What does “a gay man who isn’t defined by his sexuality” even mean?

It means the gay character is not in the book or on the screen to simply get AIDS and die to provide cheap sentimentality or do the ladies hair or choose their dress for them.

It means the gay character is being fully written into the story but treated equally not like some “very special” one shot national exposure deal on your typical sitcom.

It means the gay character is more than a one dimensional stick figure used as a place holder to appease the politically aware and is actually doing something to further the plot for a change.

It means people are growing the fuck up.

And lastly it means get over your fixation on terminology and the way someone says something and over analyzing every single word chosen. Jesus Mary!

Look into my eyes and basque in the power of the loon!

Lucía Etxebarría career plagiarist and all around literary whack job has announced she will quit writing… or is that copying… my translation of hysterical whackabasque might be wrong.

Anyway, missy cut-n-paste with a fake accent refused to publish her new xeroxes in eBook format because then we could use all that new software to uncover who she was stealing her work from. Well she got into a complete tizzy when she found out people will just go and create eBooks of her overpriced hardcovers of other people’s words to enjoy on their Kindles anyway. Without her permission! Like how she uses other people’s writing without their permission. IT’S NOT FAIR! Whaaaaaaaaaa…

Who saw that coming? eBooks is such a fad I tells you.

Wait till she finds out no one gives a shit about her entitled cut-n-paste ass. Buh bye Crazy Burglar Basque Barbie!

Gatekeeping Ignorance & Disdain For Self Published Or ePublished Titles & Authors With The Current Realities Of The Digital Market…

Todd Dickinson, co-owner of Aaron’s Books in Lititz, Pa. commented: “We’ll treat them the same as self-published authors that use Amazon, only on consignment if they are local and link to our store.”

Blaming The Competition Instead Of Accepting Market Change & Doing A Better Job To Meet Customer Expectations…

Christine Onorati, owner of WORD Books in Brooklyn, “It’s very hard not to constantly rail against Amazon as the enemy. I believe they are killing small business by undercutting everyone and constantly drilling home the point that price is all that matters. I have never ordered much from Marshall Cavendish in the past, but I will definitely not order anything from them in the future. We have to take a stand however we can. I will also not order any books published by Amazon right now.”

Irrational Demonization Of Technology & Customers Looking For A Decent Price…

Kenny Brechner of Devaney Doak & Garrett Booksellers in Farmington, Me., are angry. He calls Amazon’s new price check app “the virtual equivalent of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil gas station strategy” and regards its acquisition of Marshall Cavendish as “a naked move toward vertical monopoly.”

Morrow adds, “This only highlights why we need some version of minimal retail pricing. Why should a customer be in my store and compare Playmobil to Amazon and see the same price, but see that the Steve Jobs book is half price? The book has been substantially devalued in the last decade.”

Yeah, because that anticompetitive Agency Price Fixing under investigation as we speak worked so well for you the first time and that anticompetitive keeping Self Published and ePublished books off the shelf even if your customers buy them all the time online is going to stop the market changes from taking place.

Buh bye now little Dutch Boy you stop the big bad ocean of change!

Let’s see we have Denial and then obviously Anger so Bargaining comes next I think. I bet they try and politically stop this self induced travesty by buying off some brain dead Republicans and Fox News commentators or should that be just taters…

The comments are so good…

A customer who comes into a bookstore to learn about books and then buys on Amazon is committing a crime: intellectual shoplifting.

Yeah, just wait till this guy hears about used bookstores and comparison shopping boy will he be pissed. People who help you ONLY because they expect you to buy something in return are called “hucksters” dude look it up. If I want to “learn” about books I think a librarian is the more qualified person anyway not some literary scam artist like you.

Who knew that these bookstores were run by a group of people who hated their customers so much?

I’m the queen of my castle
I’m the king of my room
Get out
Get out of this house
I got more than I need
More than I ever could use
Get out
Get out of this house
Shawn Colvin ~ Get Out Of This House

Who the fuck hired you? No, I mean it!

Who do you think you are? Where the hell did you get the idea I worked for your ass? I have a “real” job and by the way I probably pay more in taxes and medical insurance than an idiot such as yourself makes all year.

Who the flaming fuck hired the most unprofessional clueless “marketing team” on the god damn planet and then to make matters worse in this economy of all times authorized a pea brain like you to send these emails out to every fucking book blogger on the Internet? Are you naturally suicidal or is this a seasonal occurrence?

Are you related to the boss? Did you marry into the company somehow?

Because if I worked at William Morrow in any capacity right this moment I would be firing your ass and the fool who hired you so fast your pointy little pinheads would be spinning off into the far horizon.

What a mess and too bad for all the authors involved but that’s life they signed those contracts with you, not me, I do not have to put up with you loser. You are just one less brain dead legacy publisher heading for bankruptcy court as Amazon eats your lunch I will be bothering with. Just one more channel I choose not to watch and I have hundreds, no thousands, to choose from. All your authors gone just like that because you are nothing special and never were. My memory of you will be something like… Great books, too bad their attitude toward free word of mouth promoters sucked ass… You and your begrudging charity act are so fucked right now.

Catch a clue on your way to the unemployment line jerk… you need us… we do not need you… we never needed you… and with your irrational Agency pricing and mangled newly published DRM laced big name author eBooks And then to prove my point you mangled yet another big name author eBook AGAIN! So that I for one cannot even begin to promote or recommend an outright idiot factory like you or your parent publisher Harper “Mangled eBooks” Collins to anybody and now add on top of that your even more irrational customer relations you are exhibiting right here in this love note you sent out with no clue what a royal fucktard you sound like to all of us… well, we need you oh gate keeper, of the broken busted down fence, less every god damned day Amazon sells another New York Times Bestselling eBook you can’t because you were too lazy to bother to play the game right from the beginning.

You are now dismissed.

I really have to stop reading this crap. No, I mean I REALLY just have to stop reading these Gay Romance blogs.

Sean Kennedy

Here’s a personal story. I believe Armistead Maupin helped save me when I was a teen. His books were the first that I ever read that showed me gays in a positive light. That showed me I could love, and be loved, and survive in a world I thought was out to get me at times.

And so I also looked up to Maupin, as he was a gay man who had survived and wrote the life he knew about. I would have been crushed if I found out he wasn’t really gay, or a man. Not because of his writing – that still would have been great. But the authorial persona and the role model would have been nothing but a lie

So if you lie about your gender or your sexuality writing Gay Erotic Romance… Sean Kennedy is gonna come down on you like a ton of bricks and make jokes about Milli Vanilli because he read Armistead Maupin as a kid and wants you all to “think of the gay children”? HUH? WTF? No wonder I am reading blog posts like this now! Sean Kennedy talks like a Republican candidate for President at a DOMA rally.

Why is anyone publishing this jack booted thug? He hates half the folks writing Gay Erotic Romance obviously and the other half he thinks he is personally entitled to “Lambda Lit dick check” just to be sure they are real?

Who is he? Who was he? Who does he think he is now?

Oh and then the frosting on this shit cake kids… Ann Somerville

I named this author for a couple of reasons – one is that they were engaged in genuinely harmful behaviour outwith the gender issue (and that behavious is still wrong even now he’s stated he’s transgender.) His behaviour since my ‘outing’ has confirmed that naming him was the right thing to do.

The other reason was that the innuendo was hurting the innocent. As you are aware, the habit of straight women claiming to be gay men (and there’s your appropriation right there – it’s not a matter of writing under a male pseud but writing under an assumed identity if you’re straight and claim to be gay, just as it is to be white and claim to be black etc) has meant that actual gay men are being told they’re fakers. Why should real gay people suffer because of the misbehaviour of straights?

So the evil queen Logophilos/Tritorella/HoniSoit has spoken (Go google it with the term Journalfen or Fandom Wank sometime before buying her crap or follow this link left on my blog in the second comment and go from there. She is an expert on bad behavior. I mean just think about how many people had to document all that crap about Ann Somerville aka Logo/Tri/Honi/whatever her next fake online persona) and on top of that is now claiming to be the vanguard to end Gay People suffering from what? Other nasty evil fake online persona “wanna be gay men” just like her?

This is why even though I am a “real big” grown up gay man who can think for myself and decide what matters to me and what does not. I am so not participating in the Gay Romance blogs no more because they seem to feel they can tell me what is really important even if it seems to be more insider wank and those never ending grudge matches between authors etc than anything else.

I not only need a break I need to go clean my brain of all this. How can anyone review in this community and not know that gender is fluid and does not always match the stupid fake pen name? HOW? How do you even begin to do that?

Not to mention WHY are people buying into whatever gender they think the Gay Erotic Romance Fiction author is or says they are etc etc etc? There is a question I had that no one could answer. Just because Wendy Carlos changed her underwear but first promoted her successful album as a man she is no longer a valid musician because now she is different somehow than when the album was recorded? How about The Matrix, did that movie’s success suddenly change just because one of the brothers might be a sister who wrote that film?

I swear people are listening to the wackiest whack jobs they can find in the “can’t write shit but they sure can talk their ass off” category. And the scary part is people are obviously buying into it from word on the street about threats and harassment and other childish behavior.

Back to Skyrim… maybe I will stay in there. Will the NPC characters all shun me for being real in their little fantasy world you think?

Wow! And even off that damn screwed up website and they keep smacking you in the face with their garbage… I am so fucking glad I quit Goodreads before reading Monica/Delta/whatever’s little comment on this post or I would have had to double dog quit. Those are the type of people running that zoo. Just wow! A little insensitivity to go with all the name calling is what makes Goodreads the website no one smart wants to be seen on.

But I have to question how it is right for you to go after the things you didn’t like that were said with equally negative comments directed at all?

Hmm, maybe because it’s his blog and he can say what he wants about that witch hunt we all saw going on in your forum that you did nothing to stop. Just saying pookie.

I just wanted to say my best conversation so far over this whole event was with Sunita and she pointed out two things that made me think which is pretty impressive with my hard head let me tell you.

Now she did not really connect the two of them but left them sitting there for me to ponder last night. I want to share them with you now…

One was this Damon Suede deally where he goes on about AJ.

I like Damon but I have to say I have only ever seen him participate on Goodreads an “author promo” website which frankly is like the new Livejournal with all the same old fanbois, same old sock puppet infestation just a different format. So what the hell? He has written what… all of one whole book and maybe it is selling well, it is not the first time that I have scratched my head over sales. But… I don’t think one book makes him no instant expert on the Gay Romance Community. His statement sure did get linked to and passed around like wild fire.

Then Sunita being smarter than I ever will be says this in response to me being puzzled by the community reaction to AJ and all that when I thought the ground rules were to treat people according to the “pen name gender” unless otherwise noted and we had seemed to be all playing along…

I don’t think everyone was just giving him the benefit of the doubt and going along with the authorial convention. I think they were giving him that extra authenticity bonus that comes with “gay male author.” I really hate the idea that being a gay man makes your writing automatically more authentic, as if every gay male author’s book is better than every non-gay-male author’s book. And I’m tired of having an author’s gay male attributes waved at me as confirmation of how good he is at writing gay romance (not all authors do this by any means, but some sure do).

There it is the core of this whole thing in a summation that while I think I would love to see her explain it a bit better… Well, it explained enough to me in this case and the reason for several people’s overly violent reactions and why everyone is clamoring about Damon Suede’s opinion and and and there you go the whole tempest and the teapot.

You want the biggest issue I see in Gay Romance look no further than that right there and think about it. The whole Lambda Awards thing and what they and their nasty cheerleader Victoria Brownworth published on their own website particularly about “straight women” writing Gay Romance despite knowing full well about such talented and highly awarded authors like Annie Proulx and then look at all these “male pen name” scandals that keep popping up every so often.

Do I think people will learn anything from all this? No
Not as long as they accept or expect this type of treatment and the witch hunts.

Do I think it will happen again? Yes
As long as the deck is stacked against women in this case by other women which I do not believe is restricted to this particular genre.

Will I say the same god damned things over and over again like some broken record?
Sure, why not. That’s how my mom taught me…

Update! Vacuous Minx ~ Since you asked so nicely … The VM ponders authenticity

Don’t hold your fucking breath assholes! Writing is the best way to put your middle finger in the air and salute the fucktards of the world. Success is so much sweeter when revenge is used for added flavor. What a bunch of unprofessional useless hacks who could not write their way out of a paper bag so they attack their peers. Self Publishing, the new excuse for when your pub fires your ass because you kept publicly attacking your coworkers.

Says a hell of a lot more about them does it not? They would rather gossip about good old AJ and tisk tisk on their blogs instead of reflect on the fact their own careers are going NOWHERE. Hell, you want to fight oppression in our society? Here’s a hint… Stop acting like the oppressor first. Stop using all “his” dirty tricks on your own peers. It’s the difference between building a community and tearing it down. I myself would rather build something.

Failure is so self-fulfilling.

And just for clarification for people out there I see figuring this all out… I SEE YOU! Yes, you my friend are correct! We have seen this same wank with the same players pulling the same shit as before. It’s terribly boring and I really wish those losers would find something new to do with their sad obviously pathetic lives.

Read this…

Celina Summers ~ Breaking My Silence on Aspen Mountain Press

Thanks Erec!

Oh I get it! It’s like this really bad impersonation of Triskelion Press done on a low budget by talentless drama students on a weekend meth binge.

Celina Summers ~ Breaking The Silence on Aspen Mountain Press Part Two

Popcorn! Get your fresh popcorn!
More authors are spilling the beans.

Charles E. Wells ~ Grits n Gravy

Esther Mitchell ~ Dropping the Legal Ball: A Publishing Nightmare Exposed

Andy Dunn ~ You may have noticed something

Kimberly Nee ~ Well Hello There…

Grace Wen ~ Don’t buy my book. Buy my friends’ books.

Scott over at Bill In Exile always has something interesting going on. This latest controversy was over internet porn star Christian Jade AKA Sergeant Matthew Simmons of the Marine Corps Band.

The guy did a porn shoot in full Marine uniform… Um, let me repeat that. The idiot used his real uniform for a porn shoot. As Scott pointed out it is not about this jerk being straight or gay it’s about being stupid and doing something totally against the rules even without bringing up any of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell aspects.

Scott thinks Mr. Simmons should get his ass handed to him and as a retired Navy Submariner myself I think the asshole should get kicked out as well.

Listen If the guy had “quietly done some porn” on the side without any fanfare and say made a few bucks without involving his military status or wearing his uniform… I would probably snicker and maybe even hope he would not get caught doing such stupid shit and wish he at least put all the money to good use.

I mean if you got it in the looks department and this type of thing is offered as the way to make a few bucks then fine I have no real “issue” with it all to a degree. Just don’t get caught like a million other “silly things” you could possibly do in the military while being enlisted that you should really not get caught doing. Like whipping your dick out for a picture while in uniform and on duty and posting the thing for free on Facebook. You should not get caught doing that crap either like I need to explain why.

The guy stepped over the line when he starred in some gay porn wearing his uniform on camera and obviously making a quick buck doing it. That definitely crosses a few lines there.

Scott seems to be getting some shit for stating the obvious in this case and I have no clue why people are having such a problem with what Scott has to say. I totally agree with the fact this idiot deserves to get his shit canned and I hope the guy knows he fucked himself up and he has only himself to blame for it.

It’s not about being “gay in the military” it’s about “getting caught doing something outrageously stupid” while wearing a uniform and having someone else post the pictures you know are being taken of you doing it where your command can easily find them. Durrrrrr!

You can’t play the victim if you knowingly did it to yourself.

The more voices heard the harder to hide…

Anyway, it seems that all communications have come to a complete stop about royalty problems or the numerous requests to release rights even on eBooks that have expired contracts.

So this is better treatment than Triskelion Publishing HOW?

Oops Irene just took out my Internet landline. Damn you Irene!

Posted from my 3G iPad which is the bestest eBook Reading / Post Writing doohicky ever made. Thanks Steve Jobs!

UPDATE! More information over at Absolute Write!