Category: childhood

New World Man

I am up earlier than I have been since before the surgery (no, I don’t want a cookie–never been a cookie fan, even as a kid), and feel pretty good this morning. Yesterday was a pretty good day, over all. I didn’t really leave the house at all, but I worked on getting things more under-control around here–the kitchen has been a mess since the ceiling collapse, and the cabinets and drawers need some serious organizing–and also spent most of the day doing other chores around here, while thinking about getting back to work writing. The brace is still awkward to work around, but it feels like I’m getting more used to working with it on–and having a cleared and cleaned off desk surface also helps with that as well. I am going to run some errands this afternoon, but there’s not college football today to distract me or send me to the easy chair for the day, so I have little choice about blowing the day off, methinks, which is not a bad thing. I also did laundry and more dishes yesterday, and I have some other things I need to do here in the kitchen/office today as well. I also spent some time reading the second book in Raquel V. Reyes’ delightful Caribbean kitchen cozy series (Calypso, Cooking and Corpses), which is just as delightful as the first, and then…well, I fell down a Youtube/Twitter wormhole that was eye-opening and shocking before Paul got home from the gym and we watched this week’s Fellow Travelers, which, interestingly enough, kind of tied into the wormhole in some ways; as you may recall, just the other day I was talking about how these stories (Fellow Travelers), while sad and depressing, were necessary to remind people of how awful the past was for queer people not that long ago; we don’t have much of a societal memory for things that happened as recently as twenty years ago. There’s a large gap in our community that was created by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, so the oral traditions within the community of passing along our history was horrifically interrupted and many younger queers–and those that aren’t that young–have no way of connecting to the past, and don’t even know where to start looking.

During the shutdown I spent a lot of time in my easy chair making condom packs for the day job to justify getting paid for being at home–there were other job duties I could do at home, but mostly I made a shit ton of condom packs–and so I spent a lot of time looking through streaming apps on my Apple TV for things to watch while my hands worked. This was how I discovered the endless wormholes of Youtube video essays and documentaries; and of course, algorithms started suggesting other videos and channels of “influencers” similar to the videos I had watched and was finding on my own. Discovering Matt Baume’s delightful channel about queer rep in popular culture was a joy for me; he named sources for his information, was very clear about what was fact, what was unknowable, and what was his opinion–and since most of it was stuff that aired or happened while I was alive, it was a lovely trip down memory lane for me, reminding me of the few things that resonated with me growing up as a lonely queer kid and what shaped my views on what it was like to be a gay man in America. (Also, once I discovered there was such a thing as queer books and queer publishing, spent most of the 1990’s reading mostly queer stuff…and I’ve always been a voracious reader.) Anyway, watching Matt’s videos and subscribing to his channel shifted the algorithms, and I started getting other videos and channels suggested to me….and one of those belonged to a queer video essayist named James Somerton, and one of them–called Evil Queens and having to do with Disney–I don’t remember the actual name of the video, and he has since scrubbed his entire Youtube channel (more on that drama later)–and thought, interesting–a long time ago I read and reviewed a book called Tinker Belles and Evil Queens by Sean Griffin, but you can’t copyright a title and can you talk about queer coding and such in Disney and not use the words “evil queens”? Disney has always fascinated me, since I turned into a Disney queen after The Little Mermaid (I was never a big Disney kid; that waited until my adulthood and coming out, oddly enough), and Griffin’s book was so astonishing and good and insightful that I never forgot it. I watched Somerton’s video, and it all seemed incredibly familiar to me–and I did note he said some things that were wrong; mainly Gay Days/Gay Nights at Disneyworld were never official, Disney-sponsored events…which I know because I lived in Florida and used to go for Gay Day. I also thought it was odd that he left out how the Southern Baptists tried to boycott Disney to stop Gay Days…and were ground completely into the dust by the Mouse. But it didn’t fit the narrative of the video essay–how Disney queer baits us for money then betrays us by not giving us rep in their films1. I also thought it was weird that the book–which so much of the video’s content was dependent on for its facts; the stuff that was wrong I assumed was from Somerton himself–wasn’t credited for anything, or even mentioned as a companion reading piece to the video itself. Periodically, after that, Youtube would suggest other videos to me from him, and I’d watch them, mainly out of curiosity…and began noticing things.

Like how his entire video about queer coding in Hollywood film seemed incredibly familiar–like I’d read it all already in the uncredited The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, which had already been made into a documentary in 1996…so much so that I bought an e-book of it to see and yes, it was used almost word for word with no attribution. And some of his other videos…were not only offensive but just bald-faced lies, things he’d made up, or okay, let’s be fair–conclusions he drew were from cherry-picked facts and broad speculations made from those facts; it seemed, in his video on gay body image issues, that he took the old 1990’s term for gym and body culture (the “you have to be a ripped muscle god to have any sexual currency”), which was “body fascism”, and somehow extrapolated from there the bizarre notion that Nazis created body culture and American GI’s brought it back from Europe after the war…and even weirder, somehow we didn’t get it from the Soviets because they were so “bundled up” we couldn’t see their bodies. (Maybe he should have read Michelangelo Signorile’s Life Outside, which explored how body culture morphed into something even bigger after the advent of AIDS because a strong, muscular, defined body was the antithesis of the wasting most people dying from AIDS experienced at the time; fit body= not infected; seriously, dude.) He was also horribly misogynistic at times–he didn’t like lesbians, and he hated straight women, and was also borderline transphobic at times despite trying to champion transpeople? It was all very weird, but I would periodically put on one of his videos that sounded interesting, even as he made claims that didn’t make sense or was simply restating things I’d already read somewhere. I didn’t think much of it, but I was idly curious–the way I often am; periodically I think about influencers and how to write a crime novel around one, and Youtube influencers seemed like the way to go if I were going to do that, and so I always chalked it up to research…and sometimes, the wrong things he said would send me off in search of the actual facts, so it was kind of educational by reminding me of things I’d forgotten about.

Turns out, he plagiarized almost all of his videos, never credited or named sources unless called out for it (he took down the videos about Disney and queer coding and put them back up as “based upon” the books he literally was quoting verbatim); the scandal dropped this week–I only found out yesterday–with two other Youtube influencers making really long videos about the plagiarism and the harmful lies he was spreading, as well as the self-loathing, misogyny, and transphobia. I went down that wormhole yesterday, watching both videos–which were long as the crimes were plentiful–and now his Youtube channel is gone, completely. As I said, I didn’t put a lot of thought into it–but he had a Patreon, and his Youtube channel was monetized, which meant he was profiting from the work of other queer creators that he was plagiarizing and stealing, then playing victim when caught…until he was literally destroyed by these other two Youtubers this week. He was apparently making a shit ton of money–and you know, there’s the plot for an influencer crime novel.

It was very eye-opening.

But it extrapolates further to what I’ve been thinking about since starting to watch Fellow Travelers–dark and sad and depressing as these stories are, they are important because our history is always erased; how are queer kids supposed to feel pride and understand where we’ve come from and what we’ve fought for, if they never hear about it, can’t find it, and are never told? The kids I work with (with an age range from early thirties to early twenties) don’t remember how horrible HIV/AIDS was because they hadn’t been born yet or weren’t old enough to really pay attention before the cocktail and the new meds changed it from a fatal disease to a chronic one (with treatment). There’s SO MUCH bad information out there about sexually transmitted infections, and so little education, that it frightens me on an almost daily basis as I work with my clients.

Obviously, this is what I’ve been wrestling with lately, with myself and my own artistic work (yes, I am starting to think of myself as an artist, which I should have done all along); what responsibility do we have to the younger people who don’t know our history, the history I lived through? It’s part of the reason I started writing “Never Kiss a Stranger”, and set it in 1994; I wanted to show what gay life in New Orleans was like during the time when HIV/AIDS was still a death sentence, and the city was also crumbling and dying itself before the wave of renewal and gentrification that started before Katrina and kicked into high gear; who is going to write that story if I don’t?

And what responsibility do I have to current and future generations of queer people as an artist? Do I have any? Or is my only responsibility as an artist to myself?

Something to think about, at any rate.

And on that somber note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably be back later; I can never stay away for long.

  1. Uh, I guess he never saw the Disney documentary about Howard Ashman, who was partly responsible for the Disney animation renaissance and who died of AIDS before the release of the last film he completed, Beauty and the Beast; to date the only animated film to be Oscar nominated for Best Picture, and won three other Oscars, including two for Ashman? ↩︎

Does It Make You Remember

It is impossible for me to express how much books have always meant to me, and how grateful I am, to this day, to my parents and grandmother for encouraging me to read. We’ve always been a reading family–but no one ever has read as much, or as often, as I did. One of my aunts called me “the readingest child I’ve ever seen”–and she was a librarian. Books made sense to me; the worlds I escaped into whenever I opened a book made sense to me, and none of the worries or cares of my childhood bothered me when I was lost in a book. I also loved history, and thus read a lot of it when I was a kid; the basic overview history classes I had were pretty easy for me because I already knew the history in greater depth than the textbook provided.

The Scholastic Book Fairs were always my favorite day every month, and I was always so delighted when my mom would let me order a few–never all the ones I wanted, because I really wanted them all–and it was even more exciting when I found one that was also set in a period of American history. Johnny Tremain remains, to this day, one of my all-time favorites, and when I was a kid, I wanted to write both a mystery series (like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew) as well as historical fiction.

One such book that stuck with me over the years–and didn’t have as big an impact on culture as Johnny Tremain, which won awards and was filmed by Disney–was Margaret Goff Clark’s Danger at Niagara, which was set on the US/Canadian border during the War of 1812 (which few people write about and is mostly forgotten today). A few years ago I was looking for the original hardcover of Johnny Tremain I had read as a child, when a copy of Danger at Niagara was recommended to me by the eBay algorithm. It wasn’t expensive, it was a library remainder, and I thought, what the hell and shelled out the less than five dollars including postage, and the other day while they worked on the ceiling, I reread its 120 pages.

Sorry for the not-clear cover image; my copy is a library discard and there are no clear images of this cover on-line; at least not that I can find.

Exhausted from a day of fruitless hunting, Homan Reed ate a cold supper of cornbread and milk. Hastily he banked the fire and then fell into bed, forgetting his loneliness and the ever-present danger from across the river.

He awoke at dawn, shivering under the heavy quilts, awakened as much by the silence as the cold. He lay still, listening. Gray morning light had come through the small panes of glass Uncle Oliver had carried all the way from Connecticut. A sound that usually penetrated the log walls of the cabin was missing–a sound that was part of the background of his life in this lonely frontier clearing in western New York State.

His hear began to beat too fast, and he sat up in bed, reaching for the buckskin breeches he had laid on top of the quilts. Homan was a good-looking boy, rather small for his almost fifteen years.

There really isn’t much to the story, really. Homan wakes up to realize he has slept through a raid on his little family farm, and their livestock is gone. His uncle brought Homan and his brother up here after their parents died, and his brother is off fighting in the American army in the War of 1812. The Reed place is right across the river from Canada–and of course, at that time Canada was the enemy. Putting myself into Homan’s place was exciting; trying to imagine what it was like to know that not only was the British army capable of crossing the river at any time, their Mohawk allies were also out and about and a constant threat. Shortly after the opening of the book, the American army burns a Canadian town and turns out women, children, the sick and the elderly out into the cold with no shelter or food; to the author’s credit, she makes it clear this is horrible and a war crime; Homan, who witnesses this from inside Fort Niagara (he’s gone looking for his brother and to try to enlist), is horrified and ashamed Americans could do something so heinous–and everyone on the American side of the river knows there will be retaliation and retribution.

As I reread this short book, I paid very close attention to what we now would call propaganda for American supremacy–and there was some, but not as much as I would have thought, and there was less problematic language than I would have expected for the time (it was published in 1967 originally). Yes, Clark refers to the Tuscarora and Mohawk peoples as “Indians,” as do the characters (which is what they would have said at the time, so historically accurate, if offensive) but she treats the natives with respect–no references to them not being human beings, or being savages or uncivilized or anything like that; Homan even has a friend his age from the Tuscarora people. The Mohawks are referred to as the enemy, but in the same way the British are. There are a few mentions of pro-American exceptionalism propaganda–things like “we are a growing power the world needs to respect”, that sort of thing that Americans have always believed and never questioned until the last few decades or so. But Homan is likable enough, and the story itself, of worrying about your safety and losing your home and so forth, resonates still, even if technically Homan and his family were colonizers.

I really do need to reread Johnny Tremain…

Let’s Go Dancing

Monday morning in the Lost Apartment after another terrific night’s sleep. I am really going to miss not getting up with an alarm when I go back to work next week. I’m not going to lie–sometimes this enforced rest has been annoying and frustrating and kind of unpleasant, but on the other hand, I haven’t felt this rested in years. This is nice, as is how refreshed I feel every morning, along with the knowledge that I don’t need to shower as part of the waking-up ritual every morning as well. I think as the week goes on I will start trying to get up earlier and go through the usual morning ritual, to get back into practice with it.

Yesterday was a relatively mild and relaxing one. I literally forgot that the Saints were playing–I’d lost track of what day of the week it was–which is just as well; it seems like the game was an exercise in enormous frustration for Saints fans. Granted, we had a better day than Florida State fans, who were seriously robbed. I figured that maybe they’d get screwed, but the Georgia loss made it seem unlikely; and the final spot in the play-offs was up for grabs between Georgia, Alabama, and Texas–and much as I hated to see the SEC left out, it made sense to me. Georgia lost to Alabama who lost to Texas; but Texas’ loss was to Oklahoma, who didn’t have a great year, and that was after Texas beat Alabama, while the Tide was running the table. I figured that would be the committee’s justification for screwin Texas in favor of Alabama; it never occurred to me they’d screw Florida State over and take both Texas and the Tide. This was an odd year, with a surplus of undefeated and one-loss teams, along with any number of two and three loss teams who only lost to undefeated or one-loss teams (LSU lost three games–undefeated Florida State, one loss Alabama, and two loss Mississippi–whose two losses were Alabama and Georgia). It is, I suppose, a good year for the four-team play-off to go out on; but if people think there aren’t going to be controversies and angry fan bases once it goes to a twelve team play-off next year, think again. LSU’s schedule is insane for 2024 (USC, UCLA, Oklahoma, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas A&M); the only traditional annual games no longer on the schedule are Auburn and Mississippi State. I think people are already mad about next season, based on the final rankings by the committee? There seemed to be a lot of vitriol on the social media apps last night. So, yes, football fan bases can even get up in arms over projections.

I did read David Valdes’ marvelous Finding My Elf yesterday, which was absolutely delightful, and really left me feeling a bit warm inside when I did finish it, and am really looking forward to when his You Spin Me Round comes up in the TBR pile. I think my next read will be Donna Andrews; and I’ll just read her latest two Megs back-to-back. One of course is the annual Christmas mystery–which I want to read for the season–but my brain won’t let me read them out of order, so I have to read Birder She Wrote first before Let It Crow! Let It Crow! Let It Crow! which is also a great title. I also want to do some writing of my own today; the days are slipping through my fingers and I need to prioritize writing more than anything else with the energy I have on reserve. I also watched Joy Ride, which was quite fun, and then we started watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which is extremely well done, and for a television show about monsters–we don’t see a lot of monsters. The story primarily focuses on a young woman who survived the Godzilla rampage through San Francisco, and the whole concept of a world and a humanity that has adapted to enormous monsters, like Godzilla and others (the Godzilla evacuation route and directions in Tokyo was startling) is interesting. Monster movies like this, and the various others about giant creatures from the depths of the ocean or the bowels of the earth terrified me as a child and gave me nightmares. (I’ve never watched any iteration of King Kong, for example, and I think I’ve only seen the original Godzilla, which was a huge mistake as it really did haunt my dreams for years. There was one film about a giant octopus who would unfurl his tentacles to crush a seaside city that I can still see sometimes in my mind.) But I am enjoying this show, and am interested in seeing where it goes; it seems like its primary purpose is to expose some corporation (Monarch) who has something to do with the monsters. There’s also a dual time-line, which you know I love.

The workers just checked in to see if the kitchen ceiling leaked over the weekend, and so they are about to come in and take down the rest of the ruined ceiling in preparation for making it look pretty tomorrow. Yay! I also have my first PT appointment tomorrow morning, so I am curious to see what that’s going to look like. I am going to run my errands tomorrow morning after my therapy, since I’ll already be uptown (it’s near the corner of Magazine and Napoleon), so I might as well head over and get the mail and do whatever brief grocery run needs to be done.

I also started getting better organized yesterday; I got my bills all mapped out for the month (I generally do this after every pay day, after I’ve paid the bills so I know how much debt is still outstanding; it also helps keep me from forgetting to make payments). The desk area looks much better than it did, but I still have some filing and organizing to get done. I’m hoping they won’t be in here for very long this morning; I am going to repair to my chair as soon as they come in and try to read until they are finished, and maybe do some writing once they’ve left. I am terribly behind on everything (hey, I’m starting to sound like myself again!), and so one of my tasks for today is to make a to-do list, as well as a “upcoming submissions date” list so I can try to get some stories back out there.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Christmas and crime don’t get together often enough for my liking–although I always love to call It’s a Wonderful Life a Christmas noir, because it’s actually an incredibly dark film if you look below the effervescent sugary surface. (I’ve always wanted to write a book set in the world created had George Bailey never existed–Potterville.) Agatha Christie handled the holidays in a couple of books, most notably Murder for Christmas, and the occasional short story. (This is a good place to note that when I was talking about my own Christmas writings, I’d forgotten “The Snow Globe”, which is my most Christmas story of them all; the one I did remember to mention, “The Snow Queen,” was more a winter’s tale than a Christmas one.)

Lisa Unger is one of my favorite writers, and she’s also pretty prolific; I turned and looked away for a moment and suddenly I was way behind on reading her books. I had never caught up on the backlist, either; so I think focusing on that is a good plan for 2024. When i saw that she had written a Christmas novella, getting it was a no-brainer–and I read it in one day…and it reminded me again why I love her work so much.

I always loved Christmas. I still remember how magical it was to believe in Santa Claus, lying in bed at night, trying to stay up to hear the pitter-patter of reindeer hoofs on the roof. Then falling asleep and waking up to the tree glowing downstairs, the floor covered with gifts, my parents groggy and smiling.

I saw him, my sister would say. On the lawn, climbing out of his sleigh.

And I would be so jealous that she got to see Santa, while I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough. She was always first. Always better. Still is.

I lean against the pole now, arching my back, all eyes on me. The music pulses and the stage lights beneath my high heels flash–purple, blue, orange, red. I am alive here, all of it moving through me. Tonight, I perform to various Katy Perry songs–a playlist I made. “Hummingbird Heartbeat.” “Peacock.” “Part of Me.” All songs that are sexy and upbeat but have a secret message. Like me. No one is listening to the music though. The smattering of men sitting on stools and in various booths, nursing drinks, are only thinking about one thing.

Ten years ago, Madeline Martin survived a brutal night in which her best friend was murdered, and two others disappeared. Maddie herself was stabbed multiple times and the side of her face slashed. Her boyfriend was convicted of the crimes and sent to prison–he was a rich bad boy exiled to their upstate New York town (but further south than the Hollows, the town Unger writes about a lot), and for whatever reason, he just kind of went nuts that night during a wild party at his home a few days before Christmas. The two sisters who vanished were never found, and the assumption has always been he killed them also and got rid of the bodies…which really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maddie’s father was the sheriff, and he has recently had a stroke, requiring at home care, while she runs her own bookstore with some success. Maddie has also closed herself off from dating–who wouldn’t, when your high school boyfriend turned out to be a psycho killer–and at the very beginning of the book, true crime podcaster/writer Harley Granger has come to town, buying the home where the missing sisters once lived, to turn over the stones and interview people–he doesn’t believe for one moment that Evan Handy had the time and ability to not only do what witnesses saw (stabbing Maddie and killing her friend) AND kidnap and murder and hide the bodies of the missing sisters. Harley thinks Evan either had help, or there’s an unrelated serial killer operating in the area–and the disappearance of a stripper named Lolly from the area is proof–along with some other young women gone missing in the years since that nightmare of a night that Maddie can barely remember.

This is Lisa Unger at her best; she writes brilliantly, defining and developing realistic characters that the reader can identify with and relate to and root for; delving into the psychology of what it must be like to survive a night like the one Maddie did as a teenager allows for complexity and many layers and facets to her character, and despite the shortness of the story (compared to Unger’s novels), it’s fully realized, compelling, and hard to put down. Unger’s pacing is urgent, grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go until you’ve turned the final page.

Which is why she is one of my favorite writers.

destination unknown

Thursday, and I am so relieved that the recovery is going well, and that I can actually start fending for myself. The brace isn’t rigidly locked anymore, and I have a lot more freedom of movement–plus I no longer need that wretched sling, which I hated, and I am no longer attached to anything. Granted, I haven’t been since last Friday, when the pain ball1 was removed Later this morning I am calling to make my first PT appointment, and another referral to follow up on as well. I also slept in my bed last night for the first time since the surgery. I was sleeping super-well in my easy chair, and was a little worried about going back to the bed (I will worry about anything, thanks, anxiety!) because I usually sleep on my left side–which is the bad arm–but I fell asleep lying on my back and shifted to the right side and back a couple of times, but other than that, I was dead to the world. I also slept for another ten hours last night, and I am thinking that I need to get this rest. My body is demanding it, and it feels marvelous to sleep so deeply and restfully–this is what I am always longing for most of the time….but I’m not going to start going to bed at eight once I am back to work because yeah, that would be terrible.

I took it easy yesterday after getting home from my appointment and a couple of errands. The temperature has turned cold (for New Orleans, don’t @ me), which always makes the apartment feel a bit more snug. I did some straightening up, took a long hot shower (still not easy, but so much better than before), and then curled up in my chair with Sparky and J. D. O’Brien’s Zig Zag, which I enjoyed very much (more on that later). I’m still trying to figure out a way to comfortably type with the brace, which isn’t as easy as one might expect. because the brace raises the hand so it’s not flush with the keyboard. It just feels awkward and so I need to find a position to type that doesn’t feel awkward–or I need to get used to it. I don’t know that I’ll have the brace on long enough to worry about Carpal tunnel syndrome, but you know me–anxiety always on the starting line waiting for the starting gun. We also finished watching Bodies, which I also highly recommend. It’s extremely well done, and very clever. If you liked Dark, you’ll definitely enjoy Bodies. I haven’t picked out my next read yet, but I have some incredibly delightful options to choose from. Yay! I love having a massive TBR-pile filled with terrific books by great writers. I am leaning towards Christmas Presents by Lisa Unger; I do want to read some holiday themed novels this Christmas season.

Christ, it’s Christmas season already. I may have to have my annual viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas soon. I feel more like being in the holiday spirit this year. We haven’t decorated in years (and what little decorating we did was kind of half-assed, anyway) because the one thing Scooter would–in his long, comfortable life as a lap cat–actually spring into action against was the tree. That first Scooter Christmas was the last time we decorated, and I feel pretty confident that Sparky would see the tree as an amusement park, since everything is a toy to him and all he wants to do is play. I didn’t notice until the other day–and maybe it’s a recent development–but Sparky has some orange in his coat. It’s more obvious when he’s lying on his back, but we did end up with another orange cat, even though we didn’t realize it! The string of orange babies continues!

I was also thinking some more yesterday about being a writer–and the many different ways there are to be one. What is the difference between an author and a writer? Are authors artists? What is literary art and what is not, and who decides? Can genre fiction be art (of fucking course)? This was triggered by one of those things on one of the social media platforms where you were supposed to “quote text” my favorite books by women, and right off the top of my head I rattled off five great ones…and then I started remembering more, and more, and still more. I’ve read hundreds, if not thousands, of marvelous novels and short stories and essays and columns written by women. Why were those the five that popped up into my brain at first, why are they so implanted on my brain that I would come forth with these titles; any such list from me will always include The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and I will never apologize for that. Which left me with only four, and there were so many options. My mind immediately defaulted to four women writers I love, and then had to pick which of their canon was the best. Then I remembered a beautiful novel about friendship, love and loss that made me weep (Somewhere Off The Coast of Maine by Ann Hood) and thought, damn it, I loved that book and I want it on my list…and then started remembering all the others, the dozens if not hundreds, of other women writers whose works entertain, enlighten, and edify my life. There are so many great women writers, currently and in the past, who wrote so many amazing books that it would be hard to name them all, and I would certainly always forget scores of them. For some reason yesterday I was thinking about Taylor Caldwell–who used to write massive doorstopper books about rich people and industries, as well as interesting historical fiction. If remembered at all today, it would probably be for Captains and the Kings, but that wasn’t one of my favorites of hers–that would probably be Testimony of Two Men, which was about medicine in the late 1800’s and a courageous doctor who believed in modern breakthroughs rather than “we’ve always done it this way”–so of course the entire medical establishment was trying to ruin him as he bravely stuck to his principles and tried to modernize American medicine. I would probably hate it if I read it today for the first time–my politics, ethics, morals, and tastes have dramatically changed since I was a teenager, which was when I read Caldwell–but I do remember it fondly. And there’s Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; Jacqueline Susann and Valley of the Dolls; Jackie Collins and Hollywood Wives; any number of Agatha Christie novels–I mean, there have always been so many great women writers around. Does anyone remember Rona Jaffe? I’ve always wanted to reread The Best of Everything, and I think I have a copy of it somewhere. Then there’s the scifi/fantasy writers, too–Anne McCaffrey and The Dragonriders of Pern, Ursula LeGuin and A Wizard of Earthsea, the amazing Octavia Butler….as I said on whatever social media platform that was, I could sit here and name women writers who wrote books that I loved all day. Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Dorothy Eden, Susan Howatch…seriously. Maybe I should write a book of essays about women writers that aren’t remembered much today? ANYA SETON! How I loved Anya Seton back in the day–and all the crime women–Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy L. Hughes, Mary Roberts Rhinehart, Helen MacInnes, Patricia Highsmith, and Mignon Eberhard, to start.

I bet no one else remembers Edna Ferber–and if they do, it’s for Giant and it’s because of the movie (many of her books became famous films: Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, Show Boat, and So Big). Now that I think about it, I think she addressed race issues in both Saratoga Trunk and Show Boat….which may be worth revisiting. She was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table.

This entry sounds and feels more like me than the more recent ones have, doesn’t it? I am itching to dive back into the book this morning, after I pay some bills and do some other aggravating chores. I also have a prescription ready to pick up; so since I have to go to a Midcity pharmacy to get it, I may as well make a grocery run on Carrollton.

I didn’t realize what a difference sleeping in the bed would actually make, really.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the day. Have a blessed Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again a little later, as I really need to do a lot more promo. OH! That reminds me, here is a lovely review of Mississippi River Mischief; check it out! That absolutely made my day–and reminded me that I need to do more self-promotion.

  1. I had a contraption attached to my left shoulder that dispensed a nerve-deadener to the arm, so I wouldn’t feel pain. It lasted for 72 hours, and by the time it was empty, I didn’t have any pain, which was great. I also had to carry it around in basically a fanny pack, so it was one more thing I had to drag around those stressful first 72 hours. However, if you are going to have surgery, ask for one. It was amazing. ↩︎

Blame It on the Edit

I love Alyssa Edwards. She’s the perfect reality star; a completely delusional human living in her own reality, yet also funny and witty with a highly expressive and thoroughly meme-able face, and basically harmless. I’ve always meant to catch her reality show on Netflix about her dance studio–which is so fricking cool that she does that–but have never gotten around to it. I was amused by her on her initial season, but really hated her feud with Coco Montrese, and of course that was also the season won by the marvelous Jinkx Monsoon. Alyssa was also terrific on All Stars 2, which made the rigging of the season all that much more disappointing. (We also gave up on Project Runway after one season where it was clear they’d already decided who was going to win at the start of the season. Don’t give me a rigged competition, thank you very much; if I want that, I’ll watch professional wrestling, thank you very much.)

Which makes it interesting for me to write a book about a drag pageant. I already have tons of ideas for the book, and it’s going to be very brutal in how it approaches the homophobes who have wrested control of Florida from the sane people (hey Moms4Liberty, how’d those elections turn out for you, you pathetic soulless pieces of shit? Your tears are as delicious as mimosas at a gay Sunday drag bunch, you miserable fucking bitches.) and have taken the state, once a beautiful place with scenic beaches and lovely weather, on its final steps to a complete and utter hellhole. Bravo, by the way; nicely done.

Anyway, back to drag; sorry about that sidebar. But that kind of shit will always enrage me. Nothing makes me angrier than misplaced self-righteousness. I may no longer be a practicing Christian, but I know that faith far better than many–if not most–of its most ardent public proselytizers and purveyors.

Gender-bending, of course, is nothing new. For centuries, women weren’t allowed on the stage so female roles were always played by men. This was certainly true in Shakespeare’s day, and often he wrote plays with characters pretending to be the other gender. So there’s a long, proud history of men doing drag in theater and performance art. Who decides what is masculine and what is feminine, anyway? As I have said numerous times, I love this new young generation of leading men and actors who are abandoning traditional black-tie male drag for new and inventive outfits that showcase their youth, beauty, creativity, and personal style; there’s nothing quite so stifling as toxic masculinity and it’s regular insistence that there is only one way to be a man–which is not only stultifying but incredibly limiting. Film and television (and theater, to a far lesser degree) have long influenced what is considered masculine in this country–the prototype being, of course, John Wayne. (Probably the funniest scene in both La Cage aux Folles and it’s American version The Birdcage is when the more butch of the gay couple tries to get the more feminine partner to be more masculine–telling him to walk like John Wayne…which was the first time I ever noticed how peculiarly John Wayne walked. Also amusing is that Mr. American Macho Man John Wayne–and Mr. Patriotism Ronald Reagan–didn’t serve in World Was II…but played war heroes in movies about it. Style over substance.)

But the history of the colonizing of this continent is very queer. Do we really believe those frontiersmen, trappers, hunters and explorers simply went for months and even years without having sex? There weren’t enough women to satisfy the need–and cattle drives? Pshaw. In any purely male society like that–the cattle drive, the explorations, etc.–there is always male/male sexual contact; “helping a buddy out.” This has been erased from history as effectively as if it had never happened–as though homosexuality is some modern thing that never existed before.

It’s always struck me as odd that the masculine ideal (as shown to us by Hollywood, at any rate) inevitably is depicted in all male environments–war movies, cattle drive movies, Westerns–with the occasional token female thrown in as a supporting love interest. These women are often set up to be abused–spanking was often popular in these films; how many times did John Wayne spank a woman in a movie?–and mocked and made fun of; if they had any kind of mind of their own, well, they had to be tamed.

Anyway, I digress.

I also know there are women who despise drag, see it as mocking women and misogynistic. I can actually see how they could feel that way, and far be it from me to tell a woman–any woman–how she should or shouldn’t feel about something, particularly when it comes to misogyny. (I sure don’t want anyone telling me what to think is homophobic or not.) I don’t think drag is misogynistic; if anything, it’s critiquing the misogyny of society. Dolly Parton also exaggerates femininity to the point of being a drag queen–she even says it about herself. Mae West was so good at this exaggeration that people believed she was an actual drag queen for years. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Jane Russell became sex symbols (and stars) by exaggerating their bodies and the way they dressed and their make-up and hair; how is that not female-drag as the converse of over-exaggerated masculinity (John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood); establishing exaggerated norms of masculine and feminine that subconsciously altered what the over-all culture thought in terms of gender roles.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to be more manly…

But the reason gender roles exist are because they are more comfortable for most people than thinking about it at any great length. You were born with a penis, so you should be interested in sports and guns and hunting and wear pants; your parents don’t have to think about it and neither do you. But for those of us who weren’t comfortable in those comforting boxes society so gladly constructed for us all to fit into–it’s not quite that easy. I hated having to do “boy” things and hated the expectations that since I was a boy I should like something in particular–and being incredibly stubborn, being told that I should like something was much more likely to make me disdain it. I didn’t want to play sports or even watch them when I was a kid; I just wanted to read. My struggles with wrapping my head around my gender and my sexual identity as a child were difficult, and those scars are still there–some of them are still scabbed over and not healed. All the messages I was being sent through popular culture, school, and society were telling me that something was wrong with me–and you don’t get over that overnight. I’m still unpacking a lot of that to this very day.

Writing Death Drop forced me to start thinking about these things again–gender markers, gender identities, the duality of our natures (no one is 100% one or the other, I think; I will always believe that gender and sexuality are a lot more fluid than anyone thinks)–and what makes one male and what makes one female. I hope, in writing more about Jem in the future, that it will help me understand myself better as well as society.

And what more could a writer ask for?

The Look of Love

It truly is incredible what a shithole of a site The Site Formerly Known as Twitter has become under the tenure of that brilliant modern thinker Elon Musk (Narrator voice: those adjectives were meant as sarcasm). Every time I go there to cross-post the blog or something, it only takes a moment or two before I am getting the fuck out of that hellish place. I know I should probably just deactivate and be done with it as it fades away into memory like MySpace did once upon a time, but something keeps me there–despite knowing its immoral to even scroll a little bit, and definitely against my own personal ethics–but I think it’s more along the lines of watching a slow-motion disaster movie, frame by frame.

If only it would bankrupt him financially, to go along with his moral and ethical bankruptcies.

Yesterday wasn’t a very good day around the ranch. I was low energy all day, and while i did get all of my work-at-home duties taken care of and handled, after running errands and having a ZOOM call with three very dear friends (who undoubtedly are sick of me talking too much on ZOOM calls), I was just flat out exhausted and simply collapsed into my easy chair with my purr kitty for the evening. I did watch a lengthy documentary about the Eastern Roman Empire, and how the Holy Roman Empire was western Europe’s attempt to recapture and regrasp the legacy of Imperial Rome, to the point of rebranding the real Roman Empire as the Byzantine, or Greek, Empire. (The history of “western” civilization is full of these sorts of reclaimings and rebrandings, as the West sought to basically claim the history of civilization in general.) It just goes to show you–the history we all learned in public school was biased and written to enhance and create a foundation for white supremacy to rest upon. There’s a rather lengthy personal essay to be written about having to relearn everything I learned as a child as an adult because it was all wrong–or people could just read Howard Zinn’s work.

Today I do have some errands to run and vaccines to get injected into my arms; I also have things around the house I need to get done. I am going to make Swedish meatballs today in the slow cooker, I think; that’ll be a nice treat to go along with the LSU game tonight against Georgia State. There really aren’t many great games today–everyone has an “easy” game scheduled for the weekend before the Thanksgiving rivalry games, many of which this is the last go-around for. It’s weird to think LSU won’t be playing their most hated rival, Florida, every year any more (but how delightful to go out with a five game winning streak over them, ha ha ha ha and fuck off, Gators), or that other classic games won’t occur anymore. I don’t know why or when LSU’s Thanksgiving rivalry weekend opponent changed from Arkansas to Texas A&M; that was a fun rivalry with the Razorbacks pulling off some upsets over the years–why is it that everyone plays lights-out when they play LSU?–but that was also a manufactured rivalry that didn’t exist before Arkansas joined the SEC.

I also want to spend some time reading this morning; Lou Berney’s Dark Ride is calling my name and I am really enjoying it. The fun thing about Lou’s work is everything is always different; no two books are ever the same, or even the same kind of voice or style. Every book is an original in every way, and I will go to my grave with The Long and Faraway Gone as one of my favorite crime novels of all time. The one thing I am looking forward to after this surgery is more time to read, and if need be, I can read on my iPad–it’s not like I haven’t downloaded hundreds of books over the years. I’m still enjoying The Rival Queens–man, I love that period of French history–and I think my next read after Lou’s will be Zig Zag, by J. D. O’Brien; since it’s about a weed dispensary heist, coming after Lou’s stoner noir seems like the proper pairing, and then after that I am moving on to the new Angie Kim.

I was exhausted last night so I slept incredibly well. I even slept in this morning, not getting out of bed before eight-thirty like a slag. I feel much more rested and emotionally even this morning, which is a very good thing. I want to get a lot done today–I really need to move furniture and figure out how to make my work station more Big Kitten Energy proof, which is possible but will take some figuring out, and I won’t be able to move anything after Tuesday’s surgery, after all, so I have to get all this stuff done before hand. I don’t feel like I’ve had the chance to think everything through the way it needs to be thought through, nor do I feel like I am prepared for the aftermath and recovery period–which I think was the explanation for yesterday’s low energy; created and maintained completely by my anxiety.

I also want to read this original text version of The Mark on the Door, a Hardy Boys mystery.

We watched Blue Beetle last night, and I really enjoyed it. First, it was lovely seeing a Latinx family centered in a super-hero movie, and to have a super-hero of Mexican ancestry. It had some really funny moments (as well as some that made me go huh?), and as far as DC/Marvel movies go, it was one of the more solid plots and origin stories, but I’m also not terribly familiar with the Blue Beetle character. I primarily remember/knew him from the Justice League comic books of the late 1980’s/early 1990’s, and he was often teamed up with Booster Gold for comedy. I don’t know what has happened to the character with all the reboots since then, but I appreciated seeing something different from a comic book movie. The lead actor, young Xolo Maridueña, was handsome and appealing and charismatic, and the rest of the cast is fine other than the old witch who gave us Presidents Nader and Sanders because she doesn’t vote with her vagina (maybe you should have, you fucking piece of trash, since your mouth and going everywhere all over 24 hour news to trash Hillary helped give us the current Supreme Court, and you should be shunned and forced to take a Game of Thrones walk of shame down Pennsylvania you fucking hateful bitch–I will carry that grudge to the grave, skank). Seeing that fucking trash was in the cast made me seriously reconsider watching, frankly, and her “acting” was a joke and so horrific that Paul and I spent a good hour recasting with actresses who wouldn’t have just cashed the check and phoned it in the way she did.) The movie is actually strongest when it focuses on the Reyes family and their dynamic (Nana is the absolute best), and while it didn’t pull down the kind of financial numbers a movie like this is intended to (and odds that it’ll be blamed by Hollywood on centering a Latinx family are pretty strong), I do think this is one of the movies that in the future will be reclaimed as a classic and one of the best in the field. I hope there will be a sequel, as was teased at the end.

But I think they’re rebooting the movie universe for DC, so who knows.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous, marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and may whatever teams you’re rooting for today have a nice win–unless you’re a Georgia State fan, of course.

Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous

As I was saying in my other blatant self-promotional post of today (for Mississippi River Mischief) I rather jokingly mentioned that perhaps my childhood fandom of celebrities like Cher, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck was an early sign of my destiny as a gay man; and yes, I know that’s a stereotype but as I always say, “stereotypes have to start somewhere“–there’s occasionally some kernel of truth in a gay stereotype. (Example: Jack on Will & Grace got some grief for being a stereotype–but I’ve known any number of gay men who were very similar to Jack; imagine being told you’re a stereotype.)

RuPaul’s genius idea to kind of create a Project Runway and American Idol hybrid reality show started out very slow–it was on Logo, I believe, and the budget was incredibly bare bones that first season or two or three; part of the fun of the show was how much it looked like a cable-access do-it-yourself reality show. And as usual with any art form created by gay men, it was popular with gay men and straight women; the show slowly started building an audience and then WHAM! One day it seemed like drag had taken over the world.

Katya from RuPaul’s Drag Race, whom I find hilarious–and beautiful.

Paul and I lost interest in the show after the Bianca-Courtney-Adore season, because that season was so good we both felt that anything after that would be anti-climactic. I know there have been other good seasons and incredibly fierce queens since then, but we came back for All Stars Season 2 (when I became a fan of Katya, actually) and were bitterly disappointed at how scripted, staged, and unfair the entire season was to everyone who wasn’t Alaska, Detox, or Roxxy. And just like with Project Runway, once we saw a season that was clearly predetermined from the start, we stopped watching.

I have zero interest in watching a “competition” with a predetermined winner, which is kind of why I don’t watch WWE much anymore. (it’s also very cartoonish, but that’s a subject for another time.)

I know there are cisgender women who have issues with drag, and I know there are transwomen who do as well; I think the transwomen’s issues primarily have to do with the conflation between the two–which was clearly prescient, given the rise of the raw sewage known as LibsofTikTok and “Moms4Liberty” (how’d that election go for you on Tuesday, you miserable soulless contemptible bigoted shrews? CRY MORE BITCHES, your tears are like Mimosas to us gays), who see no difference (because the harpies are as ignorant and uneducated as they are bitter, soulless, and unChristian). I’ve never seen a lot of criticism for drag from the straight cisgender women as a general rule, but I know there are concerns and critiques from the feminist community, which I do not dismiss or take lightly.

But since the primary straight cisgender woman who used to scream at me about the “misogyny of drag” also has turned out to be a sociopathic TERF who is dead to me (shocker, I know; a feminist who hates drag is a bigoted disgusting piece of shit TERF? Who could have seen that coming?), I don’t necessarily take those feminist critiques as seriously as I used to. If your feminism is about cisgender white women only, go fuck yourself. (This is the same woman who claimed to be a gay ally because she loved going to gay bars where gay men made much of her…the irony that it was primarily because she acted like an over-the-top drag queen completely escaped her–but then, drag queens competed with her for attention in gay bars, and I’ve also come to recognize that the poor bitch is so fucking thirsty for attention that she probably needs intense therapy for at least a decade.)

I’ve always seen drag as a critique of the societal notions of what a woman is supposed to be; drag is that expectation taken over the top to the nth degree. This is why they have the exaggerated everything–from wigs to shoes to gowns to make-up to hip padding and fake boobs. (I also think that the reason drag kings never attained the same level of popularity and mainstreaming as the queens is because it’s harder to over-exaggerate masculinity; it’s not as easy to create the illusion of a thickly muscled body, a super-deep baritone voice, and thick body hair–and besides, who wants to watch women performing toxic masculinity? And as a general rule, men don’t wear make-up when they are cosplaying masculinity.) They’re also loud, funny, and crude–all the things women aren’t supposed to be in proper society–and when they are hyper-sexualized, it’s to make a point about the hyper-sexualizing of women by the dominant culture. Women aren’t supposed to have control of their bodies and sexuality; they aren’t supposed to be crude and crass and vulgar. They aren’t parodying women; they are parodying the cultural expectations (that still exist) for women by over-exaggerating everything and reflecting back to the overall societal culture about how we limit and control women.

I tried explaining this several times to my former friend, but she was also sociopathic in her narcissistic belief that she was never wrong. She was exhausting, frankly, and when I cut her out of my life like the cancerous tumor she was, it was amazing how much better I felt knowing I would never see any of her ignorant bigotry anywhere on my social media ever again, and sorry–you come for transpeople, you’re coming for all of us.

Keep your conditional allyship, bitch.

It’s called intersectionality, use the Google.

And yes, there are misogynistic gay men and drag queens. Some of the common language of drag is misogynist; “fishy” and so forth are questionable–but again, it plays into that critique of societal feminine archetypes; women would never talk about themselves that way and would be furious if a straight man did; so why is it okay for gay men and drag queens to do so? It’s not really; but if you’re going to come for drag with honest concerns about misogynist anti-woman language, that’s one thing; when you come for the entire community because of it, fuck you with a cheese grater.

So, part of the reason I wrote Death Drop was for the same reasons I write y/a about rape culture and homophobia and racism; to put a human face on an issue that might help the reader develop more empathy about the subject than they may have felt before reading my book. Death Drop is not going to convince drag-haters or TERFs that their beliefs and values are trash and they need to rethink and reevaluate; but maybe, just maybe, someone who doesn’t know much about the subject and the issues around it might learn something.

That may be hubris, but you can’t be a writer without some level of hubris in your personality.

So, feel free to click on this link and order several copies! They make great gifts for homophobes, and Christmas is coming!

Dark Lady

The fortune queen of New Orleans, stroking her cat in her black limousine…

Ah, Cher’s 1970’s musical career. This one was always a big hit at Tea Dance at both Cafe Lafitte in Exile and the Pub on Sundays; there’s really nothing like a gay sing-along, is there?

I suppose being a fan of Cher as a child was kind of a sign? What is it about performers like Cher and Bette Midler and Liza Minnelli that draws young boys into their fandom who are going to wind up gay? Why was I drawn to actresses like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katherine Hepburn, and Doris Day before I knew I was gay? It’s something I’ve often wondered about–what is it about those women that draw us in like Formosan termites to a lit chandelier on a Monday night after Mother’s Day?

Ah, Formosan termites. That brings me around to today’s blatant self-promotional post for Mississippi River Mischief.

Isn’t this a cool, spooky looking shot? I took this out one of my kitchen windows one Sunday afternoon during a mighty New Orleans-style thunderstorm, and love how spectral and haunted-looking it turned out.

I still can’t believe that it took me this long to write about the swarming termites.

No one warned Paul and I about them, for the record. We had no idea that first May we lived here on Camp Street that the city was infested with swarming Formosan termites whose breeding season was the few weeks past Mother’s Day every May, and they are a scourge. We were swarmed, and had no idea what to do with them or how to handle the situation, or anything. We were running around the apartment spraying Raid everywhere, swinging at them with brooms, and they were everywhere. When the swarm finally passed, the apartment was filled with wings and corpses. It was horrible. We talked to the property manager, who apologized for forgetting to warn us–and the primary problem with the apartment on Camp Street (which was where Chanse also lived) was we had a very bright security light mounted on the front corner of the building–which drew them, and our apartment was right there. We learned to turn off everything that gave off light–including the television–when the first scout flew into the apartment, the mad dash around turning off everything, and then sitting there in the dark with maybe a couple of candles lit, waiting for the fury of the swarms to die down.

But that damned outside security light…ugh.

They are quite literally like one of the Biblical plagues of Egypt, and you see why the Egyptians constantly cried to Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.

But now that we live in the back of the house, we’ve been pretty insulated from dealing with them. Sometimes when I walk the garbage out in May, I can see a small swarm around one of the street lamps, but all the lights in the front of the house are off. We usually turn everything off if and when a scout flies into the television screen and immediately light candles and sit in the dark until we feel the coast is clear.

So when I started writing Mississippi River Mischief, I thought the best way to open the book was with the line It was the Monday after Mother’s Day and the termites were swarming. I posted this on Twitter, and local meteorological icon Margaret Orr replied “what a great opening line!” which kind of made my week (I am a big Margaret Orr fanboy) and helped me realize I was on the right track in writing something about New Orleans that rarely makes it into fiction. (Author’s note: That isn’t the opening line anymore; I added Scotty asking the guys a question about the renovation, and then after he talks, that’s where the line is. I just couldn’t get the prose to work with that as the first sentence; it read awkwardly, so I moved Scotty speaking up.)

Nature, and the natural world, is all around us here in New Orleans; the occasional alligator will sometimes lumber into the city limits; snakes and nutria and squirrels are all over the place, and of course there are the insects–the flying cockroaches (aka palmetto bugs), the swarming Formosan termites, the stinging caterpillars–peculiar to here. The tropical climate makes everything over-bloom and grow and expand and try to reclaim the natural balance of the region before it was settled. This is NOT the place for you if you have pollen allergies or have sinuses sensitive to the air pressure (I do); and I swear by Claritin-D for allergy and/or sinus relief (not the over-the -counter kind, but the kind you have to ask for at the pharmacy because you can make meth with it). OH–and the gecko lizards, always darting around and running up the side of buildings or fences or trees.

So, yes, since Scotty had finally bought the building he’s lived in all these years, I thought it was time to talk about termite swarms, as they would be an enormous headache for a property owner, and what better way to start a book where Scotty is now a landowner than with swarming termites?

And I remembered the buy link! Maybe I’m getting better at this.

Lady Marmalade

He met Marmalade down in old New Or-leenz, strutting her stuff on the street, she said “hello, hey Joe, you want to give it a go?“

That classic song by Labelle came out while I was in high school, during the early to mid-1970’s, and there was a lot of prurient young teenager thrill in knowing that the French lyrics translated to “do you wanna have sex with me tonight?” But the song–essentially about a hooker in New Orleans and a man’s experience with her–was an introduction to another side of New Orleans–one you wouldn’t find in the World Book Encyclopedia.

It was very important to me, for a variety of reasons, to make Scotty someone who embraced his sexual orientation and sexuality. I wanted to write someone who LOVED having sex, loved beautiful men, and felt no Puritan-American based shame about enjoying sex. Those kinds of characters were few and far between in gay fiction, let alone in gay crime fiction. After writing the typical miserable cynical bitter gay man with Chanse, I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted Scotty was to be the obverse of Chanse in everything, except their mutual love of New Orleans.

(This was, in part, in response to being briefly dropped by Alyson when I signed the Scotty series with Kensington, being told “two mystery series set in New Orleans would be too alike.” I took that personally, as an insult to my talent, ambition, creativity, and abilities…and I think I proved my point. Once Murder in the Rue Dauphine and Bourbon Street Blues were released–and Rue Dauphine sold super well for them and was nominated for a Lammy–Alyson changed their minds. I’m still mad at myself for not asking for more money.)

But while Scotty was highly sexually active, he never got paid for it. He also never did porn–although I did consider that at one point as an option; I thought a murder mystery built around a porn shoot would be interesting and kind of fun. And of course, in this book he mentions that he and the guys have recorded themselves having sex, and have sexted each other.

Scotty always preferred to keep his status amateur–but he was a go-go boy (stripper, exotic dancer, dick dancer, whatever you prefer to call the guys who dance for dollars in gay bars wearing various kinds of male undergarments), and he was certainly someone who was not averse to having a sexual encounter with a handsome stranger. (There’s a joke about this in Mississippi River Mischief where Frank comments after they’ve met someone, “I’ve been with you for almost twenty years. If you think I can’t tell by now that you’ve recognized someone but you’re not sure from where, which means you’ve probably slept with them, think again”–a paraphrase, but you get the gist; Scotty is often running into men who look vaguely familiar, and that usually does mean he slept with them a long time ago.)

New Orleans, despite it’s rather prim-and-proper high society set (on the surface, anyway), with the Pickwick Club and the Boston Club and the mysterious Mystick Krewes of Rex and Comus and so on, has always been a city of loose morals and freewheeling attitudes towards sex and sexuality. We had a zone where prostitution was legal for three decades or so (Storyville) and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were several bordellos operating within the city limits as we speak. There was the arrest of the Canal Street madam; and of course local author Chris Wiltz wrote The Last Madam, a biography of notorious Norma Wallace–the last well-known madam in the city. (Which I need to reread…) Bourbon Street was known for its strippers and vice for decades; there are still strip clubs on the infamous strip running from Canal downtown to Esplanade–and there are usually men in bikinis or something equally scanty on the bars of the gay clubs down down around the St. Ann/Bourbon queer nexus of the Quarter. When I was starting my deep dive into New Orleans/Quarter history, I wasn’t surprised to find out there were “stag” bars down along the riverfront along the levee; and if someone at one of the fancy houses in Storyville had a predilection for the Greek vice that needed scratching, the madam would send one of her bouncers down there to find someone willing to turn a trick, with a fair share going to the house, of course.

I think that’s fascinating, really; and something I want to explore in a story. I’ve started the story (it’s “The Blues Before Dawn” which I’ve mentioned from time to time) but can’t quite nail down the crime part of it. The set-up is great, though, he typed modestly.

I didn’t intend for Scotty to wind up in what is now known as a throuple–a three way couple, or a relationship of three people–on purpose. I wanted to create the dynamic of two men being interested in him at the same time, and have some fun with that in the first book. I absolutely did, and when I sent Colin away at the end of the first one, that was deliberate. I couldn’t decide who Scotty should wind up with, and I wanted Frank to be really who he logically should end up with–but this bad boy with a mysterious background who was so hot and sexy? I couldn’t NOT bring him back, and so I decided I had three books to wrap up the romantic dilemma. I wasn’t certain what the backstory of the dilemma would be, or how it would turn out, or how it would go–but when I was writing Jackson Square Jazz I found the perfect place and perfect way to bring Colin back. That book ended with them deciding to try a throuple to see how it works out. It was going pretty well until Mardi Gras Mambo–and I tried really hard with that book to not end the romantic story the way it ended in that book…and finally decided, since the series was actually turning out to be popular, that I would finish it by the end of the fourth book.

I’ve also not talked about it in the books or on this blog at all, but….they also have an open relationship. (Someone asked me about this at some point after the last book came out.) Nothing else would work for Scotty–he may not take advantage of the opportunities that pop up now the way he used to, but that’s because he has the freedom to make that choice. If he was forbidden from outside sexual relationships, he would cheat–and he doesn’t want to do that because that’s hurtful and wrong. He never wants to hurt Frank or Colin–but both of them are also away from New Orleans for long periods of time; Colin off doing his international agent stuff, while Frank is on the wrestling tour doing shows and promo events; so they are on their own a lot and temptation is always there–after all, all three of them are gorgeous–so while it is unspoken on the page, it’s an open throuple. And usually, Scotty finds outside sex to be kind of dull, unemotional, and not nearly as much fun as it is with one or both of the guys. That’s a character development arc. I also don’t show Scotty going out to clubs or waking up with hangovers with a stranger in his bed anymore, either. He does still go out–he loves dancing–but the gay bar scene has changed since he was younger and he doesn’t find it to be nearly as much fun as he used to.

Though he won’t say no to a hit of Ecstasy during Carnival or Decadence.

How subtle are the changes in Scotty as he has grown, aged and evolved? I think they are miniscule, but a revisit of the first two books in the series has shown a lot of change and growth over the years for him. He is definitely not that same flighty twenty-nine year old who booked a gig dancing at Southern Decadence all those years ago to make rent and wound up kidnapped by neo-Nazis deep in a swamp–I think he’s a little less flighty and a lot more responsible than he used to be…though he’s not as responsible as most people his age. Turning him into a property owner in the Quarter from a renter–and letting Millie and Velma ride off into the sunset in Florida as retirees–has also made him grow up, as now taking care of the property is his responsibility.

I will always be fond of my Scotty, though, and hope to keep writing him till I can no longer type into a computer or speak into a word-to-text app.

my neighborhood is so beautiful at night, isn’t it?