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Rock and Roll Heresy

Rock music is heresy. It has a unique ability to slide ideas into one’s soul through the ears. Coming to you over FM or over the internet, rock is a worship service for the god Dionysos; the guitar is one aspect of the thyrsos, his phallic wand that gives milk and honey and sustains his worshippers in the wilderness. Unconstrained by mortal notions of proper behavior, the god changes genders onstage and in our heads. Ecstatic music is a gift from the spirit of drunken frenzy to humanity—a compensation for the inescapable fact that we will all die some day.

Rock music changes the world. When Pat Benatar’s song “Hell is for Children” hit the airwaves in 1980, thousands of suburban kids looked up and realized they were not the only ones ordered to lie to grandma and say they fell off the swing. And they learned that what was happening to them was not OK and never would be.

If you grew up thinking that “gay” was nothing but a terrible word to call other children, rock educated you otherwise.

I was ten when “Renegade” by Styx charted. I remember hearing that song and feeling…something when JY’s guitar wailed and crunched on the bridge and Tommy Shaw screamed at the top of his lungs that he didn’t want to die on the gallows. I didn’t have a word for that feeling until later. But I saved my allowance and spent it at the record store in the mall.

The pre-Shaw Styx album Cornerstone had a song entitled “First Time For Love,” which was the slow-dance song in middle school. I remember reading the tiny lyrics in the fold-out album cover. And there, right below that song—in the tiniest font ever—were the words, “For Paul.”

I kept reading, over and over, the words that meant that someone loved a man named Paul, and that—most importantly—everyone else in the band was OK with this.

If you’re paying attention to the lyrics of Cyndi Lauper’s song “She Bop,” you know what it’s about. But it takes a certain level of 1980’s cultural literacy to place Blue Boy Magazine. Ms. Lauper was, apparently, not reading a soft core gay rag for the articles.

And then there was “The Belle of St. Marks,” which Prince wrote for his good friend, the percussionist Sheila E. Prince never said what the song is about. We’re left to guess why Belle uses masculine pronouns. Why is he wearing his dad’s clothes? Doesn’t he have his own? Unless all of his clothes are dresses. No wonder he cries. Despite—or because of—his tears, the Belle is a hot man, and Sheila will die if she can’t have him. Doesn’t she sound like she’s singing with her hands down her pants at the end? Well done, madam.

Joan Jett covered a male vocalist to sing us a honey-dripping song, “Crimson and Clover,” about her love for a woman. And, by the way, she’s not ashamed to say that love is pain.

Fast-forward to 1998. Brian Molko of Placebo jumped off a London building in the video for “Pure Morning” and did not fall. The song has music-of-the-spheres guitar riffs and lyrics that would make Molko nauseous later; he’d have re-written them if he knew that the song would be Placebo’s highest-charting hit. “Pure Morning” might not have got quite so much attention if someone hadn’t decided to slap a self-harm warning on the video. Controversy ensued. Once more, thousands of isolated suburban kids took notice, this time of the androgynous rock star with the bare shoulders. Some of them went out, bought black nail polish and painted their toenails as the first tiny step towards figuring out who they were.

For a while, music was out of the closet. Now it’s feeling less and less safe to celebrate queerness with the joy that love and pleasure deserve. But pay close attention to those lyrics. Dionysos will be looking out from between the lines, laughing and changing genders without warning.

See you on the other side.

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Free Story: The Double-Edged Bomb

An older story of mine, The Double-Edged Bomb, is now available on TheoReads for free. Theoreads is a new online platform for sexy stories that has had a soft launch and is still building. Check it out!

In a grim, dystopian future that could be right around the corner, a gay man teaches his superhero lover what it means to be human.

The Double-Edged Bomb

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Wishbone Opening on TheoReads

What it says in the title: the opening of Wishbone is available for free on TheoReads, if you’ve been wondering if the book would interest you. More soon!

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Patreon Discount Code

Are you interested in reading the sequel to Wishbone, Names of My Beloved? The book is being serialized on my Patreon. You can now use the discount code DD75A for 60% off your first month. This discount is good through December 20, 2024.

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How old is Wishbone?

Answer: He’s eighteen at the start of his eponymous novel.

Why? Because characters in erotica are supposed to be eighteen and up. Except in Nebraska and, I think Alabama, where they must be nineteen. Presumably fictional characters are completely asexual until they get close to eighteen, at which point they, I dunno, sprout genitals?

But the main character of Kushel’s Dart is old enough to be initiated into sacred prostitution the moment she turns sixteen. Why? Because Kushiel’s Dart is not shelved with the erotica. It’s fantasy. No, this doesn’t make a bit of sense. Certainly there exists erotica with younger protagonists. And sometimes there is trouble over it. There was a huge kerfuffle many years ago on LiveJournal over erotic Harry Potter fan fiction. Yes, someone went and deleted a bunch of blogs about fictional characters to protect real children.

Furthermore, fiction with gay characters will be scrutinized in ways that fiction with purely straight characters is not. If you don’t believe me, you’ve never struggled with Amazon “dungeoning” your books, even books that are not erotica, because they have queer characters. The bots that look for questionable content automatically categorize the love that dare not speak its name as, well, unspeakable.

Most authors know about this, but readers do not. Thus if you read the reviews of Wishbone, you may see people assuming that Wishbone is thirteen and being disturbed by this. I don’t blame them.

So why didn’t I come out and say that Wishbone is eighteen?

Because it feels really awkward to write, “Once there was a character who was eighteen.”

In real-world fiction it’s easy to handle this. A character is either old enough to drink legally (twenty-one in the US), or isn’t and has a fake ID. Or there are other cultural markers, like whether the character has attended or finished college.

In a secondary pre-industrial world, someone’s exact age isn’t important. They’re either functionally an adult–working for a living and capable of reproducing–or they’re not. They’re going to be married off as soon as there is a possibility of them having children. By the way, did you know that puberty for women is controlled in part by body fat? In a world without fast food, accumulating enough body fat to support ovulation is a huge struggle and takes longer. A woman is unlikely to get pregnant before she’s sixteen or so.

Wishbone was functionally an adult at thirteen or fourteen. He looks young for his age due to hard living and lack of regular meals, and is working in a profession where looking younger is a marketing feature. On top of this, he has lost track of his age because the number is not relevant, and because calendars are things that only rich people with secretaries use.

You can see me attempting to address this in Names of My Beloved. How’d I do?

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What’s your writing process?

I don’t travel well (except inside my own head). All of my writing is done sitting at my desk in front of a 2020 vintage iMac with a 27″ screen. The large screen allows me to use large fonts so I can still write even with the blurred vision and negative scotomata that are facts of life for me.

I type using a Kinesis Freestyle 2 Mac split keyboard and sit on an extremely decayed Aeron chair.

For writing software I use Scrivener, which is excellent for my pantser-style writing process. I don’t write character sketches. I keep files of quotes that I imagine characters saying and build the scenes where these quotes would be said.

I also use LibreOffice, especially for final formatting. In a few cases I’ve used Sigil, a free ebook editing application, to tweak an existing ebook.

As I said, I’m a pantser, not a planner. I was the kind of schoolkid who wrote the essay first and then wrote the outline because the assignment demanded it, not because it was going to help me write. Writing for me is largely a subconscious process where I have to fold away my thinking brain and connect my messy back-brain to my fingers and let the ideas flow out.

I have a cat who tries to help me write but isn’t all that good at it. She is very furry, though.