Summary
In this engaging episode of Art in the Raw, J. W. Steed shares his journey as a writer whose queer identity deeply informs his work, blending eroticism with science fiction and fantasy. From early literary influences to his groundbreaking queer erotica and thoughtful exploration of clone rights, Steed offers candid insights into creativity, vulnerability, and challenging norms in queer storytelling.
Keywords
queer erotica, science fiction, fantasy, J. W. Steed, clone rights, queer identity, erotic fiction, LGBTQ+ literature, vulnerability in art, queer representation
Takeaways
- J. W. Steed began writing poetry as a child, heavily influenced by Victorian poet Edward Lear and continued through creative writing workshops in school.
- His early writing included queer characters subtly woven into young adult and women’s fiction, with his first trans character appearing in 2004-2005.
- Steed’s work blends humor and seriousness, inspired by authors like Shirley Jackson and Patrick Dennis, enhancing emotional depth.
- He has been a proud member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, recently writing explicit queer sci-fi erotica featuring clones.
- The novella “Journey’s End” explores identity, loss, and complex relationships through the sci-fi lens of clones with varying memories and citizenship rights.
- Steed uses his long-running personal blog—focused on erotic personal essays—to develop his comfort and skill in writing sexual scenes.
- He emphasizes that eroticism in literature is not just about sex but about arousing emotional, sensory, and intellectual responses, making characters more relatable and stories richer.
- Steed addresses social commentary in his work, especially around clone rights and commodification, reflecting challenges faced by queer communities.
- Despite potential risks and censorship in queer erotic genres, he advocates for writing true to oneself and embracing vulnerability as a source of creative strength.
- For emerging queer writers, Steed advises clarifying personal beliefs and harnessing that conviction to write authentically and powerfully.
Chapter Timestamps
- 00:01 – Introduction to J. W. Steed and early writing influences
- 03:00 – Queer identity and writing erotica
- 06:00 – Literary inspirations: Shirley Jackson and Patrick Dennis
- 08:30 – Role of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association
- 12:30 – Creation of the queer sci-fi clone erotica duology
- 15:00 – Writing “Journey’s End” amid personal loss
- 18:20 – Queer representation and sexuality in sci-fi literature
- 21:30 – Blog and personal essays as creative development tools
- 27:00 – The role of eroticism in character and narrative development
- 31:00 – Social commentary on clone rights and identity
- 35:00 – Reception and challenges of queer erotic fiction
- 40:00 – Overcoming creative doubts and rejection
- 43:30 – Contributions to broader queer literary conversations
- 44:30 – Upcoming sci-fi projects and creative process
- 46:00 – Advice for emerging queer writers
- 48:30 – The 10 Artistic Questions with J. W. Steed
- 57:30 – Closing remarks
Guest Website and Socials
Learn more about J. W. Steed and his work:
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uh Let me start over.
What first drew you to writing?
um And how did your queer identity shape that early creative voice that you had?
(00:24):
Very good question.
I have always been a writer since I was a child, essentially.
I began writing a lot of um poetry, m not any of it good by any means, but by the third orthe fourth grade I was writing a lot of poetry, a lot of comic poems.
(00:45):
I was very influenced by the poetry of Edward Gilear, the Victorian poet.
uh He's the author of, I think his most famous poem would be The Owl and the Pussycat.
uh Still a popular poem among kids these days, maybe.
And I would write imitation poetry in his style and then try to branch out and write myown poetry as well.
(01:12):
My teachers noticed that and started to suggest that I attend creative writing workshopsthat the public school that I was in was offering.
So I would attend a lot of those.
And throughout my elementary, middle, and high school years, I attended a lot of creativewriting workshops, as long as they were free, because my parents didn't have the money to
(01:34):
pay for it.
So I always knew I wanted to be a writer.
My career has taken, has gone a roller coaster kind of route to get to where I am.
But in my 20s, I tried to send in novels that I was writing.
and to get them published.
I had some success with short stories, which I had published in national magazines and ahSunday newspaper supplements, that sort of thing.
(02:05):
But I did not become a published novelist until I was in my 40s, when I realized that Ihad to buckle down and actually get things done.
I started writing for
A children's imprint, not a children's a young adult imprint for teens and got my firstbooks published that way.
(02:26):
I branched out into adult books as well.
Within the first five or six years that I started to get serious, I had 16 uh novelspublished uh internationally.
I had some that were even translated into foreign languages.
And then later on, I've kind of branched out into this erotic side of my
(02:48):
career, which has been very exciting and fun for me.
So that's been my basic journey.
Can you recall a moment or experience that kind of made you realize that you wanted towrite about that erotic queer desire?
um
I have always wanted to be very frank about my sexuality in my books, but I have not beenable to do that just because of some of the genres that I was writing.
(03:14):
When I was writing for young adults, you could be flirty a little bit, but you could notbe outright sexual.
The imprint that I was writing for was targeted primarily towards uh teenage girls.
So the...
publishing has asked me if I would mind publishing under a female pseudonym, which Ididn't mind at all.
(03:38):
I don't really have much ego attached to putting my name, my real life name, to a piece offiction.
When I was writing for adults, uh the primary market that I was writing for was uh adultwomen, women's literature, romance, that sort of thing.
(03:58):
And I could not be very
frank about my sexuality than either.
Still, I was able to write about some uh aspects of my sexuality, even within those works.
I was able to include in my very first novel, uh which I'm very proud about because it wasearly 2000s, I had a trans character that uh really did not go very much remarked about.
(04:25):
Nobody objected to it.
uh I don't know if people noticed.
uh Perhaps not, but I thought that was fun to do.
And I had uh queer characters of all kinds within subsequent novels.
Even when I was writing under my own name, was able to, for a fantasy series that I wasdoing, I was able to include a uh character who was the child of two uh gay adult parents.
(04:56):
And that was quite satisfying to do.
But being able to write frankly about my sexuality and to include some of my ownexperiences and past uh sensory uh data has been very satisfying to me.
How long ago was the trans character that you mentioned um in terms of how the politics istoday around trans rights?
(05:26):
How far ago was that?
This would have been in 2005, if I want to say 2004, 2005.
I knew trans people and accepted them as what they were, but I'm not sure that the transmovement was quite as much in the consciousness of the American public as it is now.
(05:50):
And I don't think that I could necessarily get away with such a controversial
character.
It's not controversial to me or you perhaps, but to many people and certainly topublishers these days.
I don't think I could get away with that these days, unfortunately.
Yeah.
(06:11):
You mentioned a few of your earlier literary influences, the poetry and such, how havethose influences evolved as your work is developed?
Some of my earliest influences were uh very serious or very comic.
(06:32):
I think that as a result that I've kind of mingled the two sometimes.
When my mom first took me to the adult side of the library, which was a big rite ofpassage to me, she took me to the adult side when I was, I think, 10 years old, about,
because I'd run out of books to read on the children's side.
(06:53):
She gave me a handful of books and among them was uh Shirley Jackson's We Have AlwaysLived in the Castle.
And Shirley Jackson is the author of many uh respected uh short stories, novels.
She's the author of the short story that just about everybody used to read in high school,The Lottery, which is quite famous.
(07:15):
She's the author of The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted into that Netflix seriesa few years ago.
uh
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is her last novel and it's very somber.
It's about two sisters living in an abandoned house or a rundown house.
One of them may be a murderer.
(07:36):
Maybe, maybe not.
ah It's not the kind of fear that you would necessarily give to a 10 year old child, butshe saw something in me that uh let her know that I was prepared for it.
But also in that same ah
library check she gave me uh the novel by Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame, which of course hasbeen made into movies and musicals since then.
(08:01):
It's a ridiculous comic book and those two authors have been among my favorites my entirelife.
I kind of tend to include even in the most serious of my books have comic scenes or comiclittle interludes just because I believe it
makes the serious parts more serious and the sexy parts more sexy.
(08:25):
So I read a lot.
I've been able to adapt my own style from the authors that I have read.
And I'm always happy to talk about the books that I love to read as well.
How is your involvement with the uh science fiction and fantasy writers association playedin your artistic journey, especially with your, your more queer focused content.
(08:54):
When I started to become serious about writing novels, my first novels were all fantasynovels.
I wrote one and I decided to find an agent with it.
I sent it off to her and as soon as she said, yeah, I kind of like this, let me see if Ican find a buyer for it, I started to write another.
(09:16):
And then when I finished that one, I started to write another because the process offinding a publisher is quite...
exhausting and can be very long.
The first book that you write may not be the first book that you publish.
I teach writing as well and I'm always hammering that point home to the writers in myworkshops.
(09:37):
uh Once you write a book, you have to keep on writing more because that first book mightnot be the one that hits.
So I've always been interested in writing fantasies because they were what I loved.
to read as a child.
I loved reading, you know, the Chronicles of Narnia.
I loved reading the Lord of the Rings, those books.
uh And I read those all throughout my youth.
(10:00):
The Oz books were ah easily my favorites when I was a kid.
And I remember the excitement of reading those, you know, when I was a child and late atnight under the covers of the flashlight.
And that was just very exciting to me.
And I wanted to, you know, give that
excitement back to readers.
uh So, you know, in the back of my mind, I've always wanted to write fantasy.
(10:25):
I went, as I said, through that roller coaster route to get published, so I wasn't havingmy fantasies published at all for many years.
But eventually one of those first fantasies that I wrote did get published, and I was ableto, you know, parlay that into a membership in the science fiction fantasy writers.
(10:46):
And I've been a member ever since and proud to be one because they're a good organization.
Lately, my last erotic novella has been a science fiction one.
And that's the first actual science fiction that I've ever written.
I've always been interested in the fantasy, but I enjoyed it so much that when mypublisher earlier this week said, hey, would you like to write another science fiction
(11:12):
book?
I was like, yeah, let's do that.
I had so much fun with the last one.
ah it's an exciting science fiction and fantasy.
It's exciting for me to read and it's also fun to write.
It's interesting.
You mentioned some of those older fantasy novels that I, that I also read.
Um, and I tend to, um, judge a book that I read today based off of how closely it makes merecall how those books made me feel the excitement and the fantasy.
(11:45):
Yeah.
you ever read the another one I just thought of the tripod series?
Did you ever read those growing up?
They're by John Christopher.
I think they're British science fiction series from the, I want to say 1950s ah aboutthese aliens that are on tripods and they've subjugated humans.
A very exciting series to read when you're eight or nine years old.
(12:09):
Yeah.
So speaking of which, um, same sex gay SF clone erotica, um, kind of merges sciencefiction with explicit queer erotica.
What inspired you and Frank Slater to tackle that theme of cloning identity and desire inthat book?
(12:33):
to be blunt with you, was sheer coincidence.
Our publisher, Peter Schuetz uh Publishing, asked us both to write science fictionstories.
And Peter Schuetz Publishing, I should say, is a line, it's an imprint that aspires topresent pulp style, uh gay, queer, erotica, in traditional paperback format.
(13:03):
Mm-hmm.
that the books look like the pulp paperbacks of old.
ah And each paperback tends to have a theme.
um All of them are erotic themes.
You can go to the website, which is peterschutz.com.
(13:23):
That's S-C-H-U-T-E-S.
And look at the, yeah, absolutely.
And you can look at the lines there, but he wanted to branch out and try a science fictionuh story.
And he knew that I was an SFWA member, so he asked me to submit one.
uh And Frank Slater and I both submitted by pure coincidence stories that had happened tobe about clones.
(13:50):
So he decided to put them together and um turn them into a duology, uh both about clonestories.
It was nice and I think that they fit well together.
And it's interesting to see what somebody else does with the same sort of theme.
Yeah, definitely.
Especially when you don't even know that the other person's doing it, then you canimmediately compare notes.
(14:16):
Can you walk us through the creative process that you had for stories like journeys and orBilly club?
Yeah, Journey's End is my story in the uh duology called Same Sex.
I've actually got a copy right here.
um And it's a story about a scientist who is preparing a frontier planet for colonization.
(14:41):
And while he's watching a video transmission, essentially a zoom call, from a scientificorbital post that's above the planet,
he happens to discover that his ex-boyfriend is screwing around with his clone.
And what follows after that is a story of sexual obsession, of coming to terms with havinglost somebody, and how we make amends to the people that we love even after they have
(15:09):
moved on.
ah I did not have all that in mind when I started this story.
I just wanted to write a sexy story about clones.
Yeah, exactly.
ah
One of the things I did when I was thinking about the story was to say, okay, maybe I wantto do clones.
um And I thought, well, I don't want to necessarily have the clones have sex with eachother, but I want them to um blend together in ways that uh the reader might not be able
(15:41):
to distinguish between them and the clones themselves might not be able to distinguishbetween the other.
And I think that happens to a certain extent in my story.
A lot of the story had arose from what I was actually going through at the time.
My uh dad had been, uh essentially his health had been failing for quite a, for a verylong time before I was writing the story.
(16:08):
But I'd gotten halfway through the story and was enjoying writing it quite a bit when Igot a call uh that I better get to the hospital because it was going to be his last day,
essentially.
So I went to the hospital and spent the day with him.
It was very sad and very depressing.
Got home and I woke up the next morning and my husband kind of had found out during thenight that my dad had passed away, but he let me sleep because he knew how exhausted I
(16:37):
was.
And he told me that morning and you know, it was very affecting of course, but I didn'treally have anything.
else to do that day except for sit around and feel sad.
So I channeled a lot of that energy into finishing the story.
So the last half of the story came out in a way that I didn't entirely expect based on thecircumstances at the time.
(17:05):
I kind of turned the story into a meditation on how we might uh hue close to ourprogenitors.
people who have sired us, whether in this case it was clones.
uh In my case, I was thinking about my father and how even though we hew close to them, westill differ in vitally essential ways.
(17:31):
And exploring those differences is what made the story interesting to me.
So the rest of that day, I just sat down.
I wrote a scene in which the protagonist makes amends with his ex-boyfriend.
who's cheating with his clone, in which they confront each other and uh share a sexy scenebecause he's erotica after all.
(17:58):
And uh then I wrote a ending that still leaves me in tears whenever I read it, justbecause I think of the emotion that I was feeling that day.
that last half of the story just became really emotion packed for me.
And I hope it does for readers as well because
because of what I was going through.
um
(18:20):
I could definitely feel as I was reading through it, the emotion that you're talkingabout.
em The books introduction discusses kind of the lack of queer representation in sciencefiction.
How did that gap influence your approach to writing that collection?
think that there is a certain degree of queer representation in science fiction.
(18:44):
Even in the 1980s, I can remember reading science fiction novels that had queer charactersin them.
I do not think that there is a lot of...
very sexual queer characters.
When queer characters are allowed to exist, they are often very sexless.
(19:09):
They don't have any physical contact with other queer characters.
I think of a novel like Ethan of Athos, which is a Lois McMaster, a bourgeois novel, oneof our earliest ones, which is set in space and basically has a
planet of the queers, where the entire planet is men, and they reproduce uh using petridishes and that sort of thing.
(19:40):
they're fairly explicitly gay coded and have relationships with each other, but they don'tactually have sex at any point.
And when I read that, I was kind of disappointed.
And I'm not expecting to find these sort of outright
sexually explicit scenes that I pen in my novels, some types of...
(20:05):
Let them have some fun, essentially, is what I would like to see.
So I kind of in my novels like to take a literary approach.
I like them to be well written and I like my novels to have engaging characters and bethoughtful and be funny at the same time.
But I like them to be sexy as well.
My characters should have fun.
They deserve it.
Yeah.
(20:26):
And I recognize that as I was watching some of the latest, uh, episodes of some of thestar Trek series, uh, where they have some openly gay characters, some openly non binary
characters.
and, uh, some of the other sci-fi, bored us, um, is one character from one of the sci-fiseries that I'm not recalling the name of it at the moment, but he was in a same sex
(20:52):
relationship and they even had.
child together, but they didn't, you didn't see over sexual intimacy between thecharacters.
It was just hinted at.
uh
and in Star Trek Discovery, which I think is the one you're talking about, you've got malecharacters who are essentially husbands, and definitely partners and lovers, but at most
(21:17):
they share a chaste kiss.
Now this is partly because of the franchise, but they could deserve some shirtless sexytime with the covers pulled up.
If Captain Kirk can have some shirtless sexy time, I don't see why the other two couldn't.
Exactly.
So you, you've also got a blog that you write with.
(21:38):
Um, and it mixes, uh, erotic fiction with some personal essays that you do.
Um, how does,
is entirely personal essays.
There's no fiction on it.
there you go.
Um, so it's not just, it's, it's not erotic fiction.
It's erotic personal essays.
Nice.
how does that interplay between the fiction that you write and your autobiography?
(22:05):
Another good question.
I have been keeping a blog online for 15 years now.
It's been since 2010.
So that's a big chunk of my life in which I write about my erotic history, in which Iwrite about my erotic adventures, and which I think about and discuss sexuality.
(22:32):
Again, as I said, it's not
It's not fiction, it's all me, essentially.
um I had a storied youth, so I have a lot of stories from my teenage years and twenties inwhich I discuss the things that I did then as a sexual being.
(22:56):
And it's gone on for 15 years now with varying degrees of
enthusiasm on my part.
There haven't been any huge years long lapses, but sometimes there may be several monthsthat go by between entries, depending on what other projects I'm doing at the time and how
(23:21):
much fun I happen to be having.
But I discuss all kinds of things in my blog.
I use my past a lot in my erotic writing because
Writing that blog is how I became comfortable with writing sexual scenes.
When I was writing uh romances or women's fiction under a woman's pen name, I couldn'twrite, well for one thing I was writing straight love scenes, for which I have limited
(23:54):
enthusiasm, shall we say.
And for another, I couldn't get as
explicit as I necessarily do in my current erotic fiction or on my blog.
So I wasn't entirely comfortable with writing explicit scenes at first.
And as a challenge, I decided to keep this blog so that I could develop that side ofmyself.
(24:22):
it has, boy has it developed.
That's all I'm gonna say.
But I use a lot of my uh blog material for my fiction.
um
The first erotic novella I ever had published, for example, was called Sleazy A, which isuh part of the anthology, Dirty Dorns and Fresh Men.
(24:42):
You can kind of guess the theme from that.
And, yes, exactly.
And it's a look into a single weekend of a character named Wick, who's a sophomore at asmall Southern college.
And he has encounters with three different gentlemen who represent three kind ofarchetypes of
queer men at the time, and it's set in the 1980s.
(25:04):
uh But one of them is a favorite married professor of his.
uh Another one is an overnighter with a closeted professor who's so far back into thecloset that it makes him toxic to be around.
And finally, there's a chance at romance with a younger man his own age.
uh This book is fictional in the sense that the
(25:30):
main character has a different name for myself.
Essentially it is uh three encounters with three different men that I knew during mycollege years.
And uh the first two men are encounters straight out of my history.
The third one is a fictionalized version of a boy that I had a chance with, but to whom Isaid no, unfortunately.
(26:01):
And we spent the rest of the year after I said no, regarding each other mournfully fromacross the classroom.
can hear the violins playing in the background as I tell you this.
And he moved to there was, there was longing in our eyes too.
He moved to New York City shortly after graduation and died in that first wave of the AIDSpandemic.
(26:26):
uh And.
For the rest of my life I have regretted not getting to know him better.
So this first novel is way of memorializing him in fiction and giving him a life beyondthe life that he actually had.
Beautiful.
Well, thank you.
(26:46):
uh I regret, you know, not saying yes to him at the time.
And it came out in this story.
But this is a way for me to celebrate my past and to uh translate my sexual fun into funfor others.
(27:07):
Um, so the stories that you write in your most recent book and some of your other writingsare definitely, as you mentioned, unapologetically kind of explicit.
How, how do you see the role of eroticism playing in advancing the narrative and deepeningcharacter development?
(27:30):
We are all, well not all of us, but most of us are very sexual creatures.
Most of us also have a certain degree of reticence about expressing that.
I think that as an artist, however, pornography is a wonderful thing to create.
(27:53):
And, you know, whether you call it erotica or whether you call it pornography, I use theminterchangeably.
um They're both uh fun to create, fun to consume.
uh When you write erotica, when you create pornography, you are setting the example thatyou want to see in the world.
(28:15):
Sometimes these
characters can be cautionary.
For example, when I wrote about that professor who was so far in the closet that he wastoxic to everyone around him.
I mean, that was a real life person, but I learned from him about what I did not want tobe as a sexual gay adult.
(28:35):
um And, you know, I want to communicate that to others as well, that, you know, livingyour life, enjoying your sexuality can make you a better person, I think.
um
When you're writing erotica, you're celebrating an important part of yourself, or at leastI hope that you think it's an important part of yourself.
(28:56):
And this goes for any artist, whether they're writers or not, but you're celebrating apart of yourself in a way that arouses not only these sexual organs, even though that can
be a valid end goal, but you're also trying to arouse a person's hopes and fears.
(29:16):
You're trying to arouse their laughter as well.
And, you know, maybe you're even trying to draw a tear from them.
Erotica does not limit itself to, you know, the down below organs.
It is a buffet of the senses and it should be arousing all kinds of senses and emotions.
(29:38):
uh You're being provocative in the best way when you are
writing or creating erotic works.
You are pleasing readers, you're pleasing viewers, whatever medium you work in.
And on one side, and on the other side, you're pissing off all the right people, thepeople who wish to suppress it.
(30:04):
And when you're creating something pornographic or something erotic, you're sharing ofyourself.
You're making yourself vulnerable.
And I think the best art comes from that place of vulnerability.
think being able to, I think when you're able to open yourself up in that way, when you'reable to communicate something that you feel about so strongly, as I feel about the
(30:32):
enjoyment of one's sexuality, you're writing from a place of strength.
Yep.
Yeah, that's a way to beautiful way to put it.
um So on the on the topic of cloning, again, if we could go back to that one in your newbook, same sex, there's a strong undercurrent of social commentary on clone rights, and
(30:57):
commodification of bodies.
How do you think these elements mirror contemporary issues for queer communities?
I'm very glad you picked up on that.
I'm not sure anybody else has commented on that to me about, but when I was writing thebook, I was thinking about what rights do these clones have and uh how much freedom do
(31:18):
they have?
And I almost wanted to write an entire another book set in this universe, I wish Iexplored that, but I was trying to keep, you know, we're never a certain word count and
trying to keep it sexy.
So I didn't get to explore that, but it certainly was on my mind the entire time.
In this universe of Journey's End, which is my story in the clone duology, the protagonistcreates 32 clones of himself because the universe in which he uh exists has just suffered
(31:56):
an enormous pandemic of its own.
uh
And those of his scientific team who were supposed to colonize and prepare this planet forcolonization, I should say, have either gone back to their own homes or have passed away
in the pandemic.
And he has no scientific team left.
And he says, well, if there were 32 of me to get the job done, we could do this.
(32:21):
So he gets 32 clones of himself made.
They have varying degrees of
similarity to him.
They all look like him.
They all have the physical imprint because I pictured the clone machine or whatever youwant to call it as kind of a 3D printer using biological materials.
(32:41):
So they all look like him.
But there are certain classes of the clones.
There's the class C clone, I think, which has 25 % of his memory, a class B clone that has50 % of his memory.
And then there's a very special, very expensive S-class clone that has 98 % of his memory.
That happens to be the one that his ex-boyfriend is fooling around with.
(33:05):
The class C clones do not have citizenship.
I can't say this word.
Citizenship, right?
That's the one it writes in his universe.
The class B ones will eventually have citizenship, but do not current.
(33:26):
The protagonist shares with his S-class quorum all the rights of a citizen.
And while I was writing that, was thinking, how is this company exploiting the workers?
ah Do they consider themselves exploited?
What are they going to do after this planet is prepared?
(33:48):
And how are they going to uh disperse?
and find identities of their own outside of the original progenitor.
It's a lot of questions.
I don't have any explicit answers for you, but it is interesting for me to think about.
as I said, I've agreed to write another science fiction story and I'm going to set it inthe same universe.
(34:13):
It's not going to be about clones, but perhaps I will try to address this idea ofcitizenship and...
how it is earned in this kind dystopian universe.
One of the aspects of Journey's End is that it is really a dystopian civilization.
The only way that the scientific uh project is going to get done is because they have asponsorship deal with a fast food company.
(34:42):
I can see that happening within our own society within a couple of decades wherescientific
This was written before the last Trump administration, but where scientific uh research isderided and unfunded and it has to be done through corporations that really have no vested
(35:07):
interest in the science itself.
Yep.
How has the what is the response from readers in the queer literary community have been?
Have any of the reactions surprised you?
I have not had many other authors reach out to me explicitly about my erotic materials.
(35:28):
ah Writer friends of mine who read me enjoy it, which is always a nice thing.
And I have some positive feedback going on with other writers with whom I share works andwith whom I get advice and that sort of thing.
But the queer literary
(35:51):
seen as a whole, yeah, they haven't reached out to me on mascot.
I welcome their feedback.
maybe they will after we release this episode.
That would be nice.
Um, so let's talk a little bit about kind of challenges and risks.
Um, what's been the most challenging aspect of writing and publishing queer eroticfiction, especially within the science fiction genre.
(36:24):
I'm aware that writing erotica is always a risk because as I said it does piss off all thebest people.
ah
I have not had a lot of blowback, though.
The people who reach out to me are the ones who actually enjoy reading.
And with so much material out there for people to consume, people are able to pick andchoose what they want to read, what they want to watch, what they want to listen to.
(36:56):
And I am always surprised when
people decide to pile on to somebody who, to whom they aren't interested anyway.
So I haven't had any blowback exactly.
But there are always risks.
People do look down upon you when you write in certain genres.
(37:19):
But I have always had that kind of blowback, no matter what the genre I've written in.
When I was writing for young adults,
I had quite a lot of people saying, oh, you're only a young adult writer.
Why should you have an opinion on anything?
When I wrote for women, that was especially telling because people would say, oh, theseare just books for chicks.
(37:47):
Why should we read them?
Why should we listen to you as an author?
When you write for certain genres, whether it's fantasy or science fiction, people aregoing to look down on you.
uh I always find that if someone is going to attempt to dump their insecurities on you,then they're going to find a way to do it no matter what you're doing.
(38:15):
So it's always best to just go ahead, write what you feel, create the art that you want tocreate, and damn the consequences.
Do think there's any uh increase in um censorship or pushback um for queer themed eroticawith given the today's political climate in the industry?
(38:40):
I think there is easily pushback.
It's difficult for some queer erotic writers to publish some of the stories they want tobe published because they often will be rejected from ah many venues.
(39:00):
I know that Peter Schurt's publishing, my publisher, sometimes has issues with certaintypes of stories or
If Amazon or another book selling venue is particularly anxious about uh a particulartheme in a story, they will just completely not sell it.
(39:24):
So that there are always things that need to be worked around.
I have not experienced any of that myself yet.
Maybe I'm just not pushing hard enough.
Maybe I need to write.
I'm not hitting the right buttons.
I have to have more orgy scenes, more dad son scenes.
(39:46):
uh But so there's always risks and there's always the possibility that you know somerandom person at the other end of a button is going to say no this story should not see
the light of day and therefore they won't distribute it.
That's always going to be a risk.
(40:06):
um Can you share a moment when you maybe doubted your creative path along the way alongthe years and what what helped you move forward?
Writing is not the most fun thing to do for me.
I always find the process of sitting down with my laptop and staring at the blank page tobe very intimidating.
(40:34):
And I, as again, I said, I teach and so I always communicate this to my students that thewriting itself, day to day, the day to day act of sitting down, setting aside time,
writing.
looking at your piece and saying, God, this is terrible.
You know, that is not fun, but the totality of the act is one of the most joyous thingsthat I have ever and could ever experience.
(41:03):
So I recommend going into it with your eyes wide open that not every day is going to befun, but realizing that the process itself is worth it.
Was there a breakthrough or attorney?
Go ahead.
was gonna say, keeping that in mind, um looking at my career as a whole, there have beentimes when trying to get, especially in the beginning, trying to get works accepted,
(41:31):
trying to find an agent or trying to find a publisher, uh those rejection notices canreally hurt your feelings.
There are, it shouldn't.
because when you're on the hunt for an agent, you're really looking for somebody who'sgoing to be enthusiastic about you, who's going to want to represent you, and who finds
(41:52):
your work exciting.
if you get, as a writer, you're getting rejection notices that say this isn't for me, umyou honestly should be grateful.
You should be grateful that this person is being uh upfront about what they want andletting you know that you're not it so that you can find that person.
(42:12):
who is interested in you.
I can say that now because I've found people who were interested in me.
But in my early years, when I was trying to find those people, getting those rejectionletters was quite dispiriting.
uh And some of them were borderline, well, I want to say more than hostile, but I got onefrom a...
(42:35):
old established New York agent, true sector.
If I had a dime for every time somebody sent me a proposal of this crap, then I would be abillionaire and I wouldn't have to be representing you goddamn authors.
I was like, maybe this isn't my problem, maybe it's a you problem at this point.
uh So those kinds of rejections can really hurt.
(43:00):
Yeah.
And even when you are an established writer and you think you've got something, you'reonto something and you're trying to find somebody else enthusiastic about it, nobody else
seems to be showing that same enthusiasm, that could be dispiriting too.
But overall, the process I find is meditative if you allow it to be solitary if you're ina bad mood.
(43:23):
um But uh worth it.
How do you hope your work, and same sex in particular, contributes to the broaderconversation about queer representation in literature and art?
I would love to see more works, especially in science fiction, in which queer sexuality iscelebrated, in which queer characters are accepted as a norm, they're not explained away
(43:54):
or apologized for.
I would love to see more works in which queer characters of all stripes, not just the gaymen, all the queers are celebrated and uh find their place.
within the universe.
fiction is such a flexible, open, wide-opened genre to write in.
(44:17):
You can create worlds that have nothing to do with this one.
And I just want to see people take their place within that universe.
The only limit is your imagination.
Absolutely, that's absolutely true.
Are there future projects you're working on that you're excited to explore?
(44:37):
Well, as I said, I just started a new science fiction project.
Peter Schultz Publishing came to me and said, would you be willing to write anotherscience fiction story?
I was like, sure.
And he said, well, it has to be about a road in outer space.
That is really weird.
And I don't know how to do that.
(44:58):
And I said that to myself.
I didn't say it to him.
And I was like, all right, let me think about that.
And
I went to bed that night and there's that liminal area between sleep and wakefulness whereyou're just kind of lying there and your brain is going.
And I was thinking, oh, okay, I've got an image of two men on this alien road uh against aforeign horizon with groves, trees on either side.
(45:29):
And then I was like, yeah, I could write this story.
So I got very excited about it because I started thinking about what are these two mendoing on that road?
Um, what is this alien ecology that's surrounding them?
Um, who are the people that built this road so long ago in the past?
And then I was off and running on another story and, uh, it's exciting to start a storyand have nothing but questions and nothing but ideas.
(45:56):
Uh, nothing's quite set in stone so that your imagination can still roam free.
Uh, and I'm very excited to have been working on that for the last two or three days.
Nice.
What advice would you give emerging queer writers who want to push boundaries in their ownwork and get published?
(46:16):
Be true to yourself.
One of the things that I ask my own writers on my workshops to do is to think about acredo, things that they strongly believe in.
I like them to write actual statements in which just, you make a list of statements ofstuff that you believe in.
(46:37):
uh Things like, I believe my work should be heard.
If you believe that strongly, that's what you need to do to be a writer or an artist.
Write about, if you feel strongly about politics, make a statement of, a series ofstatements about politics.
If you feel strongly about the connections between yourself and your family, writestatements that that, because from those statements of belief is where strong writing
(47:04):
emerges.
If you don't believe in things strongly, you can tell it in your writing.
If you do believe,
about what you're writing and you feel it in your heart and you feel it in your gut andmaybe even you feel it in your groin if you're writing erotica.
You're going to write something that's strong and relatable and other people want to read.
(47:28):
So I say know what you believe, feel strongly about what you believe and be willing tocommunicate that to people in an honest way.
I think that's really great advice.
And I think it also merges pretty well with something you mentioned earlier around how thebest writing, the best art comes from a place of vulnerability.
(47:52):
And sometimes when you're in that place of vulnerability, you've got to be able to betruthful with those statements that you were just talking about writing down with yourself
and with your audience about what those statements are.
I love that.
Thank you for sharing that.
And I don't even believe you need to, you know, those statements don't actually have toappear in your novel, or your short story or whatever, but you do have to be able to
(48:17):
communicate your feelings about what you're trying to say.
and why you're doing it.
and why you're doing it.
All right.
Well, it's time for the 10 questions that we ask at the end of every podcast interview.
These 10 questions are inspired by inside the Acre studio.
Um, but we've put a little bit of an artistic flair to them.
(48:41):
So are you ready?
I guess I'm as ready as I will be.
Number 10.
10?
What is your favorite artistic medium or tool?
I suppose it would be words.
ah Words are what I work with.
(49:02):
They're what I enjoy working with best.
And ah they've always been my medium of choice.
What, uh, since you're a writer, what literary trend or cliche do you wish woulddisappear?
You know, if you would ask me this at various times of my literary career, I could haveanswered so easily.
(49:25):
There was a time that I was ready for vampire novels to disappear.
um There wasn't, exactly.
There was a time I was ready for dystopian young adult novels to disappear.
I'm not really sure what I would want to disappear right now, but I think it would bethe...
(49:48):
novels by or the works of fiction by people who didn't actually write it but have bignames, you know, if a real housewife is supposed to have written a novel, I don't want to
read it.
um If, you know, if somebody who is famous has written their memoir, but I can pick it upand tell that it isn't in their voice at all, I'm not going to enjoy it.
(50:14):
So that's the answer I'm going to go with.
What fuels your creativity the most?
What fuels my creativity the most would be partaking in...
(50:34):
media that I have not had a hand in.
ah Watching television programs that excite me, watching movies that excite me, readingother books that excite me, going back to old favorites that inspired me in the past,
those are the things that I think keep me going.
what sound or noise instantly inspires you.
(50:55):
a sound or a noise that inspires me?
What a curious question.
I will tell you that when I write, I tend to write with headphones on and I tend to havemusic playing very loudly.
ah And usually it tends to be pop that I don't have to listen to very closely, ah butwhich I still enjoy.
(51:19):
So I'm not going to give any
particular noise or song, you know, the most prominent ah position here.
But just music in general.
If you catch me writing, are I'm probably blasting Kylie Minogue in my ears.
I can appreciate that.
(51:42):
What's under noise completely kills your focus.
um I can tell you that easily the sound of my cats yacking up.
That brings everything to an instant halt.
uh When I'm listening, when I'm writing, I'm also listening to see what the cats are upto, because I'm usually at home.
(52:02):
And either they are getting into a fight on the front porch with cats that are passing by,or they are yacking up and I will have to hop to my feet and clean it up immediately.
There you go.
favorite word or phrase to include in your work?
One of my favorite words, I don't ever use it all that often because I don't want it to benoticed, uh is the word caesaurus, which is, uh it's kind of like a hush, it's kind of
(52:33):
like the hush noise that tall grass is making the wind.
It's almost an onomatopoeia.
I love to sneak it in when I can.
I don't do it very often because it's such an unusual word that I'm afraid it will benoticed.
Well, onomatopoeia is also an interesting word to throw in there every once in a while.
but I don't spell it that well.
(52:55):
If you could see any queer artist or writer living or dead, honored with a major publicmonument, who would it be?
Public Monument.
I think I would go back to the author I mentioned before, Patrick Dennis, who was soimportant to me in my childhood.
He was a queer author.
He wrote during the 50s and 60s, very early 70s.
(53:19):
As I said, he's most famous for the novel Auntie Mame, but he wrote so many others, andthey're such sharp satires of the things that he likes to skewer, which is showbiz and
business and Westchester County.
New York City and New York City itself.
he, um his aim is always true.
(53:42):
His uh Sharp Wit never failed.
I don't think that his works outside of Antimame get any attention these days.
And it's a shame because he's still a very funny writer.
I would like to see him, go ahead.
if there was a statue with him, I think at the bottom of it, it should say life is abanquet and so many poor souls are hungry.
(54:08):
I think I'm probably gonna get skewered for getting that quote wrong, starving to death.
There you go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't hate me in the comments.
ah What is uh one profession or creative field you could never see yourself in?
Well, I will tell you that I rejected a career as an academic.
(54:31):
My parents were both academics.
They taught history.
And they kind of expected me to be an academic as well.
And I followed in their footsteps for the longest time.
I studied for a PhD.
I used to teach.
used to, you know, I worked as a college professor for quite a long time, adjunct, notactually tenured or anything.
(54:53):
But...
em
I rejected it because I did not want to live that monastic life that I saw in my parents'living, trying to publish and trying to not perish in the process.
The life had a calling for me.
It was very seductive.
(55:13):
It could be very sweet for those people who enjoy it, but in the end, it really wasn't forme because I couldn't be true to myself, true to what I wanted to do.
And I could not see myself as a queer man.
being an academic.
I'm not saying that others can't.
If your art could take on a life of its own, what form would it take?
Your art, if your literature could take on a life of its own, what form would it take?
(55:38):
This is a funny question because one of my novels when I was writing women's fiction uhalmost became a reality TV show, which horrified me.
There was, I wrote a book in which it was about a man on the make and the methods that heused to try to pick up chicks.
This was back in the days of, I can't remember the name of it, that um handbook for menwho would try to pick up women by dissing them and nagging them or whatever it was called.
(56:07):
oh But I wrote this fiction, it almost became a reality TV show.
It was optioned, I actually got some money for it.
Not a lot, but I got some money for it.
as an author, free money is always a fantastic thing.
And I was just sitting back in horror thinking, what the hell are they gonna do with this?
(56:28):
And how are they gonna turn it into a reality TV show?
And when I saw the proposal for it, I was like, all right, go ahead.
My name is Moll Print, please.
um So I'm glad that did not happen in the end because the results would have beenhorrifying.
And then finally, um, a hundred years from now, what do you hope your, your literaturesays about you to those who find it in the future?
(56:56):
I hope that somebody who finds it in the future will read it, say, wow, this guy knew whathe was talking about even back then, and respond to it in the way that I intended.
I don't particularly think much about legacy.
It would be nice to be read after my demise.
(57:16):
It would be nice to be remembered, but I focus very much on the here and now and trying togive the people who read me pleasure.
now rather than thinking about what people in 100 years will think of me.
um That said, if you are 100 years in the future and you happen to be watching orrecording this podcast, hey from the past and I hope you're enjoying the work.
(57:40):
Well, JW, it was very nice talking to you and getting to know you.
I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next with your uh byline on it.
Well, thank you.
And I'm looking forward to hearing more from your podcast, which I enjoy very
Thank you, I appreciate that feedback too.
All right, take care.
Thank you.