In a world that is still getting used to shifters,
where everyone thinks omegas are second class citizens, nature photographer and
omega Braden Payne lets everyone think he’s a beta. That way no one gives him a
hard time and he doesn’t have to live a repeat of his failed relationship. But
when his car breaks down in the remote Blackwood forest in Western Australia,
without the medication that lets him hide who he is, he’s faced with what he
fears most: an unmated alpha.
Government forest guardian and alpha Coll MacDubhar
is tired of illegal loggers, foolish tourists and people who underestimate the
wilds of Western Australia. He discovers Braden lost and in need of medical
assistance in the forest he protects and knows something’s not right.
But there’s hidden depths to Braden that capture his
interest, and no decent alpha would walk away when Braden’s unwelcome past
comes to visit.
Blackwood by Pia Foxhall (Perth Shifters #1) – Can be read as standalone! – Each book in the series focuses on different characters Queer (gay/bisexual character) m/m romance 93,000 words // 267 pages (Kindle) Cover by TiferetDesign Subscribe to the Foxhall Newsletter!
The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore (Call #: 294.513 M3115) is a compilation of traditional Hindu stories with a common thread: sexual transformation and gender metamorphosis:A god transforms into a nymph and enchants another god, a King becomes pregnant, a Prince discovers on his wedding night that he is not a man, another King has children who call him both father and mother, a hero turns into a eunuch and wears female apparel. A Princess has to turn into a man before she can avenge her humiliation, widows of a King make love to conceive his child, friends of the same sex end up marrying each other after one of them metamorphoses into a woman. In addition to the thought-provoking stories in The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore, you’ll also find an examination of the universality of queer narratives with examples from Greek lore and Irish folklore a comparison of the Hindu paradigm to the biblical model. This look at how Hindu society and Hindu scripture responds to queer sexuality and includes a discussion of Hijras (transgender people assigned male at birth) and how they fit into Hindu society. With the telling of each of these tales, you will also learn how the author came upon each of them and how they relate to the context of prevailing Hindu attitudes toward sex, gender, pleasure, fertility, and celibacy.
A fake marriage between two best friends because they need money? SIGN ME UP.
I only read the first four chapters, so I don’t really know how the story will unfold, but I’m definitely buying the book. I can’t believe a book was written specially for me.
You wake in the night with your arm hanging over the side of your bed. It is still dark, and your bedroom is shrouded in deep shadow. Something unseen seizes your hand.
You grasp it tightly, knowing that first impressions are important and a firm, confident handshake will establish dominance.
A hollow voice echos under your bed, shaking you to your core, “You’re hired.”
my dad has been riding me for, like ever. get a job, ash. like, okay but. have you even heard of summer. plus i’m tired. plus i literally don’t want to do anything but wear a rainbow bikini and bake on beaches.
“i’m serious,” he says, in Serious Voice, his hand on the door handle with white knuckles. “you can’t waste your time like this.”
“ugh,” i say, because, like ugh. he slams the door. i bury my face in pillows and like, “ugh” for a solid thirty second, limbs spread akimbo all over the place. without meaning to, i fall asleep. i told you i was tired, dad.
i don’t know what happens. maybe it’s all those times i had to stand in his office pretending to be official in white shoes and a pink skirt but when somebody grasps my hand, i grasp back. like lizard-brain response, i’m still half-asleep when i’m full-on up-and-down single-pump professional-style handshaking a demon. by the time i have bolted upright in bed and retracted my now-sticky (yet somehow also soggy?) hand, the voice is already speaking.
“you’re hired.”
excuse me? “I’m what now?” my voice in comparison is weak, slippery with sleep and fear, dancing all over the place.
i hear something shift under me. my heart is caught in my throat while there’s chuckles from the owner of the handshake equivalent of squeezing a taco bell meal. i’m having flashbacks to french kissing h.p. lovecraft in a bathroom in high school grade and i’ve never even done that.
“i’ll have to look at your references, obviously, but that’s a hell of a handshake. i like you, kid.”
like but. for some reason, a giggle rises in my throat.
like okay. like. this is normal. i’m like. it figures there’d be something under my bed. like, with how much time i spent in the closet? who am i to even, like, judge.
“of course, orientation will be difficult,” the taco bell meal tentacle continues, “but you wouldn’t be the first we’ve hired like you.”
“like me?” like a woman or a gay woman or like a gay woman who’s really good at making hot cocoa or like
“a human,” taco bell says.
i’m actually almost awake now. like i’m pretty sure i’m awake and i’m talking to the CEO of creepy, incorporated. certified possible demon. sock eating friend of cerberus.
for a second i’m about to call for my dad but then i remember those white knuckles around the door handle and my white shoes and how much gas money is and how he once made me shake hands for an hour but didn’t give me a hug for the next four years.
i clear my throat. like, abuela told us about devils since she was old enough to threaten me with them and like technically i can’t “commune with spirits” but i also know enough not to upset a creature like this so i figure it’s in my best interests to take this in stride and maybe tomorrow throw a little bit more salt over my shoulder than usual. and like, i mean, at this point it’s just negotiating right. and if there’s something i understand from dad it’s negotiating business.
“hours?” i ask, sitting up straighter. i can’t see more than a writhing something that barely extends beyond the edges of my bedframe.
“night shift, obviously.”
“salary?”
“competitive.” a pause. “lucrative, even.”
well like. what else is there. “i’m in.”
“wonderful,” says taco bell, expressing with an accent i’m unfamiliar with and a form of joy that i’m uncomfortable with, “i’ll go get the contract. be back in a jiffy.”
like, the sound of hell opening up isn’t exactly a slurp-pop, but it does sound a lot like the way my seventh grade math teacher’s tongue used to sound when she was about to make a harsh comment about my homework. and like, for a second there i’m like. wait what the fuck did i just agree to am i in a horror movie is chucky gonna be my roommate now like does dracula sign my contract as a witness like am i really doing this. like? i’m a smart girl (don’t look at my love life) how am i even considering this.
it’s also when my dad opens my door. “ash?” even when he’s just woken up, he looks tidy. he’s wearing his wingtip shoes. never slippers on this man.
i’m like. coming around to my senses at this point. i hallucinated all that. i ate too many crackers with cream cheese and guava before bed. i listened to too many of abuela’s supernatural sightings. and like, i told you, i’m tired.
“dad,” i say, blinking in the light from the hallway.
“you were talking in your sleep, ” he says.
“oh,” i say.
“it is keeping me awake,” he says.
“sorry,” i say.
“you know i am a light sleeper,” he says.
“yeah,” i say, “sorry.”
“please control yourself,” he says.
“yeah … i… okay.” i say. “sorry again.”
“goodnight, ash,” he says, and he turns to go. he looks back at me and says “and ash?” and for a second, because i always have this moment, because i never learn, because i’m not a good learner, for a second i’m thinking – oh, he’s gonna say something nice, “in the morning, please get a job.”
“yeah,” i say, and my voice cracks and the door closes, “sorry again.”
i sit there, staring at the wall, saying nothing for a long time, or maybe no time at all. thinking about nothing. like the feeling you get when you’re thinking too much so it all just sounds like white noise.
then i hear it again. the crack-slurp of hell. i jump about like twelve feet. when i return from the space station my soul ascended to, i see the barely-defined outline of something, like the leg of an insect outside of a tentacle inside of a crab leg outside of the right back support beam of the eiffel tower. and like, a sphere of dull green light radiates directly above it, which, like, isn’t even the weirdest part of my night.
“howdy!” taco bell nacho supreme is back, “sorry for the delay, i was checking with management.”
“uh,” i say.
“just insert your hand into this here contract and you’ll be employed part-time, pending references.”
“hang on,” i say. i swallow. “you said the rate is… competitive?”
“we got wishes, monkey’s paws, souls, video game cheats… you name it, we pay it.”
“…. USD?”
“666 an hour to start. we do love tradition.”
i choke. “like six dollars and sixty-six cents?”
taco bell laughs. “you know what i meant. and we do direct deposit!”
i swallow. i think of my dad.
words tumbling out of me. “do i have to hurt anyone? is my soul forfeit? can i ever get out of this? am i gonna turn colors how many days a week do i work is there a retirement plan can i readjust the terms after signing is it permanent will it harm me in any way how many people die doing this when do i start what’s orientation who writes the checks and” i take a breath “is the boss nice?”
“no, no, yes! but two weeks notice. no, usually five, if you sign up for it, yes, no, probably not, not many people are doing it mostly we’re non-physical or extra-corporeal so you’d have to ask H.R? tomorrow if you want, loads of fun and free sushi, H.R again, and” taco bell takes a breath, “usually but particularly on wednesdays.”
i sit there and curl my knees to my chest.
“all this… because of a handshake?”
taco bell is silent for a moment. well, like, kind of. if eerie silence had a twin brother, or like the silence of a fast food restaurant exactly four minutes before the lights are shut off.
“usually, we come if we’re called by darkness. we deal in darker things than needs. i don’t tend to show up when someone needs something. but sometimes… the lines get crossed, that’s all. instead of your need heading on upwards, it called me instead.”
“uh,” i say, “are you admitting to the existence of like… angels?”
“oh yeah, no, he retired to live with his six hivenests in west Berlin. we need new blood,” taco bell says. “of course, metaphorically.”
okay. okay. like. i could say i was bartending? in a few weeks i could buy a used car. out of pocket. like. if i needed to i could always quit. and like. honestly, again, how many chances to make closet jokes. plus, time at the beach. plus like. okay like how cool would it be.
“okay,” i whisper, “okay.” i try not to shake as i reach my hand out to the contract. it feels like dipping my hand into the inside of a cold turkey. i repress the shudder that runs up me.
in an instant, the specifics of my job write themselves over my eyes. they burn into the back of my brain. everything is spinning.
“see you tomorrow!” taco bell is saying. i want to puke. my ears are ringing. i barely hear the portal to hell open again.
the fire of the contract’s words fade slowly until i am staring into the dark again. it’s not what i expected. it actually appeals to my sense of justice. taco bell was right about being called by something. i’ve just agreed to be the thing that goes bump in the night. the one thing left against the people nobody else can fight. i’m gay dracula. i’m both a lesbian dementor and the boggart. i’m a rainbow-flag-flying boogeyman and i have a long list of people who i got a bone to pick with.
it takes me a moment to realize i’m smiling. sorry, dad, i’m gonna be like. ultra mega tired. but i got a job. doing what? oh, nothing.
just being the creature that lives under your bed. when bad men have darkness, we come haunting.
OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:
– In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances.
– Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.
– The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.
– Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.
– In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.
– Real Person Fic was like, not even discussed. It had its own mailing list where we kept basically all of it, and you didn’t mention it in polite company. Then suddenly in 2000-2001 all these legitimate people got into NSync fic. But before that, it was pretty taboo in a lot of fannish circles.
re: point one, there was also an enormous amount of time spent on characters agonizing over being attracted to other men. like, i was reading something a while back that was actually written in 2003 but by someone who’d been in fandom for a long time and obviously hadn’t changed their aesthetic much, and the first time the pairing started making out, one of the guys suddenly had to stop—and i thought it was gonna be like, traumatic memories, or just general intimacy issues, or whatever. but it was because it was ~all too new~ and he had to take a few more days to adjust to the whole gay thing.
oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.
basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.
oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?
i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.
oh, and not related to anything else, but: usenet! usenet was a super important venue for many fandoms. this actually continued well into the 2000s for certain fandom circles—not slash-focused media fandom in general, but there was a lot of overlap. i was reading alt.tv.angel during season two, and there were fic writers i recognized posting there. and of course earlier on, the alt.startrek.creative.* groups were central.
Random things I want to add based on my admittedly-hazy memory:
– elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?
– faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.
– There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’ Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.
– DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new? But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.
– there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking. Cue: wank.
– OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].
(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)
– let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.
– fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY. One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings. Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize). Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that. This is why I give money to ao3, people. I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.
– oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week? Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow. (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)
– yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform. Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.
>midlevel-bofq jazzhands<
Oh, goodness, yes. There’d be the occasional fangirl collective where a prolific handful of fans of a given franchise (Highlander comes immediately to mind) would put a website together for hosting all their fic. And you’d get the impression that they were all betaing each other’s stuff, and if you liked one take on the canon you’d probably like everything on the site so it would be a total “jackpot!” moment.
I hand-coded one of those geocities pages – that’s how and why I learned to code. (And yes, it was on a webring!) There was a subgroup of us from alt.tv.highlander that split off into our own private mailing list (you needed an invitation to get on) and for that I rented space on a university server and learned the unix commands to run it. I think this is the fandom equivalent of walking five miles uphill – both ways! – to school.
Right around 2000 I started watching Starsky & Hutch re-runs. But unlike when I watched it as a kid (first run) I now had slash goggles! I went looking for the fandom, only to find it was mostly hide-bound to print zines and slash was still a dirty word. OMG the kerfuffles I got in to with the old BNFs trying to pull that fandom, kicking and screaming, into the digital age. I did have one digital compatriot, and she photocopied several old slash zines for me. Swear to god every story was a WNGWJLO fest of sexuality angst and outright hatred of Hutch’s ex-wife. There was one memorable story with butter for lube. 🙂
So, THAT’s where butter for lube came from! I failed gloriously attempting to draw that in a game fanish pictionary back in the day.
Also, those bare bones html and .txt fics and posting the file size were as much about the fact that everyone was on fucking dial-up as it was about saving space on archives and people not really knowing how to code.
People did in actual reality use butter for lube—all sorts of oils and butters (Crisco, people!) and anything they had. They use butter in Last Tango in Paris which is a disgusting movie that you should never watch, but case in point.
Also, while I’m here, I just want to say that, the old day were not all terrible. Fans rolled their own websites and helped each other and hosted each other, and there was a coming together and a can-do and a generosity that was special; IMO it was because of the can-do, build it ourselves ethos of the old days that fans were able to build things like the AO3 in the first place.
What I remember the most about Ye Olde Times when I first got into fandom (2003, when I was a prudish thirteen year old) was the epic hurt/comfort that were Totally Not Gay. You’ve not read h/c until you’ve read some early 2000s Jack/Daniel h/c fic. I remember one fic in particular where Daniel is struck down with some illness which makes him sick and hallucinate/regress (think Lifeboat, if you know SG-1 – canon did it too!), and Jack literally cradles him in his arms and nurses him back to health. But they Were Not Gay.
They had a fucking name for this shit in The Sentinel fandom. If you ever dig up an old archive for ‘smarm’ RUN, do not walk, away from it as fast as you can. It’s like the Lord King Badfic version of Totally Not Gay. To be fair, the actual show had some of this also seeing as the two main characters lived in the same FREAKING APARTMENT. They’re TOTALLY NOT GAY! Jim brought Blair back from the dead with the power of their ~totally platonic~ mystical bond (REALLY!)
one of my very favorite Fanlore footnotes, from the Smarm entry:
The mailing lists on yahoogroups were like nectar from the gods for people who’d had no other access to communities of like minded perverts people. Webrings were…hit and miss. They could be linked by the most tangential element of a fandom, which is how I – seeking a general Buffy website – stumbled on an Angelus/Willow archive which was really something… special. There was blood.
As for websites, Angelfire and Geocities bore the weight of so much fic it was ridiculous. I remember the announcement that geocities were shutting down their sites and hundreds of authors and readers who had been inactive or quiet for months suddenly sprang to life and started frantically saving everything they could.
Also songfic. There was so much song fic. I don’t even know why. I don’t even care why. But it was everywhere.
OutWeek Magazine was the seminal lesbian and gay publication during the peak era of AIDS activism in the late 80s and early 90s.
Founded by Gabriel Rotello and Kendall Morrison, it employed a staff of about 30 people in Manhattan during its tumultuous two-year existence.
OutWeek redefined the role of the activist gay press, not only by reporting the news but also by frequently making news itself. Its aggressive coverage, incisive commentary and in-depth investigative articles on gay rights, politics, AIDS, the arts and popular culture made it a must-read publication far beyond the usual scope of gay magazines.
Several of the most contentious controversies of that era were sparked by OutWeek. The magazine pioneered the use of the word ‘queer,’ which was highly controversial at the time. It was closely associated with the AIDS activist group ACT UP, and several of its staffers and contributors helped to co-found the group Queer Nation.
Many of OutWeek’s editors were committed to sharply challenging the then-pervasive culture of the closet, and a sideline of that commitment – the advocacy of ‘outing’ prominent gay and lesbian celebrities – began in Michelangelo Signorile’s “Gossip Watch” column and was one of many things that made OutWeek a household name and a lightning rod.
OutWeek was committed to an inclusive vision of queer life, and was the first major national publication to bill itself as a ‘lesbian and gay’ magazine.
this is a really exciting resource! especially if you’ve ever wished you could get a better view into gay/queer/lgbt activist culture in the early ’90s, you gotta check this out
hi everyone im still pissed we never learnt in school that shakespeare was bi and wrote the sonnets about a dude and a woc he was into
hi everyone im still pissed that we were told emily dickinson was a spinster when she spent her whole life writing love letters to a woman
hi everyone im still pissed about the fact that we never got taught any of the super super gay Greek myths. it seems impossible to think they managed to pick all the hetero myths when Greece was just THAT gay but guess what? they did.
hi everyone virginia woolf was also bi im still pissed that so much of literature is queer and has queer coding within it that deserves to be analysed through that lens in the same way that we don’t ignore the gender of an author, but sexuality is never mentioned in highschool literature classes
hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were never taught that da vinci was gay af and that the ideal the western world has of jesus (white, long straight brown hair) was based on one of his male lovers
hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were told sir isaac newton died a virgin when he had multiple boyfriends over the course of his life one of whom he wrote passionate love letters too and lived with
Been reading the “Slash Controversies” section of Fanlore. I’m a long time fan, but some of this stuff is from way before my time, even. Mary Lou Dodge’s outrage over smut at Trek cons, for example.
Slash was still controversial in the mid to late ‘80s, when I got really involved in fandom. But the battles over whether it should be allowed at cons were more or less over. There were slash-only cons by then, but fan cons in general permitted slash. I’m told because slash fans were such a big part of fandom, they just couldn’t afford to exclude them, even if the con organizers disapproved of slash and would rather not allow it.
I remember discussing fanfic awards at a con once, with someone who was outraged that there were separate gen and slash categories. “Slash writers shouldn’t get special treatment,” she proclaimed. A couple of other fans explained that having separate categories was actually to protect the gen writers. Gen stories tended to lose to slash stories, because there were so many slash fans, and “slashers read across fandoms.” While gen fans tended to stick with their personal favorite fandom(s), slash fans often read (and voted for) slash in any fandom they found it in.
That wasn’t me. I tend to fall deeply in love with a fandom and/or character, and read everything I can find in that fandom, gen or slash. But I knew a lot of slash fans who fit the description. I used to zine-shop for friends at MediaWest. (People who couldn’t make it to the con would ask those who were going to buy zines for them, either giving them the money upfront or promising to pay them back later.) The slash fans often asked me to buy them slash in any fandom, as long as it was new.
And I didn’t know David Gerrold hated slash. As recently as 2013, he reiterated his feelings about K/S. He’s gay, so I thought he’d be a little more tolerant. His characterizing slash fans as “fat ladies with a sexual dysfunction” seems just a tad misogynist.
Though come to think of it, that’s not that unusual. A lot of gay men seemed perplexed and even offended at the idea of straight women writing gay smut. That changed, IME, in the ‘90s, when the Internet made it a lot easier for gay guys to find slash, and become a part of it. Minotaur‘s willingness to answer slash writers’ questions about m/m sex (and his good humor about it) made him popular both online and at cons.
He ended up writing in many fandoms, but his first was Voyager – in particular, Paris/Kim. Though his first story was more Kim/Ayala than P/K.
Minotaur was a godsend to us, and a wonderful man.
Minotaur proved what impact you can have with positivity rather than just bitching and throwing shade all the time.
Ahh, this took me back.
Some fandom history for y’all youngin’s out there.
Ugh, I still remember when he died. It was like a mass grieving across the fandoms. I was only 22 and I forget exactly how I ended up on his lj but he was just so damn open and funny and willing to talk about things that were rarely talked about in a healthy and informative manner. His writing taught me a lot, both in terms of basic human anatomy but also just how to tell a damn good story.
Then four years after his passing, there I was, being relegated to the LGBT kink dept in the publishing house (because nobody wanted it, can you BELIEVE) and with the absolute authority of someone who grew up reading minotaur’s works on fandom was able to say with confidence, “that’s not how the prostate works” to a room full of senior publishers attempting to cash in on the popularity of m/m works, with no idea what they were doing.
It was hilarious, and I feel he would have gotten a good laugh out of it.
Queer Fiction Writer 