Category Archives: publication news

“Crotchwatchers” finds a home

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I’m thrilled to announce that my short story “Crotchwatchers” has found a home at Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol. 3 Issue 11-12.

The issue went live today, and is available for download (free) here.

A word to the wary (or voyeuristic) – “Crotchwatchers” is not erotica.  It’s hardly graphic at all.  The title comes from one of the characters’ observations:

“The world is divided into two kinds of people:  people who check out a guy’s crotch when he walks by, and people who don’t.”

That gem of wisdom (paraphrased from an ex-boyfriend) was calling out to me to be parlayed into a story.  It turned into a coming-of-age piece that was influenced by my work with urban gay teens in the 1990’s, and my personal experience.

The setting — New York City’s Christopher Street Piers — was once an unlikely refuge for gay and transgender teenagers, some of them homeless, some of them looking for a place where they could be themselves, hang out with friends and people watch.  Gentrification had yet to come to the spare, concrete platforms jutting out into the Hudson River.

In the early 90’s, I was not much more than a teen myself, and my boyfriend and I would walk out to the end, holding hands, and watch the sun set, while the area filled up with a diverse crowd of ‘bangie boys,’ ‘butch queens,’ boys in drag, and ‘baby dykes.’

Around that time, I started working at an LGBT youth center.  A lot of the kids spent time on the Piers, particularly the lower income Black and Hispanic boys.  There were perils to the Piers.  Some kids got involved in street prostitution, and many complained about being harassed by the police.  Gradually, kids were displaced from the area due to Greenwich Village residents complaining about crime and vagrancy.  The riverfront area went through renovation to become a tidier urban park.

In part, “Crotchwatchers” is a tribute to a vibrant street phenomenon that sadly has no equal nowadays in New York City.  Groups of queer kids still hang out on Christopher Street, outside the bars and shops where they are either too young to enter or don’t have the money to spend anyway.  The neighborhood very well may be safer, but it’s lost some of its soul.

Short Story MIKE’S POND is Live

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Cool news this week:  my short story MIKE’S POND is live on Wilde Oats Issue 9.

You can check it out here.

Odd story about how MIKE’S POND came to be.

It started as an experimental piece while I was participating in a writers critique group back in 2009.  We decided to all try writing horror stories for a change of pace, and it got me thinking about the stories that scared me as a child.

I have an older brother so the source material was considerable.  He used to tell me all kinds of frightening things about the world, bizarre suburban legends, in addition to disturbing “truths” of anatomy.  Did you know that, instead of blood, your butt is full of green juice?

We grew up in a suburb north of Buffalo, New York, where there were many plots of undeveloped, wooded land, tempting exploration grounds for pre-teen boys, especially in the summer when we were largely unattended by our working parents.  There was an overgrown place called ‘Shotgun,’ where supposedly a boy got killed by the father of a girl he got pregnant.  Then there was Mike’s Pond.

Without giving too much of the story away, since I’d really love people to read it, Mike’s Pond evoked the most imaginative tales from my youth.  It was an acre or two of swampy land between the buzzing thruway and our handsome suburban enclave, and it was cordoned off by a fence.

All the legends about the place are true.  Well, at least I heard them at some point.  The characters are fictionalized, and the narrator is more of an amalgamation of me at different points during my teenage years than me as a twelve-year old boy.  The story turned out to be more coming-of-age than horror.  I guess I can’t help myself.

Media Advisory and Fave Video of the Week

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Two articles of mine go live in the span of two days.

First, an opinion piece “Diversifying books for teens,” inspired by #YesGayYa, will be up on La Bloga Sunday, October 9th.

Then, I have a review of DC Comics’ relaunched Aquaman #1 coming out Monday, October 10th as part of the Comics Project.  It’s hosted by writer Kelly Thompson, of the comics/graphic novel blog 1979semifinalist and 3 Chicks Review Comics.

Meanwhile, I’m querying, tarrying and not yet despairing.

Here’s my favorite video of the week.  #OccupyWallSt.  Social justice and collective action!

Embedly Powered

via YouTube

Short Story Publication News, and Other Stuff

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Gotta say, I’ve had a patch of good stuff happening lately.  From my videotaped reading coming out earlier this week to getting an acceptance from Wilde Oats for my short story Mike’s Pond, I’m feeling pretty proud of meself, and lucky.

Wilde Oats Issue Nine will include my short, fictionalized memoir Mike’s Pond about growing up in suburban Western New York.  The issue comes out in December, and I’ll be sure to do a major blast on the release.

I also have a guest blog up today about working with LGBT teens in the suburbs.  It was a great opportunity offered to me by author/blogger Brandon Shire.  Brandon recently published The Value of Rain, a novel about a gay teen who gets sent to an institution to turn him straight.  He’s donating half of his book sales to LGBT youth agencies, and he was kind enough to do a plug for Pride for Youth, where I work.

I’m still following Yes Gay Ya, and working on an article about diversifying young adult literature.  Since Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith put out their testimonial on censorship, Colleen Lindsay leant her platform The Swivet to Joanna Stampfel-Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary Agency to tell a different side of the story.

Stampfel-Volpe writes that the authors leaked the name of the agent they accuse (from Nancy Coffey); the agent never offered representation on the condition of cutting out a gay character or making him straight; and the Genreville article is a mean-spirited publicity stunt.

Only a fly on the wall knows the truth.

But out of the kerfuffle, there’s an opportunity to look critically at the status of LGBT YA, and how we can get more and better representation of LGBTs in literature.  That’s what I’m writing about.  Deep stuff.