Howie

her not bringing up the subject may be a good sign. maybe she's ruminating on it and will at some stage accept it. your dad using the word 'queer' to describe brokeback mountain doesn't sound very hopeful... please forgive the following (unhelpful) remark: sometimes i'm happy i was born in old europe and not america. i hope that america will at some stage catch up. howie

so nicole, how are things? i hope everything's okay, and that your mother has calmed down a bit. do let us know... howie

mm, that doesn't sound good, what your dad said about edwin. did he say what he didn't like about their lifestyle? maybe you should tell him first that you don't have a problem with gay people. and it sounds like you should give your mother time to come to terms with it. it sounds as if your sister would support you though maybe it would be best to put plans on telling your dad about your sexuality on hold. oo, this all sounds complicated. maybe somebody else has some advice too.

hi nicole i think you're asking the wrong people if you want to hear "don't tell them! live a lie your whole life!" basically i regard your situation as a normal part of growing up. everybody realises at some stage that they have their own life to lead. nobody is the perfect child, and i think you can judge parents as to how well they modify their hopes for their children and gradually grow up as parents themselves - "okay, i wanted my son to become a top lawyer in senile, senile & senile, but i'd rather he were happy and healthy and will support him in it, even if he ends up working at macdonalds". so what i want to say is, you seem quite well adjusted (what a strange term!) from the short post you wrote, so i imagine that your parents did something right bringing you up, and i imagine that they love you, and you love them. and seeing as they don't have problems with other gay relatives, chances are, things will turn out fine, if you tell them. of course, they probably already know. loving, attentive parents aren't quite as slow as many people like to believe and if they don't already know, try spending demonstratively more time with your girlfriend. they'll proabably soon catch on. hope this helps. howie

i was just perusing the site and couldn't find (at a cursory glance) any information as to supported formats for hosted stories. i presume txt with a standard coding (utf-8?) or html are accepted. but actually i wanted to talk about something slightly different. question. what software do you use to write in? or to surf with? or whatever else you do with the computer? operating system? i bring up this topic because software is also a political issue, and i'd be interested in knowing what the people here use. my bet, is that the average person here is politically more liberal in their choice of software than the average computer user is. just to start the ball rolling, and to let you know what sort of freak you're dealing with here: text editor: kwrite/pico/emacs internet: firefox other maor bits of software i use pretty much daily: gcc (programming stuff) gimp (picture manipulation) operating system: linux 2.6.15 and also 2.4.31 (laptop) edited:- then i of course forgot the most important thing which formats do you use for text documents? i tend to use pure text (has the ending txt on windows systems) html (has the ending htm on windows systems) rtf odt (rarely)

mm, maybe i should write a story with van damme and someone else (i know, i'm totally perverted, i like jean-claude van damme). you know, it's strange. i never used to be this way until about 2 years ago. i used to be able to do what i want the whole day long without difficulty, but now i hear a little voice in the back of my head 'you should be doing something productive'. strangely, writing gay fiction about people who don't exist doesn't trigger this voice, but writing a story about someone who existed, would. you have no idea how much i hate this voice... well, maybe it's a good thing too. i've stopped playing computer games and instead program device drivers in assembly. you can imagine how much fun i can be at parties. well, this reply seems to have degraded to the level of a blog. howie

you know, this is one of those moments when i realise how terribly naive i've been all my life. it seems to me as if most gay male erotic fiction is written by women, not by men. not that i'm complaining, of course just wondering why... howie

not a chance. science is an empirical subject. one has to try it out for oneself

...okay, so in this chapter we'll be discussing vector calculus while also discribing a blow job between two imaginary students reading this book. we'll be discussing the qualities of a curl-free field derived from the velocity potential by imagining the flow of fluids in their seminal vesicles during orgasm... you know, i'm not sure it's a good idea... howie

o mon dieu. sometimes i feel quite out of place as a humanist on this web-page... to think that the characters in my stories tend to talk about long-complicated-scientific-things. maybe i should write textbooks and not gay fiction... howie

as a (potentially) interesting side-note, i just read recently (and i doubt i'm the only one who's read it), that in the ultimate x-men universe (for those who don't know, 'ultimate' x-men is a new version of the adolescence and young-adulthood of the characters in the standard x-men universe) northstar (who is also gay in the 'real' x-men universe, but a lesser known character, coming, as he does from canada) and colossus (who is actually pretty straight in the real x-men universe) are now a couple. possible, i've used too many brackets here. maybe other people regard this as being of pretty low significance in the grand scheme of things, but as an avid fan of mainstream superhero comic books, i'm chuffed (ah, the wonders of british english!) howie

am i the only one here who's thinking, that it's been a while since we heard anything from hi_college_guy?

don't be silly, it's perfectly ok to be gay. has somebody got a list handy of famous gay and lesbian people? hugs howie

going to the meeting may well still prove to be a positive thing. if you kill yourself, the one's who have driven you to it win. you've got to fight. howey

for some reason, i find this whole discussion here heart-warming. the only other discussion i'm actively pursuing here in gay authors is this evolution thread, which is rapidly going nowhere. but even there we're still being half-way civil... there are so many nice people here, who want to help. i don't think we in this community are that unusual here. okay, being gay we all know how it is to a greater or lesser extent, what it means to feel ostracised, to hate oneself. and we also know the joy of conquering this. i personally find it cool the way we rally together to offer support. and there are hundreds of thousands of people on this planet who would do the same, hi_college_guy. maybe you do find five idiots to every nice person out there, but that's not a bad rate. i think you'd be surprised, how supportive some people are, how much some people do care. howey

i think the intentions of this friend are important. maybe he thought he was doing the best thing. you're in a better position to judge that. we are all human, and we all make mistakes. to be angry at someone because of a mistake they made while their heart was in the right place wouldn't be good. i'm sure you can think of examples yourself, when you have done the wrong thing for the right reasons, i most certainly can in my life. ich w

sorry. it's a bit pyschological. it's set in the future, but only a bit in the future, so it's not science fiction. it's about two guys with bad childhoods who somehow find each other. it's totally unrealistic. a sort of cinderella story. it's not anywhere near ready, but a few chapters are almost fine. it would probably get close to a pg-rating (apart from one scene at the end of the book), so don't expect graphic sex scenes. let me know if you're interested howey

niemand? wirklich niemand? howie

i'm not sure how important appearance is in a story. does it really matter, what colour hair the character has? maybe if it's an episode of murder she wrote... i think something more ad&d-like works for me. i just let the character react to each other as if i was doing a charisma check. at some stage the reader will have a good idea of what they look like. (of course, this may explain why i'm such a bad writer...)

i think i've finally worked out how to post on this site. sorry for hijacking this thread, just wanted to ask a quick question. I'm working on a book at the moment with gay main characters. the problem is, the book is in german. would anyone here be interested in it? let me know, and i may have by that stage worked out how to post bits of a book here. take care howie