Drew Payne

“All that Uncle Jelly Bean scandal leaves such a nasty taste in the mouth,” Aunt Marion announced to the room in front of her. Dan wanted to let out a loud and sarcastic groan, but he didn’t. Instead, he changed his position on the sofa and glanced over at his mother who silently rolled her eyes. Only now had Aunt Marion got onto the subject of the Uncle Jelly Bean Scandal. She’d spent the whole of Sunday dinner ranting about one subject or another, shooting out her very black and white opi

One of my oldest friend Sally's wife is a United Reform Church Minister, I have several friends who are Anglicans and worship at every accepting churches. I certainly know that there are safe places for LGBTQ+ people in the Christian church, and lovely people who attend them. I also watch how the Christian Church, especially a lot of the leadership, are still tying themselves up in knocks with homophobia, and appear so unattractive to those of us on the outside. What interests me is how would a gay man find a place in the Christian Church and how would they deal with the vocal Christian homophobia out there. I also know that there are many Christians who aren't homophobic. In September last year, we had a new nurse join our team at work and she was very quick to let everyone know she's a Christian. When she found out I'm gay, which was very quick too because I'm very out, she told me at length how wonderful her uncle's wedding was, when he finally married his husband. That's what I want to write about with this sequel, that Christianity isn't one bigotry to fit all and how people work out their own beliefs. I just need to find a plot for that. Give me time, my imagination will hit on it.

I'm only human. Like so many people, I do feel ashamed of the awful way I behaved as a teenager, but I don't blame myself anymore. I had therapy, nearly thirty years ago, and that helped me to understand why things happened and my part in it all. I have that found understanding of situations and people is so powerful and helps me not to repeat the sins of my past. I'm so fortune that I have been able to learn from my experiences, and that of others. I've met so many people who've had no insight into their lives and actions, and that is so sad. I don't blame my teenage self for what he did, he didn't have my experience and education, but neither do I want to forget about what he did and why. It was that memory that fuelled this story. Thank you for what you said about my writing. That is what I want to write about, how people react to different situations and events, how their experiences influence their actions and emotions. I am fascinated how people deal with difficult or unusual situations. But life is always lived in full, living colour and writing should NEVER be black and white. Thanks for making me think about a sequel to this story. I've been looking for a story where I can write about a gay man who is also a Christian but has rejected all the homophobia and sorted out his own spirituality within it. Why can’t LGBTQ+ people be Christians too?

Thank you, you make me blush. This is what I wanted to write about. That Graeme isn't the villain of this story but the victim. He is faced with what he fears the most, but what he secretly wants the most, a happy gay man, and he can't cope. Stephen Cartmel is what he really wants to be. I was like him when I was sixteen/seventeen. I feel so ashamed of myself, when I look back to then, I believed all those lies and it was eating me alive (!!).

I hadn't thought about a sequel but now you mention it, it’s a good idea. There are two characters here it could be about, but it would have to be set years later than these events. I've got one more story to add to this collection, I've decided to close a collection when it reaches twenty stories (That worked with my other collection), so the sequel will be in my next collection. Thank you so much for the idea.

Graeme Meades resented the man even before he met him. He’d also applied for the job of Claims Manager, although it was a sideways move. It would have meant a promotion for him, and he needed that now he and Sophie were engaged. He’d been nervous at the interview, but he still felt it went well; he knew two out of the three people on the interview panel. One of them was Terry Sanger, who he’d worked with before Terry got his own promotion. After he left the interview, he’d felt so positive about

Thank you. This story started off so differently and was going to have a very different ending. I have started to write the second part, which will explore Shaun's relationships, with Harley, with his mother and his brother. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has got in the way of my writing. Work has been very busy and I've been asked to write a lot of articles about Covid-19. It does feel that things are finally settling down, I'm getting more time and energy to write and I need to tell the rest of Shaun's story. He's one of those characters who bounce around inside my head.

This is what I wanted to do when I decided to introduce Harley into the story. Just because Shaun has had so little love in his life doesn't mean he doesn't miss it. Shaun is also deeply depressed, look why he wanted to holiday in Scarborough, and depression will make any pain feel worse. A bit of affection has lifted his mood and helped with his pain relief.

Physically he is based on a real guy, but he is a bit of the "ideal hunk". I hope I give him more personality here.

Thank you. I used to be an Orthopaedic Nurse and I looked after a lot of people who had life-changing injuries to their limbs, especially their legs. I didn't know about Guillaume Depardieu but I looked after several people who had legs amputated because of chronic pain/failure of the bones to heal fully. Their lives were turned around by the amputation, they began to live again once their leg was gone. But this is very extreme and doesn’t happen very often. Shaun needs something else.

I disagree, Shaun's mother cares deeply but about herself. She doesn't care about other people and she deeply resents Shaun, though from nothing he did. When we were staying in Scarborough, one of the people we were there with had her car stole. She'd left a spare key in the car and the thefts broken a window to get into the car. Because she'd left the key in it the police were very uninterested in her car being stolen, they seemed to do the bare minimum. Add to that that Shaun is lying to the police and he's not that good a liar, the police don't take much of an interest, especially as they won't be able to identify anyone from what Shaun has told them. Shaun isn't helping himself but he'd have to out himself to do so.

Thank you. People looking back on events from their lives is very much part of my writing style. I like the challenge of writing memories but pacing it so I can pull the reader back into "present day" of when the story is set. I also like the challenge of writing memories in a style that is aping the way we remember events (though these memories are much more flashbacks). This was the first long read I published on GA and I didn't know there were people who would happily edit/proofread my writing. I'm dyslexic and I can't see the mistakes I make.

Thank you. I would like to say that its all fiction too but I filtered it through Shaun's eyes and his desperate need for love.

Shaun isn't me but I’ve met a lot of men like him, and Aunty Agatha taught me how to plot. We did spend a holiday in Scarborough and its a place that sticks in the memory, though we didn't go there for the same reason as here.

@JeffreyL, thank you for this. I chose a fictional character because it was easier and safer way to tell the story. If I'd told it from the point-of-view of a real character then there is all that terrible responsibility of getting them right, and what if I got their characterisation wrong. But also, I'm really interested in history told from the point-of-view of the people on the side-lines. I chose Mark because I wanted someone who would get increasingly disgusted by what was unfollowing in the courtroom. As I was researching this story I was shocked by what happened during this trial and how the judge did everything he could to make sure Mary Whitehouse won. Thanks for your encouragement, I'm going to be writing more stories here but I need to write them first.

@Mawgrim, I was like your aunt when I was a teenager. I'd didn’t sent missionaries around to other people but I was always forcing my views onto them and telling them how they were "wrong". I look back at myself then and shudder, I saw everything as black and white, right and wrong. Of course that was all until I had to face up to my sexuality and that smashed all that self-righteousness. I'm afraid that fundamentalist Christians don't just screw up gays. I have kept contact with only three other people from my Evangelical days, two of them are straight and one is a Lesbian, and all of them had their sexualities screwed up by what they were taught and forced to believe. None of them are Christians now.

@Parker Owens, thanks for your feedback. I meant to add a postscript to this story with links to all the real people and events in it but I'd forgotten to prepare it. I sorted out it yesterday and its up now. I am so glad you don't know of Mary Whitehouse, she was a nightmare and deserves to be forgotten by history. She was a breath-taking liar and yet so many people believed her. As a teenager, I remember hearing a sermon at church where she was called a messenger from God (!!). I am fascinated by people like Mary Whitehouse, people who use religion and "morals" to gain power and push their political agenda, but emotionally they also make me so angry by their hypocrisy and bigotry. With these stories I do plan to write about the big events of gay history but I also want to also write about the smaller ones, the events that have often got forgotten, that pushed forward our freedoms too. I also want to write more about Gay News and Mary Whitehouse, there's several other stories there.

@Mawgrim, thank you. It was a long time ago I learnt the power of re-telling huge events from the point-of-view of ordinary people, people caught up in the events rather than the "important people" behind them. I 'm interested in the people at the edge of history. My parents did agree with Mary Whitehouse, especially my mother, and as a child I didn't question Whitehouse. I began to question her motives when she went after Doctor Who, my favourite TV program as a child. Then, when I was a teenager, she went after the TV program The Singing Detective. There was a scene were a young boy sees his mother committing adultery. She condemned it, calling it pornographic. The scene was horrible but no one would have got turned on by it. I realised she wasn't interested in "morals", she only wanted people to see things that agreed with her mindset, she was a deep bigot. The scales fell away from my eyes, so to speak. With these stories (The ones I want to write for this collection) I want to show how far we've come. I feel it’s so important to remember that.

@chris191070, thanks so much. I was eleven when the trial took place (Oops, showing my age) but I don't remember anything of it, at the time. I found out about it in the 1980s but just that Gay News lost the case. It was when I started to research this story and I found out what a Kangaroo Court this trial turned into, it could have been a farse if it wasn't so homophobic. My research has shown me the really poor way gays were treated by the whole criminal justice system in the 1970s and 1980s, and before. There’re so many stories I want to tell from what I have found.

11th July 1977 Mark sat on the wooden bench and waited. He still couldn’t shake that awkwardness sitting there, that feeling that he shouldn’t be there, as if any moment someone would point at him and call him out as an interloper, as someone there under false pretences. He was only waiting the trial to restart, the final part of it. The cold, wooden benches, the rituals of the trial that no one had explained to him and everyone else there seemed to know perfectly, the hushed and col

History is written by the victors, the winners, those in power, those at the top of society. Who tells the stories of those groups forgotten by history? For centuries LGBTQ histories were hidden histories, histories forgotten by the mainstream, histories passed down by word-of-mouth. It has only been in recent decades that scholarly works have been written about gay history. This collection of stories are about gay history, stories that focus on different events from gay history, events that helped shape our gay world, stories that cover so many different emotions.

@Parker Owens, thanks for your feedback, it means a lot. I was twenty-one when the events (the real ones) of this story took place and I was twenty-two when I wrote the original story. But saying that I have re-written it so much that only two of the scenes are based on real events. Originally it was a story of my pain with a very wish-fulfilment ending. When I came back to it (many, many years later) I found a theme of obsession under all the pain, so I re-wrote the story and made it about obsession. For so much of my writing I take things from my life, or other people's lives, and run with them, use them to write about things that interest me or I feel strongly about. I re-wrote it so much that the narrator here isn't me, even at twenty-one I knew too much about life to become obsessed with someone who didn't want me. The guy "you" is based on is now one of my oldest friends. We had a rather complicated relationship until we realised we were actually really good friends, though I've not told him I wrote this story about him...

1 - The Next Morning The radio clicks into life and fills the bedroom with a bright pop song as an upbeat DJ’s voice informs me that it's a chilly October morning. I bury myself further under the duvet, covering my head with it. You roll further away from me, leaving an even greater space between us. I shouldn't have stayed here last night. That was the wrong choice, but I made it. The mattress moves. I've never noticed it before: we always got out of bed together. Even with my head un

And your friend was right. I've been reading and researching a lot about gay life in the seventies and for those who were able to escape to the big cities and tap into the emerging gay life there it could be an amazing time, gay life was more than just clubs and bars, and people did explore different ways of living. There's so much I want to write about it and I will. I also want to write about living in the eighties, so much changed during then, it was such a different and difficult time. I think I need to get myself organised.

I don't want to write about this little turd every again, he's horrible and vile. I am so surprised that I was able to write about someone who is completely the opposite of me. Saying that though... I think for an epilogue, I'd have the narrator arrested for stalking another man and tries to use his knowledge of Christopher Waters' innocence as a way of bargaining his way out of it all. He would fail but Christopher Waters' lawyer/friend/supporter would pick up on it, force the narrator to do the right thing, and Christopher Waters would be released.