Dusk

Here's a full list of the gay and male friendship stories I've posted/reposted in the past year that deal with BDSM/leather, have dark settings (imprisonment, slavery, war, or prostitution), or feature servants, liegemen, apprentices, or mentors. As the boilerplate warning for my stories puts it, "All of the stories feature love or respect, though sometimes it takes a while to get there."

You're welcome.

My gay e-zine True Tales is currently offering news coverage of Hurricane Gustav, with breaking news of the hurricane's effects on the gay community, as well as the leather/BDSM/bear communities. As with our Katrina coverage, I'll be keeping a special eye on the effects of the hurricane on gay writers and artists.

The August 2008 issue of True Tales: An Erotic E-zine of Masculinity and Power links to texts, photography, and a video in tribute to Larry Townsend, late author of The Leatherman's Handbook. The issue includes links to interviews by Jack Rinella and Bob Wingate, as well as writings by Larry Townsend, Thomas Roche, Jack Fritscher, and others. For adults only. E-zine's warning page | Latest issue.

"Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers" takes leathersex out of its usual bars and back alleys, setting it in unexpected locations: A 5&10. A potluck. A hamburger joint. A college waltz party. Even when the leatherman who narrates these stories returns to the Eagle bar, things don't go quite the way he expected. . . . Written by the former director of the Erotic Authors Association, who is also editor of "True Tales: An Erotic E-zine of Masculinity and Power," this five-tale gay erotica collection includes the story "Spontaneous," runner-up for the 2006 Rauxa Prize for Erotic Fiction. For adults only. Book preview, booktrailer video, and links to ordering pages.

I don't know whether anyone has posted about this yet, but here are the finalists. Finalists from very small presses (i.e. the type that attract authors on the scale of most of us here): MLR Press has a finalist in the erotica category: William Maltese & Wayne Gunn's "Ardennian Boy." Blind Eye Books has a finalist in the SF/F/H category: Ginn Hale's "Wicked Gentlemen." Interestingly, all the finalists in the Men's Romance category (which is where the very small presses have made their biggest mark) are from larger presses.

(Links lead to an adults-only site, True Tales: An Erotic E-zine of Masculinity and Power.) Links on the Military Men page have been added to stories by Ranger, Parhelion, and Marquesate that are set around the conflicts in World War One, World War Two, and the modern British army. Links on the Leathermen page have been added to bondage art that is an exercise in minimalism, an article about a bottom-man's efforts to overcome a phobia, and a video about power play that starts in a leather bar. Next year's theme will be Prisoners and Prison Officers. (Yes, the 2008 theme has changed. There have been some good stories coming out in this category recently.) Please e-mail me if you have any suggestions for links to gay erotic and non-erotic narrative nonfiction, fiction, narrative poetry, drama, book excerpts, blog entries, art, photography, videos, and audio. The links can be to your own works or anyone else's. Suggestions for links to military and leather works continue to be welcome. Take a look at past issues to see what types of works True Tales links to. Link submission guidelines.

The first volume of the series is now in print.

Here you go: Online male homoerotic fiction recommendations, divided by topic. There's a "Military Men" category. And I promise you, my taste runs toward long stories.

True Tales: An Erotic E-zine of Masculinity and Power (adults only) has been updated with links recommendations. Links on the Military Men page have been added to fiction about unusual twists to life in the British army in 1951 and to a Tom of Finland drawing that departs from his usual style. Links on the Leathermen page have been added to a 1965 interview with a member of a Danish leather club, an accompanying photograph, poetry about a slave who discovers his limits, and a video that's definitely not just for the leather crowd.

I haven't gotten past the first couple of chapters yet, but Marquesate's previous work, Her Majesty's Men, is wonderful.

JSmith said: "We do have an 'Ask Me' option" Oh, believe me, I noticed that you were in advance of a lot of other sites. But I still prefer the option of not having to choose an option.

I tell people, "I have a sexual orientation that it takes PowerPoint to describe." Seriously. My sexual orientation just doesn't fit into the normal boxes. I usually tick "bisexual," because that's as close as I can get to a standard label, but being forced to choose a label is annoying. I wish that every site on the Web would stop requiring gender and orientation labels, except on a voluntary basis. Now, I think voluntary labels are wonderful. As rknapp and others here have said, there should be a place for labels for people who can easily say what they are and want to share that information with others. But as colinian says, being required to pin a label on oneself is annoying.

eliotmoore asked: "Would women be so quick to write rape into their stories?" Yes. Rape stories are a popular subgenre in the fan fiction community, which is predominantly female. Sometimes those stories are written for titillation, sometimes to explore serious issues of abuse. The stories that are written for titillation aren't necessarily by authors who aren't concerned with real-life abuse. Sometimes rape survivors write such stories. The authors make a strong distinction between fantasy and reality, as I imagine many authors in the gay fiction world do. Personally, I can't easily read stories where rape is presented for titillation, but I do very much enjoy stories that explore abuse issues.

What I write: Fantasy, historical fantasy, contemporary leather fiction, friendship fiction, gay fiction, gay erotic fiction, and various genres of nonfiction. What age groups I write for: Ages ten to fourteen (if you count my nonfiction), young adult, and adult. What I read: Um . . . everything? Well, okay, I'm especially likely to steer toward stories that have hierarchy or power dynamics of some sort in them, such as historical fiction or spy novels. And most of my online reading is of original slash.

The Slash Skinny: June 2007 (99

The professional authors (and semi-pros and amateurs) are pouring out their stories. Have fun reading what they've posted.

After the outgoing vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America posted an entry at the SWFA blog, slamming professional authors who post their works online (he later toned down his wording), author Jo Walton wrote a post encouraging authors to "give away professional quality work online" on April 23 "to celebrate our technopeasanthood." Over at the SWFA blog, the moderator, Will Shetterly, encouraged people to post links at that blog on April 23 to their online work (in replies to a special entry he'll post on that day), adding, "If you can't come up with something new for the 23rd but already have work that's free on the web, offer the link. Everyone's welcome in the IPST!" I queried, and he clarified that, yes, he meant everyone: pro, semi-pro, and amateur writers. It seems to me that all writers who support the right of pro authors to publish their works in the manner that they wish may be interested in participating in this celebration. If you would like an icon by which to spread the word, here are some nice ones by John Scalzi, Mary Dell, and Leigh Dragoon.

For those of you who are interested: The Slash Skinny is a news and market report I edit on four genres of professionally published literature and art featuring same-sex attraction: original slash, femslash, yaoi, and yuri. Past issues are available free online at The Slash Skinny's Website. The April 2007 issue is available through the link in this sentence for 99

I can't recommend anything that precisely fits your criteria, but Manna's Administration series is a futuristic tale set on Earth. Here's the author's description: * * * In 2097, Europe is controlled by the totalitarian Administration, which shares political power with powerful corporations. The oppressive government uses torture, violence and the various Divisions of the feared Department of Internal Security to maintain power. The corporations fight amongst themselves, using lethal force under the euphemism of 'corporate sabotage', uniting only to resist attempts by the Administration to extend its control over them. The inspiration for the Administration series of stories is a maxim of Chris Boucher, script editor of Blakes 7

The Erotic Authors Association, which was founded in 2000 and which I now direct, is accepting membership applications through February 18. (The next enrollment period is in April.) There are three categories of membership: Authors, Professionals (editors, illustrators, etc.), and Corporate Membership (forums, e-zines, etc.). The Join Us page lists member benefits. All writers of erotic literature are welcome to apply. Authors must have had their writings published or self-published in print, electronically, on the Internet, in audio or video format, or have had their writings performed. For those of you who'd just like to browse, there are some goodies linked at the site, such as "A History of Erotic Literature," articles by well-known erotic writers, and market reports.

Like others here, I think the issue of straight sex needs to be kept separate from the issue of straight relationships. If you're writing a story that's at least partly aimed at getting gay readers turned on, straight sex will only turn on your bisexual or heterosexual readers. (I know that you have some of the latter, from seeing your name mentioned on slash forums.) But you're not writing about straight sex. So there's really no reason why nonsexual references to women should make any sensible gay male reader say, "Ew! Girl cooties!" As for the subplot issue, just ask yourself, "If I'm writing a story with a non-gay-romance subplot, how big a role do I want it to play?" You'd ask yourself the same question if the subplot involved, say, football. "I wasn't sure how people would react to it, and sometimes writing romance, even for fictional characters, can feel a little bit like imposing on moments that are supposed to be private. I don't seem to have trouble 'imposing' when it comes to two males together, but when a girl's involved... yeah." Keep in mind all those female readers you have. Are they "imposing" by reading about gay men's romance? Then you aren't imposing by writing about a straight woman's romance.

"Talking of masterful, you deal with a genre that sure helps to clearly explain rules!" . I wouldn't have thought there was any connection, myself, but . . . The first feedback I ever got on that story was from a gentleman who worked for the W3C. Turned out he was a leather slave.

adblue wrote: "Most text for stories is done straight across the web page. On 800 x 600 monitors or above, the line length is usually too long." Oh, lord, have I struggled with accessibility issues at my Website, as can be seen from this story. Line length has been my worst headache. Ignoring the W3C advice, I made the table width in absolute percentages, because when I tried relative percentages, the line length seemed much too long on large screens. That was several years ago. Now, of course, everyone has PDAs, and heaven only know what my Website looks like in them. I've been trying to decide whether to get rid of the table altogether.

I write historical fantasy set in a world based on the Victorian and Edwardian Eras, and one of my leather series is set in the 1980s and 1990s, so yes, I do a fair amount of research. Research on recent decades is actually harder for me than research on earlier eras, because I know that no Edwardian man is going to look down his nose at me and say, "It wasn't like that." My Victorian and Edwardian novels are set in prisons and in a house of prostitution. Finding contemporary writings on prisons was a piece of cake; there are plenty of them at Project Gutenberg and Google Books and Victorianlondon.org. Finding contemporary writings on male prostitution? Um . . . no. There's virtually no period sources on the subject, and the ones that exist take the form of pornography, which was about realistic then as most pornography is today. So I had to dig, dig, dig for historical studies on the topic. Here's my bibliography for the novels, if anyone's interested. I continue to add to it. Other than that, I've made plentiful use of turn-of-the-century store catalogues and my handy-dandy editions of Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1884) and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911). I inherited the former volumes from my father. It helps to have a parent who's a historian of Victorian literature. For my leather series, I'm forced to peruse contemporary gay leather magazines from those decades. Oh, darn.