Category: childhood

It’s Raining Men

The first song I ever danced to in a gay bar was, quite naturally, “It’s Raining Men.”

I never said I wasn’t a stereotype, did I?

I was twenty-one the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar. (If there were gay bars anywhere near me in Kansas, I had no idea) It was in Fresno, California, of all places; where I spent the 80’s and which I often lovingly refer to as “Topeka in the Valley.” It wasn’t much of anything, really; a small building on Blackstone Avenue, I think just past Olive, and near the off-ramp for the new cross-town highway in an attempt to alleviate traffic on the main streets of the city (it may have been further north). The bar was called the Express, and someone I worked with–the first obviously gay man I ever knew, and certainly the first one who was out and proud and not ashamed of it–took me one night after work. I was nervous as hell. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I remember it was dark and crowded. There was a bigger front room with the bar, and there was a smaller dance floor further in the back. We arrived–I didn’t recognize the song that was playing–got a beer (he got a vodka and cranberry), and then the next song started up. I didn’t know it, had never heard it before, but he dragged me out onto the dance floor and yes, the song was quite a jam. I loved it, and rather self0-consciously danced my ass off (I always loved to dance). My friend later told me the song was by the Weather Girls, who used to sing back-up for Sylvester, and it was called “It’s Raining Men.” The song was utterly ridiculous–it still is–but those powerhouse vocals, the driving beat, and the absolute joy in the idea that all you had to do was “rip off the roof and stay in bed” so a hot man will drop in from the sky for you? How could gay men not embrace the song? I bought the single at Tower Records a few days later, and every time that song played, I’d be out on the dance floor. Even now, when I hear it, I always think back to that first night I went to a gay bar.

HIV/AIDS was already a thing, but we didn’t know much about it in Fresno; it seemed like something new and scary but maybe no worse than some other new diseases that had been discovered in the 1970’s/early 1980’s. The rare yet terrifying information and reporting on it referred to it as GRID. It eventually claimed that co-worker who took me to my first gay bar, and his roommate, who was the one who told me years later that the co-worker (whose name I cannot recall, I just know it started with a K) was in the hospital, dying. “It’s Raining Men” always reminds me of him; always takes me back to that first time when I so nervously paid my cover charge and flashed my ID and walked into my first ever gay bar. There was another gay bar in Fresno, the Red Lantern, that was in a much shoddier (“dangerous”) part of town. (Gay bars, back in the day, were never in the best neighborhoods. Tracks in Ybor City in the early 90’s–when I lived in Tampa–was also not in the best neighborhood. Ybor City did begin gentrifying before I moved away, but originally? Yeah, not the best neighborhood.) I went there a few times as well–made friends there, made friends in the other bar, too. I lost all those friends, of course, and their names and faces are also gone, more lives lost to the mists of time in my memory. It seems a bit shameful to not be able to remember the names and faces of the first people who knew a part of me I’d never let anyone see before, but they also didn’t know me in that I kept the other part of my life secret from them.

It’s very strange, because I decided to google the gays bars of Fresno while I was writing this and apparently the Express closed in 2013? I don’t think it stayed in the same location–according to the site I found it had also been called “708” before becoming the Express again; who knows what that was all about. But the Red Lantern is still there on Belmont Avenue, in the same location; how wild is that? That’s a pretty long-lived gay bar for a place like Fresno, really. I remember in Houston there was JR’s, and Heaven, and maybe another one there in the Montrose district. But I didn’t start spending a lot of my weekend evenings in gay bars until I moved to Tampa. Tracks in Ybor City and Howard Avenue Station were the two primary gay bars when I lived there; and there was Bedrox on Clearwater Beach–which was the gay section.

And of course, there are gay bars everywhere in New Orleans. I haven’t set foot in one in a number of years, and may never do so again. I’m old; spending the night dancing would end with me in the hospital, or needing days to recover.

I don’t know what gay bars are like now because I’ve not been a part of that culture for a very long time–we haven’t even done condom outreach during special weekends in the bars in years anymore–which is why it’s hard for me to write about Scotty being still a party-boy. His age in the book I just finished and turned in is roughly forty-three or forty-four; after Katrina when I had to actually pick a time for the books to have been set (Katrina couldn’t be ignored), I decided that the Southern Decadence where Scotty met both Frank and Colin was in 2004, Jackson Square Jazz was that Halloween, and Mardi Gras Mambo was Carnival 2005. Scotty had just turned twenty-nine in Bourbon Street Blues, which meant he was roughly born in 1976, which works with the other timelines, making him twelve or thirteen when the Cabildo caught fire the last time. While the other books can be more amorphous, obviously Who Dat Whodunnit was set in January of 2010, right before the Saints won the Super Bowl. With the pandemic starting in 2020–which I will deal with at some point–this one had to take place before the world shut down, so I am thinking it’s May of 2019. I don’t want to skip ahead a year to the pandemic, so Quarter Quarantine Quadrille will be further in the future. I kind of want to do Decadence again in another book–with Scotty older but not much wiser–but am not entirely sure. I also would like to really do a Scotty Halloween book, and maybe even a hurricane evacuation one, I don’t know.

I am, however, very glad that I did write those first three Scotty books, when I was enmeshed in gay bar culture, because I’m glad it’s preserved in fiction. That world is gone now–washed away when the levees failed and the city rebuilt. Someone once told me I was the only person to document that pre-Katrina gay male existence, of going out to bars and being promiscuous and dancing all night long and drinking too much and occasionally dipping into party drugs.

I’m also kind of glad modern gays don’t have to use the weekends and gay bars as a place to let loose and be as free and gay as possible, which they couldn’t do during the week. Friday nights were always a relief, a respite from a cold and unloving world that judged us harshly and wished us harm.

I don’t miss the bright lights, the cigarette smoke (that’s how long it’s been), the stench of male sweat and the smell of poppers in the air as the deejay spins another banger. I mean, I do, but not in a sad kind of way; those memories are lovely and they make me a little wistful for the days when gay bars weren’t clogged with bachelorette parties and obnoxious drunk straight girls. But those weren’t the good old days, really; we had no rights and our sex lives were against the law; the few legal protections we have now were goals back then, something we could strive to achieve sometime in the distant future. I certainly never thought Lawrence would decriminalize my sex life and Obergefell would make it legal for Paul and I to marry; I never thought those things would happen during my lifetime. I didn’t expect to see an openly gay member of the Presidential cabinet; out queer characters as leads in television shows and movies–none of these things seemed possible to that closeted twenty-one year old who walked wide-eyed into the Express and went out to dance to “It’s Raining Men.”

I had no idea what the future held for me or for my community that night. In some ways I wish I could let that kid know everything would be okay and his life would turn out so much better than he ever dared dream…but knowing might change things, and I wouldn’t want to change anything that would take away the life I live now, because I love it.

Perhaps Some Other Aeon

Tuesday morning and heading out to Metairie for an appointment. I took the entire day off because I have no idea how long this might take or how I might feel after, so I figured it was better to not have to deal with clients. It’s nothing serious, and perhaps by being vague I am intensifying interest in what my appointment is; I’m just not comfortable talking about it just yet. Who knows? Tomorrow I might be here telling everything and more, always more than you could possibly want to know. Then again, you are here, after all.

I got some great work done on the book last night, and I am feeling most self-satisfied to the point where I can barely stand myself today. I hadn’t planned on using today to finish the revision when I asked for the day off, but how opportune this has turned out to be for me. When I get home, I can do some chores around here and then dive into the final two chapters of the book. Yes, I said the final two chapters. The end is clearly in sight, and the work I did today successfully pulled the story back in from some dead ends and subplots that were not absolutely necessary. I cannot wait to get home and finish it off this afternoon. But…we’ll see how it goes. One never knows when fate is going to throw a monkey wrench into your plans. (And what an odd phrase that is. I wonder what it’s origin was?)

We finished watching The Lake last night and it was quite fun and cute. I really like Justin Gavanis, and Julia Stiles is epic as Maisie the bitch no one likes and everyone fears. We also started watching the new Apple Plus Tom Holland series, The Crowded Room, which seems relatively intense and sad at the same time. But we’re intrigued and will most likely continue with it this evening. I also like Amanda Seyfried, and she’s the female lead.

I didn’t fall into a deep sleep last night but I rested, which is all that matters. I’ll hit a wall at some point this afternoon without doubt; but that’s okay. As long as I can get my work done once I’m back home from this appointment, that would be super great. I can also get some more chores around here done, too. Or I could get back to reading, if my brain isn’t too fried. Funny how reading used to be the thing for me when I was tired, to relax and refresh and reboot my brain, and now that I’m older I can’t focus enough to read when I’m tired. My reading has slowed down a lot this past year or so; the pandemic gave me a lot of time to read, but for the longest time I couldn’t. I did reread a lot of Mary Stewart novels to get me into reading again–I also reread some other marvelous older titles that I love, like Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters–and that broke through that barrier to reading. Maybe I should do that again, once I get my current book finished reading? But I’ve also got some killer reads to get to–new books by Kelly J. Ford, Eli Cranor, Megan Abbott, and S. A. Cosby, with a new Carol Goodman and Laura Lippman coming later this summer. And then of course there are all the books I’ve got here that I haven’t read, because I am a book hoarder.

And I got the notes for the other manuscript I am trying to get finished and out of my hair as well. So, if I can get the last two chapters finished today, and write the epilogue, I can start doing the macro edits. I have a long lovely weekend ahead of me, thanks to the Juneteenth holiday, and of course the week after that I am heading to Alabama and Kentucky to spend some time with my dad. Their anniversary is–was–June 26th, so I am going to meet Dad there in Alabama for their anniversary and then we’ll caravan back up to Kentucky. And then we’re in July–another truncated work week for me–and next thing you know it’s Bouchercon and football season and then the holidays and the year ends and that, my dear Constant Reader, is how you run out of time and how quickly life shoots past.

And on that cheery note, I am going to head into the spice mines and start getting ready for this appointment. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

But I’m Not

Sunday and I slept late this morning and i am not a bit ashamed of it, quite frankly. The opportunities to sleep in are rare these days–getting up early so often for so long has adjusted and shifted my body clock in ways I’m getting used to but don’t like, and chief among those ways is the inability to sleep in. Yesterday I was up before eight, for example, but this morning it wasn’t even nine when I got up, and I could have easily stayed in bed longer. But there’s spice to mine today, and while there is still a lot of it to get done, I am feeling very good about things this morning. I actually felt really good about them yesterday if I am going to be completely honest. I got two chapters done and finished editing a manuscript (not my own) and turned it in to the publisher, which felt marvelous to be finished with that. Deadlines and juggling projects is something I’ve always done, but something I’ve noticed since the pandemic shutdown is deadlines are much more stressful and demanding on me, and take a bigger emotional toll than they used to. Probably part and parcel of the long COVID rewiring of my brain, but whereas before, I relished the pressure and it drove me to work harder, now it shuts me down and/or depresses me, which has the exact opposite reaction it used to have with me: instead of driving me, I think oh I’ll never get this all done so why bother and I end up blowing things off completely. Depression is quite the bitch, you know.

But I am very pleased with the work I got done yesterday and look forward to today’s work. I also did a load of dishes and laundry yesterday, and some cleaning. But after I was finished with work for the day, my brain was too fatigued to read so I watched movies on television, discovered two gems I’ve been wanting to revisit: Cruising and The Last of Sheila. I wanted to watch Cruising because I remember all the controversies about the movie while it was being filmed (yes, even in rural Kansas we heard about the gays being mad about the movie). I eventually watched it in the mid-1990’s. Paul is a huge Al Pacino fan, and when we moved in together he owned almost the entire Pacino filmography on videocassettes, so one night we watched Cruising. I didn’t much care for it when I watched it the first time, but I’ve wanted to watch it again–when I watched I wasn’t yet a published crime writer–because the story itself is interesting to me. A hot young ambitious cop sent undercover into the gay BDSM/leather community to look for a serial killer? The question of identity and sexual confusion that could arise from playing the part, which entailed going out and picking up (or being picked up) by gay men expecting some sex? I mean, you have to admit that’s a great set-up and concept for story. The Oscar winning director William Friedkin (he won for The French Connection but was much better known for directing The Exorcist) failed and ended up with a deeply flawed film. Pacino was also robbed of a far greater performance due to the homophobic cowardice of the either the director or the studio. Rewatching, the film’s flaws are even more apparent, but it’s a shame. It could have been a great film–and it does remain one of the few Hollywood films that actually depicts gay bar culture of the late 1970s the way it was–but I don’t know what went wrong with it, but it’s still a great idea. I also liked seeing New York as dirty and grimy, the way it was during that time period before gentrification came to Manhattan. It’s also fun seeing old movies where people who went on to greater stardom later had bit parts or cameos; Ed O’Neill popped up on screen at one point, as did several others that made me think, hmmmm.

If I had the time or inclination, I would take that basic framework of an idea and turn it into something stronger than the film. There was also a book it was based on, but it’s rare and used copies are insanely expensive. It also reminded me of a gay crime novel I read as a teenager living in Kansas; I may have been in college, I don’t remember, called A Brother’s Touch by Owen Levy. The book was about a brother who comes to New York to look into his estranged brother’s life after he is murdered–they were estranged because the dead brother was openly gay–and begins to question his own sexuality after being enmeshed into the gay community of Manhattan at the time. It was reprinted recently and I got a copy (by recently I mean in the years since Katrina; I have no concept of time and its passage anymore); I should move it closer to the top of the TBR pile. I wish I could still read as voraciously as I used to…something else that has slowed down with getting older.

After watching this I wanted to rewatch a classic old crime film of the old school, The Last of Sheila, which I’ve always loved. Co-written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins and directed by Herbert Ross, it’s a whodunit worthy of Christie herself, in which a widowed producer invites some film community members on hard times for a week on his yacht. Everyone invited was at the party a year before where the producer’s wife Sheila wound up being killed by a hit-and-run driver, and the producer, whose known for loving to play games, has come up with a game for his guests to play. Everyone gets a card, and every day they will stop somewhere they will look for clues to the identity of whoever holds the card of the day–the first is a shoplifter, the second is a homosexual–and of course, the game turns dark and ugly when the producer host–played to sadistic asshole perfection by James Coburn, is murdered…and it turns out the game their host was playing had layers none of the guests knew about going in. The cast is a perfect time capsule of early 1970’s stardom: Richard Benjamin, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, James Mason, Joan Hackett, a beautiful young Ian McShane, and of course, Coburn. It has twists and turns and surprises, and is so markedly clever that it’s hard to describe without spoiling anything…and the surprises are what make it such a great and fun film. This was one of our Sunday movie-after-church movies, I think; I do remember seeing it in the theater and being impressed and amazed. One thing I absolutely loved in the rewatch was the books scattered over every set–they are all mystery novels by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, and Erle Stanley Gardner, which should tip the viewer off that you are in for a mystery influenced by the master crime plotters of the time. It’s really a shame the film wasn’t a success, because it would have been amazing if Perkins and Sondheim had collaborated on more scripts like this one. As I was watching, I kept thinking how much I would love to write a puzzle-type mystery like this one; I’ve always feared such a thing was outside of my wheelhouse so I have always been afraid to try. Who knows? Maybe I will.

I feel very rested this morning and I am not dreading diving into the book this morning, which is nice. I don’t think I have the mindspace and bandwidth to work on multiple things all at the same time anymore, if that makes sense. I don’t know if it has to do with the long COVID rewriting of my brain waves or what, but the last few books I’ve written or worked on–going back to Bury Me in Shadows–have been more stressful than fun for me to write. Writing on a deadline is always stressful, and I rarely, if ever, actually make deadlines. But having multiple projects going on at the same time now feels like I am not devoting enough of my time and attention to any of them, let alone all of them, and that makes me feel uncomfortable about the work. Of course, my last three books–and my last anthology–have all gotten a lot of mainstream award attention, which makes it seem weirder. Which, of course, makes me wonder if the stress and the heavy burden pressure of multiple projects going is somehow making me produce somehow better work than before, and do I really want to mess with that at all? It never ceases to amaze me how neurotic I am about being a writer, and how afraid I am that any change or variation means it’s all over for me now.

I do wonder sometimes if other writers have that same secret fear: that the well will eventually run dry or that we’ll forget how to do what we do. People like to call me prolific; I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I am and that it’s not a bad thing (I always try to figure out if being called something is bad–which goes back to being called a fairy as a child and thinking he was saying ferry and being very confused). John D. MacDonald was prolific; so were Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Erle Stanley Gardner. I think my insecurities came into play when people started calling me prolific; I am so used to being insulted that I assumed it must be an insult as well, like it was something I should be ashamed of or something. I’ve decided to embrace it as a compliment. I am sure there are literary writers who produce one novel every ten years or so who would think it an insult, but I don’t respect them so don’t really care much what they think. And if I am not as prolific as I used to be–which I am not–it’s nothing to be ashamed of; I’ve gotten older, have gone through some things, and I don’t have the energy that I used to have. My imagination still rages out of control at any and all times, of course, but I don’t have the energy to fool myself into thinking every idea I have will turn into a short story, an essay, or a novel. I certainly won’t live long enough to turn all the ideas I already have into longer works of whatever style and kind.

And on that note, I am diving back into the book. I am getting another cup of coffee and putting some bread in the toaster for later, and I may or may not do another Pride month entry later today. Anyway, you have the loveliest Sunday possible, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

Free, Gay, and Happy

Probably the first clue that I wasn’t like other guys was that I loved to dance. There’s nothing like that feeling of freedom when you’re out on the dance floor and the deejay is playing one of your favorite songs to dance to, and you’re in a crowd of gay men, all moving to the same music but in vastly different stages of reality diminishment, from total sobriety to tipsy to buzzed to wasted to fried on a drug of some sort (you always could tell the difference between the drunks, those fried on a stimulant, and those on Ecstasy), and many of them with their shirts off and passing around bottles of poppers. Dance floors in gay bars always have a musty smell to them when they’re crowded, as though the man-musk from dozens and dozens of sweaty men has somehow seeped into the walls, the floor, the speakers.

That interesting mix of sweat, musk, cologne, cigarette smoke, and poppers that lets you know you’re in a gay bar, and pheromones are everywhere.

And of course, there’s today’s title, which was a great dance hit back in the mid-90’s; 1995, I think, to be exact?

Click here to hear the song.

God, how I used to love to dance.

I had no idea how to actually dance, of course. All I had was years of watching American Bandstand, Soul Train, and various teams of cheerleaders and pom-pon girls. The first time I went out onto the dance floor was when I was a junior in high school. It was a victory dance after we won a football game, and someone asked me to dance. And oh look, Greg actually can find a backbeat and knew instinctively to move to it–and that your upper body could move differently than your lower body. It was fun, I loved it, and people actually thought I was good at it, which made it even more fun. My junior and senior years of high school saw the rise of disco, and my first few years of college were during the height of the disco era. The little clubs and bars in Kansas I was able to get into, where I could drink beer till I was drunk and the music played and I could dance, weren’t Studio 54 or anything like that, but I could dance, and I would spend the whole night out there on the dance floor, sweating through my shirt and my bangs plastered to my scalp with sweat. I missed dancing, when we moved to California and I was no longer old enough to go out to bars, and when I was, I did want to go out dancing, but the 80’s weren’t a great time for dance music (in straight bars, any way), and the few times I was able to get to a gay bar, the music was much better and the dancing was way more fun…

The dance floor was, for a long time, the only place in a gay bar where I felt comfortable. This remained true even after I came out and merged my two separate lives into a single whole. Coming out was really just the first step towards accepting myself and figuring out who I was. I’d spent most of my life thinking there was something wrong with me, and that manifested itself in incredibly unhealthy ways for me emotionally and mentally. I’d always believed that coming out would solve all of my problems, but it didn’t; instead it created new problems to replace the old. I felt unattractive, overweight and unlovable. Every experience I had with another man only added to that sense of discomfort, that self-loathing that was still there in my head. I used to go to gay bars with co-workers, who would disappear as soon as we got there, out prowling for a cute boy for the night’s comfort while I just stood somewhere in a corner. I had a crush on this really hot bartender at a gay bar in Ybor City, Tracks, which is where we always used to go. He was always so friendly and polite and I naïvely thought he might be interested…which was when I learned all gay bartenders are friendly and nice because they want to get tipped (and I never made that mistake again). The only time I ever felt comfortable or at ease was on the dance floor. I also convinced myself that I was unappealing, which was why no one ever approached me–or it was rare that someone did (I am too shy to ever approach anyone). I had an extremely unpleasant experience the summer I turned thirty-three, and that motivated me to reevaluate everything in my life and start over. I essentially burned myself to the ground and started over.

I still had the same shitty job, but if people thought I was out-of-shape and unattractive, well, I couldn’t change my face but I could change my body. I radically altered my life and started eating healthy and exercising. I even stuck to it. I lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time (which probably wasn’t healthy) and figuring (hilariously) that the possibilities of finding love and a relationship were already gone because I was thirty-three and still single (just goes to show what I know, right?), but everything changed. I also began to realize over the years that followed that I wasn’t ever approached back in the day because I wasn’t attractive but because I was giving off a bad vibe–how can you help but give off a bad vibe when you’re insecure and feel uncomfortable? It’s amazing what a difference a friendly, open smile makes. But it’s hard to look friendly and inviting when you don’t feel friendly or inviting or good about yourself. The on-going struggle with my self-esteem really started in earnest during this time of my life, and while those self-esteem issues have never truly been conquered, I started enjoying my life a lot more. I no longer felt like my life was something that just happened to me. I felt like I was making things happen for myself. And as my self-esteem continued to grow, I also found myself figuring out how to make the big dream–becoming a writer–come true.

And I also managed to find my true love in the process of finding myself.

I do miss dancing, but I don’t think I am capable of staying out late at night to dance. But I remember those days of dancing till dawn fondly, trying to flag down a cab in the cold gray morning light, drenched in sweat and shivering. It would probably take me a week to recover from dancing all night…and let’s face it, dancing all night was the best way for me to get cardio.

Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires

Wednesday Pay-the-Bills day, and I am awake and slurping coffee, which is truly hitting the spot this morning. I slept well last night, and I think I am actually getting used to getting up at this ungodly, abhorrent hour. When I sleep well, I have no problem getting up in the morning (although I always long to stay in bed longer) and I am pretty well conscious, for the most part. (The coffee will do it’s job indubitably before I have to leave the house for the office, which is lovely, as always.) Yesterday wasn’t too bad. I did run uptown to get the mail on the way home (there was exactly one letter; my copy of All the Sinners Bleed, the new S. A. Cosby, won’t arrive until tomorrow), and I wasn’t terribly tired when I got home. I unloaded the dishwasher and cleaned out the sink, revised another chapter, and just chilled out for the rest of the evening. I’ve got a couple of nonfiction reads going at the same time (Hi Honey I’m Homo by Matt Baume and The Way They Were:  How Epic Battles and Bruised Egos Brought a Classic Hollywood Love Story to the Screen by Robert Hofler–I do love books about the making of movies! And of course I am still reading The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough) so I finished the Hofler last night (cannot reiterate how much I love books about the making of classic films. The Way We Were, however flawed it may be, it probably my favorite Barbra Streisand movie–either that or What’s Up Doc.

I have a ZOOM meeting tonight as well, so I’ll probably come straight home from the office today after work. The excitement never stops, does it?

I was also thinking some more about my Pride writings, and whether or not I really want to talk about the homophobia I’ve experienced in my career. I do think these things need to be addressed–absolutely no one should have the false impression this kind of shit doesn’t still go on, isn’t still happening–but at the same time, it’s hard to write about those things without getting angry, or becoming THAT Gay Man (similar in some ways to the Angry Black Woman, I think; a trope that is easily dismissed by the dominant culture rather than examined in the ways it should be; if a Black woman is angry, why not find out why rather than being dismissive?) who people can easily stop listening to. Homophobia sucks, and being on the receiving end of it is no pleasure for anyone. It’s even less pleasant to experience and write about. But these things happen, and not shining a light on these unacceptable behaviors allows them to fester and grow. I like to believe sometimes (when feeling more charitable than usual) that people aren’t aware sometimes that what they are saying or writing is homophobic because that shit is baked so deeply into our society and culture; if you never examine yourself, you never learn and grow.

It amazes me how many people think they already “know enough” and don’t need to continue learning and growing. I always want to keep learning, keep modifying myself into the best version of myself that I can be (thank you, Ted Lasso), and growing into a more compassionate, empathetic person. It would be nice to talk about gay joy, you know?

For me, coming out was like a rebirth of sorts. I was absolutely miserable before I started living out loud as a gay man; I kind of led two different lives in which I had two different sets of friends that knew nothing about the others. But the real life was the closeted one, even though hanging out with other gays and going to gay bars was like a breath of fresh air after being stuck in a smoke-filled room for hours. I was keeping so much from either set of friends that I never really felt super-close to any of them; I loved them all dearly, but felt disconnected from them because they didn’t really know me. I was thirty when I started merging my two lives together, and believe me, coming out didn’t solve much for me, either. I felt freer, but I also had to start learning how to navigate being gay all of the time instead of having a few brief hours of freedom every week. I didn’t make many gay friends, and most of the gay people I knew were my co-workers…and the last thing I ever wanted to do was get physically and emotionally involved with a co-worker. There was still a lifetime of self-loathing and self-flagellation stuffed into my head as I started to reeducate and reevaluate myself and my life. The lovely thing about coming out at thirty meant I wiped the slate clean and had to start really figuring out who I actually was. It also makes sense that my writing never went anywhere while I was closeted; I wasn’t a complete person,. so how could I write and create compelling characters that are fully rounded when I was still under construction?

The weird thing is that thirty-one years later, I still feel like I’m figuring out who I am and what I want from my life…as the sands in the hourglass continue to run out. But while there have certainly been difficult times since I waltzed out of the closet, I’ve also been happier and more content and at peace than I ever was before. It might be age and experience, I don’t know, but I believe that I could have never reached that point while living in the closet. Had I continued to deny my true self, how miserable would my life have turned out? It was already going down a dark path already; the 1980’s and HIV/AIDS still cast a long shadow over my life.

But I’ve also known joy in the second half of my life; joy I never experienced or felt in the first half of it. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything…I’ve never regretted it, not once, not even when all the forces of the religious right and their useful idiots in elected office have arrayed themselves against people like me.

On that note, I think I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

wolf in the breast

Tuesday morning in the Lost Apartment and I feel daunted. I know we have a busy schedule at the office today and I am mentally preparing myself for all those interactions. I love my job (I don’t love getting up at six, never will), and I love that I am helping people (not quite the urgency of the olden days, but still–new HIV infections need treatment and care else it can still prove fatal), but lots of clients have a tendency to wear me out some and thus I am exhausted when I come home at the end of the day. I have to run errands after work today–mail, mostly–and hopefully won’t be so drained by the time I get home that I’ll be able to carve out some revising time. I managed to get through another chapter last night, and I do believe the book is starting to take its final, publishable form, and I should be able to get it in on time.

Last night after writing Paul and I started watching a new bilingual show on Apple Plus called Now and Then. It’s set in Miami, so some of the characters speak Spanish, some speak English, and some speak both. Twenty years ago after a college graduation, six friends partied on a beach; one of them died, and as they were rushing him to the hospital (driving under the influence) there was an accident. The other driver was killed, and to protect themselves they moved the by-now dead friend into the driver’s seat and fled the scene. Twenty years later (there’s a dual time line, which can be a bit confusing at first) the now adult kids are being blackmailed, and of course the same cops are investigating the new murder of one of them…it’s interesting, if a bit confusing, and it took me a while to get used to the characters (as well as figuring out who they all were in each timeline) but it was intriguing and we will most likely continue watching. I am really looking forward to their new Tom Holland show, The Crowded Room, which also looks interesting. Apple is doing interesting things with their television service.

I have some other Pride entries that I’ve started and haven’t quite finished yet. I am hesitant to post them because–well, I don’t really know why. Writing about homophobic treatment within the publishing community, and my experiences with it, shouldn’t make me feel reticent and squirmy. It gets tiring calling this shit out, then having to defend yourself against straight people who question whether or not this stuff happened. It’s a form of gaslighting the mainstream has perfected when it comes to the non-majority; is it homophobia, or is he just an asshole? Why should i feel uncomfortable talking about how I’ve been treated by certain members of the community, when I didn’t do anything wrong? It’s why women who are sexually harassed and/or assaulted at conventions don’t say anything–because for some reason people always want to protect an institution instead of the individual. You become the problem, instead of the person who actually did something wrong in the first place. The casual homophobia at events at Bouchercon etc. always leave you wondering, should I have laughed that off? Should I have said something? There are some straight male writers who’ve made it abundantly clear to me they want nothing to do with me–and can’t even be bothered to be professionally polite. There’s one in particular who’s been especially rude to me at several events. He’s friends with friends of mine, so he will inevitably drift over and join us–pointedly ignoring me. He actually refused to be introduced to me at Sleuthfest one year.

And of course, when I mention this to my straight writer friends, they are very quick to “oh, you must have misunderstood he’s such a great guy” and I always have to bite my tongue to not say, “Great to straight people, sure.” I was a little taken aback when he refused to be introduced to me at Sleuthfest, but I have started being amused by the fact that my existence clearly shakes him to the very core of his being, to the point that now he turns his back to me if we’re in the same area. How can I not be amused by that level of childishness I’ve not experienced since grammar school and the playground? Sure, dude, you’re really punishing me by not meeting me and engaging with me. It keeps me up at night (sarcasm). Sorry about your penis being so small, homophobe.

And of course, there are the lovely ones who think making a joke about diversity concerns along the lines of “I let a guy suck my dick once for drugs, does that count?” Ha ha ha ha, such wit, I can see why you became a writer with that kind of sharp thinking and clever turns of phrase coming so naturally to you that it just rolls off your tongue.

I also wish I had a dollar for every time a straight person has explained to me how someone else saying something horribly homophobic is actually okay because he/she is “nice” and I must have misunderstood. Um, after sixty-one years of dealing with it, I’m pretty fucking sure I know homophobia when I see and hear it, but please, O Wise and Wonderful Straight Person, please explain what is and isn’t homophobic to the gay man from your vast wealth of experience of dealing with it every day, I would never tell a woman something isn’t sexist, nor a person of color what is and isn’t racism.

Sigh. And on that note, back to the spice mines with me.

I Want to Break Free

The don’t say gay laws a rash of frightened sheep in red state legislatures have been passing, or trying to pass, lately are absurd on their face. “We don’t want our children learning about queer people! They’re too young to learn that!” This argument, of course, begs the question, how old is old enough to learn about alternate sexualities?

I say it’s when kids are old enough to start using slurs in a bullying way on their schoolmates.

For the record, I was only eight years old the first time I was called a gay slur, and I didn’t understand anything about it, let alone the word itself meant.

Why, my eight-year-old mind wondered, is he calling me a ferry? That doesn’t make any sense.

But what the older brother of the girl who lived down the street actually meant was ‘fairy,’ and now it amuses me to remember how naïve I was at age eight, how I had no idea what this older boy, who seemed so enormous and grown-up to my younger self (he was in high school) meant. Somehow, I knew he was insulting me, but eight-year-old me didn’t know what he meant.

But I did know, was very aware, that whatever he meant, it was a bad thing.

I already knew I wasn’t like the other kids on the block or in my grade at school. I was a boy who liked to read, who preferred to go off in my own mind on flights of imagination where I was writing stories and creating fictions, inventing characters and how they related to each other. I much preferred that to playing catch or catching bugs or any of the other, more traditionally masculine things little boys were supposed to be doing in their spare time. I liked to sit on our back porch in the shade of the big tree and read my library books or my recent Scholastic Book Club paperback treasures.

I was in the seventh grade when I first heard the word fag hissed at me contemptuously in the hallways of my junior high school, and even then, I still wasn’t sure what it meant, I could tell by the tone used that it wasn’t meant as a compliment, especially when followed by cruel laughter. That was the first time, but it was by no means the last—even now, in these more enlightened times, I doubt that I will go the rest of my life without someone saying it to me another time, because there’s always another time.

I don’t remember when I finally learned what they meant when they called me fairy or fag or faggot, but I do remember this: it was true, and it was something unusual, not normal, something I should be ashamed about. I did my best to change my camouflage, like a good chameleon, to hide it so no one else would know my shameful secret, what I had to disguise from the world: that I was, in fact, a homosexual. A fag. A fairy. A Mary. Faggot. Queen. Homo. Nelly. Pansy. Sissy.

I was ashamed of who I was, because I was taught by the world around me that my sexuality was suspect, wrong, bad.

So, when I see the words politically correct (or more commonly now, woke) used in a sneering way, as a methodology of trying to shut down honest conversation and derail discussion about the realities of what non-white, non-straight, non-cisgender, and non-male Americans experience every day, I get angry. Because none of those people, for one example, who sneered “well, this is just political correctness out of control” about the American Library Association’s decision to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award several years ago due to concerns about problematic racial overtones in her work were ever called a fairy when they were eight years old, or had the word fag hissed at them in the halls of their junior high school; were ever called any slur used for non-white people, or non-western European lineage, or been told to go back where they came from, or been called the n-word (which I can’t even bring myself to type out, even for a column about slurs).

Frankly, people who argue against “political correctness” are people I assume want to be able to use slurs with impunity–they aren’t arguing about freedom of speech as an abstract legal principle, but because they want to use slurs and not suffer consequences.

Merriam-Webster.com defines “politically correct” as the following: conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated. Wikipedia goes still further: The term political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated to PC or P.C.) is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. Since the late 1980s, the term has come to refer to avoiding language or behavior that can be seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting groups of people considered disadvantaged or discriminated against, especially groups defined by sex or race. In public discourse and the media, it is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.

So, the next time you want to sneer something about “political correctness being out of control”, here’s what I want you to stop and think about before you say it: an eight year old boy being called a fairy by a high school kid, or a ten year old tomboy being called a dyke, or a seven year old kid told to go back where he came from, or a nine-year-old Native American reading a book where Native Americans are dismissed as “not people, just Indians”—and ask yourself, would I want something like that said about or to me?

I feel pretty confident that the vast majority would say no.

Words have power, and no one should know that better than a writer.

I’m Coming Out

So, one of the things I’ve decided to do for Pride Month is spend the entire month talking on her about, well, being a gay American and how that impacted (and continues to impact) my life every day. I have written numerous essays over the years, many of them with a very limited audience, and I’ve always had an eye to collecting them into a book, or using them to build a memoir of sorts around. But…this one I am sharing with you all this morning was very well received. I was asked to write a letter to my sixteen-year-old self, agreed to do it, and then completely forgot about it. I received a reminder email about it, which I read when checking my phone at the train station in Florence where we were waiting for the train to Venice. Horrified, I sat down in the first class car (we splurged), opened my laptop, and started writing. I reread it several times, made some edits, and then, as we were pulling into the station in Venice, I emailed it in. It went live overnight while we were in Venice, and when I checked in on-line the following day (taking the train back to Florence) I was shocked to see it had gone a bit viral (for me), being shared a lot and getting lots of likes and comments. Anyway, here it is, my letter to a sixteen year old me while on a train in Italy. (Rereading this made me laugh–as I pretended I had written it before the trip, so they wouldn’t know I waited to the last minute. For the record, I always wait till the last minute, and I also didn’t want them to know I’d forgotten about it.)

Dear Greg as a 16 year old:

I am writing to you on your birthday; our birthday, I would suppose. We have just turned 53 (I am going to henceforth refer to our disparate selves in the singular; Teen Greg as you; current self in the first person—the royal-sounding “we” sounds a bit on the pompous side). In two days, I am leaving for Italy. Italy! As a teenager, you are perhaps lying on your bed, either reading a book (if I recall correctly, that summer before your senior year you worked your way through James Michener; Centennial being the last one you read before school started) or daydreaming of being a writer, of being an adult, of getting out of Kansas, of being a success and traveling the world.

I know there are times when you wonder if you will ever leave Kansas, if your dream of being a writer will come true. I know there are times when you despaired of this; but please rest assured that on your 53rd birthday you will have published over thirty novels and fifty short stories. You will be president of the local chapter of Mystery Writers of America as well as serving a term on the national board and chairing several committees. You will have edited almost twenty anthologies, and been nominated for awards more times than you can remember—and will have even won some.

I know you think you are different from everyone else you know at your school, and in some ways you are. Your classmates will fall in love and marry, have children and watch those children grow up and marry and have children of their own. But that difference you are so ashamed of, the one you carefully hide from everyone you know and deny when confronted, is nothing you need feel shame for. I know there are nights when you lie in your bed and wonder if you will ever feel love, will ever be worthy of being loved, or whether your difference will force you to live your life, and walk your path, alone. I know that in 1977 it seems impossible not to be ashamed of who you are, and weight of that secret weighs heavily on your heart. But I can assure you that not only will the day come when you can hold your head high and shout at the top of the lungs I am a gay man, but likewise, you will find a love so pure and beautiful and remarkable that some nights before you go to sleep you will think about how lucky and blessed you are in wonder. There will be times when you are reading a book and you will look up at the man you love as he sits on the couch playing with your cat and you will be so suddenly overwhelmed with love that your eyes will fill with tears.

And several months before you turn 53, you and the man you love will decide to jointly celebrate your birthdays as well as the landmark of your nineteenth anniversary together with an eight day trip to Italy, visiting Pisa, Venice, Florence and Tuscany.

Just as you once dreamed.

As for never getting out of Kansas, you will find your true home on the day you turn 33. You will get out of a cab and step onto the cracked and tilted sidewalks of New Orleans and become overwhelmed with a sense of belonging and home. And two short years later, two weeks before you turn 35, you will move to New Orleans where you will hopefully live out the rest of a life that proved richer and more amazing than you could have ever hoped.

Yet as I write this, I realize that knowing these things lie in your future will affect the decisions and choices you make. Part of who I am now is because of the sorrows and sadness and bad choices you will make in your future. Even one different choice, one different path, will change your timeline and it is possible, even very likely, that I would not be sitting at my desk after packing for this trip to Italy writing this letter to you. I would not change my current reality for anything. I live in the city I love with the man I love doing the work I love living a life I love.

So I am glad I cannot actually let the 16 year old me know what the 53 year old me knows. I prefer to believe that writing this letter will send the positive energy back through time to give you the strength to always persevere, always survive, and always keep moving forward.

And maybe that is where my strength came from; maybe that is how I  managed to find the way to hold my head high and keep chasing my dreams.

As lovely as it would be to tell you this, that every one of your dreams will not only come true but better than you dreamed them, I am glad that I cannot.

With all my love,

Greg at 53

Almost ten years ago. Wow, that was a long time ago.

Pride (In The Name of Love)

I had a revelation last night.

I’d been feeling sour lately; the constant hate attacks leveled at me and my community relentlessly; the bigotry and hatred against us so naked in its hostile resentment. I was also feeling sour about Pride and its co-opting by corporations eager for queer dollars but who cower before the bigots (here’s looking at you, Target and Anheuser-Busch), and I actually started writing an A Charlie Brown Christmas-type diatribe about how the meaning of Pride has changed and been demeaned and devalued and lost over the last few decades. I may still write it, I don’t know. But last night it occurred to me the best thing I could do to fight the bigots this month is to celebrate my joy in who I am, in my community, and in my country. Because yes, it’s my country, too–and don’t you ever fucking forget it.

I wasn’t meant to have the traditional American male life trajectory. There was never going to be a wife or children, even if I had been born straight. I realized very early on in life that I would be a terrible parent–I don’t pay enough attention to be a good one–and so I ruled that possibility out. I also always wanted to be a writer, and I honestly think being one is the only thing that could have possibly made me happy in this life, gay or straight; but it was such an overwhelming piece of who I am that I could have never committed to a white collar salaried job for a corporation. For me, the day job just needed to be enough to cover life’s necessities; it was never going to get my entire attention and dedication and energy. But not being straight, and not seeing any kind of representation of people who were like me in any medium–television, film, books, comic books–and seeing only the dominant societal paradigm modeled repeatedly, and knowing I didn’t fit comfortably into that paradigm, made me believe there was something wrong with me, something dark and horrible and shameful that couldn’t ever be public knowledge. Couldn’t ever be admitted. The overwhelming shame at being something different, something unusual, was engrained deep into my soul. I was miserable for many reasons for a very long time, but the primary was denying who I was: a gay male writer. Recognizing, and accepting, that truth has gone a long way towards helping me heal, become a better person, a better adult, and has certainly brought me a great deal of joy.

I love my writing career. I do. I’m very proud of it, every last bit and piece of it, whether it was crime or horror or suspense or sports journalism or erotica or romance or whatever it may have been that I created, that I wrote, that I put a piece of myself into. I’ve had some absolutely amazing highs in my career, and I also know that I don’t actually give myself enough credit (any credit, usually) for what I have done and accomplished. I’ve been nominated for a shit ton of awards. I complain about it a lot–there are many days when I don’t want to do it, times when I have to force myself to do it, and yet…I am never happier than I am when I am writing, creating, getting my daily word count, and rereading the book when going over the page proofs..which is when I usually realize (for the first time since starting to write the damned thing) that hey, I’m not so bad at this as I always think I am and then of course, there’s the day the box of books arrives.

I also got to interview the marvelous Margot Douaihy for Saints and Sinners’ Pride Month celebration, which you can find right here: https://youtu.be/RQ2e22mRFqw. I think it went pretty well, and is yet one another example of how wonderful and lucky my life is and how I should always be grateful. My last three novels accounted for some of the best reviews of my career, and accounted for seven (!) award nominations for me over the last couple of years–mainstream awards, at that. (I supposed it’s really only six; one of the nominations is for an anthology I edited, and I don’t really count that as one of my books; editing an anthology is an entirely different animal than writing a book. It’s still work, it’s still a lot to get through, and I am proud of my anthologies just as I am of the novels…but I don’t think of those as being wholly mine; the anthologies also primarily belong to the contributors, really.

This last year or so has actually been, despite all the personal drama and trauma, has actually been lovely for me on many levels. Over the past year, I’ve reconnected with the queer crime publishing community. I walked away from it over a decade ago; tired of people pretending to be my friend while driving the knife in and twisting it, tired of always being made to feel like my work wasn’t worthy or meant to be taken seriously, and so on. As I moved into and toward the more mainstream mystery community and trying to carve out a space for myself in that world, there were setbacks and pitfalls…and homophobia. As tiring as it is to have to deal with that kind of shit every day, I also recognized that the only way queer crime writers were going to get their due in the mainstream is if some of us went out there and made room at the table for us. That was why I joined various mainstream mystery organization’s boards of directors, not only to do work that would benefit the entire crime writing community but also to make space for queers, too–if by doing nothing more than showing up and being noticed. Presence makes an enormous difference, and sometimes…it helps to have a queer face and voice there to pipe up every once in a while. Over the last two years, thanks to making some terrific new friends who are also queer crime writers, and amazingly gifted and talented at what they do (John Copenhaver, Marco Carocari, Kelly J. Ford, Robyn Gigl, and so many more), and they are looking to form a queer crime writing community to organize and help the organizations and conferences be more inclusive and welcoming. It was lovely spending time with other queer crime writers at Bouchercon in Minneapolis. John and Marco also went out of their way to include me in things at Left Coast Crime and Sleuthfest last year, which was also marvelously kind.

So, yes, I am proud. I am proud to be a gay American, and I am proud to be a queer crime writer. I’m sorry that my existence bothers you, but my life is also none of your fucking business. It’s hilarious to me that the people who obsess about sex lives and genitals are the “christians”–you know, I spend absolutely zero time every day obsessing about the sex lives and genitals of other people…because it’s none of my fucking business.

And I am going to continue to be proud here, every fucking day of this motherfucking month. Fuck you, homophobes and haters.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll talk to you again later.

You Must Love Me

Many years ago, at a Bouchercon in the far distant past, I was lucky enough to be assigned to a panel with several strangers. It was Raleigh, and I don’t remember what the panel was about–other than none of us on the panel actually wrote what the topic was about–but it ably helmed by Katrina Niidas Holm. That was the weekend where I was lucky enough to meet both her and her husband, Chris. Also on the panel were Liz Milliron, Lou Berney, and Lori Roy. I always intend to read my co-panelist’s work before panels, so I can talk to them intelligently about their books–but it’s not near as pressing as it is when I moderate, and this was one of those years where I was busy and simply didn’t have the time. The panel was marvelous. I had the best time, and I loved everyone on the panel. I have since gone on to read their work and have become a besotted fan of all three of them, really.

My first Lori Roy novel was Bent Road, which won her (deservedly) the Edgar for Best First Novel. I absolutely loved it, and made sure I got the next two as well. (At the Edgars following the Raleigh Bouchercon, both Lou and Lori won Edgars; her second, also making her one of the few authors to win Edgars for Best First and Best Novel.) I’ve read everything she’s published since then, but have never gotten to the second novel (an Edgar Best Novel finalist) or Let Me Die in His Footsteps, her second nomination for Best Novel and her second Edgar win. I don’t remember why I decided to finally read Let Me Die in His Footsteps, but I am very glad I did.

It’s really quite marvelous.

Annie Holleran hears him before she sees him. Even over the drone of the cicadas, she knows it’s Ryce Fulkerson, and he’s pedaling this way. That’s his bike, all right, creaking and whining. He’ll have turned off the main road and will be standing straight up as he uses all his weight, bobbing side to side, to pump those pedals and force that bike up and over the hill. In a few moments, he’ll reach the top where the ground levels out, and that front tire of his will be wobbling and groaning and drawing a crooked line in the soft, dry dirt.

They‘re singing in the trees again today, those cicadas. A week ago, they clawed their way out of the ground, seventeen years’ worth of them, and now their skins hang from the oaks, hardened husks with tiny claws and tiny, round heads. One critter calls out to another and then another until their pulsing songs made Annie press both hands over her ears, tuck her head between her knees, and cry out for them to stop. Stop it now. All these many days, there’s been something in the air, a spark, a crackle, something that’s felt a terrible lot like trouble coming, and it’s much like the weight of those cicadas, thousands upon thousands of them crying out to one another.

Annie has known all morning Ryce would be coming. It’s why she’s been sitting on this step and waiting on him for near an hour. She oftentimes knows a thing is coming before it has come. It’s part of the curse–or blessing, if Grandma is to be believed–of having the know-how.

Let Me Die in His Footsteps is set in rural Kentucky, with a dual timeline–the present in the book is 1952; the past is 1936. Both timelines feature two sisters, one normal and the other with the “know-how.” In the present, Annie is the sister with the know-how while her sister Caroline is normal and pretty and sweet and pretty much beloved. The 1936 section focuses on Caroline’s mother, Sarah, and her sister with the know-how, Juna. It is soon made clear in the present day that something terrible happened back in 1936, something whose repercussions are still being felt to this present day of 1952. Annie isn’t Caroline’s sister, but rather her cousin; Sarah is Caroline’s mother while Juna was Annie’s. Juna also had a bad reputation around the county, having played a pivotal role in the 1936 tragedy. The book opens with Annie reaching her ascension; the halfway mark between sixteen and seventeen, when she is supposed to look down into a well at midnight, where she will see the face of the man she is going to marry. Annie sneaks out of the house late at night to go next door and peer down into the Baine family well; there’s trouble and tension between the two neighboring families…dating back to 1936. All the Baine sons are long gone; the only one left is old Mrs. Baine, who sits out on her porch with a shotgun in case of her worthless sons try to come home. Caroline follows Annie and sees someone in the well; Annie sees no one. But after the look into the well, they discovered Mrs. Baine’s dead body in the yard…and all the secrets and lies from 1936 start to not only unravel but impact 1952.

We’re never really sure what the “know-how” is, or if it’s just an old wives’ tale, a superstition. The rural south in both 1936 and 1952 were dramatically different than modern times; the rural areas weren’t as exposed to television or films or the newspapers, really and the old ways still held sway. I can remember being told about someone with the sight that everyone was supposed to stay away from in rural Alabama when I was a kid; those kinds of superstitions and beliefs still exist in some of these more backward rural areas. But one thing I truly appreciate about Roy–who often writes about poor rural Southern people–is that her writing isn’t what I call “poverty porn”; her characters are very real and this just happens to be their situation. The Hollerans have a lavender farm, having eschewed tobacco in the recent past after Grandpa Holleran died from lung cancer. Lavender infuses the novel almost from the very first page. I love the smell of lavender, although I would imagine fields and drying houses filled with it might be a lot. The story plays out in a slow burn, terrific build to the end, and all kinds of secrets from the past must be dealt with in order for the present-day characters to get on with their lives.

Roy is such a good writer that it almost takes my breath away. She uses a distant third person point of view, one in which we don’t really get inside her character’s heads that much, so the reader has a kind of distant remove from the characters, but it really works. Her work reminds me of Faulkner without the racism, and of other great Southern writers. Her novels are very smart, with a lot of depth and emotional honesty that resonates with the reader, compelling us to keep reading.

Highly recommended; Let Me Die in His Footsteps clearly deserved to win the Edgar for Best Novel.

Hopefully there will be a new Lori Roy soon, because all I have left of her canon is her second novel, Until She Comes Home, which was also an Edgar finalist.