Category: gender

The Keeper

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

swearing cheapens everything

it fucking does

I went away to practice my elocution

why do you have to sexualize everything

you’re the one who insisted on the mountains

the snow like cream

the foothills dank with fir

sappy air that ignites when you snap your fingers

such danger

much fear

I went to practice elocution

the shape of words and

the morals

to every fairytale

eat the apple: sleep a thousand years unchanged

then fuck a prince

“so what’s the catch?”

(2023)

Have I written any poems this year?  I keep posting old poems to Insta because I’m lazy and I need content. I don’t write poetry with any diligence. Only when the words need to be poems and not my standard prose. 

But I went to an indie book fair yesterday.  Everyone in my town is a poet or knows a poet.  Pretty, pretty books everywhere. This is what I bought:

A photo of two books laying on a desk. The book on the left is “Poetry is Queer” by the author Kirby. It has a light purple cover with a picture of a surreal phallic shape outlined by white buttons and filled in with googly eyes. This shape is passing through a circle of white buttons. The book on the right is “Dream Rooms” by River Halen. The cover is mainly black with bold white text and a colourful photo of hundreds of pieces of discarded chewing gum. Both books are very, very queer.

Who the heck am I?  I mean this week…

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I can overthink anything.  You name it, I can lose myself down a rabbit hole of reverie that will touch on any and every topic my pick-n-mix brain can associate with it.

So when it comes to who I am as an author, you better believe I have come at this hot mess of an identity crisis from every angle under the sun.  Total anonymity.  Full disclosure.  Pen names that had nothing to do with my real name, and one that is an amalgam of names by which I’ve been known all my life. This is before I start thinking about gender, both mine and my characters.

Everything feels up for grabs, as if I am remaking the world if only in a very narrow way.  But what set me off?  Why think about any of this?

I was interested in joining a book promotion with a group of other authors.   LGBTI+ books were siloed off in their own category, regardless of genre.  Most of the authors in the category were cis-presenting white women writing thinly veiled fanfic of Buffy (everyone’s a dude and they all bang) and/or Brokeback Mountain (everyone’s a cowboy and two of them bang.)  If that’s your trot, as Chuck Tingle says, let’s trot,

I usually go a different way.  Because I’m a pernicious troublemaker who has never found a foothold in the mainstream.  But what does this mean for my career?  If I write about diversely queer characters, am I doomed to scrabble at the margins, never gaining a fan-base, never writing a book that other people truly want to read? Can I really survive the long hours, months, years to build a following?  Other people are making it work, though they started sooner, have a head start so to speak.  My genre is certainly niche, but it exists and the reader base is committed and growing. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

So why didn’t I join the promo?

Because I hadn’t done all this thinking yet.  I hadn’t come to terms with the ever more obvious truth that I really only want to write about queer love. Y’all straights got plenty to read.  I want to tell a different story.  Love is love, however, even if you’re the straightest arrow ever drawn, and being bi (though maybe I should start saying ‘pan’ as gender is a social construct and doesn’t really exist) I’m fine with heterosexual unions.  I just don’t much care to read or write about them.

Perhaps the most valuable thought that came up is the difficulty of straddling certain genre divides.  It’s one thing to write a historical paranormal shifter omegaverse time travel story and quite another to put both a straight and a gay romance arc into that story.  There’s an ick factor around romance a.k.a. kissing that cannot be denied or even overcome.  Many people find out they’re a certain orientation by a bit of exposure to what it turns out they don’t like.  When that first kiss makes your skin crawl but not in a good way and you realize you can’t kiss that sort of person ever again.  

I don’t need people putting my books down because of that mood.  Just because my edges are blurry as heck doesn’t mean I can assume the same about readers.  In fact, the longer I work in self-publishing the more I understand that I am not my target market.  For starters, there’s only one of me, and my tastes are unpredictable.  I need total strangers to see, want, then read my books.  Then to want to read all the others (in their niche genre interest, that is, which ought to be obvious from a glance at my books’ covers or I’m doing genre fiction wrong.)

The big promo has started and I’ve missed my chance for the year.  Such is life, and I can only wish that I’d been thinking clearer that month and been able to come to these conclusions while I could still get involved.  We do what we can, and in December 2022 that turned out to be almost nothing while I recovered from you-know-what.  Brain fog is real, yo, and it’s a sonofabitch.

Never Enough

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I wanted it not to matter

for it to make no difference

for this to not be measured in these pounds of flesh

weighed and found wanting

we wanted to be free

not to measure

not to count

you mourn yourself

your particular futures

the claims you have made on them

usurped by raw fact

these things too must (sometimes) pass

“No fear exists except beginning”

It is enough

It is never enough

After, we swam in the river

trusting in the darkness

calling one another’s name

you forgot to answer and I

swam to you

blind in the blood warm water

the sacred dark

and when your hand touched mine

beneath the surface I forgot my

own name too

(2023)

Representation matters (so don’t f*** it up)

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

For the first time in my writing life I paid someone to critique a manuscript. It took a week for me to get up the nerve to read the report, because folks, this book is my baby. In a way no book has ever been. There’s something about my main character that won’t let me go. The editor had a similar reaction. In fact, they said some of the nicest things I’ve ever heard about something I wrote. More importantly, they got it: the point, the vibe, the Universal Tropes driving the story.

That being said, the book is not perfect. It may in fact be deeply flawed. Nothing I can’t redeem, and absolutely worth the effort to do so because I want this book to SHINE. If my character Izzy resonates with other readers the way he did with someone I paid to be professionally mean to me, then this might be my first major success. It can’t be held back by a mediocre subplot, wishy-washy supporting characters, and accidental queerbaiting.

That last criticism hurt. With surgical precision, because it was true. For those who haven’t heard the term or perhaps don’t know the meaning, in modern media analysis queerbaiting means to present a character as if they are queer, but never allow them to be openly queer. Worse is when the queer-coded character turns out to be straight. For example Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory: would you have been at all surprised if he had been gay? You know, like Jim Parsons, the actor who played him?

That’s a good indication why queerbaiting is a problem. We see so few queer characters in popular media whose queerness is both present in the story and…not the plot of the story. Because not every story with queer characters needs to be a painful coming out story. Not every Trans character has to struggle with body dysmorphia. We don’t all get rejected by our families. And more to the point, most of the time we aren’t thinking about our orientation. It’s just a fact about us, like the color of our hair and eyes, or whether or not we can stand the taste of coriander. But by not letting characters be openly queer, it traps queer people in this shadow realm of not properly existing in the public consciousness.

Some might argue that the queer agenda is taking up too much air these days. As much as I can speak for the LGBTI+ community at large, we certainly didn’t plan to become ammunition in the culture wars. But the cats are out of the bags, we are out of the shadows, and that’s simply the way of things now.

Which is a lot of words to say, I fucked up. I did myself what I decry in others’ work. Telford seems gay. Possibly asexual. So why did I bend over backwards to make him kiss a girl? Honestly, it was nothing more than carelessness. I am so dialed in on my main character Izzy that I just kind of did whatever for poor Telford. He deserves better. And Izzy deserves my best.

More posts to come on this process, I’m sure. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written and I think it’s going to change my life. If I get it right…

Why choose?

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Reverse Harem and the (r)evolution of Romance writing

If you aren’t an avid ebook reader, it’s likely you’ve never heard of the genre, which has begun to call itself “why choose” because algorithms are prurient snitches. Yet it’s the strongest trend in self published romance, with no signs of slowing down.

It is also an astonishing indicator of where culture is headed. Because two out of every five ebooks sold are romance, and reverse harem tropes are EVERYWHERE.

So what the heck is it? Nothing more or less than a romance story where the heroine gets ALL the boys. Without having to choose between them, favoring one and only one. Without lying or cheating, with the consent of all the men, which is perhaps the most fantastical aspect of the genre, that three or more cis-het guys could get over their egos enough to get along with their partner’s metamour.

OK so what the heck is a metamour?

It’s the point at which the Why Choose genre gets really interesting. Because, pardon me if I’m wrong, but this is polyamory. A metamour is your lover’s lover. Not your competition, just “the other person who loves the same person as me.”

Meaning the strongest trend in romance writing is a vigorous, fun-loving, open-hearted repudiation of the nuclear family. One of the lynchpins of Western society, blamed repeatedly (and quite sensibly) for maintaining women’s inferior status. Less than half a decade ago, women in the US were being arrested for wearing pants. A wife needed her husband’s permission to open her own bank account. The assumption was nearly universal that all women wanted was safety. That women weren’t sexual, weren’t interested in freedom in being their own person, in existing for any reason besides replicating DNA aka having babies.

Oh, my sweet summer child…

That has never been enough. And hear me out, this is not some Sandberg gaslighting about how every woman miraculously can have it all aka a high paying high pressure job as well as a functional marriage, happy children, and time enough to seek personal meaning. Such women usually have nannies. And they are frequently miserable. The women, not the nannies, though I reckon a fair few of them are less than thrilled with what often functions like a sort of indentured servitude.

This is of course not universal. But that’s the point. Women want different things. Women can finally have what they want. And yes, RH is a book trend. It isn’t a sign of the death of marriage. But it is certainly a sign that the Overton window has shifted hugely in the direction of even more freedom for women. And for men, who must bear the brunt of being denied softness, emotionality, compassion. Who are taught they must defend their tiny tribe against an entire world which wants them dead. Truth is, the world usually isn’t paying attention. Truth is, modern marriage isn’t a siege state. Wives are not chattel, nor are they princesses, to be kept in a tower and denied the world.

Women are raw, and horny, and also nice and pretty and kind, but still red-blooded, salivating, alive. And we are tired of being told what to do.

There is a world filled with possibilities. Even it’s only words on a page or a screen. A world where women get exactly what they want, and men are happy for it to happen. So come on over! Sometimes the grass really is greener even once you’ve hopped the fence.

The Point

two bare-chested men sit in a landscape of dark rocks
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

tell me how it happened

we didn’t know, he said

we knew so much but this

we couldn’t know

we had such power

that to think of stopping was impossible

to speak it, death

this is what we left ourselves

this brotherhood

these stale defences

self-made

empty-handed

possessed of no inner life

partaking of no mystery

no raw internal knowings

the shapes of us proscribed

the tablets broken

the prophets’ voices stilled

our cells know nothing

born and borne in churning, soupy chaos

wisdom embodied new in every newborn mind

our cells know what we teach them

a limb, deleted

a kindness tasting more and more like fear

what’s the point of man?

what meaning in becoming so?

in mimicking the still point in this maelstrom

an embodied singularity

a fecund drop

erupting then forever calmed

what is a man?

what point

in ever

being

so?

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 6: A pack of Chippendales playing cards

a muscular man's bare torso reflected in a shadowy mirror
~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

Not only because it was fifty-two images of nearly naked men, but because I stole it from my mother’s sock drawer and brought it to school to show my schoolmates.  If I could have only stayed that popular when I changed schools the following year…I might not be writing this sardonic internet commentary about the fleetingness of fame and my propensity for causing trouble.

I got away with it that time, and returned the cards to my mother’s drawer.  It’s so long ago, but there are faint memories of creeping into her room to revisit the cards.  Much of a muchness, fifty-two oiled torsos, numerous thighs, and in the centre of each, a satin or leather-clad implication of what men were really like.   

I knew so few men in those days. My parents had separated and my father lived overseas. My mother didn’t date and had a modest social circle, and so my interactions with adult men were limited to teachers.  Growing up, attraction and response were a muddle.  I was almost always surprised when someone kissed me. I almost always chose to kiss them back.  

There’s a specific absence in my upbringing.  When others were being warned off sex, being taught it was vile, evil, degrading, dangerous, I learned nothing.  This hasn’t harmed me over the long term, though I have made some spectacularly bad decisions.  People who learn to fear sex also make bad decisions, and hate themselves while doing so.  Between the two, I know what I’d choose.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 5: A copy of Fetish Times

closeup of a woman's back, tied with hemp shibari ropes
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There was that time I was coming down after a semi-licit rave at a downtown ballet studio.  I’d only just met the woman whose apartment we were in, though she knew some of my friends. It must have been spring, for the room was full of sunlight.

The woman was a dominatrix. Messily beautiful, twice my age. I am quite sure that if she tried to fuck me I would have said yes. Instead I read the magazine Fetish Times.

It was 1994. The internet was barely a word. No smartphones, no cameras, no 3.5 million search results and nothing to Google it from (sorry Netscape, you did your best.) We still called it cyberpunk, for fuck’s sake.  Then adolescent me picked up one of western culture’s strangest artefacts and the bottom dropped out of the world. Thanks to the imprinting effects of psychedelics, there was no coming back.

I was appalled. I read it cover to cover. No one noticed. They talked about San Francisco in the 1980s, about tweakers on roller-skates and failed revolutions. I read about…stuff.

Why do we want it so weird? Who told me to ask my first lover to pour hot wax on me, the third time I ever had sex?  That was before I’d seen the magazine. He asked what I wanted and that’s what I wanted.  We were barely dating. I just went to his house to fuck. To smoke hash. To read his mind-bendingly seditious books and fantasise about changing the world.

Am I ready?

Are you?

Oh! Those Victorians!

a wrought-iron spiral staircase painted red and white, in a lush tropical greenhouse
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I write dirty books.  On the literary side, because I’m a hopeless show-off, but they’re books full of naked people and cuss words and often very little plot.  Why do I do this?  Of all the things I could write, why smut?

Insert obvious noises about it being fun, titillating, and at times very lucrative (if one writes the right kind of smut.) There is of course a great big long theoretical answer as well, because hey, I like trying to live from the heart of my philosophy.

And the evidence suggests I am one of those humans that doesn’t make enough dopamine unless vigorously stimulated.  It often feels like my choices are to write scorching sex scenes almost daily or succumb to an ennui so intense that I must develop another addiction to distract me. Maybe writing smut is my drug of choice.

But then dirty books about those repressed, prudish Victorians?

I follow the framing of landmark French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose work on the social construction of sexuality neatly upends this idea that the Victorians never spoke of sex.  Far from it, as sex became no longer a private activity but a matter of public concern.  Certain classes of people—homosexuals, working class families whose faith and poverty lead to an “excess” of children, wives who were disinterested in providing sexual services to their husbands, and so on—were doing sex wrong, and needed identifying, and where possible correction.  Deviance became not a matter for the church but for the doctor’s office, the psychiatrist’s couch.  Less a sin than a dysfunction to be remedied.  

Set against this is the growing agitation by these same groups, demanding less patronizing treatment from the ruling classes.  Homosexuality was criminalized, but by defining a criminal class who didn’t perceive their own behaviour as a criminal choice, the ruling class forced disparate individuals into a social unit, which then discovered it had significant power by dint of size alone.  The legal enclosure of homosexuality is the dawn of the modern, collectivized, queer rights movement.  State power labelled homosexual people and lumped them together in order to control them.  But as is the way with humans, the subjects of control, once forced into proximity, were able to define commonalities which allowed them to organize against the continued operation of Power.

That this discursive road is rocky as fuck is not really surprising. Winning any kind of space is hard, and those who win often then protect it against all others, even if it was those others (i.e. the trans women who drove the Stonewall uprising) who won them that space. Capitalism and the dogmas it serves want us to hate each other, so that we’ll keep fighting each other and not our masters.  Power right now wants to enclose trans people, but do that and it obliges them to align.  They count heads, and its suddenly not a handful of isolated cases but a sizeable percentage of the population.  One percent of the US population is over three million people. That’s… statistical.  That’s a voting bloc.  That’s how we change the world.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 2: The VCR

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

My father (R.I.P. 1989) had no filter. I’ve had to think about him from this peculiar distance for most of my life, and thank the gods I knew him as long as I did, because I don’t know if I would understand myself as much as I do without that solid decade.

a VHS cassette sits on a wooden table

Near the end of that decade, he acquired VCR, then rented a number of really challenging films for a nine year old to wander into the room and watch.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Altered States. Rocky Horror Picture Show (calling Dr. Freud, bring clamps) and oh gosh, and I sort of wish this wasn’t so, but among these mind-bending stalwarts I have to list A Clockwork Orange.

I was nine. Maybe ten.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m a bad person because my daddy didn’t monitor my viewing. I’m saying these are some heavy duty psychological loads for an absorbent mind to bear. The circumstances of my life had already conspired against me being normal (Montessori is scarily effective, for the record.)  Now I had the mental imagery to suit, stewing in my preadolescent brain, waiting for me to stumble into my libido.

But I like who I am. I don’t think I’m a bad person because I have peculiar tastes. I’ve never thought that, no matter how often people have tried to tell me it was so.

I still miss him, for the record. 1989.