Alright, here it cums! ( )

Title: When Love Comes

Setting: Unspecified University setting, later revealed to be fictional Adam State University in later stories

Plot Overview: Dr. Gary Griffith is a young college professor, who recently finished years of education and started his teaching career. He has come to grips with his sexuality and is just beginning to understand himself. Matt Stevenson is a College football player, who has fallen in love with Professor Griffith, but is afraid of his sexuality and other dark things in his life. Can they both go beyond a student teacher relationship to something more? Or will fate keep them apart?

Character/relationships: Gary Griffith- He is basically most of us in our late twenties, confident enough to seek romance, but cautious about the prospects of finding love. As a gay character, he is pretty spot on in terms of the reluctance and uncertainty factors that some of us share, but his cardinal weakness exists in that he allows doubt to keep him away from forming relationship, especially in the case of Matt Stevenson. While, I will reveal that these two guys do find each other in the end, Jeff does not give them an easy bow out to happily ever after.

Matt Stevenson- A man of two souls, a college jock and BMOC (Big man on Campus), and a haunted young man with horrible abusive past. This character is complex and sometimes I wonder if he was really in love with Gary Griffith or in need of a father figure and sexual outlet (Yep, I thought he might have been a daddy chaser ). Still, with only one sexual experience between him and Gary Griffith early in the story, I think the truth is in the facts that they both kept their distance, but never stop caring for one another. That was love and I loved how Jeff handled Matt's evolution and tragedies to be a gay man, we can all be proud to call friend.

Supporting Characters worth a mention:

Jamal Phillips: Matt's best friend, who messed around with him in high school and is currently with him on the College football team. He is supportive, fun loving, and a great piece of meat at least I've been told I can count in one hand how many stories I've read that featured great African American gay characters in my youth and Jeff, you definitely stood out there. I know nowadays we have shows like "Empire" where black gay men take center stage, but it was a radically different reality in 2001. Jamal eventually ends up with Mark Stevenson, Matt's younger brother.

Mark Stevenson- You can't help but want to cuddle up to him, but at times, I wish I got more out of his story. He in my opinion is the prototype for a lot of "rescue" abused gay kid stories that would come in years afterward. Bill W. and Comsie on here might be more well known for this, but the threads were being turned years ago. Still, he was a nice character.

Kevin Williams: Hmmm...a straight married man, who enjoys exchanging blowjobs with his gay friend and colleague, when his wife was pregnant. Alright, I'll bite, this part of the story was a little weird to me, but in his defense, it also added dimensions to this character. While we label ourselves as gay and straight, we honestly don't open ourselves to try new experiences in sexual practice. Nothing came about this sexual exchange, except a strong friendship and a new baby boy getting born to Kevin, named "Gary", (I love the symbolic love making of the three to create Gary Williams, but that I will leave to theme)

Kathy Williams- Really open minded woman, who allowed her husband to try a lot of new things and accepted Gary Griffith without issue. Part of me assumes she's from a Hippie generation throwback, but Jeff never gives us that detail. Still, she is delightful though sparingly use in the story. It's an old weakness among gay writers, we focus so much on the gay characters that sometime we forget that our heterosexual friends need to be included in, if not sexually at least in the plot.

Themes:

Coming of age is definitely a big thing here, along with many of Jeff's stories

Forbidden Love- Jeff began his stories into age gap relationships, which in this story I found to be not just acceptable, but something that should not even be questioned as both men were adults, they just existed as Teacher and student. In later stories, I question myself on how far I was willing to accept Jeff's characters in this regard, then I thought back to this story and said "Screw it, I can't accept one and say no to the other"; even though I think he might have gone too far in the first few chapters of Finding Family,, Jeff Allen was not stupid or non-conscious of the fact that emotional maturity might not be there. In this regard, Jeff trumps almost every other writer in these kinds of stories, because he questions himself through his characters and that's a healthy does of concern for readers and for the characters.

Abusive families- Well this theme comes up in gay fiction way too often, but it should never be forgotten that art is a reflection of life. There's a lot of fundamental flaws in people and it creates fundamental flaws for the long term within families. Jeff did not overtly preach what was right and wrong, like Brew does in his story, but he did push Gary Griffith to be more assertive towards Matt as a father figure as well as a lover to prevent some of the darkest chapters of family history from repeating.

Sex- Lots of sex was in this story and sexual tension rose so high, I thought Jeff wanted to give everyone blue balls. For those of you, who did not grow up reading Nifty in its earlier days where Sex and story melded together, this was how a story kept people interested and I feel that it actually enriches this story nowadays, since there was a real story that went along with the sex.

Story Review:

I have read a lot of stories in my time; I have seen many beautiful characters rise and fall, but Jeff's little story etched itself into my imagination. Gay erotic fiction does not need to be shunned out of writing, it is part of who we are and where we come from, you just need to have some humanity mixed into it. When I read Jeff's story as a gay teen, I liked it because it had lots of action and sex, but also a story. As an adult, I like Jeff's story, because it has a well developed plot with sex. This story was the 1st of many, he would add to the settings and make the stories far more dynamic. However, this was his first and it was probably his most underrated story that showed how far he could go as a writer.

The story was solid, the characters were creative, and the themes spoke true today as they did 13-14 years ago. There's a lot of writers, myself included, who have written stuff that has since been dated and obsolete in today's gay fiction environment, but a sign of writing "mastery" to me is that a story can only age well, without regard to when it was written, because the themes and characters still are relevant today as they were a decade ago.

For example, ee got our first openly gay Pro-footballer in Michael Sams recently, but Jeff was already discussing the realities of a professional gay football players' issue years before with the same result. Michael Sams did not go anywhere in his first year and he was left to dry on the CFL. In Jeff's story, Both Matt and Mark Stevenson played well in College level, but never rose to the next level after their "outing", which is sadin a way that even with all the hype of gay marriage and openness toward us, things still remain the same in that regard.

Also, there's a lot of authors on here at GA, who are descendants of Jeff's writing style, Mark Arbour comes to my mind in his earlier works and the evolution continues with people who have read Mark's stories, then write as well.

In gay writing there are no literary critics, theme analysis, or character observations that you might see in "AV Club" or a New Yorkers' column, but there should be, because our writing is evolving into something new and completely different than what mainstream novels and fictions are doing.

I am not an English Major, I am not a critic by choice or design, but I feel like we should identify ourselves far more as a new genre rather than a subset of an internet publishing culture.

For all these reasons, I give Jeff's story:

9.0/10

Good, well written, and made me remember why I love to read gay fiction

Story Link:
http://www.crvboy.org/stories/jeffallen/s001/c01.html