Adam Phillips

Chapter 29 has just been posted to the eFiction section: It Started With Brian, Chapter 29 This story will be finished by the end of 2009. I'll be posting two more chapters in November, and the final three in December. I just want to say a note of thanks, gratitude, and appreciation to John. To allow someone you didn't know all that well to come nosing into your life, and to be so generous in sharing your memories, has honored and humbled me. There's no way I could finish this story like it needs to be finished without your input. --Adam

Sam left us a year ago today. I miss him. Though I never met him in person, he was one of the most compassionate, intelligent, and wise people I've ever encountered. It took him a while to apply those qualities to his own life, but in the end he found what he was looking for. RIP, buddy. --Adam

Flattery will get you nowhere, but I appreciate the compliments. I'm Adam Phillips, the author of Crosscurrents. I've never been a speedy poster, but I haven't touched CC in over a year. Here's why: A good e-friend of mine began an autobiographical story here at eFiction. It's called It Started With Brian. In November of 2007 he told me he had colon cancer and the prognosis wasn't good. As time went by, he felt he needed to spend the time and energy he had with his family instead of working on the story. I knew how badly he wanted it finished, so I volunteered to finish it from his notes. He gratefully accepted, and so around March 2008 or so I began working on it. I put Crosscurrents on hold at that time. Sam died October 25 of last year. He was in his early thirties. I wished I could have finished it before he died, but he trusted me to get the story told and he understood that my offline life is crazy busy. I am a married bi guy with a young son; I teach at a community college and have a business on the side, and I do all kinds of other stuff to keep my ADD-riddled brain occupied with a pretty frenzied schedule. I've found that works best for me. In any case, I promise that as soon as I finish It Started With Brian I'll return to Crosscurrents. I have about six chapters left on ISWB, and Andy and Matt are jumping up and down on my stomach demanding that I get back to them. I'll do that as quickly as I can, but I have to do right by my fallen buddy first. Thanks for your interest, and by the way, it's my preference that you read Crosscurrents at Nick Archer's site, Archerland. Here's the URL: http://archerland.di...ve.org/adam.htm New chapters get posted there first, although it's also at Tickie's site and crvboy. I like both of those sites, but I wasn't crazy about the way crvboy reformatted my story. To be fair, that site has a standard formatting, and CC there was brought into line with that format. Still... It's my expectation that ISWB will be finished by the year's end, if not sooner. The day I finish ISWB, I'll spend a few minutes grieving for my absent friend, then I'll move on back to Crosscurrents. --Adam P.S. Is there a reason I can't turn the italics off here? It looks normal in the preview, but when I post everything turns to italics.

I've just posted the latest segment of It Started With Brian. It Started With Brian, Chapter 28 Thanks, readers, for staying with Sam's story. --Adam Phillips

After months of fooling around, and avoiding, and generally staying-stuck, I've posted a new chapter: It Started With Brian, Chapter 27 Big-time thanks to John, who got me past this stuck place with his patience, his tolerance for my intrusions into his personal life and his memories, and his willingess to answer a billion stupid questions. Readers may find the next couple of chapters somewhat repetitive and tiresome, at least on a couple of themes. Probably no more tiresome than the experiences behind them were for John. Still, I think they're important, because all the while the "plot" will be advancing, and the repetitiveness is going to be part of what drives the story. Thanks for your patience, everyone. --Adam

I finally have a draft of ISWB 27 that John can tolerate. ;-) I've just sent it to my editor. It shouldn't be long now. This has been one of the more challenging writing projects I've ever worked on. I want so badly to get it right, but of course, I wasn't there and can't hope to capture things exactly as John remembers them. He's been really great about being supportive, never complaining that my stuff is crap, always willing to elaborate when I ask a question, sharing deep and personal feelings with me, helping me to try to see the story as he sees it--as he and Sam experienced it. Where the work falls short, none of the blame should fall his way. I couldn't do these final chapters of Sam's story without him. --Adam

Okay...I know I posted here last month and said that a new chapter was on its way. Stuff happens. I had all kinds of things going on over the summer. And John--my point of contact with the story of Sam and Brian--was involved in some transitions of his own that took him out of pocket for a while. But mainly, I couldn't figure out how to do the rewrite. How far to take Chapter 27. How to divide out the remaining material. So I just avoided it and let it roll around in my subconscious. Week before last, I returned to it, and hammered out the rest of the chapter. From there, I went and organized Sam's notes. Decided where major chapter divisions belonged. And discovered, as I looked closely at his notes, that there was more that needed to be told than I'd originally considered. Once the divisions sorted themselves out, I made folders on my computer for each major remaining section, and put the relevant notes in the appropriate folder. In the course of that, I came to realize that the story's going to be 34 chapters long, not 31. Don't groan. The time I spent sorting through his notes--which were quite non-linear, chronologically--has paid off. I have a much clearer picture of what's going in which chapter and how many chapters there'll be. The remaining material won't be near as difficult to assemble into readable chapters, so the work should go faster. In any case, I've finished a draft of Chapter 27 that should address the difficulties John pointed out a couple of months back. I'm sending him a copy to look at before I sign off tonight. Then it'll go to my editor, and I expect to post it next week. Thanks for your patience. Adam P

I turned thirty on the 20th. I told members of my Yahoo group that I was going to write in my blog about what I've learned about love in 30 years. That sounds waay too effing pretentious. And boring too. And that's not exactly what I meant to say anyway. What got me to thinking I'd like to post something on love is that there's a lot of cynicism about the whole romance-thing-over-the-long-haul. It seems as though a person's belief in the whole "in-love" or "romance" thing is inversely proportional to the number of years he or she has been in a relationship. The longer you've been in a relationship, it seems, the less likely you are to believe that that "in-love," "romantic" feeling is anything more than an initial insanity that quickly fades and leaves you with...well, with "comfortable." Which disappoints us. Disenchants us. Discourages us. And more than occasionally destroys the relationship. The thing is, a lot of people--maybe even the people who don't believe in the staying power of "in-love" and "romance"--don't want comfortable. They want want freakin ecstasy. Right along with the "long-termness." But they don't believe it's possible. What I have to say doesn't amount to proof. It's strictly anecdotal evidence. But what I have to say is that it is possible. I have it in my life. I think anyone can. I've been married for four years and have a son who'll turn three next week. But I have been in love with my son's mother (aka "my wife") since I was 17, and have been in an intimate relationship with her from that time, excluding part of 1998, 1999, and part of 2000, where we were both off making sure there wasn't something else out there for us that didn't include each other. And I swear: She takes my breath away as much as she did when I was 17. She can still make my head spin. Just looking at her can make me feel like that kid who first nervously asked her out. And she'd say the same thing about me. Of course, it's become much more than that. I'm not that nervous kid anymore. And over the years we've built something much deeper and closer. But it's still exciting. Sexually and romantically. And it seems that doesn't happen with a lot of couples. How does it happen with us? I honestly don't know for sure, but I have some suspicions about why it hasn't gone away for us. So I thought I'd make a list of things that seem to me to contribute to it. 1) We don't need each other. Oh, hell, I've used that kind of language before--you know, the "you complete me" thing. And there's some truth to it. But we're each complete individuals on our own. What excites me about her is that she's this amazing, vibrant, sexy woman who doesn't need me, and has yet chosen to make a life with me. Being needed can be very flattering at first and might give the relationship some initial mileage...but a person who needs you--daily--to make them whole isn't, over the long haul compelling, sexually attractive, or even particularly interesting. It gets to be a burden, in fact. 2) We know we can trust each other. This is particularly important in our relationship, because it...well, there are some aspects of our relationship that are not at all traditional. I mean, c'mon. Here I am, married to her with a son, and I'm posting to a blog at a gay stories site. But my point is not our unconventionality. My point is, to delineate it further, that she knows I post to a gay stories site, and that I write erotic narrative with gay themes. Hell, she's read them. We don't hide things from each other that we know would be relevant to the relationship. People get too reactive over the whole "lying" thing. There's lying and there's lying. Everybody does some of it every day. Our social fabric seems to depend on certain small lies. When your wife asks you if she's starting to look overweight, she doesn't really want you to tell her if you think she is. That kind of "lying" is benign. Everybody knows the kind of lie that can sow mistrust. The easiest way to evaluate it is to ask this question: "Does it seem scary to the relationship to bring this truth to her/him?" If the answer is "yes," that's a sure sign you have to tell her/him. That is, if your goal is intimacy. I add that last qualification because I'm not judging people who withhold aspects of their lives from their spouses or significant others. There are all kinds of ways to configure a relationship. I'm just saying that if one of your goals is that whole romance thing, significant withholding of important truths is incompatible with that kind of relationship because lack of trust and lack of full knowledge can eat away at romance. Where there is doubt or uncertainty or an awareness that there are areas of the signif other's life to which you're not invited, that's a buzz-kill for romance. Conversely, there is a kind of freedom in being able to trust your significant other that, in my opinion, is in and of itself romantic; erotic, even. There's nothing too out-there about me to share with my wife. And trust me, I got some out-there shit goin' on. I'm here, right? 3) We keep an eye open for those traits that originally attracted us to each other. If you're not careful, you can take those for granted. But they don't go away, often; we just get ungrateful. We take those things for granted. We shouldn't. Sometimes I look at my wife and see the blond cheerleader/AP student who mesmerized me back in the day. She was fiery, determined, confident, soft, alluring...the mixture was intoxicating. And it's still there. Oh, it hides now and then under the time-demands of her residency requirements, our mutual schedules, the challenges of parenting...but it's there. And I make it a conscious practice to look for it. 4) We know ourselves and keep examining ourselves. I think that for a couple to really stay giddy in love, each one has to know what it is about himself/herself that made the other person giddy originally, and has to know what there is about himself/herself that's a liability to the relationship, and each one has to work to bring the good stuff and has to work--hard--at not subjecting the partner to the bad stuff. We'll each fail at that last part. And we'll fight, and get angry, and get annoyed, etc., from time to time. But because we've been consciously trying to bring the good stuff--the stuff the other fell in love with--there's a bigger picture, and we get over fighting, being annoyed, being angry...and anyway, makeup sex is pretty damn good! If you think all that sounds really artificial and forced, all you have to do is think back on when you were on your way to becoming "a serious item," and you'll have to concede that you did just that: You brought your best stuff and held back your worst. So you snagged the prize; and you show your gratitude for her/his choosing your lame ass by getting lazy and not doing that any more? Hell, no wonder romance has died! 5) We work on keeping it fresh. I've been in love with my wife for 13 years, give or take a couple years' off a decade or so ago. That's a long time to know someone intimately...and yet she still surprises me sometimes, and in good ways, in amazing ways! I try to be the same sort of person for her too: Someone who brings some creativity, some spontaneity, some of my inner joy, to her in ways that catch her offguard from time to time. In that way we sort of inspire each other to bring that kind of thing to each other regularly. Surprises. I'm confident I won't have exhausted the mystery which is my wife even when I've drawn my last breath! All that being said, we've had some significant fights. We had one last spring. I spent a couple of nights on the couch! But those five things prevailed, and got me off the couch. And, as mentioned above, the makeup sex was fantastic. Anyway, your mileage may vary. But if I had to say why we still feel crazy in love with each other after 13 years, I think those five things have a lot to do with it. Adam

I'm sorry you feel that way. Many readers don't; they get the point. If you don't, there's nothing anyone can say that will help you get it. So let me suggest that you stop reading and stay with things that will make you happy. That's the great thing about America--freedom.

Some of you have been asking, so I thought I ought to put something here about the delay on It Started With Brian. I'm writing the rest of the story from Sam's notes. The closer to the present the notes get, the more sketchy they are, and the more detail I need to fill in. That usually requires that I harangue John and get some of the missing detail from him. He's always been more than generous in sharing his time with me to work on this, and he's been willing to share details that are quite personal and at times surely painful. For these reasons and so many more, I want to do right by this story, as right as I can. I had a version of the next chapter finished a couple of weeks ago. In writing it, I followed a plan that Sam had mentioned in passing to me. There were a series of conversations between him and John in the wake of the events described in Chapter 26, but I think Sam was wary of beating the reader down with all these repetitive conversations, so his original plan was to represent all the conversations as one--one extended conversation following "Brian's" kiss. I wrote the chapter like that. I had to do a lot of filling in and a lot of imaginative reconstruction, but I came up with a chapter that seemed okay to me. I always submit the chapter to John for him to look at it before I post it. John has always pretty much given each chapter the go-ahead, but I always want to give him the right to request a revision. This time, he did. He felt that if the series of conversations got represented as just one long conversation, an aspect of Sam's emotional dynamic during the remainder of the story wouldn't come out as clearly as it needed to. He made a very good case for representing the conversations as multiple conversations. It's the only time he's ever asked for a rewrite--how could I not do what he asked? This is his story, his and Sam's, and I take it as a sacred charge, and as a promise I made to Sam, to get it as right as I could get it. The problem, though, was that, as I said, Sam's notes were pretty sketchy at this point, so I knew I'd need John to fill me in on a lot of things. I wasn't even clear on the chronology of their talks myself. And worse, I wasn't even sure what questions I should ask John. I was afraid it was going to take about five pretty lengthy IM sessions. As it turned out, it only took two. Those took place a couple of weeks ago, and I've been slowly rewriting the chapter. Slowly, because the narrative flow becomes a little more complex with the revisions. But I think, like John, that it'll be for the better. Something else has developed. I thought that I'd need to write a Chapter 27 and a Chapter 28, and that would cover the remaining ground and segue into the final chapter, which Sam wrote months before his death. As I began working on it, though, I began to realize that I'll probably need to split the material originally planned for Chapter 27 into two chapters, and the material originally planned for Chapter 28 into two chapters. That means Sam's chapter, the final chapter of the story, will in all likelihood be Chapter 31. I don't want any of you to worry that that means it'll be that much longer before the story is finished. I'll probably bang out two chapters at a time from here to the end. It's just that I'm thinking there's too much material to represent it all in two chapters. I'll know more by the time I've finished writing this latest one. I hope to be finished with it by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience and for your ongoing support of Sam's story. And thanks to you readers of ISWB who have also written me about Crosscurrents. If you've followed both stories, you've seen the weird way in which two online lives intersect and have impact on each other. It's been one of the strangest experiences of my life, but also very gratifying, and I'm so thankful I got to know Sam, and that I've made a solid e-friend in John.

Thanks for the comment. And actually in my own life I have arrived at a resolution. I was speaking kind of hypothetcially.

I don't really want to open up a can of worms, but I'm going to. It seems as though the topic of bisexuality always does. For gay people and straight people alike. There's a popular sentiment that's so widespread it's made its way into the world of entertainment TV. A specfic example is found in the lyrics of one of the songs of Friends' adorably dippy Phoebe. Check out this clip: Or, for those of you who can't/won't go there: "Sometimes men love women, Sometimes men love men; And then there are bisexuals, But some just say they're kidding themselves." Yeah. Funny. Haha. As a root canal for some of us. Here's what irritates some of us about that sentiment: (And, no, it's not "hits a little too close to home; right, buddy?") It's insulting. The owner of that sentiment, when he directs it at me, presumes to know better than I do how my body responds, how my brain and emotions are configured. Granted...for some men, declaring yourself "bisexual" is a safe first stepping-stone on the way to coming out as a gay man. It's as if they can't fully admit even to themselves the full truth. I think that probably the most vehement "bisexual-deniers" out there come from this group of men, who assume that, because it was true for them, it's true for every man who labels himself "bisexual." But this isn't the experience of all of us who call ourselves "bisexual." And you know, you can posture all you want about labels...but dicks don't lie. If, when you look at beautiful women, you get hard...if you jerk off thinking about them...if you have erotic dreams about them...if you have had sex with them and enjoyed it intensely...it seems to me that by definition it's not accurate to call yourself "gay." Likewise, if, when you look at beautiful men, you get hard...if you jerk off thinking about them...if you have erotic dreams about them...if you have had sex with them and enjoyed it intensely...it seems to me that by definition it's not accurate to call yourself "straight." I have had both of these sets of experiences. So tell me that, as Phoebe says, I'm just "kidding myself." About what am I just kidding myself? Another misconception--one that comes from people who are willing to concede that there are, in fact, bisexuals--is that for bi people, male and female are interchangeable, and that in the search for a life-partner, it makes it so much easier to be bisexual, because you can be fulfilled by making a life with either one. I can't speak for all bisexuals, but that hasn't been the case for me. And here's why. There's a difference in the...I don't know, the nature of my sexual responsiveness to each gender. In women, what I desire is the soft, sensuous curves, the wickedly seductive softness of the female form, inviting you in. It's the difference, the mystery, the yin-yang of the whole thing that makes it so compelling. To be explicit, and, I suppose, somewhat crass, when my penis is sunk deep into a woman, there's this incredible merger of hard and soft that is absolutely sui generis. Equally compelling is the slight mismatch in the tempo and the contours of male and female desire. Learning to make love to a woman is an art that opens up the most intuitive aspects of me. You have to come to know the enticing differences in a woman's body and in her desires to fully and successfully make love to her. That's amazing to me, and utterly compelling. There is no experience of sex with a man that is in any way comparable, in my opinion. In men, what compels me is the toughness, the strength, wrapped up in a beautiful package. The rhythm of desire is no mystery; it is as familiar as my own libidinous interior. In my experience there's a no-bullshit quality to men coming together. And lovemaking is, in one way, actually more violent--although that's not quite the right word--because there's muscle involved, contending with muscle. And the tender element of making love to a man...it blows me away. The concatenation of tough and tender is an incredible turn-on to me. And with men, to run your hands over the hard contours, to feel the power thrumming under your fingers...juxtaposed with the incredible softness of the skin covering backs, faces, lips, asses...to look into the eyes of this strong, wild being and to realize that he's given himself over to you...that is nothing like what I experience when making love to a woman. How could this possibly be an either/or? How could it be a matter of indifference which gender I partner up with for life? For me, the difficult part of being bisexual has been that in choosing one, I am denying myself the other. And the choice, regardless of which way it falls, is for me unbearable. And in this paint-by-the-numbers culture, resolving that in a way that meets society's approval is difficult; very difficult indeed.

Wow. Uhh...did hell just freeze over? ;-) Good to see you post here--nothing like getting the straight dope from the guy in question--and I just want to say to everybody that this chapter wouldn't have happened without some huge help from John. Sam's notes on this part were sketchy, and I had to ask John a series of incredibly intrusive, personal questions for me even to understand how it all went down. He was gracious and generous in sharing what his incredibly deep (and surely painful) feelings had been at this juncture in the story. I was just blown away. John's been tremendously supportive of my work on Sam's story since I first began helping Sam with it. It didn't take me much time at all to see at least a little of what Sam saw in him--obviously I don't know him like Sam did so I can't claim to see everything Sam did--and I have to say he's one of my favorite e-friends. --Adam

I think that's right, Celia. I think we label because we want some conceptual aid to help us through our confusion. I think of the people who have encountered my tale, or Sam's, and written back mystified. They didn't understand. How could Matt have allowed Andy to make love to him? He likes girls, doesn't he, and for that matter, what's up with Andy? Or, how could Brian say he's in love with Sam? Is he just gay and in denial? Life and love are huge, and messy, and they confound our expectations and frustrate our intellects and give the lie to the tidy pictures we create of reality for the purpose of controlling it better. It only makes sense that in the minefield of sexual attraction--where it's not beyond the pale that people can be murdered for loving the wrong person--we'd be driven to get a handle on all of that by seeking to control it conceptually. To figure it out. To manage it. What better and more efficient way than by attaching a label? And sure, sometimes labels do help us understand. What makes me sad is that sometimes labels create problems and blind us from understanding. Andy and Matt had their hearts broken by that label-induced blindness. So did Sam and Brian. But you're right. The labelling obsession, I think, comes from being confused and bewildered by a phenomenon, and it represents an attempt to understand.

The people who've e-known me for a while, from looking at this entry's title, are already either grinning or rolling their eyes: Here we go again. I'm sorry, I cain't hep it. Tell you a little bit about how I got onta the Internet as a dirty-story-writer. Long time ago, I ran into a story at Nifty that was pretty weak technically, but absolutely compelling--at least to me--from a "story" standpoint. That story was called Fraternity Memoirs, and it was based on the college experiences of its author, who went by the screen name of John Walsh. The story tells of how a college freshman decides to pledge a "renegade" frat, and tells the story of his friendship with his frat Big Brother and of his...uhhh...relationship with another kid in his pledge class. One of the things that was masterful about his storytelling was his ability to convey the palpable sexual tension between him and his straight Big Brother. I was much moved by the portrayal of that friendship. I emailed John thanking him for his story. It was the first time I'd ever written to a "Nifty" author. I told him a little bit about myself: Bisexual, if I had to put a label on it, but in a serious relationship with a woman. We got to corresponding via e-mail, and he became a very good e-friend. He asked me to tell him the story of my first time with a guy. I wrote him a reply that took 3 emails from me. Somewhere along that time I had joined his Yahoo! group, a little reluctantly. He'd created it mainly because the lag time between his chapters was pretty significant, and he wanted to let his readers know when new chapters were coming out. But, as these things often go, his group became a hangout for his groupies, who lavished praise upon him (aka "licked his ass"). You wanna talk serious hyperbole, though--he had people comparing him to Norman Friggin Mailer. That was just over the top for me. I told him, jokingly, that hell would freeze over before I'd ever participate in the asslickfest which was his group. He laughed and replied that it was pretty over the top. After I'd been hanging out at his place for a while, though, it struck me that I had a story of my own to tell. I was a senior in college, and it was the spring of my senior year, and I was about to graduate and move south to go to graduate school. My gf--no, by this time she was my fiancee--whom I'd known since we were elementary school kids, attended college in a different city, but she was going to be entering medical school in the same city where I'd be going to grad school. Life was about to change for me, and I too had some things from my past that haunted me a little. I was feeling the need to put some closure--or some something--on my past, as I moved into my future, and I was feeling a little pensive. But there weren't many people I could talk to about it because it wasn't easy for many people to understand me. See, the thing was, I was a mostly-straight-guy who nevertheless noticed guys, and who had fallen in love back in high school with his best friend. That friendship was intact in college, after a 2.5-year period of alienation, but it was a little strange, and I had a sense that he and I were about to walk the proverbial diverging roads, and that before too long we'd hear from each other twice a year at best--then once a year--then once every two years, etc., and think of each other once in a while as "someone I used to know." God, it was killing me. But what was to be done about it? We were walking different paths. He'd gotten married that year--I was best man--and we weren't living in the same city anyway; and I was about to move even farther south. I needed to talk to someone about how it felt for me. How I'd loved him so much, and how it seemed as though there would be this dark and empty place in me from then on, even in the midst of the joy I was feeling as I began to make a life with the woman who'd agreed to marry me. But who can a guy talk to about loving a man and a woman? I got to thinking about how much I'd been touched by Fraternity Memoirs. I decided I'd like to write the story of myself and my best friend, talk about what happened, and put it up there at Nifty. In a way I just needed to talk it out, to Say It, as I put it sometimes. I guess, too, it was a love song to my high school buddy. I also had hopes that I might touch some reader as Fraternity Memoirs had touched me. I thought that maybe--just maybe--there might be a reader or two out there who knew what it felt like to be torn between the love of a woman and the love of a man; and maybe those readers might contact me and we could talk, compare notes, stuff like that. You don't feel like such a freak when you can talk to other people who can relate. So I took the three-email writing I'd sent John telling him about my first time with a guy, and I began expanding it. I entitled the story Crosscurrents and I submitted it to Nifty. I thought the name was perfect, because it described how I felt. Out there in the surf, pulled in two different directions, by two strong currents that came together at the same place--the place of me. I started getting emails almost immediately. From gay men who loved the story; and from bisexual men who got it on another level entirely, because they'd lived versions of it. That was tremendously gratifying. By the fifth chapter, Nick Archer from the Archerland gay-fiction site had contacted me and asked if he could host Crosscurrents at his site. I knew nothing about all this, but I liked Nick from his email contacts, and after some further inquiry with him, I agreed. Archerland is no more, but I'm now hosted here at Gay Authors. In any case, for the most part, I've enjoyed the reader email in response to Crosscurrents over the years. But from time to time I get letters either lecturing me, or confused as hell, because they don't know why "Andy" doesn't come out as gay, or why he's trying for a straight boy. I've also gotten letters telling me that straight men cannot be with gay men, can't love gay men, can't make love to them, would be repulsed by it, so the "Matt" character must be a gayboy in denial. And I've gotten letters ripping me a new one for telling a story about a "bi" man falling in love with a "straight" man. Somehow by telling a story like that, apparently I'm betraying the entire gay community (funny; I didn't think that as an author trying to talk about real-and-true things from my life I was accountable to any "community."). My point is, the only negative email I've ever gotten is from indignant readers who don't want to accept that a man's sexuality could be multivalent. Many of these indignant readers insist that bisexual men are just confused and/or scared gay men. And they neither concede the possibility of, nor approve of, a "straight" man loving--intimately--a "bi" man. And then there are the readers who want to know why I don't make it more clear that "Andy" is gay and that "Matt" is at least bi. What is this about? Why are people so determined to tell me what makes my body respond sexually, as if they know better than I do? I mean, I'm the owner of said body, right? I guess I know what gets my engine going, and I guess I know better than people who aren't me. I've also gotten this in response to a story I helped complete that's not even mine: Dan Kincaid's It Started With Brian. The story has been an intriguing one. It takes 26 chapters for Brian to admit to Sam he's in love with him. But in that very same conversation Brian makes clear that he's straight. Or, rather, he doesn't deny it when Sam says "but you're straight." Rather, he counters with, "But I love you." And this in fact is part of the dilemma, part of what keeps Brian at arm's length for years until he finally decides, to hell with the labels, I want Sam. But I have readers who have emailed me and they seem utterly unable to just let the story tell itself. They want to know why it took so long for Brian to accept his gayness, or they tell me they knew all along Brian was gay, or they figure he must be at least bi, or yada yada yada. I've received more email asking questions about the sexuality of these guys than I've had commenting on how cool it is that Brian is finally making an attempt to get the two of them where they should have been years ago. It mystifies me. Why does a label have to be attached to these guys? What's wrong with accepting the description that they give of themselves? Granted that some gay men have tried not to face their "gayness" and have hidden under descriptions that aren't accurate, why does this need to label have to attend the reading of the story? Can't the story just be the story? It's a love story, and it's a love story that happened. Why the urge to dissect and label? I ask this with some urgency, first of all, because everything I've experienced in my own life, and in hearing from some of my readers, and from research and reading I've done, suggests that sexuality is much too complex and nuanced to be adequately captured by the labels "gay," "straight," and "bi." Secondly, and maybe more importantly, in the story under consideration, it's precisely the oppressiveness of these labels that keeps Sam and Brian from opening up to each other, thus wasting years, and causing both of them years of pain. Both of them were attracted to women, Brian almost exclusively so; but both of them were in love with each other. It was an awful thing that the labels shamed them into wasting years apart that they could have had together. I should clarify that I'm not pissed at any of the people who've responded in this way to It Started With Brian. It does mystify me, though. I don't understand why so many people feel compelled to rush in and proclaim that a person is gay. Or straight. Or bi. It doesn't alter the fact that the story is a love story, and it only insults the characters involved by telling them they don't even know their own sexual responses. Okay, I'll shut up now. Some of my readers characterize my occasional rants as Adamic Blasts. I think that's unfair. I am warm and fuzzy everywhere. I do trim, though.

I got a use or two for that. Stop by later tonight.

Gods, how authors appreciate perceptive readers!! Even though I don't really consider It Started With Brian as "my" work, it seems to me this is precisely one of the points. "Labels" messed Sam and Brian up tremendously. They messed Brian up because he knew he was attracted to women sexually, and not really to men; but he also knew he was in love with Sam, and because he was, there was a sexual component. But because "straight" guys are not supposed to fall in love with men, he held back. Meanwhile, for Sammy, Brian was "straight." So he just knew there was never a chance that Brian could love him like he so badly wanted to be loved by Brian. Result? Wasted years. Years. Now remind me--why are those labels so important again? :wacko:

I didn't even know it was your damn birthday. So happy f**kin birthday. Also, your "rantings in the Soap Box" and your "blunt style on the other forums" ain't something you should apologize for. God help us if we should all have to go around being insipid just so as not to scare people with thin skins. Oops. Did I say that? Surely not.

Don't even get me started. I agree with you 100%. 1000% if it were possible. And no. Brian's not gay. That's the whole point. That's what threw him. Adam

Oops. Sorry. I have to log in under Dan's account to add chapters, and I was doing a little minor editing and didn't log in under my own name before I came to the forum. Please email me and let me know if you still see name glitches. Adam

I'm very curious--what is there in this chapter that makes you think this story is over? It really mystifies me. As a matter of fact, there are three more chapters left, and I can assure you, they're not just padding. Sam's...uhhh...challenges are by no means conquered here in Chapter 26. There's some rocky road left to walk! Adam

Chapter 26 has been posted: It Started With Brian, Chapter 26 This chapter should provide some answers to questions that many of you have been asking for quite some time. --Adam Phillips

I've posted the next chapter of Sam's story: It Started With Brian, Chapter 25 I think this is a chapter that readers will appreciate. --Adam

I made a promise to Sam. He wanted this story to be finished. Short of getting hit by a truck, I intend to keep my promise. There are five chapters to go. I'll only need to work on four of them, because Sam wrote the final chapter himself. It means a lot to me that It Started With Brian will get to end with Sam having the final word. --Adam

Yeah. Very weird.