Tag Archives: LGBTQ

Love Has Reasons: Now in Paperback!

Love_Has_Reasons_400x600As you know (or as the name “Mister Stewardess” will tell you), I work in a customer service-intensive job. The epic, childish fight over To Recline or Not To Recline even ascended to the level of national news last week — I certainly understand the impulse to haul off and smack somebody upside the head with a rolled up USA Today or a book. And if you are the type who goes around whacking people with reading material, I’ve got good news: now you can keep my latest novel close at hand for just such an occasion. Love Has Reasons is out in paperback, and you can get your very own copy at JMS Books or Amazon.

Ashok Rai is fit, charming, and dynamite in the sack; for Danny Hanrahan, falling in love with him is a piece of cake.  Embracing his alter-ego, celebrated drag diva Raima Reason, proves to be more of a challenge.  Danny divorced his wife for a reason, and it wasn’t so he could go out and find someone who takes even longer than she did to put on makeup. When Raima’s career looks set to take off, Danny has to decide if he’s along for the ride, or if a boyfriend who’s sometimes a girl is more than he can handle.

 

 

Hop Against Homophobia and Transphobia

HAHAT 2014The Hop Against Homophobia and Transphobia has ended. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to commenter H.B., who won a copy of my new book, Love Has Reasons. The hop is over, but homo- and transphobia persist, so I’ll leave my rant against them below for you to enjoy: 

Chocolate LickFull disclosure: I think homophobia is scaredy-cat control-freak bullshit. You don’t know me. What the fuck business is it of yours what me and my husband get up to on the mornings when he just can’t let me sleep past four? (He loved when I was flying international; somehow me being cross-eyed exhausted is a huge turn-on for him.) (I said it was none of your business, I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna tell you all about it anyway.) There’s a tweet (apparently falsely) attributed to Morgan Freeman that used to get passed around with some enthusiasm: “I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You are not scared; you are an asshole.”  While I can get behind this quip in spirit (cuz if you actively promote discrimination or bullying or general shit-headishness because Being Gay is Wrong!, you are an asshole, no offense), I take issue with its content.  I think homophobia and transphobia are absolutely driven by fear.  It’s just not me of whom active homophobes are afraid.  If you’re not scared to death of the rainbow-glitter-loving queer pounding on your own closet door and howling for release (ahem), the notion that me going about my gay business is somehow a threat to you or “the children” or “society” should be wholly foreign, if not downright laughable.  I hate to break it to you, but any moth drawn to this flame(r) is a little bit gay already. Everybody loves a chocolate fountain, but you’re not dipping your pound cake in one if you’re not already at the Golden Corral, if you know what I mean… Continue reading →

He came up with an idea for a short story while he was passing through the Vancouver airport. What happened next will blow your mind wide open!

OK, maybe it won’t, but according to my Facebook newsfeed, this is how we’re titling posts these days.  And I did want to get your attention to tell you this: JMS Books is having a 40% off sale this weekend on ALL eBooks, and we’re releasing my brand new erotic short two days early so it can get in on the action.  It might not blow your mind, but it is sexier than some of my other stuff, and I’m excited to welcome it into the world today.

You_Again_400x600

Henry Kavalauskas spends a ton of time at the Vancouver airport.  He works there; he hangs out there; he knows the world is bigger than his fast-food job and his parents’ living room, and he wishes he could find a guy to take him out into it.  Someone to shepherd him through its teeming cities and sleep beside him in its fine hotels.  Someone like Zack Hoffman, to be quite specific, although Henry’s first encounter with this short, sexy business traveler seems destined to be his last, seeing as how it takes place in an airport men’s room.

But Zack’s long-haul flight cancels, and when their paths cross again quite by chance at Henry’s job — and Zack produces the key to a hotel room — Henry seizes the moment.  The room’s gorgeous, Naked Zack is gorgeous; it’s a dream come true for Henry.  Until Reality barges in, chases Henry half-naked back into the airport, and raises some questions about Zack.  “Is he who he says he is?” is one of them, sure, but the one that really nags at Henry is “What if I never see him again?”

Part super-sexy love story, part mash note from a flight attendant to his favorite airport, You Again? can be yours, all yours this weekend (through Sunday the 20th) for 40% off!

Is your Michael P. Thomas Collection incomplete?  All my other eBooks are 40% off this weekend, too!

It’s Never Easy to Say Goodbye. Except When It Is.

I want very badly to let Fred Phelps’ death pass unremarked upon, mostly because of how I imagine it would aggravate the crotchety old attention whore.  But he spent so much of his energy foisting himself onto the queer consciousness, I feel like saying my piece will help me send his bullshit karmically packing along with the rest of him.

Fags R Cute (reddit)

If the frightened and tight-hearted bigots of Westboro have taught us anything, it is that not every death is a tragedy.  The passing of Fred Phelps is not a loss to the American Community, the Brotherhood of Man, nor even, according to what I have read, to most of his family — a legacy, it is tempting to speculate, on which he might have hoped to improve.  He chose the burden of hate that he lugged through this life, and he can take it with him when he goes — he neither needs nor, frankly, warrants any from me.  I wish him a more forgiving god than he would ever have wished for any of us, though still I hope he planned ahead and packed mostly for exceptionally warm weather.

It seems that Westboro doesn’t believe in funerals for its members, which I find a hilariously convenient tenet of their “faith.”  I’m annoyed that there won’t be a funeral for the most famous funeral-crasher since Harold and Maude, but not for the reason you might expect (or for that matter that I would have expected of myself).  The only thing that was ever sacred to this man, his megalomaniacal family, or their quasi-political fund-raising-organization-masquerading-as-church was media attention, and the most fitting send-off I can imagine would be for the number of vociferous, sign-waving picketers at his own going away party — be they from military families or the gay community or families or victims of the numerous tragedies he sought to exploit or just the fair-minded community at large — to total Zero. Continue reading →

Singing the Praises of Gay Propaganda

steve-nyman-shirtless-skierAt the end of the summer of 2012, a story of mine was included in EM Lynley’s Olympic-themed anthology Going for Gold.  The collection of eight stories about gay Olympians (and their boyfriends, natch) was something of a Reader Favorite, and has seen renewed interest during the ramp-up to the Games of the Twenty-Second Winter Olympiad in Sochi, which arguably has a higher profile in the Queer community than Games past, due to the visibility and virulence of recent anti-gay laws passed in their host country.  Hell, I’m paying attention, and Michael Phelps doesn’t even ice skate.  Specifically, Russia has outlawed “gay propaganda,” which includes not only art and literature but any kind of public or private speech that seeks to legitimize gay people or equalize their families with any that hew to the more traditional model, in order to Protect the Children from being exposed to these notions.

Laff-a-lympicsAnd frankly, I kind of dig being a part of a project that links Gay and Olympics quite so explicitly at this moment in time.  The International Olympic Committee is not exactly famous for its explicit support of LGBTQ equality.  Yes, we’ve had the Laff-A-Lympics, and the Pig Olympics, and 2014 has already crowned the winner of the Selfie Olympics, but if you travel to Cleveland this summer, you will be invited to enjoy the ninth quadrennial Gay Games, so called because weeks before the First-Ever in 1982, the IOC (and the USOC) sued to block the use of the word “Olympics” in conjunction with this particular sporting event.  More recently, a member of the IOC from Italy called the United States’ inclusion of three gay athletes in its official delegation to Sochi “absurd.”  From where I’m sitting, it takes a certain amount of guts to roll up in a country that has recently chosen  not only to pass, but in some cases to harshly enforce, laws against being visibly gay — you know, lest it harm The Children to behold you — and then go on and be gay on what will, for two weeks, be the most visible stage in the world, but I don’t speak it — maybe that’s what “absurd” means in Italian. Continue reading →