Blogs

variegated - Word of the Day - Thu Aug 25, 2022

August 25, 2022

Gay Authors Archive

We Need Your Support!

The anthologies are an important part of GA, and have always been eagerly anticipated by both authors and readers. We’re in the final stretch for this year’s anthology, with the deadline for submission to the proof team a week away. That’s still plenty of time to complete the final edits and get stories to me by or on September first. I’m going to let the final number of stories be a surprise, so you’ll have to wait until it goes live to find out if we met our goal of at least twenty stories.

Valkyrie in Anthology

August 25, 2022

Writing Unblocked

Cancer sucks!

I tend to take to the blogs section to whinge, so here goes. I have been living with cancer for almost four years now (well, four years since diagnosis, but it was obviously invading various parts of my body before then.) Long story short - diagnosed stage 4 December 24th 2018. Great Christmas present. Treatment (chemo and radiotherapy) started early in 2019, knocked me for 6 and the spinal damage left me unable to walk more than a few paces and having to use the kind of gadgets normal

Mawgrim in cancer woes

August 24, 2022

rectilinear - Word of the Day - Wed Aug 23, 2022

August 24, 2022

Book Review: Miss Marple's Final Cases by Agatha Christie

Miss Marple is probably the most famous female detective in English literature, she was certainly an original character when she first appeared in print, using psychology and character observation rather than searching for physical clues to solve crimes. This collection of stories was published posthumously after Christie’s death and brings together the remaining Miss Marple short stories that hadn’t been published in book form before, plus two supernatural stories that didn’t feature Miss

Drew Payne in Book review

August 23, 2022

flounder - Word of the Day - Tue Aug 23, 2022

August 23, 2022

Life is worth an entry

Writing Raising a Rebel- Why?

It's a fan-fiction story and a passion project. I usually don't write fan-fiction or historical fantasy for that matter, but the idea came to my mind rather quickly after I was able to read through Heaven Official's Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. The idea of a powerful gay martial (warrior) god from the Chinese Taoist immortal pantheon caught my attention. Later the same day, I was in a conversation with my father discussing classic Chinese literature, and he pointed out that Sun Wukong's (Son G

W_L in Writing Stories

August 22, 2022

slew - Word of the Day - Mon Aug 22, 2022

August 22, 2022

caduceus - Word of the Day - Sun Aug 21, 2022

August 21, 2022

Gay Authors News

Weekly Wrap Up (Aug. 14 - Aug. 20)

Stay tuned to this spot. Currently I cannot do the weekly update as I have a caching issue. I'm lucky to get this far. I will try again in the morning Edit to add: I'm swooping in because I was online doing homework. I can see what Mr. Wildone cannot for some reason, so I thought I'd help out! Thank you all for being patient with this horrible bug; Myr is working diligently to track it down every day since that last IP update. It's not an easy one, and he's swamped! ~ Cia Monda

wildone in Weekly Wrap Up

August 21, 2022

With Pride, July 2019

Something New Every Year (July 2019) The other Saturday, I did something I’d never done before. At my age, it isn’t often I get to do something as new as this, but the other Saturday I marched in the London Pride March openly as a nurse. I’ve marched in the Pride March many times before, with friends, with LGBT organisations, but never before openly as a nurse. This year, a group of staff in my Trust’s LGBT Network organised to take part in the London Pride March and we had

August 20, 2022

With Pride, January 2017

And Some Things Change and Some Things Remain the Same (January 2017) I started to come out when I was nineteen, more than thirty years ago, and nearly overnight I lost almost all of my friends; I was ostracised just for being gay. It was a shocking experience that has left a lasting impact on me. Today, I am married to my husband Martin and work as a community nurse in North London. Everyone at work knows my husband and no one has a problem with him, I have almost forgotten the l

August 20, 2022

With Pride, August 2015

Do Unhealthy Attitudes Ever Change? (August 2015) During my first year of nurse training (twenty-five years ago) I ran into a wall of homophobia. I was told by some of my vocal colleagues that I only wanted to be a nurse to see naked men, that all gay men deserved AIDS, that I was a danger to children, and that God could heal me and make me “normal”. I endured it because it was 1990 and homophobia was what I expected as a gay man. It's now 2015 and our society has changed so much

August 20, 2022

With Pride, January 2015

A Safe Place for All? (January 2015) Freddie Mercury died from AIDS in November 1991. I was a student nurse at the time. One of my colleagues told me that he “deserved it” because of his “lifestyle”. I exploded faced with her homophobia, but I was turned on by others who supported her, saying their views were right because they wanted to be parents and any parent would want to protect their sons from the likes of Freddie Mercury. And I was wrong, they said, because I was defending some

August 20, 2022

With Pride, July 2008

Marching with Pride (July 2008) On Saturday (5th July 2008) it was London LGBT Pride and, with bright sunny weather, my partner and I had a wonderful day there. The highlight, as always, was the Pride March. People were laughing and smiling, enjoying walking through central London together and openly. The march was headed by groups representing many of our uniformed and emergency services. First came lesbian, gay and bisexual members of the navy, army and RAF, all in their

August 20, 2022

With Pride

The next six blogs form a short series, which I have called “With Pride” because they were all originally comments pieces, on LGBT rights and healthcare, published in the Nursing Standard magazine, and I am proud of having written them. For nearly fifteen years, on and off, I have written comment pieces for Nursing Standard and a lot of them were on LGBT healthcare. These pieces chart changes in attitudes, but they also had recurring themes and one was responding to a very disturbing piece

August 20, 2022

When Joan Met Tommy

My father married the girl next door. My parents met because they lived next door to each other, in post-war Barrow-in-Furness. But saying it like that makes their story sound so simplistic. My parents did not a make big deal of how they met. It certainly wasn’t a family story, brought out at every chance and worn as a badge of pride. I only found out how they met when I was fifteen. My parents had taken me back to Barrow-in-Furness, a car drive up from Liverpool with our pet dog. That trip

Drew Payne in Esaay

August 20, 2022

What He Said Was Not the Truth, Was Never the Truth and Will Never Be the Truth

December 1984 Dusk had come early that afternoon and by the time of the church’s Evensong Service, all that could be seen outside the windows was black night. The church’s windows only reflected darkness, not even vague shapes or movement within it. In the time before the service began, I sat in my pew and stared at those dark night windows. It was called The Youth Service. Once a month, the church’s Young People’s Fellowship was allowed to take part in the Evensong Service, though not

Drew Payne in My Story

August 20, 2022

Five Days and More Days on Top

I was twelve years old when my grandmother died. My father woke me up, early that morning, and told me, “Your Gran has gone to Heaven.” I was confused, no one had told me she was that ill, they certainly hadn’t told me she was dying. I thought that her decreasing health and physical ability was because of her great age, she had seemed so impossibly old to me back then. It was much later that I’d find out what had happened to her. She was the only grandparent I knew. My father’s parents

Drew Payne in Esaay

August 20, 2022

And Then There Was…

I was an awkward thirteen-year-old (a little under ten years before I was diagnosed as dyslexic) when my mother gave me a copy of A Pocketful of Rye by Agatha Christie. At the time I loved the concept of books but I found them so difficult, my reading was so slow and finishing a book seemed like an impossibly difficult task, a mountain too high to climb. This book intrigued me. The cover was macabre, a black bird’s skeleton surrounded by its black feathers, lying on an illustrated sheet music to

Drew Payne in Writing

August 20, 2022

Waiting for My Father

The room was quiet; the only sounds there were small and slight, ones that would not normally have been noticed except for the silence there. There was the mechanical noise of the little pump occasionally leaping into life as it delivered another dose of painkillers. There was the hiss of air escaping as the air mattress slowly inflated and deflated. There was also the sound of his breathing, slow and almost rasping as he drew in air through his parted lips, held that air in his lungs for w

Drew Payne in Esaay

August 20, 2022