one horrid flaw: when you copy and paste text with embedded HTML links, it often pastes just the text, not the links.  Since the links have to be letter perfect, this is very, very boring and tiresome.  So now I have to use both Kompozer and SeaMonkey, savings files in one system and opening them in the other.  Backwards and forwards.  Boring boring.

Plus, at the work which pays me (writing earns me half of nothing),  one of the busiest times in the year is just about to start.  My job (and my pay!) is supposedly part-time, but at this time of the year it never seems like it!  Though the pay remains part-time :-).

Anyway, while I'm occupied with that (WO issue 8 is due out on  1st August), I'll only be posting Majorca Flats every second day (sorry!) and not much else (though I have several long pieces in my head.....)

Meanwhile, I thought you might like this image.

The image somehow reminds me of 'Jerry' (1,2), though these blokes don't look much like each other.

Writing

Yesterday I managed 960 words on Majorca Flats.  Now, for me, that's a world land-speed record!  At say, 160 words per episode, that's 6 episodes (as it happens in fact, fewer, because two consisted of 300 plus words as they were a letter and an email response)  So far, just under 20,000 words and 92 episodes written (79 published) !  All this has given me confidence to believe that I can start doing AngelFire again, and this morning I wrote just under 300 words and on the train on the way home from work, I'll be able to do another 400, which would give me together with what I've already written a (shortish) chapter.  So from now on, I'll be writing MF one day and AngelFire the next.

It's wonderful feeling the flow of creativity again, to not feel stymied by all my writer's blocks.  Writing makes me happ/y, -ier, and it helps marvellously with the blahs.

So ... holding thumbs (which of course prevents typing!!!!), I shall have a new chapter of AF up by Sunday.

When I've finished AngelFire, I'm going to go back to The Torc.  This will make 4 Tapestry of Life novels completed, and of course, there are also lots of short stories and a novella set in this world.

Onwards & Upwards

[This amazing image is from this website]

Wilde Oats Issue 5

The latest issue of Wilde Oats has been released.

Nine new stories, a chapter from Ruth Sims' latest novel, book and film reviews, and some incredible new art from Gene Moore -- who painted the image on the left to illustrate his luscious story In my Father's House which is in this issue.

Enjoy.

Writing

I feel a bit depressed about my writing. I know I'm no great shakes as an author--I'm certainly not in the top 10%, maybe not even above average. But I've always known that, so what's changed?

The problem is that I've gone off writing about the classic gay themes. You know them: stunningly beautiful man with seven-incher has hot butt-sex with straight guy who at once turns gay after sex so good he just has no choice. No uglies. No wrinklies. No shorties. No fatties. Let's exclude, in other words, about 90% of the human race. What am I writing, Harlequin for men?

I had a romantic view of m2m love once, but these days my perspective is more jaundiced. Men are bastards. We cannot think with our hearts, we struggle to think with our bigger heads, and far too often we take decisions based on the reactions of our small head. Yup, I know: these are all massive generalizations, and all generalizations are false (including this one.) There are many exceptions: many men are very loving and not totally obsessed with sex. All the same.... Also, I like female characters in my stories, I like a world with women in it. To make me even more of a weirdo, I believe that humans are pretty much bisexual. But lots of gays won't even read stories with women or male bisexual characters.

I dunno. Maybe because I'm still not well (5 weeks of illness so far), maybe because I'm feeling a bit down, but I'm just thinking what's the point? My focus on love instead of sex is so old-fashioned and passé. Who cares? Who will read my stories? Will I ever make even enough money to pay for a daily cup of coffee from them? Why not just give up? I started writing because I hoped that I would make it easier for guys coming out now. But though the world is still full of horrible gay-haters, many younger blokes I talk to have no idea of the struggles we went through. They don't care. Same-sex acts when I was in my twenties were illegal in most places. Now most civilized countries have legalised gay marriage or its near equivalent. I talk to youngsters who are accepted instantly by their parents, friends and society when they come out. Gay ceases to be relevant when things are like that. And why would anyone need uplifting gay-shaded stories about finding someone to love, about living happily ever after, when their lives are so peachy?

I fear I am a troglodyte, outdated, dull, uninspiring and irrelevant.

Never mind, I expect I'll feel better tomorrow!

ElvenSword

Looking back on it now, I have to say I'd write it differently. A bit too florid, for me, these days. But it was my first novel, and I've already rewritten it about 10 times. So I'm not to keen on rewriting it again. Anyway I've posted another chapter at my website. I loved writing it. There was this whole fantasy (if you'll forgive the word) of a world where love is polymorphous and in some cases positively promiscuous. Men love men and women, sometimes at the same time. Something I think would be a good thing in our world, though one must always be alert to unintended consequences.

They do say that you should write your first novel then throw it away: because you learn so much doing it, and your subsequent novels will be so much better that you'll be embarrassed.

Well I didn't, and so you get to read it. Or not, as the case may be. I might still rewrite it, or rather re-edit it, but... there are so many projects still in the pipeline.

Anyway, enjoy. Oh and enjoy this image of Orlando Bloom. Mega cute.

WWGSS

If you write about gay relationships, or even just stories about gay characters, it's hard to get published. The gay market is a tiny one within the larger fiction market. And these days, whatever they say, most mainstream publishers are only interested in blockbuster novels. By definition, gay-shaded stories will never be that, because we are just 5 or 10% of the population. It's true that many women like romantic m2m tales -- half my readers are women, but then I write what I call 'original slash', which is perhaps a bit different from much of what gay writers produce, with obvious exceptions, such as Patrick Gale or Armistead Maupin. However, even these famous authors who appeal to women as well as gay-shaded men are not 'blockbuster' sellers -- though give them their due, they've sold far more books than I have! (Both highly recommended authors, by the way, if you're looking for a good read)

So... where does one get published? For me, I started with online groups. And one of those was WWGSS. You have an audience. They might well read your story. They might even like it. And if you are a reader yourself -- and most authors are -- you can read other authors' stories, and enjoy them. At the end of every month, the owner, Michael Gouda, who is himself a published author, removes all the comments on the stories, so you are left with an archive purely of stories. By now, the archive is huge: WWGSS has been going for nine years. The group's guidelines discourage stroke stories -- sex for sex's sake -- so the bias in the stories is towards romantic m2m.

Each week, Michael updates the home page photo. There are extensive photo albums in the group, as well as the stories. The two pics attached to this post are the latest from the WWGSS home page.

It's well worth a visit. Quality varies, but there are enough good stories there, from authors who otherwise we might never get to see, to make membership worth while.

And thank you Michael, for making it possible for the tyro I once was to get read. Without you and others like you, I might never have got to where I have.

Elisa Rolle

I've added Elisa Rolle's LiveJournal to the links section on the right of this page. I found out about her because of her excellent reviews of gay-shaded books on Amazon. I hope one day she'll be able to review one of my books, when I eventually get published.

He blog is a good place to see reviews of gay-shaded films and books. It's good to pop in there occasionally.I pinched this pic of Will Chalker from her blog. Hope you like it. :-)

You can access her blog here.

N