Percy

I am going to join the chorus here for more of this story. This was good but I almost felt like I was reading a summary of what was meant to be a much longer story. Well done, Wayne!

Good that you can laugh about it now! That read like a Three Stooges skit. Now tell us how you made it up to him. ;-)

You always have such good contributions for the anthologies, Dolores, and this is one of my favorites. Nice psychological snapshot of an addict's struggle. Thanks for sharing!

The never ending task of coming out! I think you did a good job showing the advance/retreat/advance of both Nathan and Sam as they came to terms with Sam's sense of gender and figured how they might establish a relationship with one another. Both their points of view were developed nicely in this short story.

Irving Berlin's White Christmas? Not gay, per se, but a fun, campy musical. I watch it pretty much every year while I'm making Christmas cookies, and it never fails to make me laugh.

Unlike being gay or straight, bisexuality or pansexuality is rendered invisible once a relationship with another person is established. This is particularly true if the relationship is monogamous and the partner does not identify as genderqueer. My partner and I are perceived as a gay male couple. The reality is that my partner's orientation is more nuanced than gay and my gender is more nuanced than male. Some people know this, particularly those who know my partner was in long term relationships with cis-gendered men and women prior to being with me or those who knew me pre-transition. Now we're two guys who have been in a monogamous relationship for over ten years. If we want to make others aware of his pansexual orientation or my transgender identity, we have to work it into a conversation. That doesn't happen too often in day to day life so those aspects of ourselves are largely invisible to anyone other than ourselves. Happily, this invisibility doesn't seem to engender distress for either of us. I guess the fact that we know each other's full range of sexual expression is visibility enough? Maybe there are still enough people who know the "full" story that we remain happy? I haven't really given this aspect of things much thought. Here's something cool. I was talking to the mother of a student at the San Francisco Ballet School a couple weeks ago. She knows I'm gay, but I don't know if she knows I'm trans. She said she was asking her daughter if one of her friends was gay or straight and her daughter said, "Mom, it's not that simple! You can't just say that you're straight anymore." A good thing - evidence that there is a growing consciousness of the middle ground of gender and sexuality and giving people a chance to claim that space for themselves.

Good for you! Glad to hear about a company that knows how to show its appreciation $$ for a stand out employee.

I really enjoy your contributions here, Bob. As I am just hitting middle age, I like thinking I have lots to look forward to. I wouldn't mind having life slow down a bit though. The years are already going by too fast!

I'm late to the party! Good to see you back around here, Yettie! It's not the same place without you.

I agree that the ambiguous ending can be the right one for a story. I guess it is a tool that some authors use more skillfully than others. Thanks for all the interesting comments here.

Double entendre notwithstanding, Mann got it right. The story built nicely for most of the book, spurred off into a polemic 3/4 of the way through, made a half-hearted attempt to get back on track but just, hmmm, deflated. i suspect the story was largely autobiographical and sine the author doesn't know how the issues she (as the character) was confronting will ultimately resolve themselves, she couldn't bring about a proper ending. Or, once she spouted off to the universe in her two chapter rant, she was spent and had no juice left to continue. Maybe that rant WAS the climax...for the author. Damn it, she got her satisfaction and I was left hanging.

I just finished a book with an abrupt ending where none of the storylines were resolved. This wasn’t a situation where the author built to a climax and then stopped, leaving a mystery to the resolution or offering the reader possibilities without being explicit as to the final outcome. No, the story just petered out. It felt like the author got suddenly bored or confused or just ran out of ideas in what was, up to that point, an excellent read. Period. Story over. Normally as a reader, I like it when I’m not given everything at the end but this ending was weirdly unsettled. So, how do others feel about ambiguous endings? Yea or Nay? What makes for a good ambiguous ending instead of one that leaves you feeling like the author simply gave up on the story? This was not a GA story, by the way, though I think it was the author's first novel.

Great interview--really interesting! I'm going to have to put Totallyy on my must read list. Well done, Ashi and Totallyy. :-)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KC

A good collection, Cia! Great for keeping writers focused on the realities of authorship. :-)

Lisa, You were great fun to interview and get to know better. It's awesome seeing what a fanbase you have here - you're really part of what makes GA such a great place to be!

For a cocktail, I like bourbon and orange bitters which I guess in some quarters is called an old fashioned. Buffalo Trace Kentucky Straight orange bitters angostura gum syrup and an orange peel My favorite bar serves this with a single, overly large hand carved ice cube in a simple glass to nice effect. No cherry or lemon. Hate cherries in anything: food or drink Mostly though, wine is my alcholic beverage of choice, especially (sorry Califorina!) Australian or New Zealand reds.

Here are a few examples I’ve witnessed. All these are within the last decade. In the Castro in San Francisco, I was walking with my boyfriend, holding hands, and had some guy forcefully brush past us and the other gay couples on the sidewalk saying “Disgusting!” half under his breath as he went. This one was sort of funny because he was walking so fast that he was practically running to get away –handholding being so threatening, ya know. In Boston’s South End (the city’s gay district), these two guys were standing in line outside a restaurant and gave each other kiss. It was just a “Hi, how was your day?” peck on the cheek. This woman who had been sitting in a parked car on the street got out and worked herself into hysterics over it. She was screaming that that was against God and the children in the neighborhood would burn in hell if they saw that and all sorts of other crazy things. She was crying and wailing invectives at the whole row of us waiting to eat dinner. Eventually she walked on down the street, yelling as she went. Down in Providence, RI a group of us were at an outdoor festival along the river. We were sitting up on an embankment. All of us were queer, but there was only one couple, a lesbian couple, who were sitting with us. One of the girls was leaning back against her girlfriend, who had her arms wrapped around her. We were just watching the festival activities on the river. These two older couples (straight) were passing by on the path below us when they suddenly circled back and marched up the embankment to where we were sitting. One of the women, who I took to be in her ‘50s, glared at the girlfriends and sneered, “Is everyone having a good time here?” They said nothing, didn’t even look at her. She looked around at the rest of us with absolute contempt. Finally one of the older guys in our group told her we were just here to watch the festival like everyone else. She continued to glare at us until the man and the other couple with her pulled her away. This one was pretty funny too because she was so clearly shocked to find gays among her. We were right at this event that everyone else goes to...the same one she herself was at! But the saddest incident happened to me at our state fair in Sacramento, California a couple years ago. I have a good friend who is blind and he was using my arm for guidance through the crowds. I’m gay and my blind friend is straight. This boy, maybe 8 or 9, points at us and yells, “That’s not family values!” The boy’s mother was absolutely mortified as well she should be. Everyone in the vicinity looked at me and my friend and then quickly looked away. Tragic, really, that this child saw what he perceived as evil in a situation that was clearly an act of kindness. A shameful statement on parenting when you’ve taken the time to school your child in hatred instead of compassion. The mother jerked her child away and looked like she was scolding him, but the problem lay with her, not him. I’ve thought about that incident since and it always makes me sad. I asked my blind friend if he got that a lot. He said that it does happen, not often, but it wasn’t the first time he’d encountered such ignorance.

Different but I am intrigued. Well written. I definitely want to learn more about the characters and their world.

Your score: 30 Gender: Male Age range: 40-49 My car is grey but I'm always being told it's blue. Now I know why.

All true and you have some wise words about budgets and making choices and guarding against debt. In your personal scenario, there is another part of the equation. You put $1,000 into the economy thus enabling someone else, if not yourself, to buy mocha blend coffee. If you got the computer at a retail store, that’s one more store that’s less likely to go out of business. That might translate into a bonus or a raise for an employee on the floor who’s been selling a lot of computers or peripherals during their shift. If you bought it online, you’re keeping those delivery drivers at Fedex or UPS in business. If you financed the purchase, a bank is getting the benefit of interest payments and that all flows to their bottom line. If that retail employee or driver at fedex or the drone working for the bank feel secure in their job, feel like business is good and they may even see a raise at their next performance review, they won’t be switching over to cheap drip coffee from their double mocha lattes anytime soon. What’s more, if that retailer and UPS and Fedex and the bank post profits and issue dividends to their shareholders – more money into the economy! Granted, not that many people hold individual stocks these days, but many of us are invested in banks and retail and shipping operations via mutual funds. If my 401(k) mutual funds are going up and I see dividends being reinvested, I become optimistic that I might be able to retire at a reasonable age. Heck, I might even head down to Starbucks and shell out some $$ for a pumpkin flavored fall drink. The bigger concern would be if you and many others decided to cut back your spending without that outlay of $1,000. Then the money is just disappearing from the economy altogether…and that’s when Starbucks start to close.

I've moved around a lot, both as a kid and as an adult. The most recent big move was from Boston to San Francisco when my company expanded and opened an office out here. One of the reasons the move was attractive to me, aside from the career opportunity it presented, was because my family is in the western U.S. It's nice not having to commit a full day, each direction, to travel whenever we want to visit. I've lived in the northeast, the south and in the western states . I like the adventure of exploring new places. My family moved frequently when I was a kid so relocating is something to which I'm accustomed. In my 20s I lived in the city, Boston’s south end, and I loved it. I lived in San Francisco the first year I was here. But, there came a point in my 30s where I was done with city life. I was just over it. Now I live outside SF, in a place where I can walk to restaurants and the gym, pretty much to everything I need, and it doesn’t have the grittiness that is part of urban living. Like anything, there are advantages and disadvantages to moving. I am good at staying in touch with people and I have friends all over the U.S. This is awesome for traveling now. Since I live near a city that others want to travel to, I get my fair share of visitors in my home and can stay in touch with old friends. However, I do notice that I don’t feel a true connection to the physical place where I live. In contrast, my partner can drive through San Francisco and talk about how in 1982 the pig he raised took first place at the cow palace and his mom talks about the days when you got to the airport by turning left at a stop sign on Highway 101. The point is that they have a shared history and it’s a history that’s shared not just within their family but by many of the people around them, the families who have lived in this area for years. I have a history, too, but I experienced it on my own. I can talk about it, but I can’t reminisce over it with someone. The memories aren’t shared by anyone else. Sometimes that feels weird; it’s isolating, especially when I’m with people who have such a rich history that they experienced together. I’m not sure if this was the type of thing you were looking for in your query. That said, I think I’ve heard you say you’re interested in pursuing a law enforcement career. Keep an eye on the San Francisco Police Department if you’re considering a move. They are going to be running a large number of academies in the next few years. They have an unprecedented number of officers who are coming up for retirement in the next 3-5 years, and they are looking to replenish their ranks. I think they just closed their most recent hiring pool but I bet they’ll open the application process again by year end or early next.

Congrats! Sounds like you earned the position - good for you!

If you find that sort of thing interesting, you might enjoy the biography of Samuel Steward. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring Steward was completely unknown to me before reading the bio, although his pseudonyms Phil Andros and Phil Sparrow rang a bell. The book provides fascinating detail of homosexual life in America – and to a lesser extent Europe – prior to Stonewall. Steward’s life intersected with many artistic giants of the 20th century. After reading the biography, I can’t say I cared for the man, but I appreciate that he was authentically and unapologetically subversive for his time. In his late 40s he abandoned his career as a professor of English at DePaul and took up a new one as a tattoo artist. Nearing that age myself, I can appreciate what a monumental undertaking such a drastic change would have been. The book came to mind because of your Oscar Wilde reference. At one point in his life, Steward sought an interview and meeting with Alfred Douglas, purportedly a one-time lover of Wilde, because he wanted his mouth "to go where Oscar's had gone." That pretty much sums up what you’d be getting into if you read the bio.

**HAPPY BIRTHDAY--HOPE IT WAS A GOOD ONE**