Unpublished Book Synopsis

After shooting a man while on a bender of drugs he was supposed to sell Conrad flees the city for a refuge where no one will find him, the home of Simon Winters, an old cellmate from his years in juvenile detention. Conrad’s avarice inadvertently causes Simon to confront his past and his life in a small town where memories run deep. How will Simon survive Conrad’s path to darkness?

Domestic Abuse Representation in LGBTQ Writing

Since February 10, 2014 I have been writing a fictional portrayal of young, gay man trying to get out of an domestic abuse relationship because I feel like queer fiction, gay fiction, needs to add more subjects and content, more diversity, to its wheel house, to represent those who are not normally represented.

It's not a popular subject.  I can understand why people don't want to talk about it.  It's frustrating.  It's real and it can be disturbing for people who never experienced it because it is closer than the boogeyman or some monster in a horror movie.

Sometimes the closest I got to finding some kind of representation of the topic was in bdsm erotica, novels trying to deal with PTSD and trauma. While I appreciate these efforts I worry that the intention is muddled by the other content, not maliciously but incidentally.  For some those subjects are even closely related as they equate bdsm with domestic abuse.  I don't equate the two and in my personal life and fictional portrayals look to define the two as separate subjects.

My story line is post break up, post abuse, and I consider other characters besides the subject of the story line (Josh), like Spencer who let's him move into his apartment and develops a crush on the recovering character.  In one part natural attraction and another it is about 'coming to the rescue', a sort of paternalistic urge, especially given their difference in age.  And yet Spencer is terribly insecure with his own past and troubles. 

Can they overcome their fears?  Will they endure?  And can they depend on their friends for support?

insidethebeltwaygayfiction.blogspot.com

Inside the Beltway (serialized fiction)

Inside the Beltway- the friends and loves of a four men in Washington, D.C.

Chapters 1-12 (archives): http://www.swishedition.com/?p=9306

Most current chapter: http://www.swishedition.com/?p=9184

Per Pound of Flesh: Free Book Promotion

http://www.amazon.com/Pound-Flesh-Ends-Meat-ebook/dp/B00D2KON12/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1372403044&sr=1-1&keywords=per+pound+of+flesh

Inside the Beltway (Serialized Fiction)

As of July 29, 2013 or yesterday, I, Bryan James, have become a regular contributor of a serialized fiction story to the Swish Edition, a podcast and LGBTQ interest site for news, gossip, and entertainment.  

My series is called ‘Inside the Beltway’ and to me is my response, my answer, to the absence I feel without Queer as Folk (QaF) and the L Word.  I had different formations of this story in my head for many years, wanting something fun but also responsible.  I wanted a modern story like QaF and the L Word were for their time.  

There were little grasps at a gay story but nothing quite stepped up.  I loved the Outs but it was short lived and now the new story by Adam Goldman is something entirely different but I bet it will be genius.  There is the homoerotic Teen Wolf and True Blood but it isn’t enough.  Although personally for me I love the Teen Wolf fandom and I’m a Sterek shipper but I know it’s never going to happen.

Inside the Beltway is a serial story that is posted weekly.  It is my attempt at modern characters dealing with the current society.  My focus will be on four main characters, gay men: Bobby, Spencer, Darrell, and Triston.  These characters arose from my own personal experience.

My synopsis:

Four friends Darrell, Spencer, Bobby, and Triston are living in the D.C. are trying to make a living, make careers,and find boyfriends, hookups, and maybe a few casual sex encounters.

Darrell and Spencer know each other from college.  Darrell dropped out to join the Army where he became a linguist.  He was kicked out after it was discovered he was openly gay.  He struggles with his identity as a gay, black man.  

Spencer graduated from college and held several internships until he landed a job with a government consultant group.  He ascended quickly from mailroom to consultant but has reached a plateau in his career and needs a horizontal change.

Bobby, a second generation South Korean in the United States, comes from the Los Angeles/Hollywood area where he attended college while living with his parents.  It was during that time that he came to terms with his sexual identity and began to obsess about fitness and his body.  He traveled to D.C. for an adventure away from his family.  He works part-time as a personal trainer under the table and at department stores.

Triston is an underachiever who majored in Philosophy at college and barely passed his courses.  He is both skeptical and open minded.  He works at an adult store selling sex toys, movies, and other forms of entertainment.  He co-hosts a local munch for kinky people.

While I will attempt to keep things PG-13 I want to also explore the complexity of the character including sex life, kink, BDSM play, and other expressions that I feel people explore and/or want to know more about.  I want to do so accurately and with respect.  Some things I have experienced personally and others I have not but may find some curiosity in the representation.

For the past year I have been, ahem, researching gay life on the internet which is a new aspect of our lives not explored very much in QaF.  What does it mean to be outed on FB or have a sex tape?  What does it mean to have someone contact you after twenty years of not talking?  And how do we cope with losing our anonymity in an increasingly public society?

My exploration of these characters in a city I found to be complex in my brief time there is possible because of the support of The Swish Edition.  

Working with the Swish Edition  is very exciting for me.  I found their podcast by accident one night as I was searching for something new to listen to and before then I didn’t really listen to podcasts.  I started listening about a year and half ago and right away I thought the guys were hilarious, sometimes rude and crude but hilarious.  It was because of them that I got interested in the D.C. area and adventured down there on a job prospect.  I landed the job, though it didn’t last long, but it did give me time.

I used the money from the job to spend time writing Per Pound of Flesh, which I partially dedicated to the show, because they gave me some much needed gay hilarity.  It was because of them that I sought out more podcasts.  They told me about The Outs, Elephant, Nasty Pig, and lots of other gay interest subjects it would have taken me longer to find on my own or may have never found at all.

Our relationship started on a lark when I found a picture in the depths of Tumblr of a sex slave man who looked similar to one of the hosts.  I decided I had to send them the picture so that was when I created my email account and actually began my nom de plume identity.  

Until then it had been a struggle for me because I felt very bound to my accounts, to being the person others wanted me to be.  Bryan James for me is like Don Draper for Dick Whitman.  It is the man I want to be.  The man I am inside without history and context of people who say they knew me when.

I sent the picture, we had a good laugh, and then I connected with them on Twitter when they were having contests for new followers.  I did happen to win a small prize package, this was while I was in the D.C. area.  I had to explain to my roommate why a package might show up with a name that wasn’t mine.  She was amused.

About a year later I decided after much toil to self-publish my first book Per Pound of Flesh and then a second book Controller Cords.  Those two books for me were liberating.  I felt as if I had ripped something from myself and it became a new entity.  I had always feared doing this would be too self-harming but I found out actually that wounds heal.  

I had been working on blog stories previously, two YA stories in fact, but I lost interest in them because somehow I think I got stuck thinking about what YA should be instead of being innovative.  

Writing these two books, but more so self-publishing them, has been a great learning experience and forced me be more bold in social media.  I have taken to Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to promote myself with minor success.  

I do have another, new story in me that I am writing as well as this weekly serial.  For me it will be the first main character that I have written in a while that focuses on a straight man.  Until I wrote and published Per Pound of Flesh I felt as if I had to represent something.  I had a compulsion to write gay characters.  I still do.  But this is a different story.  There is a gay supporting character who might also be considered a main character but this just feels different.

You can find excerpts of my books published and unpublished on my blog Briefly Told Stories.  I also write essays and reviews on my blog Queer Words Make Stories.

As per originally posted on Mychael Black Books: http://www.mychaelblackbooks.com/guest-bryan-james-2/

This Is Something

I am probably the stereotypical blogger because I live with my parents and I am in my early thirties and unemployed.  I had a career before this, briefly, working for two different colleges as well as a string of horrible temp jobs.  I am deeply in debt from my college education and I feel betrayed.

Despite all of the evidence to the contrary when I got to college I thought I would be recognized for something, hard work and enthusiasm would mean something.  Instead what I found was people, professors mostly, who were living their own miserable lives.  They were there because they felt they had settled for something less than what they deserved like many of the students.

My professors failed at being role models.  My advisors failed at giving advice.  And generally the courses were taught in a haphazard way, well the normal classes, the ones I was supposed to take.  I felt there was a great deal of self-censorship by many professors so they wouldn’t offend conservatives who might report them, dislike them, stop participating in class, and/or sue them.

But that was years ago and I am trying to move on with my life despite some set backs.  As I said in the premise I am unemployed and live with my parents.  This happened after having one promising career/job in higher education which I left for two reasons.

The first being that I was being underpaid for my job and rather than giving me more compensation the college wanted to take away responsibilities as well as having an increasingly frustrated and frustrating boss.  The second reason is that my father had a heart attack and I felt my parents needed my help.

Since then I have not been able to find stable work.  I am over educated for most jobs.  When I submit my resume for local McJobs I feel employers look at my resume and don’t want to hire me because they know I will not be a lifelong employee for low wages.  I know that I deserve, everyone deserves, a living wage and health benefits.  We deserve to be able to have pride in our work.  Most people around here don’t have that.

They smoke cigarettes and drink beer, as well as take other drugs to self-medicate emotional and physical pain.  They work under the table jobs, don’t declare most of their tips, and sometimes do illegal things to make a living.  I’m not talking robbery but other things.  You know, other things.

I briefly had a job working for another institution down in D.C. area but found the boss to a bully and genuinely unkind man.  One morning I realized I felt good until he showed up.  I realized he was a like a schoolyard bully when I was in elementary school.  I had enough and without another job to go to I decided to quit.  I reported him to Human Resources and was done with it.

I then turned to writing.  I sat down once again in my life to write a novel.  This time it was day after day of thinking and writing for about two months while I lived off the little money I earned and lived out the rest of the short rental agreement I had made.

I wrote about half of my novel Per Pound of Flesh there.  After many false starts and many attempts I finally decided to commit.  I was worried it would turn out wrong.  I was worried it wouldn’t be good enough.  I still am.

After living there and writing all that I could I finally had to move back with my parents.  And to be honest I fell into a state of depression.  There were other extenuating circumstances I won’t go into here but it was difficult to keep myself motivated.  I worked on two blog fiction stories that were Young Adult (YA) in content ‘Stay With Me’ and ‘The Family in the Window’.

Despite feeling hopeless I wanted to write something that had a positive feeling but eventually ran out of energy for the stories because I felt as if I had trapped myself in an emotional box.  I didn’t want bad things to happen.  I wanted the stories to be about healing despite feeling very wounded.

I decided to commit again to my novel.  I went through a process of planning my story, thinking about characters and plot.  I had to fix, edit, rewrite chapters but then I felt like I had worked it to a form but I also had/have such big visions.  I could imagine a whole series of adventures about this young man who goes into gay porn.  But I also felt like I needed an ending.

I didn’t write the ending in haste trying to slap something on so it would be finished.  I wrote it to hopefully provide some emotional satisfaction to the reader while also giving the opportunity for more books and stories.  I did this all while writing and editing other short fiction and posts for my blog.

It was a struggle personally and financially but I feel as if I have accomplished something.  This isn’t supposed to be a sob story but it also isn’t heroic accomplishment, not yet.  This is just what happened.

Right now I am cautiously optimistic because I see so many people struggling with the same things I am trying to accomplish which is being paid to do something they enjoy, especially after having such bad workplace experiences.  I see people doing independent work that fulfills the complexity of human experience generally not portrayed by Hollywood and the Television Industry.

One of these project is ‘Whatever This Is...’ by the very talented Adam Goldman and his compatriots.  This project actually encouraged me to write this post because it is about that same struggle of getting paid.

I feel like there are opportunities through being self-published.  I feel like there are opportunities through Kickstarter and Indiegogo.  I feel like there are opportunities out there that most people don’t understand.

I recently read an article titled ’20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't Get’ and found myself feeling very angry about the premise of the article.  I feel like the premise is to fall in line, to be another brick in the wall.  If you try hard enough, endure enough pain then maybe, just maybe you get the American Dream.  But you have to be perfect.  You can't get sick, have kids, or anything else that happens in life.

Despite good intentions it isn't easy to get ahead in this world.  I look around and I see corruption in nearly every institution that mainstream news doesn’t talk about because there seems to be a fear that it will all stop, fall apart and disrupt the general well being of all people.

There is corruption in politics, Wall Street, banking, Medicine, mining, higher education (University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education
 By Jennifer Washburn), the NSA, Military Spending, and so many institutions.  Unfortunately these are just some examples but there are many more.

I am between Generation X and Generation Y but we all feel it.  We are like the Capuchin Monkey suffering from unequal pay because there is disparity between the generations.

Many, many people would say life sucks, life is tough, and I should suck it up and move on, that life is unfair and everyone suffers but I say that the degree to which you suffer is largely based on your social privilege and yes there are people in the world who suffer more than I do.  The economic mobility/opportunity determines how fair the suffering is and if the suffering can be reduced.

And I will mostly do this, move on with my life, seek out new opportunities but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t express myself.  That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to process my emotions, that my feelings shouldn’t be recognized.  This is something.

Book Give Away July 4, 2013

If I’m Honest I’m Out

I just read the headline about Evan Low in Campbell, CA who had been asked to help in his part for a blood drive in his city.  He posed the dilemma of being an openly gay man who would not be allowed to donate and asked, ‘What would you do?’ in this situation.

This reminded me of my own experience not donating blood at work some years ago.  At the time I was not an ‘out’ person and did not feel secure as I had just recently been hired.  Though I had, and would have, many openly gay colleagues and would myself come out at work there were still colleagues who ‘tolerated’ but did not accept homosexuality.

In this case I had just started and many people had gone to donate, but one person in particular was enthusiastic about everyone participating.  This same person I knew was not accepting and barely tolerant of homosexuals at least during work.

When I said that I would not donate she began an interrogation about my motivation/fears about donation.

For some time I had managed to appease her questions until another colleague joined the conversation.  As a heterosexual woman she said she had a problem with the drive and that many people did not donate because there was a ban on men who had sex with other men after 1977.  She said it discriminated against gay and bisexual men.

Her intentions were good but this gave the person interrogating me a new question which in an indirect way she asked.

I wanted to answer and I wanted to answer honestly but I felt worried about acceptance.  I was about to say something when my second colleague defended my right to not answer.

In some way thinking back at that exact moment I was foolish.  There were many colleagues who I subsequently found out were homosexual and I believe you cannot be fired in California for being homosexual.

Now years later I live in a state where you can be fired for being homosexual.  Or at least there are no protections against being fired.

Though we have come a long way in terms of recognition and positive identity LGBTQ people can still be legally discriminated against in many states, saying nothing of lawful marriage.

But this is the dilemma.  As a gay man do I admit to having sex with men and out myself from donating blood?  Do I not donate blood and in effect out myself to my colleagues?

How many men who have sex with men (gay, straight, bisexual) do not honestly answer the question for fear of being discovered?

What are the standards for the question?  Is it blood status or something else?

I think it’s institutional homophobia.  I think it’s the threat, the potential, of two men having sex.  I think it’s about a person’s own fears, their own unresolved emotions and inability to differentiate themselves from someone else by trying to control the world around them.

Queer as Folk: What It Means To Me

In my last year of college I was renting a room in a house in a rural area out of the city limits on a lot with a steep driveway and surrounded by trees.

On my way to and from the house I used to pass a small field that hadn’t been used for crops for some time, the grass, recurring wheat, and rye grew tall, unmanaged and unchecked.

It was the type of place where it was easy to mistakenly think you were alone if you stepped out in your housecoat to pick up the newspaper.

The man who owned the house and was renting the room to me had two dogs, both were labradors and both had no training.

As I said it was easy to mistakenly think you were alone.  He didn’t like to keep them chained up and he didn’t believe in allowing animals inside the house so he had fixed up an area of the barn for them with hay where they could come and go easily.

It was the year Brokeback Mountain had been released and I was still deeply in the closet.  As part of my seeking for role models and identity I ordered Queer as Folk Season 1 through an online site along with two books.

I had known about Queer as Folk since about my junior year in high school.  Its name had pervaded popular culture enough so that I knew it was based in Pittsburgh (near my hometown) and about gay culture.  I was even able to catch ten minutes of it when my family had gotten a free preview of Showtime on cable.

Ten minutes was all I dared at the time in case someone waked into the room while I watched it.  Then when I was home from college years later and feeling more bold I used to sneak down to the living room and watch a whole episode or two in the middle of the night but by then it was season 3 or 4 and I can’t remember which episodes I caught, so frightened was my mind that it didn’t sink into my long-term memory.

So when I got the chance to order it, to have the first season arrive to my house where I could sit in my room and watch them all in private I was very excited.

The day came and I woke up late.  I looked on the front porch but I didn’t see a box so then I began to fix breakfast while listening for a delivery.  Finally with my food done I looked out one last time only to see something strange and shiny in the driveway.  I put down my plate and ran outside to see that the Season 1 box was alone in the dirt.

The cardboard covering for the season as well as one of the thin plastic DVD containers inside had been chewed upon but none of the DVDs were damaged.

I looked for more remnants.  I saw a cover to a book and I thought I would find the rest but I didn’t find anything else.  There was no shipping box, no books.

Did I mention the dogs were loose?  The two dogs had gotten into the box and ripped it to shreds, destroyed the books.  All I had left was the DVDs themselves in chewed containers.  I was pissed and amused at the same time.

Much later when one of them had puppies, because the owner until then didn’t believe in neutering animals, I found scraps of the pages in the nesting.  By then I was no longer angry and found some humor at the site.  Is there humor in that?

Anyway, the box had been destroyed by the landlord’s dogs so I called him and told him what had happened.  He wasn’t the type of man to offer compensation right away and told me I should call the place where I ordered it.  I did.  But at the time I had shame about what I was buying.

After dealing with the two different companies and complaining in my best angry but polite phone voice the representative told me to return the DVDs to a local store to get a replacement or else get my money back which I said I would.

I was full of anxiety but also enough frustration that I drove there.  With the DVD box in my bag I walked into the store, right past the return section all the way to the back of the store and through its many aisles.  We’ll say it was to let myself breath and regain focus.  I did.  And I ended up in the gay and lesbian book ghetto where a few older men lurked nearby sometimes looking for someone eager and naive.  There were a few there this time.

It was that kind of town.  It was that kind of store.  I was creeped out by the old men so I decided to confront my fears and go to the return section.  As I waited patiently to be called to the return counter one of the old men who had followed me from gay ghetto began to look at a display of calendars.

As I tried to determine his intentions he picked out one of the calendars that was a beefcake fireman one with a picture of several shirtless men on the front.  He lifted it into the air and began to look at it in a very brazen manner.  I looked away.

I’m not saying he was stalking me.  I’m not saying I wasn’t paranoid.  I am saying coincidence is a bitch, especially when you’re ashamed of the thing you are carrying with you.

I was called up to the counter where I presented my item to the cashier and told her my story along with providing the remnants of my receipt.  Oh yes, remnants of the receipt, I forgot to mention that was the other thing I found.  She had to get the manager and my anxiety grew.  In a town like this I didn’t know what type of manager I would get.

I was slightly relieved when he was only a few years older than myself, had a goatee, pierced ears, and set off my gay-dar, but only slightly.  I explained to him what had happened and he very politely told me I would have to call back to the representative and tell them he couldn’t accept the item because they didn’t carry it in the store so he couldn’t swap.  I thanked them and left the store.

Hours later I explained this to my coworker at my student work job in much the same way I am telling you and she laughed then I laughed.  She said it must have felt like God had intervened  with getting my first real gay, real defining gift for myself and it kind of did if I believed in those sorts of things.  But it didn’t stop me.

Later I would get myself several other gay interest shows and films as well as the series box set of Queer as Folk, without God’s intervention they all arrived safely.

In fact that box set was how I ‘outed’ myself to my new boss at work who himself was an out and proud gay man.  I remember standing in his office talking about something and then working into the conversation that I was between seasons.  His response was that it wasn’t the best representation of gay culture but that he watched it.

Which is a long way to saying how I feel about Queer as Folk as a show and as a series: it isn’t the best representation (what could be?) but it was and is very meaningful in my life.

My negative feelings about the show aren’t necessarily rooted in feeling that I wasn’t represented or that others, namely heterosexuals, will get a poor impression of me, because let’s face it if they are homophobic they aren’t going to watch the show, but rather some of the superficial and insulting elements to members of the LGBTQ community many of which triggered or added to my own internalized phobias and prejudice about how members of the community judged each other when it came to looks, gender, and sexual activity.

But I don’t really want to get into the semantics of that argument in this article.

Let’s just say it was a flawed diamond, a treasure that I found in the late hours when everyone else was asleep.