Love in a Chair - 31. Afterword

Love in a Chair

A story by Altimexis

Afterword

Thanks for reading this, my first attempt at gay fiction. I hope you liked the story and that it touched you in some way. I wrote this at a time when I was just coming to terms with my own sexuality, even though I was well into middle age. There’s a bit of me in many of the characters, from Aaron’s early shy and confused nature to Dr. Stevens’ approach to helping kids with spinal cord injury. My own story most closely resembles Alan Sandler’s - although I’m not very religious, I grew up with the belief that homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder. No one wants to believe they’re sick, so I just assumed that I didn’t have to be gay if I didn’t want to be - that I could “cure” it on my own. I knew I had strong feelings for boys when I was no more than ten. The closest I ever came to a sexual encounter was when I was twelve and coerced my best friend, who was eleven, to get naked with me and feel each other up.

If I had it to do over again, would I change things? Well, it’s hard to say. The grim reality is that if I had acted on my desires, I might well have died of AIDS. In any case, what might have been is irrelevant - I can’t go back and relive my life and I couldn’t be happier with the one I live now. I love my wife deeply and we have a satisfying relationship that has lasted more than two decades and even withstood my coming out to her.

So what was the impetus for writing Love in a Chair? I’ve read a lot of gay fiction on the Internet and have been impressed by the quality and depth of the writing from several outstanding authors. Sadly, only a few stories have dealt with people with disabilities, and those that have often portray them as helpless, or fail to acknowlege the difficulties they do in fact face. Even men with complete spinal cord injuries such as Brian’s can have satisfying sexual experiences - not always as normal as what I portrayed here, but satisfying nonetheless. They can even father children, with a little help from modern medical technology.

Now there are a couple of good stories out there that I am aware of that deal with gay teens with disabilities. Neither of them deals with a disability that impairs sexual function as in Brian’s case, but they are still very good stories and I can highly recommend them. The first is Tim by Cole Parker, in which the main character’s boyfriend has brittle bone disease and is largely wheelchair-bound. The second is Just Hit Send by Grasshopper. It deals with the love between two fifteen-year-olds, one of whom was struck by a car when he was very young. The story does particularly well at dealing with the feelings of inadequacy that develop over time and how they affect the relationship. Both of these stories are must-reads.

Some may undoubtedly wonder why I wrote Love in a Chair primarily from Aaron’s point of view, rather than Brian’s. One of the reasons is that, although I’ve worked with paraplegics most of my adult life, I am not myself a paraplegic. No matter how intimately knowledgeable I may be on the subject, I cannot possibly know what it feels like to be in Brian’s shoes. Perhaps more importantly, a story written from Brian’s perspective in its entirety would have been incredibly intense. Consider Chapter Twelve, which was told from Brian’s viewpoint when he was in intensive care, multiply that by twenty times and one can see how the story might have been overwhelming.

Thanks for reading Love in a Chair. Again I would like to thank WriteByMyself and David of Hope for their editing skills and invaluable suggestions, Trab for his proofreading and Captain Rick for providing incomparable advice on the legal aspects of the plot. There are a number of other people I would like to thank for their feedback on the story, not the least of which are C James, Rigel and Bondwriter, as well as all the folks who have taken the time to provide feed back through my forum, or e-mail me their comments. I am thankful to Nifty and the Rainbow Community Writing Project for hosting the original version of Love in a Chair. I am also indebted to Gay Authors and Awesome Dude for hosting this and my other stories.

I hope that I have been true to my word and that you learned something from this story, and will never look at sex in quite the same way again.

Altimexis@yahoo.com

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