My beta reading buddy, Kayla Jameth, is next on my list of authors to be interviewed to coincide with the Dreamspinner release of "A Spartan Love". In preparation, I thought I'd revisit her previously published books, set in the same universe.

One character Prince , later King, Lykos, appears in all three.

Chronologically, her recently released free short story "Body Language" comes first. This can be downloaded from Smashwords here.

Body Language takes place in Lydia—a kingdom in Asia Minor (now part of modern Turkey) that was conquered by Cyrus the Great during the 6th century BC and became part of the Persian Empire.

Years later, Lykos, the son of the king of the Thracian city-state, Aenus, is travelling incognito through the conquered province. To avoid arousing questions as to why he is there, he is only accompanied by the Persian, Narses, a friend of his father. Hearing cries for help, the two men intervene. They are too late to save a merchant and his slave, but they arrive in time to prevent bandits slaying the third member of the party.

Kas recently lost his family and was grateful to be travelling under the protection of Tahmasp. Now the merchant is dead, his future is once more under threat. He would like nothing better than to remain with the handsome warrior, but how can he explain that to a man who speaks little but Greek?

By the time we see Lykos in "Alexios' Fate" (review below) he has inherited Aenus after his father's death. Along with two other nobles, he has arrived in the city of Dicaea to determine which of them will be chosen as the mentor of young Prince Alexios. Before this happens, fate in the form of the God, Apollo, intervenes.

How Alexios' escapes is wonderfully depicted in the book along with the love he has for his slave Galen.

"496BC" also deals with King Lykos and is included in the MLR anthology "Lust in Time." This  covers an episode a month later when Alexios, Galen and King Lykos are  conveying a prophet to Delphi on Apollo's orders.

All of these are stand alone stories, but they do add into the wonderful world that Kayla is creating. A world that has, at its heart, the God, Apollo. 

This world will be further enriched by the release of "A Spartan Love" the first of a trilogy starring Theron, a  dreaded kryptes (think trainee Spartan warrior) and a local helot (type of peasant farmer)  called Andreas.

Kayla takes her world building seriously and uses the books to explore the different relationship between men in that era. Galen is a slave and is basically the possession of Alexios. Andreas, as a helot is slightly above the rank of a slave in that his body is not owned by anyone, however his services are. Kas, the star of "Body Language" is a youth without a family and without protection. He is vulnerable in other ways. Alexos is an Erômenos (beloved pupil) but he also has to serve his Erastes (mentor), Lykos.

The world these men live in, their standards and beliefs are all skillfully woven into tales of love and devotion. While none of these three stories need to be read to appreciate "A Spartan Love", the books do give you a feel for the world building and Kayla's writing.

She may only be a relatively new author, but she sure has created some wonderful characters.

Kayla is participating in a Blog Hop to celebrate her upcoming release over the coming week, giving readers a chance to win a Gift Certificate from AllRomance eBooks valued at $15.

A copy of "A Spartan Love" will be given away in conjunction with her interview here on December 8th.

Don't forget to catch next week's interview with Kayla when a copy of
"A Spartan Love" will be given away to one lucky commentor.

It’s such a pleasure to sit down again (virtually) with Julie Bozza and chat. My last interview with her came out around the time Book 2 “Of Dreams and Ceremonies” was released and “The Thousand Smiles of Nicholas Goring” was still in the conceptual stages.

You can read that interview here.

Back then I asked you about Book 3 and you said:

“The third one will be set back in Australia, probably about seven years into their relationship. I want to explore who they are by then, of course, and how they work together. But I also want to explore some more about Dave’s relationship to the Dreamtime site at the waterhole they (re)discovered. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of Charlie, and Denise and her family. I think I’ll have Nicholas’s nephew Robin pay them an extended visit as well, so we can find out a little more about who he’s growing into.”

Now The Thousand Smiles is complete, I can see that's what the story is all about! Thanks for agreeing to another interview so I can some of those issues in detail.

AB: So let’s step back a bit and talk about “Of Dreams and Ceremonies” first. Obviously the big difference between this and the other two books is the setting. As a Brit who came to Australia for a number of years and then returned, did you see Britain with fresh eyes when you went back?

JB: I guess that’s inevitable, as you finally have something else to compare it to. Also, I lived in Australia for 34 years, which is quite a stretch! Plenty of scope there for change.

Some things were as I remembered, and in many ways I ended up appreciating them all the more for having been without. The green countryside, the ruined castles and Tudor mansions and quaint villages, the sense of a living history: these were things I rediscovered and loved. The fact that I could visit (and even work in!) the places where John Keats once lived and worked is just marvellous to me.

Other aspects of living in England were a little less welcome, but that’s OK. It was good to also rediscover and reflect on a few things that make Australia such a great place to live.

AB: Class difference has always been a big factor in Britain as exemplified in films and television, eg Downton Abbey. Is this dying out? Most Aussies resist any hint of class distinction. Is it something British people cling to or encourage because of the glamour associated with it? Seeing this as welcome colour in otherwise drab lives. Social butterflies.

JB: Class distinctions are something I don’t encounter in my daily life. Which may only mean that I circulate within a narrow segment of society! So it’s something that I’m far less conscious of than I would have anticipated before I came to live here. Class was certainly something covered when I was studying social sciences with the Open University back when I first returned to England, so I can’t pretend the whole issue has gone away.

On the other hand, perhaps there is more of a sense of meritocracy these days… Prince William has married a ‘commoner’, and Prince Charles at last married his long-term love, a woman who wasn’t considered ‘high class enough’ for him in his youth. If all goes according to plan, our next two Queens will be women who wouldn’t have made the grade not so long ago. Maybe that all helps take the value judgements out of the class equation.

I think the great inequalities in wealth is more of an issue – but these days it’s not only the upper class who are rich, and the rich certainly don’t include all of the upper class. I think that’s where the divide is now. 

AB: Did you consciously have to pace the book at a different tempo and wrap it in different colours or does that come naturally when living in a different country?

JB: It’s interesting that you mention the tempo and the colours in this regard, as they are certainly things I’m aware of as being different between the two countries. However, I can’t say that I was overly conscious of this. It’s more instinctive than that, I suspect. It was a part of the process of thinking/feeling my way into a new setting and a new part of the overall story.

AB: Now onto the third book. The other type of Dreamtime. What interested you most about Aboriginal mythology?

JB: What interests me most is that it’s a completely different way of thinking about the world and about time. It’s so very different that it’s a real struggle to even describe that difference in the English language – and despite much mental wrestling, I am sure I don’t entirely grasp it even now. My main character Dave Taylor is likewise interested and he tries to understand, but he’s very aware that he is often seeing things through a ‘white fella’ filter. An element of a Dreaming ‘story’ will make logical sense to him in terms of how the Western society views the world and its history – but he tries to always remember that this is only his interpretation, and it’s not the reality from an Indigenous Australian point of view.

I hope that I have done some justice to this in my story. I certainly approached the whole issue with every last ounce of respect in me. 

AB: Where did you get your information from, because it’s not something you can just Google?

JB: I have been reading books – though probably never enough! The Indigenous culture was (and still primarily is) oral, and many of the books I have read are very much trying to understand that culture from a Western perspective. There is one book in particular that very much focuses on trying to bring the genuine stories into the modern-day written culture, trying to expand the oral into the written. The book is Australian Dreaming, compiled and edited by Jennifer Isaacs, and produced with the assistance of the Australia Council’s Aboriginal Arts Board. That has been very useful, though unfortunately I feel the idiosyncratic voices of the storytellers have been lost in ‘translating’ them into ‘proper’ English.

I am also a member of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia, and their journals and conference proceedings often include material on the Indigenous culture, and the Western relationship with it, so that has been a good source of thoughtful and challenging perspectives over the years.

I can’t claim to have very much direct personal experience, but I must give a shout out to my parents. When we first emigrated from England to Australia, they were very conscious of Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, and deliberately set out to educate themselves and us. We had items such as clapsticks in our lounge room, and not just for decoration. An aunt and uncle also worked on a mission in West Australia. We weren’t allowed to forget or overlook our fellow Australians, and those who had arrived a long time before us. 

AB: Why butterflies?

JB: Well, to answer for myself, it all comes down to a random comment from a reader on Goodreads, who kindly said I could write about two guys chasing butterflies, and she’d still read it. She meant it as an example of an unlikely subject for dramatic treatment. My Muse decided to take her seriously.

The question then became why Nicholas would be so interested in butterflies. Anyone who has read the first book will remember there are two answers. One is that the transformations undergone by butterflies – from egg to larva to pupa to fabulous adult – are equated to him coming out, not just as a gay man but also as the person he most wants to be. The second answer is related to the first, in that he’s very aware of the short lifespan given to adult butterflies, and that relates to the fact that his health means he might not survive for his allotted ‘three score and ten’. He might finally, truly emerge from his chrysalis, only to find that his days are numbered.

In relation to this last book, I think there is a third answer, and that is (as expressed so eloquently by Sting), “Lest we forget how fragile we are.” 

AB: A lot of Aussies never step outside the cities or travel west of the Sandstone Wall (aka The Great Dividing Range). Did you spend much time in the Outback?

JB: One of my formative experiences was a long camping trip through Australia when I was eleven. An extended family group, including my parents and me and my sister, travelled west to Adelaide and then up through Coober Pedy to Alice Springs. We’d been planning to come back the same way, but unexpected flooding meant we had to continue on north for a way, and then drive back down through Queensland instead. I still have vivid memories of the dawn sky, and the Milky Way at night, and the wide flat landscape, that you’ll recognise in my stories.

I haven’t done anything very similar since, but we lived inland in Canberra, and my mother-in-law lives in western New South Wales, so I suppose I actually spent most of my time on the far side of the Sandstone Wall.

AB: Did you base your characters on anyone in real life? Especially Charlie?

JB: No, I didn’t – though I did ‘cast’ Dave and Nicholas in my head, as that helps me to get to know them in three dimensions, as it were. I did have someone vaguely in mind for how Charlie looks, but basically I made him up as I went, drawing on my reading about Indigenous Aboriginal people and also perhaps on a dash of what a white fella once called Negative Capability. 

AB: I was speaking to an American friend who read your book and she was surprised that Dave never warned Nicholas about snakes and other deadly creepy crawlies? Especially as the guide was so anal about everything else. As she put it: “This is Australia--where everything can kill you. And he doesn't say a peep?”

JB: I should think that Nicholas as a naturalist knows just as well as Dave – perhaps even better! – what the threats are, and what the actual risks are. The risks tend to get exaggerated, when little more than cautious common sense is required. After all, if it were true that ‘everything can kill you’, Australia would be no more successfully settled than Antarctica. I lived in Australia for over thirty years, went camping regularly with my family as a kid, including the long trip through the Outback – and in all that time, I saw one harmless snake in the wild, and one rather sedentary red-back spider. Oh, and a plague of mice, one night outside of Coober Pedy! I do have a horror of crocodiles, but Dave and Nicholas weren’t going anywhere they would be an issue. Dave talked about the safety precautions that were sensible for the sort of areas they were travelling through, and that reflects what I believe to be the realistic approach. 

AB: Were you consciously trying not to make the book too Crocodile Dundee?

JB: The idea didn’t even occur to me, thank god! LOL! No, that’s a fun film, but I wouldn’t have wanted it hanging over my head as either a positive or a negative example.

AB: Family was an important part of Book 2, and the main fly in the ointment in Book 3 is the arrival of Robin on the scene. He had some interesting theories on life and love and celibacy. Was he based on anyone in particular?

JB: No, he wasn’t. Again, I made him up! I was very interested to explore something of another ‘letter’ in the wondrous GLBTQIA quiltbag, and I did some reading and browsing, thinking and mulling… There are a whole spectrum of sexualities, and I am interested in writing beyond the expected – as long as I feel I am simpatico enough to do justice to the characters and their ‘real life’ counterparts.

AB: Another theme that was important in this book is encapsulated in this paragraph: “Things are generally a little more complicated than that,” Nicholas replied in somewhat softer tones. He’d had the mercy to not even glance at Dave through all this. “I think you’ll find … there are infinite varieties of men and women and those in between.”

JB: I’m really glad that idea stood out for you, as it’s something I believe in wholeheartedly. I would like to think that I bring that notion to everything that I write, though I suppose it is more obvious in this story, where Dave and Nicholas have to try to at least accept if not entirely understand an identity and experience that is quite different from their own. 

AB: As befits a story about the Seven Year Itch, in a way “A Thousand Smiles…” is a book about change. Their precious waterhole is threatened. Their relationship is threatened and Nicholas’s health is threatened. Was this a conscious thing?

JB: Interesting question! I never consciously put it that way to myself, but I suppose it’s inevitable from a storytelling perspective. As the third novel in a trilogy, it feels right to challenge or threaten each significant aspect of the whole shebang, and see what results. After such a narrative earthquake, as it were, I certainly consider things settled by the end of the story, though, and I hope readers will feel that way, too.

AB: There are times in the last book when the outside world intrudes, threatening the waterhole. How do you explain what protects it?

JB: This is the ‘mystical’ element of the story, that runs through all three books, which can’t be explained away with science and logic. I’ve made my ideas of what was going on a little more explicit in this book, but still it’s up to the reader to really interpret it. I am a pretty sceptical person, and an ardent atheist, but for some reason my writing tends to include hints of ‘more things in heaven and earth’. Maybe I just wish there were. But then one of the aspects of this story that interests me is having Dave, a sceptic and atheist like me, thrown into the midst of a situation where there really might be something more going on.

May I finish by saying, AB, that I really appreciate all the careful thought and analysis you put into these questions. It is rare to have romance novels treated as respectfully or seriously as other literary work, and I am very grateful. It is delightfully affirming! 

Buy links:

• Manifold Press
• Amazon US
• Amazon UK
• Smashwords
• CreateSpace

Author's bio: Julie Bozza is an English-Australian hybrid who is fuelled by espresso, calmed by knitting, unreasonably excited by photography, and madly in love with Colin Morgan and John Keats.

Author's links:

• Julie's blog
• Goodreads
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LiveJournal

Next week, I'm pleased to announce that I will be chatting to Julie Bozza about her new book, "The Thousand Smiles of Nicholas Goring" which wraps up her fabulous Butterfly Hunter series. She will also be giving away a copy to one lucky commentator.

In the meantime, you might like to catch up with the last interview I did with her. You can read it here.

And the book which will be released on Nov 1st can be
pre-ordered from Amazon by clicking here.

AB: On this topic, I found one statement you made recently intriguing because it points at the argument about difference from another angle. In your Goodreads review of Gillian Flynn’s novel, “Gone Girl”, you stated: “This is probably the most heterosexual book I’ve read in a long time. Not because I don’t read books about straight people, I do. No, this is a true battle of the sexes. And they battle in a way that queer people just don’t.” Can you elaborate on this point? What do you see as the difference between how the two types of couples battle? Or were you referring to other things?

MT: I just saw the movie this week. Flynn got to do the screenplay and I think did a great job. Being familiar with the story I was very aware of the number of times the dialogue was about the roles that men and women play for each other. Everyone in our society is subtly pressured to adopt the characteristics of not just their sex but also whatever role they’ve assumed in relationship to their gender (ie Mom, Dad, Husband, Wife). If you’re queer you are inherently unable to fulfill those social norms. Consequently, you choose amongst them. Some men choose a heightened version of masculinity (i.e. leather) while others are very effeminate. Most of us land somewhere in between.

What “Gone Girl” does really well is take a common experience and heighten it to high drama. Most of us, regardless of sexuality, know what society expects of a good husband and a good wife. It would be extraordinarily challenging to create the same experience in a gay thriller. Even if there were a solid social understanding of what a gay man should be (which I don’t think there is yet) you’d still have two people reacting to the same social pressures.    

AB: Do you feel that the fact that it is two men introduces different stresses on a relationship? For example. Each worried about losing their independence when they move in together or not having the glue of raising a family to tie them together?

MT: For me, one of the great joys of being gay has been the ability to disregard social norms. There was never a way to fit society’s expectations, so I could simply ignore them. (I’m not so sure this is as true for younger queers – I do see increasing social expectations for young gay men and women.) Over the years, I think the most successful gay couples I’ve met avoid fitting themselves into rigid roles. Those who do play roles have adapted them from the heterosexual world and so ultimately they have no real relevance to the relationship, and thereby don’t function well.

AB: Another statement you made in that blog on categorisation was: “Typically, gay men have the ability to separate love and sex. They can pursue both at the same time and in completely different directions. Typically, straight women view sex and love as intermingled.” Now that marriage and surrogacy is legal in many places, do you see gay men’s expectations on love, sex and fidelity changing over time? Is it a generational thing?

MT: I see an enormous amount of pressure in the gay community to adopt traditional (heterosexual-style) patterns. A decision was made in the US to pursue marriage rather than full equal rights (which would have included marriage, of course) by the larger queer organizations. This means that our community has been packaging itself for heterosexual consumption for more than a decade. The message to the heterosexual world has been “we’re just like you.” I wouldn’t say that it’s a completely true message—nor one that is completely false—it’s simply that individual behavior is much more nuanced. Statistically, men are more likely to cheat during marriage than women. Something like 25 percent of straight men cheat. Assuming that a similar number of gay men will cheat then you have a very high likelihood that a gay relationship will encounter infidelity along the way. Clearly, there’s a benefit to continuing the tradition of non-monogamous relationship (for some – it does not fit everyone) within the gay community.

Please note the word typically in the quote, used twice. I’ve wrangled on line with guys who feel the opposite based on their view of the world. These are broad generalizations. I don’t feel that anyone should be pressured to live in any specific way whatever their sexuality. People should be encouraged to find their authentic selves without considering social norms.

AB: In the past, you’ve done a few fabulous interviews, so rather than re-hashing the contents, I’ll link so readers who want to read more about that topic can. For example, in your interview with EDGE, which gives a fascinating insight into the background of your Nick Nowak novels, you stated: “I have an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA and spent about a decade writing spec scripts.” Has this helped you build your plots and the descriptions of characters and sets or have you found yourself having to write differently?

MT: The education I got at UCLA was focused very much on commercial story. It was an amazing education and I loved every minute of being there (it also happens to be one of the most beautiful campuses in the world). The primary effect it has had on my fiction though has been length. We wrote a screenplay every ten weeks. Even when I write a book I write short and fast. Luckily, short books are preferred in the mystery genre so that works out. It’s very unlikely that I’ll come out with a book of more than a hundred thousand words.

AB: When you write, do you see your stories as possible movies? And are your still writing screenplays?

MT: No. I don’t. A film is told primarily in situation (visuals, dialogue, music all combine to show that situation). One situation leads to another. Creating the story. Novels are told in a character’s mental and emotional journey. The movement rests on how a character understands one situation, then the next, then the next.

I did write a screenplay last year, but it was primarily to impress a guy. I don’t have plans to write anymore at the moment.

AB: The city of Chicago has ended up being one of the most colorful “characters” in your Boystown series. It influences the mood just as much as the action and the characters do. I gather you now live in California. Can you see yourself ever writing a series based there?

MT: I have written several books set here (“Desert Run,” “Full Release,” “My Favorite Uncle” and the beginning of “The Ghost Slept Over.”) But a series, I’m not so sure. My pantheon of favorite mystery writers Joseph Hansen, Michael Nava, John Morgan Wilson, Michael Connelly, and Sue Grafton all write mysteries set in California. I’ve probably stolen enough from them already without setting a series here. 

AB: Speaking of Full Release, I gather you have the rights back to some of your earlier stories and a new version of Full Release (with new cover and my review) is available on Amazon. Are there any others in the pipeline?

MT: Yes, when my books reach the end of their contracts I’ve begun publishing new editions with some light editing. The second edition of Desert Run should be out in a few weeks. 

AB: In that same review you did on “Gone Girl” you stated: “The thing I like about writing mysteries is that you can write about anything that interests you as long as you wrap it in compelling mystery plot.” The overarching world of your Boystown mysteries is the AIDS epidemic. Personally, I love that aspect of the stories as it serves as a record of the progression of the impact on the gay community.

Too often people just see the end point and forget about the different stages that people went through. I’d forgotten it was known as GRID initially. One of the things, I particularly enjoyed about Boystown 6 was the varied way the characters dealt with the issue. Some went back into the closet, some died, some were fatalistic. It must have been a horrible time to live through. Is it painful for you, personally, to write about this topic?

MT: I wouldn’t say painful, no. I would say it puts a point to pain. Writing about that period makes sense of the pain and thus relieves it. Much of the AIDS literature of the late ‘80s and ‘90s was basically a call to arms or a cry for help. It was vitally important to let as many people know what was happening as possible and the best of the books from that period serve that purpose well. Writing about AIDS now, decades later, has a very different purpose. I can write about people’s fears, their bravery, their failings, their denial. At this point in time, I think what is most interesting about the disease is the humanity of peoples’ reactions which I think is universal.

MT: Yes, those attitudes do and will influence the work I choose to do in the future. But I don’t want to think too directly about it. I try to avoid writing about anything too polemic. It’s best to just let that stuff seep in without conscious thought.

AB: At another point on the categorization interview you stated: “I believe the distinction between gay fiction and m/m is vitally important….. Because readers don’t sort it out. A hardcore romance junkie gets her hands on a piece of gay fiction and she’s angry and often very vocal. She gets on Goodreads or Amazon and she bashes the book strictly on the basis that it was an m/m romance. It doesn’t help the author, it doesn’t help the publisher and it doesn’t help other readers who might not pick up on why the book is being bashed and just think it’s bad. (To be fair, this reader may have gotten a gay fiction book from an m/m publisher. These publishers are, commendably I think, putting out a small amount of gay fiction. Typically, though, they’re not distinguishing it well from their other product.)” I blogged on this subject in March this year. And later this month (October 2014) Dreamspinner is launching a new line: DSP Publications… a boutique publisher of historical, science fiction, fantasy, mystery/suspense, horror, and spiritual fiction. I gather that they are re-badging some of their current titles which don’t fit comfortably under the MM romance umbrella to start with, do you see this as a healthy trend?

MT: There are still publishers who focus on gay fiction outside of the MM world. Wisconsin Press comes to mind. Some of the majors will occasionally publish gay fiction in a small way. Kensington, Cleis (who you mention in your blog.) Within, or connected to the MM world, MLR has a strong commitment to gay fiction particularly gay mystery, Wilde City is publishing a lot of gay fiction and separating it from gay romance on their website. There’s also Riverdale Avenue, which does publish gay books but is more focused on non-fiction at the moment. There are probably more, these are just what came to mind. Dreamspinner’s decision to launch a new non-romance line corresponds to something I’ve felt for a while – and certainly experienced – a decent sized segment of MM readers are interested in gay fiction. That audience isn’t necessarily looking at the publishers I mentioned above – or sourcing their books in a more generalized way - but they will look at books brought out by Dreamspinner under a different name. So, it’s definitely a good thing.

AB: During our pre-interview chat, you mentioned that even though you don’t write MM romance, the majority of your readers are women and, in your experience, a lot of gay males don’t read anything. Some complain that they can’t find the books and you noted your print books sell well to guys at conventions and Pride parades, can you see any way to increase your readership in this sector of the community?

MT: I wish I had a good answer to this question. I mean, I really wish I did, because then I’d be able to reach a larger audience. Despite being a finalist in the Lambda awards twice, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting any notice in what you’d call the gay press (other than Edge where they’ve been very, very nice to me). It might be that some publications take a look at where I publish and discount me because they assume I’m a romance writer, but it might also be that these publications simply won’t write about books unless its someone as well known as Armistead Maupin (who of course began when these same publications would actually write about gay writers.)

AB: You also stated in another blog about the show “Looking” that: “The gay community does a crap job of supporting its own artists, whether it’s musicians or actors or filmmakers or writers the gay community would rather trample over them on its way to supporting this year’s pop diva or some straight guy who can’t manage to keep his shirt on then support its own artists.” Does this upset you?

MT: LOL. Reading the line again I have to say, yes, clearly it upsets me. It’s there in the tone. I do understand that media outlets are supported by advertising so it’s about eyeballs. And eyeballs don’t actually have a sexuality. I suspect that, online at least, a lot of traffic on “gay” sites is outside the queer community. Additionally, I think a lot of gay-oriented websites don’t consider themselves to be in competition with each other but rather with other “entertainment” sites. All the “entertainment” sites tend to gravitate to the same stories regardless of how they brand themselves.

It is really unfortunate that there isn’t a supportive gay press. It damages our community in so many ways. But it’s probably too much to expect advertiser-based media to care about that. It may sound like I’m just speculating but a few years back I complained to what was then After Elton (and is now a kind of de-gayed site) that they no longer reviewed gay books. I was specifically told that book reviews didn’t get enough eyeballs to justify doing them. This, of course, was after the site had been purchased by a conglomerate. Eyeballs had become more important than content.

AB: Now to skip back to your review of “Gone Girl” you also stated: “I notice a lot of people don't like the ending. That’s interesting. The ending made the book for me.” I don’t want to spoil the ending, but many critics of the story were upset that all the female characters were portrayed negatively. This is a common criticism with some reviewers immediately scoring a book down if there is a “bitch” present, yet these people exist in real life. How do you handle “unlikeable” characters or characters who are bitches or bastards?

MT: I adore evil characters. I particularly adore evil women (in stories, I don’t much like them in RL). Culturally, and I think this is still true, women are perceived as weak, harmless creatures. I think it’s pleasurable to see that (often incorrect) stereotype turned on its head.

In one of the Boystown books Nick says, “Nice people always make me want to do bad things.” I think he and I have that in common. I’ve tried to write characters who are simply “nice” and I’m bored by the end of the first chapter.

AB: I have found that some readers almost keep a score sheet on characters, feeling they have to get their comeuppance, perhaps because they lack that power in real life. How do you feel when readers dislike your characters?

MT: The best advice I can give any new writer is to write a book you really like. You’re going to have to read it over and over so if you’re not absolutely in love with it your book it will be a painful process. So, it is unpleasant when people dislike characters I like. (I do sometimes write characters I want readers to dislike.) But you can’t please everyone. Here’s one of my tricks in dealing with Goodreads. When a reader doesn’t like one of my books or one of my characters, I’ll look at what books they do like and pretty much every time I find myself looking at a list of books I either hated or would never pick up. I do often wonder why they bothered with me – which perhaps is part of why I’m very focused on genres.

Now for the opposite end of the spectrum.
Perhaps it's strange to only review the last book of a series, as all the preceding books are just as good. However, my advice is to read them all - in order - as they give a great picture of living through this important part of gay history, from the first book to where there are only the first inklings that a common illness is killing gay men to the latest, where the consequences of this virus are being felt closer to home.

Keep tuned for an upcoming interview with Marshall where I will ask him all sorts of questions about writing, living in Chicago and whatever else I can twist his arm to reveal.

AB: What is it about poetry that appeals to you, as distinct from writing an essay on a subject?

JM: I love the concise intensity and music of poems.  A good poem is efficient.  Within a relatively small number of lines, it can have a big emotional impact on a willing reader.  If fiction is about character and plot, and essays are about the intersections of personal experience and reflection, poems are ideally—for me at least—about deep feeling and the sensuous details of life in the physical world.

Thanks for the comment about my poems being readable, especially out loud.  I write them to be read out loud, and I have a passionate detestation for so much contemporary poetry that seems to bend over backward to exclude readers.  Some poets lauded by Academia these days seem to regard lucid meaning as old-fashioned.  I have absolutely no use for those folks.  That sort of “poetry” is elitist experimentation at its worst, what I contemptuously call “dicking around with language.” It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

AB: You often refer to the fact that Joni Mitchell and country singers are a constant source of enjoyment and inspiration. Is it the words or the music?

JM: With Joni Mitchell, it’s the words, for the most part.  Several of her CD’s—especially Blue, For the Roses, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Night Ride Home, and Hejira (my favorite CD of all time)—are full of top-notch poetry.  On the other hand, Mitchell’s music is amazingly unique.  When I was a young man, I taught myself to play piano, guitar, and Appalachian dulcimer just so that I could play her music.  Lately, I bought a book I’ve waited decades for, Joni Mitchell Complete So Far…, a songbook that contains all her exotic guitar tunings, plus last autumn I bought my husbear, John, a digital piano (or “pie-anner,” as I like to call it), so our household has been especially musical over the last few months.

I have a complicated relationship with American country music.  Much of the inspiration I get from male country music singers is purely erotic, since I find so many of them hot as hell, and I’ll confess that I’ve worked three or four or five or six of them (I’ve lost count) into my erotic fiction in thinly veiled ways.  Writing erotica is a fine way to abduct a man without going to prison. 

As for the music itself, I like the ways a lot of it incorporates elements of American folk music (much of that influenced by the heritage of the British Isles).  Since I grew up in the mountains of southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia and have spent all of my adult life in Appalachia (except for the occasional vacation), I also appreciate the ways it celebrates small-town, rural, and working-class life.  As a liberal, however, I’m much less pleased by the conservative religion and politics some country music expresses.  

Which brings us on to Romance:

Poems are often seen as being romantic, Shakespeare’s sonnets being a classic example. Yet one of the most common criticisms female readers aim at male writers of mm romance is that their stories lack romance. Now you freely admit to being a romantic, reading poems to a lover in bed, writing them poems. In fact your autobiography, “Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear” has 45 words based on that theme.

AB: How important is romance to you? Has your need for it or definition of it changed over time?

JM: A year or so back, I actually published an essay called “Romantic” in Who’s Yer Daddy?:  Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, an anthology that recently won a Lambda Literary award.  In that essay, I listed some of the qualities that, according to The Norton Anthology of English Literature:  The Major Authors, define literary romanticism:  a love of history, the supernatural, and the Gothic; a defiant individualism; a dedication to the natural world; an emphasis on powerful feeling and lyrical autobiography; and a fascination with the local, the rural, the regional, and the commonplace.  Those traits certainly still sum up my personality and my writing.

Then there’s the colloquial definition of romance and the romantic, as in “romantic weekend,” “romantic evening,” etc.  I was on fire with high hopes of romance when I was young and single.  Those early fictions that I devoured in my youth--Wuthering Heights, Dark Shadows, Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner and The Fancy Dancer—certainly stoked in me grand dreams of all-consuming and mutual passion (sort of like Madame Bovary reading novels and becoming infected with unrealistic expectations).

Let’s just say that I am much less romantic now.  A lot of romance is based on illusion and novelty.  From what I’ve observed, both aging and long-term relationships make folks less romantic and more realistic, more practical.  This, like bodily mortality, is a sad and inescapable fact. 

AB:  Your long-term partner, John, ensured your fortieth birthday was memorable by booking you into a suite at Key West and laying on the luxury. Is that your definition of romance?

JM: That was romantic, yes.  He and I are both big fans of bodily comforts, most especially good food and drink and the occasional vacation.  Those shared traits have helped keep us together.

AB: Do you think that men see romance differently from women?

JM: Hmmm, I’m not sure there.  Perhaps many women are brought up to expect great romance in a way that many men are not?  Or to devote themselves to their mates in ways that men are not?

AB: You noted a curious emptiness once you found your mate: “Perhaps that was what was ending, the romantic illusion that touching another man’s body, the right man’s body, might leave me entirely changed, transcendent. Now, for all intents and purposes married, my romantic quest fulfilled, the sole element my life seemed to lack was longing.” As a young man you were inspired by the tortured lovers, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, the characters in the Gothic TV show “Dark Shadows.” Is having a Happy Ever After a two edged sword?

JM: Most definitely.  I’m a very passionate person and a lover of violent intensity, and neither passion nor intensity is easy to experience in the midst of routine.  I think one of the reasons I write fiction is to re-experience fervid passion through my characters.

Let’s talk about love. Particularly love between two men.

The first writing of yours I read was an essay in Paul Alan Fahey’s anthology about infidelity: “The Other Man” which revolves around you being the other man and your love affair with Thomas who you later described in “Edge” as: “Charming, sexy, and charismatic, Thomas deftly played me for a fool, occasionally meeting me for adulterous weekends when his lover was out of town, keeping the fishhook firmly wedged in my palate by professing his love for me. When it finally becomes clear to me that Thomas will not leave his lover, that, despite his protestations of love, I am only a dalliance, I break off the affair….My first response to what feels like monumental failure is self-hatred and a sense of my own inadequacy.”

This episode in your life prompted a lot of your writing, for which the literary world is very grateful, but it seems to have exacted a heavy toll: “By the time I got to Brighton with twenty Study Abroad students, I was half-hysterical with longing, sick of being The Other Man, sick of being single. Prematurely bitter and weary, I was well aware that my youth and my chances were rapidly running out.” The killer must have been when he broke off with his long-term partner and promptly took up with another man.

AB: Looking back today from the position of a steady relationship, do you have any regrets?  Is monogamy an unreal expectation in gay relationships?

JM: I regret that the deepest passions I felt were for men who were not good for me or who did not return my depth of feeling.  That has been my greatest character flaw, albeit one I had absolutely no control over.  My heart betrayed me again and again.  Those bitter experiences were indeed artistically productive, so there’s that silver lining, at least.

Monogamy, well, I think it works well for some people, and it works not very well at all for many, many, many more people.  I have no use for it myself.  When I was single, I thought I’d be romantic, monogamous, and domestic if I ever met a man who wanted to share a life with me.  I was wrong on all three counts…though I guess I’m pretty domestic when it comes to cooking, since, on my father’s side of the family, I come from a long line of country cooks.

AB: “For the next twenty years, I was to yearn for an affair as ardor-drenched and devoted as those Warren and Brontë depicted.” Your students think differently as you also despaired after teaching a class of “uncomprehending youths, these children who were telling us that romantic devotion, the fuel for so much of the world’s greatest literature, was simply impractical and insane.” Why do you think this decline in longing for intensity has happened?

JM: Good question.  Longing and intensity are about focus, and thanks to all the damned electronic gadgets that people of all ages are addicted to these days, focus seems more and more shot to hell.  With so many distractions and opportunities for entertainment, erotic and otherwise, perhaps many of us are losing the capacity for depth, obsession, and passion.  Can you see Heathcliff, spurned by Catherine, flipping open his iPhone and looking for another beauty in the general vicinity of Wuthering Heights?  Would I have fixated so madly on Thomas if I’d had access to flirtations via the Internet or phone apps?  If I hadn’t been so starved for erotic experience and love because I was shy and far from the centers of gay life?  I don’t know.

Okay, let’s morph into your interest in leather and other kinky sex.

AB: How do you equate love and romance with your other passion: gagging a man, tying him up and beating him before fucking him silly?

JM: Well, I mentioned intensity before.  Rough sex is intense.  Therefore, for me, it’s a form of romance, yes.  A kind of reverential poetry.  Plus power inequality is romantic:  one strong man who overpowers and possesses another.  And the trust element—“You’re going to surrender your body to me, allow yourself to be put in a position of powerlessness because you trust me”—I think that’s hellaciously romantic.

AB: I worry that many readers of “MM Romance” miss out by demanding there be monogamous romance in every story without understanding that love can be powerful without the traditional hetero-normative trappings. Your novel “Fog” which involves a kidnapping could in no way be seen as a traditional romance and isn’t meant to be, but the characters do fall in love. This kidnapping theme is visited in a few of your essays.  Do you still have fantasies about capturing someone against their will and having them fall in love with you?

JM: I have abduction fantasies all the time, though at this point they’re all about lust, not love.  I had one last night, in fact, about a young man I saw in a wine store a few days ago.  Why?  Because, as discussed above, I find power inequality hugely arousing.  Because, even at age fifty-four, I have an above-average sex drive, which means I find myself strongly attracted to men almost every time I leave the house:  in the wine store, on campus, in the grocery store, on the biking trail.  Because, due to the low percentage of queer folks (the latest statistic I’ve seen:  something like 3-5 % of Americans identify as LGBT), the likelihood that one of those men might want me in return is next to nothing, especially in the rural/small-town areas where I feel at home.  Because, at this age, I find myself almost always attracted to men significantly younger than I, and I know that, even if they were gay, very few of them would be interested in a gray-bearded Daddybear or want to share a Daddy/boy or leather Top/bottom scene.  In other words, almost all of the men I encounter in my daily life whom I would like to ravish would very much not be willing or interested.  Over the decades, this realization has eroticized forced sex:  kidnappings, abductions, etc.  Since I’m not a psychopath, since I have no interest in hurting or traumatizing anyone…or going to prison…then consensual BDSM (the possibilities of which are receding each passing year) and the writing of erotic fiction are my only outlets.  Forced “noncon” or “dubcon” sex (funny little words I encountered on the Internet, standing respectively for nonconsensual sex and sex in which the consent is dubious) isn’t politically correct, certainly.  I don’t care.  I can no more police my erotic responses than anyone else.  I’m just lucky in that I can create fictional worlds like Fog in which I can kidnap and ravish a man…or vampire fiction like Desire and Devour, where I can not only ravish men I want but I can slaughter my enemies without consequence.

AB: “A History of Barbed Wire” deals with a number of stories about BDSM. I sometimes wonder whether the total concentration on another person and the fact they have to be totally honest about how they are feeling is what makes this appealing. We are so used to hiding or not taught how to express ourselves that sometimes it takes the intensity of a scene to break down those barriers. Is it this intensity that appeals to you? Could you really imagine this being achievable in a 24/7 relationship? Or is BDSM more a rich dessert to be indulged in every now and then but not sustainable as our only diet? Do the troughs and plateaus of a stable, happy everyday life help you appreciate the heights reached?

JM: When I was a kid and helping my father doing this or that country chore—gathering and chopping wood, weeding the vegetable garden, making maple syrup—and I’d complain about the labor involved, he’d point out that rest never feels better than after hard work, just as good food tastes better when you’ve worked up a real appetite.  The same with erotic experience.  When I was single, my erotic outlets were few and far between, so leather sex—well, sex of any kind—was treasured and precious.  Now that I’m in a long-term relationship with someone who doesn’t share my passion for kink, BDSM remains a luxury that I only rarely get to experience.  That’s frustrating, but it also makes the infrequent leather scene especially longed for and especially intense when it’s finally savored.  Nothing like going to the table hungry, to use the gastronomic terminology above.

Oddly, most of the leather guys I’ve played with are, like me, in stable relationships with men who aren’t into the BDSM scene.  I don’t know why those “mixed marriages,” so to speak, are so common.  Maybe that’s not true in urban areas, where there are so many more people and thus more choice in terms of dating and choosing a mate. Surely there are Top/bottom couples somewhere—say in the San Francisco Bay Area?—who are sharing regular leather sex?  I hope so.  I want that kind of life, the next time I’m reincarnated.  As it is, my attachment to my home region of Appalachia has limited my options mightily.

AB: Lately I’ve heard of people having their jobs threatened simply because they are in the BDSM scene. Is this another barrier to break down?

Yes, indeed.  One’s erotic predilections have nothing to do with one’s job efficiency.  Sounds like more puritanical prejudice.  The folks who fired those people should be “lashed until they drop,” to borrow a phrase from A Confederacy of Dunces.  It’s a dirty job, but I’d be glad to do it.

AB: Because of your job, have you ever been tempted to write under another name?

JM: I have.  Because I’m a university professor who teaches creative writing and who now directs Virginia Tech’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, it sometimes feels risky to publish material that’s so frankly erotic, especially when it deals with BDSM.  I get the distinct impression that my honesty in that regard has handicapped me in many ways.  Perhaps I’m mistaken or over-sensitive, but it seems to me that my publications are ignored or dismissed by most of my university colleagues and by the mainstream creative writing world. 

Even in the subcultures about which I write, I’m too country for a lot of LGBT critics, and too queer or erotic for a lot of Appalachian Studies folks, so the very niche that I’ve successfully filled—Appalachian/gay/erotic—has limited my readership and my exposure.  Plus many critics seem to feel that any work that is profoundly erotic, no matter how well written, can’t have literary merit.  It’s “just erotica,” or, worse, to use the word a colleague of mine used when I went up for Associate Professor, “porn.” 

So I’ve paid for my honesty, or so it feels to me, in all sorts of ways.  Do I wish I’d hid behind a pseudonym?  Abso-fucking-lutely not.  Using another name would have felt like cowardice to me.  Other writers are welcome to use pseudonyms, and that’s their business, and I don’t judge them, not one bit.  But for me…if my publications are about anything, they’re about creative freedom and honest expression and being true to your feelings and your self, and the world be damned.

The third interest you mention in the original quote was Vampires.

I gather you’ve identified with these in many ways since childhood, especially while growing up closeted. “To lie in the dark, thirsting, powerless to appease that thirst. To know that most objects of that thirst would regard me with fear and hatred. To realize that my life, celibate and gay in a small university town, feels like a chained coffin.” Yet you also recognize in them this obsession with chasing their victims: “Like the vampire’s, my appetite is not concerned with morality. Rather, …. I am interested in touching beauty and feeling as deeply as I can before I die. I have been trapped half-dead in that coffin for years, Thomas has snapped the chains, and my hunger has emerged red-eyed and ravenous.”

AB: Vampires star in “Desire and Devour, Stories of Blood and Sweat” which also brings in a number of other themes from your memoirs: your Celtic roots, travels to Europe. Is it a break from reality? “reality has become decidedly unaccommodating: too restrictive of my passions, in need of constant imaginative revision. More and more, my writing, poetry and prose, edges toward wish fulfillment. More and more, fantasy has become significantly more appealing, a space with much more room for my loves and hates, much more room to swing a sword.” The modern generation won’t accept a tortured human, Heathcliff, so why do they accept the tortured heroes of “Twilight”?

JM: I don’t understand the Twilight enthusiasm, though I do get snarly when folks who hear about my vampire stories accuse me of jumping on the contemporary craze for fictional bloodsuckers.  I always respond by pointing out that I’ve been into vampires since the late 1960’s, when I first started watching Dark Shadows. 

One student in a Virginia Tech creative writing class I visited once gently accused me of “selling out” when I said I’d gotten an advance for my very first vampire fiction (my very first fiction, actually), Devoured, a novella in 2003’s Masters of Midnight:  Erotic Tales of the Vampire.  “Selling out” meant, I assume, writing something for money.  I’ve never written a word just for money.  Royalties are nice, but I write for the challenge and the fun of it, for the relief that creative expression gives me.  After all, I started out as a poet.  No one writes poetry for the money, because poetry doesn’t sell well.  I once received a 62-cent royalty check for my first full-length poetry collection, Bones Washed with Wine.

Sorry.  Back to vampires.  As should be clear by now, I’m a man of intense passions, loves and hates, and the contemporary world of law and order trammels me considerably.  I’ve always resented the limitations and weaknesses of being human, and I’ve always craved power:  the power to take what I want, to avenge slights, to protect those whom I consider members of my clan.  Vampire fiction, at least vicariously, gives me that power, the power to wreak my will upon the world. 

One of the epigraphs I used for Devoured was a quotation from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, a book I found revelatory:  “it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction…of powerful instincts.  This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings.”  No shit!

In the dedication to Devoured, I thank Andrew Beierle, a fellow writer who arranged for me to be part of Masters of Midnight, for giving me “the opportunity to recreate the world and thus ease my cultural frustration.”  So there you go.  I suffer a high level of frustration, due to the conflicts between my “powerful instincts” and the demands of a civilized façade.  Writing eases that frustration in harmless ways.

AB: Can we expect more paranormal themes in your stories?

JM: At some point, I’m hoping that Lethe Press, the wonderful folks who’ve published most of my work in the last six years, will issue a collection of my paranormal stories.  In assorted anthologies, I’ve published a Civil War ghost story, three paranormal Viking stories, a couple of Celtic-themed stories set in the British Isles, a time-travel tale set during the Trojan War, and a vampire story in Steve Berman’s Suffered from the Night:  Queering Bram Stoker’s Dracula. 

This summer, after finishing a crime/erotic thriller/suspense novella, tentatively titled Carpetbagger, I’m planning to write a full-length novel focusing on my ongoing vampire character, Derek Maclaine, as he takes on the demonic coal companies in West Virginia.

Paganism is next

AB; You describe yourself as a Wiccan. I must admit ignorance of what the term meant before “Loving Mountains. Loving Men” enlightened me. I had assumed it was all about witches and spells and worshipping nature. Is it a case of giving something a name causes the problem? In this world where being an environmentalist is accepted, couldn’t you just say you love and respect nature? Or do you like that label?

JM: There’s a difference between loving and respecting nature and locating divinity in it.  Let me explain. 

My partner and I are both good cooks, and we love to eat, and we’re always trying to lose weight, so in the last few months John’s taken to regular jogging on the nearby New River Trail, which leads through woodland for miles and miles.  For a while, I walked on the trail while he jogged, but that didn’t seem to be doing much, so then I started biking pretty strenuously (strenuous for a sedentary academic), about eight miles every other day.  The route I take, from Pulaski, Virginia, where we live, to Draper, Virginia, just around the mountain, is a green tunnel through thick vegetation this time of year (June 2014).  When I’m out there, by myself, whizzing past blooming honeysuckle and multiflora rose, past rabbits and birds, that’s where I feel deity most clearly, in particular the Horned Gods of the wild, the Celtic Cernunnos and the Greek Pan.  That’s more than enthusiastic environmentalism.  That’s spirituality.  In the stone circles of Europe—Stonehenge, the Standing Stones of Callanish, the circles on Mainland Orkney—and in the Appalachian woods, that’s where I feel God/dess most strongly. 

And in thunderstorms, since Thor is another patron deity of mine.  Up until about ten years ago, I was focused on Celtic pantheons, since I have Scots and Irish blood in me, but then, around 2002, I started delving into Viking mythology and Icelandic sages.  I’ve since expanded into an enthusiasm for Norse deities, as reflected in my third poetry collection, Ash:  Poems from Norse Mythology, and my latest novella, The Saga of Einar and Gisli (included in On the Run:  Tales of Gay Pursuit and Passion, edited by Jerry L. Wheeler and published by Wilde City Press).  Those Northern European gods and goddesses are also appropriate for my bloodlines, since I’m an Appalachian mutt who has English (Anglo-Saxon) and German ancestry as well as Celtic.

Here are a couple more labels that cause you concern but also give you pride: Appalachia and bears. These are the themes of your latest novel, “Cub” a lovely novel about a young boy growing up in the mountains of West Virginia, feeling totally alienated from everyone until he meets another boy who shares his interest.

AB: After reading stories of your own youth in “Edge” and “Loving Mountains, Loving Men”, I can see many situations are reflected even if they are fabrications. Would this have been what you wished your early years were like?

JM: I certainly would have wished for a passionate and loving relationship with a boy as sexy as Mike Woodson, Cub’s love interest, that’s for sure.  Cub’s an odd amalgam.  It’s autobiographical in that almost all of the characters in the novel are based on real people, and all the settings are real places too, but in another respect it’s not autobiographical at all, because the plot is 95% fictional.  None of those things happened to me, except for my grief when a lesbian couple I knew broke up, and I went to Morgantown to visit them after the break-up.

AB: It’s interesting how at first you hated living in the wilds of West Virginia and couldn’t wait to get out and now you are a strong advocate of everything Appalachian and even teach Appalachian studies.  Why does stereotyping prevail in this age of the internet? Why do people fear difference instead of celebrating it?

JM: I think the fear of difference works almost at a genetic level, which would make sense in primitive tribal times, when other tribes could be dangerous.  From that genetic heritage, we get the equation, “Difference equals danger.”  That was probably an accurate assumption several thousand years ago.  Now, in such a globalized world, it’s an instinct that folks still feel but need to ignore in most circumstances.

The stereotyping of Appalachians and Southerners has gone on for a long time, at least since the “local color” literary movement that thrived in the last few decades of the nineteenth century.  Folks like to generalize; they like to pigeonhole.  It makes thinking simpler.  The Internet hasn’t really made a difference.  Popular media often still represent My People as backward rednecks and ignorant, inbred hillbillies.  I resent it; I’m used to it.

AB: “Purgatory” is a gripping tale about the developing love of men on opposing sides set around the Civil War. As a non US citizen, my knowledge of this is based on what I was taught at school and reading, eg “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara. The war was always seen as about abolishing slavery. You see it differently. Why? Even if it didn’t start that way, or for that reason, doesn’t supporting the South’s rebellion now label you as a supporter of slavery? How do you deal with that?

JM: Oh, Lord.  Here we go.  A Rebel rant!  Surely you knew those questions would madden me?

AB: Yes. (smiles)

JM: Most of what I publish is controversial, and my position on the American Civil War—what a lot of white Southerners still call “The War of Northern Aggression” or “The War Between the States”—is probably my most controversial stance.  I regret that, because I don’t like to offend people (unless they’ve insulted me or those I care for, in which case I take deep delight in offending them), but I feel obliged to be honest in all things, political correctness be damned.

Of course I’m not a supporter of slavery.  Yesterday, I visited my sister in West Virginia.  Her husband is black.  Her son is biracial.  The fact that I have black in-laws is a very valuable education for me.  It allows me to see the world in ways that many white people can’t.  I’ve seen the looks of disapproval and hatred that my sister and her husband have gotten as they’ve moved through the world together as an interracial couple.  I’ve heard the story about how my nephew was first called a nigger.  As an Appalachian gay man, I’ve been a member of two minorities all of my life, so I empathize with minorities of all kinds.  And my brother-in-law’s family is part of my extended clan.  When Obama got elected, an event that moved me to tears, I actually joked that my in-laws were finally in the White House.

Were I a white Southerner in 1861, I might have been a supporter of slavery, simply because slavery was taken for granted by many, many people at that time as part of the usual order of things.  As it is, I am a white Southerner who grew up in a region that admired and still admires the Confederate struggle and Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart, and Turner Ashby.  Furthermore, I am the descendant of a Confederate artilleryman, Isaac Green Carden, a fact I am hugely proud of.  I come by my Rebel sympathies naturally. 

At this point I know a good bit about the Civil War simply because I’ve been reading about it pretty constantly since 2008 or so.  Certainly slavery was a huge reason for that war’s inception, but for the common Rebel soldier, most of whom did not own slaves, that war was about a destructive invading army moving into the South, thanks to Abraham Lincoln.  What does a man do when his country is invaded?  He fights.  I am a regionalist with very strong attachments and loyalties, much more so to my region than to my nation.  I have no doubt that I would have done just as most country boys across the South did in the early 1860’s:  I would have put on Rebel gray and tried to kill as many invaders as possible. 

Those Rebel boys believed in the South’s right to secede.  I think they were right.  I grudgingly admire Abraham Lincoln as a man of great conviction, a political genius, but I believe he should have let the South go its own way.  If he had, all those soldiers’ lives would not have been lost, and slavery would have died out anyway.  Many of the Confederacy’s greatest men objected to it and believed it was a dying and unjust archaism.  And Reconstruction would not have poisoned race relations for generations to come. 

As it was, between the extremist abolitionists of the North and the fire-eating secessionists of the South, and Lincoln’s determination to force the Southern states to remain in the Union, the land was a blood-soaked slaughtering ground for four years, and the South--my land, the land that has shaped me in uncounted ways—was physically and economically devastated.

What irks my ass, to use one of many vulgar mountain colloquialisms I’m fond of, is that in many quarters, certainly in academic quarters, talking about the Confederate experience with any sympathy is automatically regarded as backward and racist and not to be tolerated.  Anyone with the gall to admit that he admires Rebel soldiers or sympathizes with the Confederacy runs the risk of being regarded as a stupid redneck, a conservative country hick.  There’s a kind of urbane class contempt.  There’s a kind of silencing. 

Well, my response to attempts to silence me is nearly always a knee-jerk “Fuck all y’all.”  I’m an artist.  I’m less interested in politics than in human emotion, human suffering, and human endurance.  Confederate soldiers and civilians suffered and endured horrible things.  They were human beings just as much as the triumphant Union soldiers and the black slaves.  Why are their stories not to be told?  Why does their suffering not count?

I’m not black, and I’m not a Northerner.  Other people can tell those tales and focus on those aspects of history, and I respect their attempts to do so.  I’m a white Southerner, so it falls to me to honor my ancestors.  I absolutely resist the stupidly simplistic way the Civil War is most often represented these days:  “North = Good.  South = Evil.  Those evil people deserved their suffering.  The right side won.”

There are more thoughtful, nuanced, and complicated ways to look at history.  I visited the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia, a few years back, and they have their exhibits arranged to tell three different stories: the Confederate experience, the Union experience, and the black experience. More recently, that organization has come up with a new logo:  “Confederacy * Union * Freedom.”  There’s the way to tell the story right:  all sides.

I’m about done with this riled-up Rebel tirade, I swear.  Just one more thing.  Many folks don’t understand how close that war still feels, at least to those of us who live in states where Civil War battles occurred.  Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia—the two small mountain towns where I grew up—and Pulaski, Virginia, the small mountain town where I now reside—all have monuments to the Confederate soldier.  My 94-year-old father, when he was a child, he had lunch with his mother’s maternal grandfather, Isaac Green Carden, that Rebel artilleryman I spoke of earlier.  I write this in Pulaski, and about eight miles away is what’s left of the battlefield of Cloyd’s Farm, where a ferocious conflict occurred in May 1864.  I can lie in bed at night and hear trains moving through Pulaski along a rail line the invading Yankees tore up after the Battle of Cloyd’s Farm.  Pulaski lies in the upper part of the Valley of Virginia, the lower part of which was decimated by Philip Sheridan in the fall of 1864.  Ulysses S. Grant had ordered Sheridan to destroy the Valley so thoroughly that “crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender.”  Girls in Edinburg, Virginia, begged Federal soldiers not to burn the mill that was the community’s primary source of livelihood.  Those soldiers doused the fires.

That history shouldn’t be forgotten.  And history feels very close when you live and move amid landscapes where those events occurred.

Speaking of stereotypes and labels, there is growing debate about the way gay men are depicted in MM romance. The popular view is that the main characters have to be “a man”: tall, strong, washboard abs, unemotional, the stereotypical heterosexual romance hero. One well known gay writer, Jeff Erno, has bemoaned the fact that when he depicts men like himself: small, weak submissive who is not ashamed to cry, he is told by his editors that his (female) readers won’t like that.

These same female readers are also known to complain about smelly armpits, an abundance of hair and pot bellies, all the things bears love. Yet, in some ways these two extremes have something in common because in one of your books, you describe, Bob, one of your Mountain State buddies: “I first consciously noticed something I’d unconsciously admired in Keith and Tony and have seen since in many bears, something I find exceptionally appealing. When it came to looks, dress, and mannerisms, Bob was very masculine, but he also embodied sweetness, gentleness, domesticity, and kindness, more traditionally feminine characteristics.” Which suggests outward appearance prevents people detecting these traits.

AB: Why do you like bears and being a bear?

JM: Since I hit puberty, I’ve been attracted to those great gifts of the god-sent chemical, testosterone:  the mammalian secondary sex characteristics of mature men.  Even when I’m lusting after men much younger than me, it’s what makes them look like men, not boys, that catches my eye.  “The Holy Trinity of Beards, Body Hair, and Brawn,” as I call those traits in one of my essay collections, Binding the God.  I’m a lover of what’s wild and what’s strong, so I’m attracted to beards and body hair because they’re physical reminders of the wild animals we are, and I’m attracted to brawn because it’s the embodiment of strength.

Bears also tend to resemble the country boys I grew up around, the kind of men I was first attracted to as I grew up in southern West Virginia, the kind of men I patterned my style of masculinity after, and the kind of men I still most powerfully desire.  In Binding the God, I tell the story of how John and I went to a San Francisco bear bar, the Lone Star, and John pointed out how most of the guys there looked like they were from West Virginia.

AB: Do you ever wonder or despair about what is going to happen to these twinks (or boys) who have been admired and identified only by their cuteness?

JM: I had a friend in college—a former friend, I should emphasize, for we fell out nearly two decades ago—who was a charming twink with many admirers.  Now he’s around fifty-eight, I’d gauge.  I doubt that aging has been any fun for him.  As much as I complain about aging, at least the concept of “Daddybear” gives me a way to feel desirable.  Thank God for men with Daddy fetishes.

AB: Why can’t some readers accept difference? Is it because they project into the characters’ heads and everything relates to them instead of stepping into someone else’s shoes?

JM: Good question.  For many of us who love to read, there are two types of books that especially enrich us:  those books that we can strongly relate to because we have much in common with the characters, and those books that give us glimpses of lives very different from ours.  For instance, I love Denise Giardina’s novels about the West Virginia coalfields, Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, because they’re about mountain people and I’m a mountain person, but I also enjoy teaching the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, because it focuses on black women in Florida.  From Hurston, I’m able to learn how folks different from me lived their lives, at the same time that I’m discovering how much I have in common with those characters on deeper levels than race, region, or socioeconomic position.

AB: Now for the future. You once said you use writing to probe. Is there anything left to probe? What compels you to write?

JM: I’ve already published a lot about the intersections and conflicts between my gay identity and my Southern or Appalachian identities in Loving Mountains, Loving Men and Binding the God, so I don’t think I have much more to say in that regard.  I suspect I’ll continue probing history, however.  I’ll certainly keep writing poems about desire, and the ways that aging thwarts desire and reduces erotic outlets.

As for what compels me to write, along with that vicarious living and relief from “cultural frustration” I mentioned above, I’m trying to make sense of my own obsessions and internal conflicts.  I’m trying to record the details of my life as one that’s representative in some ways, in hopes that what I publish might help readers like me feel affirmed and mirrored.  I’m trying to commemorate people and places and events that might otherwise be dismissed, ignored, or forgotten.  Finally, I write because my whole sense of self—critical acclaim or not—is wrapped up in the concept of being a writer.  If I stop writing, then I’m not a writer, and then I’d be nobody.

AB: What are you writing now? What can we expect in the future?

JM: Salvation, the sequel to my Civil War novel, Purgatory, is due out from Bear Bones Books/Lethe Press in August 2014.  It continues the adventures of lovers Ian Campbell, a Rebel soldier, and Drew Conrad, a Union soldier, as they make their way through the mountains of western Virginia, encountering several colorful, intolerant, and dangerous characters along the way.

Most of my fiction, as you cogently pointed out in a Facebook message, indulges in “variations on a theme,” or a handful of themes, and I suspect that will continue to be true in the future.  Certainly Carpetbagger, the new erotic novella I’m about done with, has elements in common with Fog (forced captivity) and Purgatory (a Northern and a Southern character as contrasting protagonists).  That novella is supposed to be the last section of a new volume collecting some of my previously published erotic fiction.  The working title’s Beautiful Captivities.  That book’s likely to appear in the latter half of 2015. 

That collection will also contain one other new piece, an experimental braiding of fiction, essay, and photographs.  The photographs were taken during what I jokingly call “The Infamous Philadelphia Photo Shoot,” which occurred in November of 2013, thanks to my wonderful publisher, Steve Berman of Lethe Press.  There I was, swilling high-quality bourbon in a fancy big-city hotel room, with assorted leather accouterments, a professional photographer, and a professional porn star.  Quite the adventure for a middle-aged academic.

Yeah, I’m being coy.  Sorry.  Folks will have to buy the book to know more.

After that, there will be the full-length Derek Maclaine novel I’m hoping to get written in what remains of my 2014 Summer Break.  Derek will be ravishing hairy young men and messily murdering mining industry executives, so that should be huge fun to write and will provide further relief from my “cultural frustrations.” 

After that, probably another collection of personal essays, some of them travel essays, a form I haven’t worked in since I composed Edge.  I have over a hundred poems written on Civil War history, only a handful of which have yet appeared, so at some point I’ll want to publish them, probably in two volumes.  

I’m about done with writing Civil War poems, though, so after that I’m planning a series of poems based on the Norse runes and another series based on my botanical enthusiasms, since I earned a degree in Nature Interpretation a long time ago from the Forestry Department at West Virginia University and know a lot about wild flora and fauna.  Appropriate for a guy who regards the aforementioned Celtic Horned God, Cernunnos, Lord of the Wildwood, as one of his patron deities.

I would like to end by thanking you for your support.  My publications, as I’ve whinged earlier, are often ignored, so I very, very, very much appreciate your interest in my books and your willingness to conduct this interview.

AB: No, thank you for being so patient and taking the time to answer my questions. For those who are interested, I have reviewed most of Jeff's books and the links can be found here

You can also check out Jeff's website
and he can be found at Facebook here and his books Cub and his paranormal Desire and Devour have their own pages.

Apart from his great fiction, I can thoroughly recommend the memoirs and essays. They give a fascinating glimpse of his life, his world and the people in it.

His books can be purchased by following the links on the name and cover. Most are available through his main publisher Lethe Press/Bear Bones Books but links are also provided for the other publishers. Most are also available through ARe, Amazon, Smashwords and other retail outlets.

In the past, I have also blogged reviews of "Purgatory" his novel about two men from opposing sides in the Civil War, his collection of poems "A Romantic Mann" and his collection of stories about vampires "Desire and Devour".


These reviews are included as a lead up to a lengthy interview with Jeff which will follow in my next blog. Stay tuned!