Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life, page 9
January 5, 2015
On Romance & Race & Dating
The other day, I read a blog post in Huff Post Gay Voices, from the I’m from Driftwood series, “'You're Really Nice, but I Don't Date Black Guys': Racism or Preference?” I’ve been thinking about the article and its supporting video ever since.
In it a black guy named Nelson Moses Lassiter, talks about racism in the LGBT community that takes the form of rejection from white guys who don’t date black guys. (You can read the article here .) Sophomore year in college I had a crush on Scott, a cute white boy who was struggling with his gayness. At some point the summer before junior year he ended up sharing my dorm room. Inevitably, perhaps because we were roommates, or maybe it was my awkward attempt to seduce him—I honestly don’t remember—he saw me naked. A few days later he confessed he’d dreamed of me right after. The dream was fairly explicit. As I stared at him, he’d quickly added, “But I could never sleep with a black guy—that on top of being gay would be too much!”
What I heard was, “I could never sleep with you.”
So I get what Lassiter is saying; rejection hurts, no matter the reason. The reason for the rejection seemed to really irk him. What irked me was it sounded (and I could be wrong) like he himself only wanted to date white guys.
A while back I read a similar article written by an Asian gay man. In this one, the writer griped about white guys whose Grindr profiles read: “No fats, femmes or Asians.” Why I wanted to scream do you call them racist when you seem unwilling to date anyone who is not white, thereby rejecting black men and most bafflingly other Asians. I’ve always been all for dating diversity so maybe that’s why it troubles me when people feel the need to date exclusively outside their race. Is it just preference at play here? Or is it something more disturbing like internalized racism?
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that my husband is white. But I also need to point out that I did not marry a white guy, I married a guy I was in love with and who I thought I could build a life with and who happened to be white.
I’ve been out of the dating pool for nearly two decades and don’t imagine I’ll ever rejoin it but, when I was dating, I didn’t want a guy who was into my race. I wanted him to support, and treat my race with compassion and equality; I wanted him to be into me. Me, Larry the good man, not Larry the black man. I don’t want to be seen as a stand in for the entire race.
My first boyfriend, back in college, was Puerto Rican. I thought he was beautiful with his brown skin and black- black hair and smoldering eyes dark as night. My second boy friend was black, a law student, dark-skinned with huge green eyes, a great-grandmother who looked like every picture I’d ever seen of Pocahontas and a grandmother from Scotland Neck, North Carolina who looked like the last reigning white woman. My husband has Casper pale skin, salt & pepper hair and hazel eyes. Their looks are dissimilar but, I dated each of them because I liked them.
Lassiter goes on to talk about the whole “I’m a white guy who really likes black guys” phenomenon, which I found amusing. I learned to avoid white guys who claimed they were “into black guys:” it reduces you to less than an object; you become a color, a symbol. After just two dates, one white guy who was “really into black guys” dumped me because—in his words—I wasn’t black enough. Our conversation went like this:
“I don’t even know what that means!”
“Well for one thing, why do you talk like you went to Harvard?”
“First of all it’s ‘why do you talk as if you went to Harvard—though ‘speak’ would be a better word here. And second. I went to Penn but I’d never realized that the Ivy League had its own accent. Or would that be a dialect?”
Well, there went any chance of reconciliation. Clearly, I wasn’t just not black enough, I was also a bitch. We’d only been on two dates and besides that he lived in an apartment whose living room was furnished with lawn furniture. You know the kind with a vinyl woven between an aluminum frame?
Baffled as I was by his observation, I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t the first time I’d been told I wasn’t “black enough.” Freshman year, I and my roommate, who was half Japanese, half black and who had grown up in Willingboro, New Jersey, ended up living in the WEB DuBois residential program―two floors of a low rise dorm―at Penn. That was the first time I got the feeling I wasn’t black enough. He must have felt it too because the next year we decamped to the more integrated high rise dorm, where we remained for the next three years.
Even my husband once infamously stated, “Well, you and your family are hardly regular black people.” Say what? Evidently I am less black than blackish.
It’s ok to be into something about a person—nice teeth, or blue eyes. I remember my first boyfriend confessing to me early on that he was first attracted to me because of my red hair. “I just like red hair,” he said, “I even like those dogs with red hair—Irish setters.” And I smiled. I was ok with that. He found an aspect of me attractive. When he looked at me, he saw me, not a race of people. And he’d fallen in love with the boy I was.
Stanley, my now husband, and I knew each other for five years before we started dating. We’d talk on the phone for hours and I’d hang up and think, “He’s such a nice guy. Why can’t I meet someone like him?” And I suppose what I was really thinking was why can’t I meet a black guy like him?
I get that you’re attracted to whom you’re attracted to. I do. And, I believe everyone has the right to love whoever he or she chooses regardless of race or religion or gender. But, I guess the most important lesson I’ve learned in my life is this: sometimes “the one” doesn’t look like you imagined he would. Why take the chance on missing a great love because of something as arbitrary as race?
And at the end of the day, dick is dick.
Read this post and view photos on my blog here
In it a black guy named Nelson Moses Lassiter, talks about racism in the LGBT community that takes the form of rejection from white guys who don’t date black guys. (You can read the article here .) Sophomore year in college I had a crush on Scott, a cute white boy who was struggling with his gayness. At some point the summer before junior year he ended up sharing my dorm room. Inevitably, perhaps because we were roommates, or maybe it was my awkward attempt to seduce him—I honestly don’t remember—he saw me naked. A few days later he confessed he’d dreamed of me right after. The dream was fairly explicit. As I stared at him, he’d quickly added, “But I could never sleep with a black guy—that on top of being gay would be too much!”
What I heard was, “I could never sleep with you.”
So I get what Lassiter is saying; rejection hurts, no matter the reason. The reason for the rejection seemed to really irk him. What irked me was it sounded (and I could be wrong) like he himself only wanted to date white guys.
A while back I read a similar article written by an Asian gay man. In this one, the writer griped about white guys whose Grindr profiles read: “No fats, femmes or Asians.” Why I wanted to scream do you call them racist when you seem unwilling to date anyone who is not white, thereby rejecting black men and most bafflingly other Asians. I’ve always been all for dating diversity so maybe that’s why it troubles me when people feel the need to date exclusively outside their race. Is it just preference at play here? Or is it something more disturbing like internalized racism?
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that my husband is white. But I also need to point out that I did not marry a white guy, I married a guy I was in love with and who I thought I could build a life with and who happened to be white.
I’ve been out of the dating pool for nearly two decades and don’t imagine I’ll ever rejoin it but, when I was dating, I didn’t want a guy who was into my race. I wanted him to support, and treat my race with compassion and equality; I wanted him to be into me. Me, Larry the good man, not Larry the black man. I don’t want to be seen as a stand in for the entire race.
My first boyfriend, back in college, was Puerto Rican. I thought he was beautiful with his brown skin and black- black hair and smoldering eyes dark as night. My second boy friend was black, a law student, dark-skinned with huge green eyes, a great-grandmother who looked like every picture I’d ever seen of Pocahontas and a grandmother from Scotland Neck, North Carolina who looked like the last reigning white woman. My husband has Casper pale skin, salt & pepper hair and hazel eyes. Their looks are dissimilar but, I dated each of them because I liked them.
Lassiter goes on to talk about the whole “I’m a white guy who really likes black guys” phenomenon, which I found amusing. I learned to avoid white guys who claimed they were “into black guys:” it reduces you to less than an object; you become a color, a symbol. After just two dates, one white guy who was “really into black guys” dumped me because—in his words—I wasn’t black enough. Our conversation went like this:
“I don’t even know what that means!”
“Well for one thing, why do you talk like you went to Harvard?”
“First of all it’s ‘why do you talk as if you went to Harvard—though ‘speak’ would be a better word here. And second. I went to Penn but I’d never realized that the Ivy League had its own accent. Or would that be a dialect?”
Well, there went any chance of reconciliation. Clearly, I wasn’t just not black enough, I was also a bitch. We’d only been on two dates and besides that he lived in an apartment whose living room was furnished with lawn furniture. You know the kind with a vinyl woven between an aluminum frame?
Baffled as I was by his observation, I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t the first time I’d been told I wasn’t “black enough.” Freshman year, I and my roommate, who was half Japanese, half black and who had grown up in Willingboro, New Jersey, ended up living in the WEB DuBois residential program―two floors of a low rise dorm―at Penn. That was the first time I got the feeling I wasn’t black enough. He must have felt it too because the next year we decamped to the more integrated high rise dorm, where we remained for the next three years.
Even my husband once infamously stated, “Well, you and your family are hardly regular black people.” Say what? Evidently I am less black than blackish.
It’s ok to be into something about a person—nice teeth, or blue eyes. I remember my first boyfriend confessing to me early on that he was first attracted to me because of my red hair. “I just like red hair,” he said, “I even like those dogs with red hair—Irish setters.” And I smiled. I was ok with that. He found an aspect of me attractive. When he looked at me, he saw me, not a race of people. And he’d fallen in love with the boy I was.
Stanley, my now husband, and I knew each other for five years before we started dating. We’d talk on the phone for hours and I’d hang up and think, “He’s such a nice guy. Why can’t I meet someone like him?” And I suppose what I was really thinking was why can’t I meet a black guy like him?
I get that you’re attracted to whom you’re attracted to. I do. And, I believe everyone has the right to love whoever he or she chooses regardless of race or religion or gender. But, I guess the most important lesson I’ve learned in my life is this: sometimes “the one” doesn’t look like you imagined he would. Why take the chance on missing a great love because of something as arbitrary as race?
And at the end of the day, dick is dick.
Read this post and view photos on my blog here
December 30, 2014
2014: What a Year it Was!
“…These empty white pages before me, which I feel compelled to fill with the black indelible ink of memory…I must write it all down—quickly, before it leaves me…"
Thomas-Edward Lawrence
What Binds Us
As 2014 draws to a close, I thought I’d look back over a year that was—for lack of a better work—brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. But before I go on, don’t take that to mean that it was a perfect year—it wasn’t; it brought with it, fears and disappointments and challenges. In retrospect, I like to think I met each of them with grace and a determination to overcome. But I like to learn from the bad stuff, not dwell on it so this post is about the good stuff, the stuff of which I’m most proud and for which I’m most grateful.
In March, the Lambda Literary Foundation announced its 2014 Lambda Literary Awards (“Lammys”) finalists. My semi-autobiographical third book, the gay coming of age romance, Unbroken made the cut: I was a finalist. I couldn’t believe it. I reread the press release and cross checked their website. I went to sleep. I woke up, checked again. They hadn’t recanted. I was a finalist!
As a Lammy finalist, I had the opportunity to do two readings from Unbroken in May. One at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in New York and the second at the legendary Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, the week before it closed its doors. At both those readings, surrounded by people I mostly didn’t know, I’d felt, for the first time, like I belonged. I felt like a real writer. Wrapped in voices, in words, I stopped feeling different, other, fake. For we’d all attempted to create beauty out of words—and been recognized for it. The written word was our common language, and our words didn’t have color or economic status tied to them; our words weren’t “A-list;” they were just words, beautiful words. The creation of art was the great equalizer it seemed. Perhaps that’s why I write; art unites, it does not divide.
In May, Unbroken won an Independent Book Publisher’s (“IPPY”) Gold medal for gay fiction. I'd never won anything that mattered before.
I was having a good year but June was a banner month. On June 2nd, along with Stanley and my brother and his fiancée, and a record-breaking crowd, I attended the Lammy Awards ceremony in New York.
I met Charles Rice-Gonzalez, author of Chulito, a book I loved. I met the very handsome S. Chris Shirley, President of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Board of Trustees. And I met Kyle sawyer, who’d been the liaison between LLF and the finalists. I’d been a nervous wreck, emailing him often. His emails back were always crisp and to the point but somehow calming, reassuring: everything would be fine. Reading his emails, I pictured a tall, cool blonde. Instead Kyle turned out to be short, dark and...well, hot. I hugged him twice.
Unbroken didn’t win and that was disappointing but in a way just making finalist, felt like winning. And I'd hugged a hot guy. Twice.
Then on June 28th, the scrawny, bullied, sissy kid, who’d always known he’d marry a man, did. On that day, the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which was also our 17th anniversary, I married the man I’d spent nearly two decades with.
In August, eleven months and 6 days after we lost our beloved Lhasa Apso, Coco, we found a dirty white dog running in the street in our neighborhood. We captured him, brought him home, fed him and cleaned him up expecting an owner to claim him. No one did, so we named him and I was surprised to find he has filled a hole in my heart I hadn’t realized was there until he filled it.
In September, my older brother got married. 2014 was the year he found love; it was also the year he and I found our way back to each other after many years apart. He’d always been my brother but in 2014 he became a friend. At his wedding, I was his best man. I’d never been a best man before.
2014 was also the year Marriage Equality became the law in thirty-five U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
So all in all it was a remarkable year, a brilliant year, a year of firsts.
I look forward to 2015 and I wish you and those you love a year of dreams that come true, a year filled with “firsts.”
What was 2014 like for you? What do you wish for in 2015? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Read about my first reading here.
Read about my Giovanni’s Room reading here.
Read my musings about finally being able to get married here.
Thomas-Edward Lawrence
What Binds Us
As 2014 draws to a close, I thought I’d look back over a year that was—for lack of a better work—brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. But before I go on, don’t take that to mean that it was a perfect year—it wasn’t; it brought with it, fears and disappointments and challenges. In retrospect, I like to think I met each of them with grace and a determination to overcome. But I like to learn from the bad stuff, not dwell on it so this post is about the good stuff, the stuff of which I’m most proud and for which I’m most grateful.
In March, the Lambda Literary Foundation announced its 2014 Lambda Literary Awards (“Lammys”) finalists. My semi-autobiographical third book, the gay coming of age romance, Unbroken made the cut: I was a finalist. I couldn’t believe it. I reread the press release and cross checked their website. I went to sleep. I woke up, checked again. They hadn’t recanted. I was a finalist!
As a Lammy finalist, I had the opportunity to do two readings from Unbroken in May. One at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in New York and the second at the legendary Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, the week before it closed its doors. At both those readings, surrounded by people I mostly didn’t know, I’d felt, for the first time, like I belonged. I felt like a real writer. Wrapped in voices, in words, I stopped feeling different, other, fake. For we’d all attempted to create beauty out of words—and been recognized for it. The written word was our common language, and our words didn’t have color or economic status tied to them; our words weren’t “A-list;” they were just words, beautiful words. The creation of art was the great equalizer it seemed. Perhaps that’s why I write; art unites, it does not divide.
In May, Unbroken won an Independent Book Publisher’s (“IPPY”) Gold medal for gay fiction. I'd never won anything that mattered before.
I was having a good year but June was a banner month. On June 2nd, along with Stanley and my brother and his fiancée, and a record-breaking crowd, I attended the Lammy Awards ceremony in New York.
I met Charles Rice-Gonzalez, author of Chulito, a book I loved. I met the very handsome S. Chris Shirley, President of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Board of Trustees. And I met Kyle sawyer, who’d been the liaison between LLF and the finalists. I’d been a nervous wreck, emailing him often. His emails back were always crisp and to the point but somehow calming, reassuring: everything would be fine. Reading his emails, I pictured a tall, cool blonde. Instead Kyle turned out to be short, dark and...well, hot. I hugged him twice.
Unbroken didn’t win and that was disappointing but in a way just making finalist, felt like winning. And I'd hugged a hot guy. Twice.
Then on June 28th, the scrawny, bullied, sissy kid, who’d always known he’d marry a man, did. On that day, the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which was also our 17th anniversary, I married the man I’d spent nearly two decades with.
In August, eleven months and 6 days after we lost our beloved Lhasa Apso, Coco, we found a dirty white dog running in the street in our neighborhood. We captured him, brought him home, fed him and cleaned him up expecting an owner to claim him. No one did, so we named him and I was surprised to find he has filled a hole in my heart I hadn’t realized was there until he filled it.
In September, my older brother got married. 2014 was the year he found love; it was also the year he and I found our way back to each other after many years apart. He’d always been my brother but in 2014 he became a friend. At his wedding, I was his best man. I’d never been a best man before.
2014 was also the year Marriage Equality became the law in thirty-five U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
So all in all it was a remarkable year, a brilliant year, a year of firsts.
I look forward to 2015 and I wish you and those you love a year of dreams that come true, a year filled with “firsts.”
What was 2014 like for you? What do you wish for in 2015? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Read about my first reading here.
Read about my Giovanni’s Room reading here.
Read my musings about finally being able to get married here.
December 21, 2014
Oh Christmas Tree: The Holiday Tree as Storyteller
Our Christmas tree isn’t just a Christmas decoration—it is a visual history. It tells a story, the story of me, the story of us, the story of our family. The idea of Christmas tree as visual history predates Stanley. My story began before him but, often, I think his story began with me.
There’s an ornament from Channing’s, my first dog’s Christmas. Each year I bought an ornament for him. The final ornament in 2005 is a memorial ornament. I did the same thing with our next dog, Coco. Last year I added her memorial ornament. I hadn’t thought about that aspect when I started buying ornaments for our dogs. Now each Christmas season begins with tears. But that’s life—into every sunny garden, rain must come.
I hang simple papier mâché ornaments from IKEA which I bought back when I was starting out and money was tight. While moving forward is important, I keep them and hang them each year to remind myself of where I came from, of how far I have come. There is an ornament an ex-boyfriend bought at a thrift store our first Christmas together. It had been his first real Christmas. I keep it to remind me of the joy that first Christmas, of how much we had loved each other, of how hurt I was when things fell apart but mostly to remind myself that I survived, moved on; I keep it to remind myself that broken hearts mend.
This year, Toby got a new ornament, his tenth, and Riley, who’s only been with us since August, got his first one. I got a Rolls Royce ornament piled high with luggage and emblazoned with “Just Married” on the tailgate because Stanley and I got married in June. I picked the Rolls Royce because we fell in love with the vintage Rolls Royces at the Radnor Concours this fall. Already I worry that in years to come, I will remember getting married but won’t remember the significance of the Rolls Royce.
Then there’re the Spider Man and I Love Lucy ornaments my brother gives us each year because Stanley likes Spider Man and I love Lucy. My brother and I have almost every episode memorized.
Christmas, as you may have guessed, is my favorite holiday. So when my publisher approached me about contributing a story to a planned holiday anthology, I knew instantly that I would write about Christmas.
When I started writing, “The Christmas Present”, I knew it would be informed by my own truth as all of my writing is. I hit upon the idea of giving Aidan a Christmas tree, filled with memories as my own is. But, in Aidan’s case, the ornaments on his tree mark a parenting failure that he, in his innocence, assumes is his failure:
“Oh! Clive!” You’re here,” Aidan said stepping into his dorm room and finding Clive, his father’s assistant, inspecting his Christmas tree. How typical of his father to send his assistant, his fixer, he thought contemptuously.
Clive turned to look at him. A slender young man, Aidan was striking, with eyes green as new money, and long pale silky hair; there was something tentative about him, like candlelight caught in an evening breeze. Aidan held in his hand a small ornament. Clive could see it was a reverse glass painting of his school—this school—a Christmas tree at its front gates, its name and crest emblazoned across the top.
Aidan gestured at the ornament in his hand. “I stopped to buy this. It seems silly now. I should probably take the tree down.”
“No,” Clive said. “Go ahead and hang it. Someone can take the tree down later.”
He hung the ornament, stooped to plug in the lights, and stepped back to survey the effect.
Earlier, Clive had inspected the tree and had been surprised to see the tree itself was less a celebration of the season than a sort of memorial to the past, to loss. The only ornaments on it were the awkward, childish ornaments he had made with Nanny and which had never been allowed to hang on the family’s glamorous tree; others commemorated lost pets, schools he had attended, nations and islands and continents his parents had been to without him. Watching Aidan, now blue, now green, now red, Clive cleared his throat, embarrassed to see something both heroic and tragic in him.
I knew from the beginning that the proceeds from “The Christmas Present” (as well as from the anthology itself) would go to The Trevor Project, so I wanted the main character to be reflective of the demographic The Trevor Project serves—LGBT youth between the ages of 12 and 24. At the time the homelessness of our LGBT youth was very much on my mind-- close to a quarter of all homeless in the nation are under the age of 18, and of those 30%-40% are estimated to be LGBT. So while Aidan isn’t physically homeless, he is in an emotional sense homeless, displaced, away:
Flipping idly through the pages of People magazine, he came across a picture of his parents at some fête. His mother, pale, delicate, was resplendent in jewel tones and diamonds; his father, in requisite tuxedo, was equally dazzling, his silver hair swept back, his eyes glittering like pieces of ice. Surrounding them were other couples, the women equally fashionable and bejeweled, the men escorting them equally somber in black, looking preoccupied by other things, other thoughts. With a wave of sadness, Aidan realized theirs was a world he’d never know. He closed the magazine as the pilot announced their imminent landing.
Recently, I came across a reader’s review which called “The Christmas Present” “depressing.” As the story’s writer, I don’t think that is a fair assessment. There is a happy ending of sorts but more than writing an uplifting, all is joy kind of story, I wanted to write something that recognizes the fact that not all of our LGBT youth have “happy” stories. The whole point of the story is that there are allies out there, and that we can—all of us—choose, at some point, to rewrite our stories to give them the ending we dream of, that we deserve.
To learn more about LGBT homelessness in Philadelphia and what is being done to combat the problem. Click here.
To learn more about The Trevor Project, click here .
To buy “The Christmas Present” and support the Trevor Project, click here.
To learn more about the Boughs of Evergreen anthology, click here.
Share or subscribe to my blog here.
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
There’s an ornament from Channing’s, my first dog’s Christmas. Each year I bought an ornament for him. The final ornament in 2005 is a memorial ornament. I did the same thing with our next dog, Coco. Last year I added her memorial ornament. I hadn’t thought about that aspect when I started buying ornaments for our dogs. Now each Christmas season begins with tears. But that’s life—into every sunny garden, rain must come.
I hang simple papier mâché ornaments from IKEA which I bought back when I was starting out and money was tight. While moving forward is important, I keep them and hang them each year to remind myself of where I came from, of how far I have come. There is an ornament an ex-boyfriend bought at a thrift store our first Christmas together. It had been his first real Christmas. I keep it to remind me of the joy that first Christmas, of how much we had loved each other, of how hurt I was when things fell apart but mostly to remind myself that I survived, moved on; I keep it to remind myself that broken hearts mend.
This year, Toby got a new ornament, his tenth, and Riley, who’s only been with us since August, got his first one. I got a Rolls Royce ornament piled high with luggage and emblazoned with “Just Married” on the tailgate because Stanley and I got married in June. I picked the Rolls Royce because we fell in love with the vintage Rolls Royces at the Radnor Concours this fall. Already I worry that in years to come, I will remember getting married but won’t remember the significance of the Rolls Royce.
Then there’re the Spider Man and I Love Lucy ornaments my brother gives us each year because Stanley likes Spider Man and I love Lucy. My brother and I have almost every episode memorized.
Christmas, as you may have guessed, is my favorite holiday. So when my publisher approached me about contributing a story to a planned holiday anthology, I knew instantly that I would write about Christmas.
When I started writing, “The Christmas Present”, I knew it would be informed by my own truth as all of my writing is. I hit upon the idea of giving Aidan a Christmas tree, filled with memories as my own is. But, in Aidan’s case, the ornaments on his tree mark a parenting failure that he, in his innocence, assumes is his failure:“Oh! Clive!” You’re here,” Aidan said stepping into his dorm room and finding Clive, his father’s assistant, inspecting his Christmas tree. How typical of his father to send his assistant, his fixer, he thought contemptuously.
Clive turned to look at him. A slender young man, Aidan was striking, with eyes green as new money, and long pale silky hair; there was something tentative about him, like candlelight caught in an evening breeze. Aidan held in his hand a small ornament. Clive could see it was a reverse glass painting of his school—this school—a Christmas tree at its front gates, its name and crest emblazoned across the top.
Aidan gestured at the ornament in his hand. “I stopped to buy this. It seems silly now. I should probably take the tree down.”
“No,” Clive said. “Go ahead and hang it. Someone can take the tree down later.”
He hung the ornament, stooped to plug in the lights, and stepped back to survey the effect.
Earlier, Clive had inspected the tree and had been surprised to see the tree itself was less a celebration of the season than a sort of memorial to the past, to loss. The only ornaments on it were the awkward, childish ornaments he had made with Nanny and which had never been allowed to hang on the family’s glamorous tree; others commemorated lost pets, schools he had attended, nations and islands and continents his parents had been to without him. Watching Aidan, now blue, now green, now red, Clive cleared his throat, embarrassed to see something both heroic and tragic in him.
I knew from the beginning that the proceeds from “The Christmas Present” (as well as from the anthology itself) would go to The Trevor Project, so I wanted the main character to be reflective of the demographic The Trevor Project serves—LGBT youth between the ages of 12 and 24. At the time the homelessness of our LGBT youth was very much on my mind-- close to a quarter of all homeless in the nation are under the age of 18, and of those 30%-40% are estimated to be LGBT. So while Aidan isn’t physically homeless, he is in an emotional sense homeless, displaced, away:
Flipping idly through the pages of People magazine, he came across a picture of his parents at some fête. His mother, pale, delicate, was resplendent in jewel tones and diamonds; his father, in requisite tuxedo, was equally dazzling, his silver hair swept back, his eyes glittering like pieces of ice. Surrounding them were other couples, the women equally fashionable and bejeweled, the men escorting them equally somber in black, looking preoccupied by other things, other thoughts. With a wave of sadness, Aidan realized theirs was a world he’d never know. He closed the magazine as the pilot announced their imminent landing.
Recently, I came across a reader’s review which called “The Christmas Present” “depressing.” As the story’s writer, I don’t think that is a fair assessment. There is a happy ending of sorts but more than writing an uplifting, all is joy kind of story, I wanted to write something that recognizes the fact that not all of our LGBT youth have “happy” stories. The whole point of the story is that there are allies out there, and that we can—all of us—choose, at some point, to rewrite our stories to give them the ending we dream of, that we deserve.
To learn more about LGBT homelessness in Philadelphia and what is being done to combat the problem. Click here.
To learn more about The Trevor Project, click here .
To buy “The Christmas Present” and support the Trevor Project, click here.
To learn more about the Boughs of Evergreen anthology, click here.
Share or subscribe to my blog here.
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
December 3, 2014
My New Story is Now Available
My new short story, “The Christmas Present,” is now available as an individual eBook for just $0.99. All proceeds from the sale of this story go to benefit The Trevor Project.
“The Christmas Present” is part of a holiday anthology which brings together 24 authors from the UK, the USA, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. When my publisher and friend, Debbie McGowan, first approached me about joining the project, I knew I wanted mine to be a story of hope, because so many of our youth, so many of the youth The Trevor Project works to support, feel they are without hope. And I knew it would be set at Christmas, the season of hope.
When I was a kid, hope was what got me through. But for me the season of hope was always in September. At the start of each new school year, I would be filled with hope: the hope that the bullying would stop, the hope that this year I would make a friend, the hope that this year the boy I liked would like me back.
I remember during the last presidential campaign, one of Mitt Romney’s taglines was, “Hope is Not a Strategy;” it isn’t but it is sometimes all we have.
When Aidan, the main character in “The Christmas Present,” arrives at his family’s compound in the Caribbean islands, he doesn’t even have hope.
BLURB: At Christmastime, a mother, unhappy her teenage son is gay, turns to an Obeah practitioner to change him with surprising results.
EXCERPT
They passed a great many whitewashed houses built in the style of the plantation houses of the American South; low slung and broad, they seemed to clutch the ground tightly. The houses were genteel yet incongruous in their gentility, planted as they were in the savage landscape of beaches, fields of sugarcane and rain forest as alien as spacecraft. Each house they passed, Aidan noticed, had a name, and each name, he later learned, told its own story: Whim, Work & Rest, Peter’s Rest, Princess, Jacob’s Fancy.
At the foot of a road that began a sharp descent to the beach, stood a sign: Anna’s Hope. Dale made a sharp right and followed the road in its downward spiral.
Dale swerved to avoid a magnificent mahogany tree that had been struck by lightning and now lay across the road, spilling its magnificent red blood onto the cracked earth. Jarred out of his thoughts, Aidan could just make out the house up ahead. Covered by a fine webbing of bougainvillea vines, it was a two-storied whitewashed structure with weathered shutters that lay crooked and flat beside the open jalousie windows. The brilliant blooms of the bougainvillea looked like blood stains, its whitewashed walls like bleached bone, its red tiled roof like blood caked upon its monstrous back. The house lay in the burning sun like carrion. A short distance away, the Caribbean Sea boiled.
In the middle of a broad open lawn was a flamboyant tree in full bloom, wearing a crown of blood-orange flowers. Long, feathery leaves pointed like accusing fingers.
The jeep skittered to a halt. This was it then. This was to be Aidan’s home for the Christmas holiday.
Clive, seated beside Dale, turned to look at Aidan, who tried not to shudder at the lifelessness of the house, at its hopelessness. Anna’s Hope? What had Anna found to hope for here?
***
“The Christmas Present” is just one of 23 stories in Boughs of Evergreen, a two-volume collection of short stories celebrating the holiday season in all its diversity, from Beaten Track Publishing.
The proceeds from the sale of Boughs of Evergreen also goes to The Trevor Project, the leading U.S. organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young people ages 13-24.
November 28, 2014
Scenes From a Thanksgiving
It’s Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving! Now, I know Thanksgiving can be difficult for a lot of people especially if you’re LGBT. If Great Aunt Gertie doesn’t want to hear about your “lifestyle,” fuck her. After all, you -didn’t want to hear about her bunion surgery or her 1947 hysterectomy that caused her to lose all her hair, but you listen with your rictus smile and glazed over yes nodding politely. Mon doesn’t want your boyfriend at her Thanksgiving table well stay home. Make your own turkey for you and him—it’s not that hard. And while you’re at it why not invite the intern from work who can’t afford to go home for Thanksgiving. And the older divorced woman down the hall who is so pleasant.
Thanksgiving is about family but it doesn’t have to be the family you were born into or which you married into. Family is composed of the people it is not painful to be around. Family is made up of the people who support you. Who love you enough to let you be you.
To celebrate the holiday I'm sharing an excerpt from Unbroken In this chapter Lincoln takes Jose home for Thanksgiving for the first time. It's one of my favorite chapters. You can read it here
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Thanksgiving is about family but it doesn’t have to be the family you were born into or which you married into. Family is composed of the people it is not painful to be around. Family is made up of the people who support you. Who love you enough to let you be you.
To celebrate the holiday I'm sharing an excerpt from Unbroken In this chapter Lincoln takes Jose home for Thanksgiving for the first time. It's one of my favorite chapters. You can read it here
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November 17, 2014
In Defense of the Short Story
Years ago, we moved to the ‘transitional” neighborhood of Germantown (in Philadelphia), then said to be on the verge of a comeback. There was much talk about The Germantown Renaissance which was talked about breathlessly and in the tone of reverence usually reserved for people who “know” computers and pop stars who appear in bikinis two weeks after giving birth. Sixteen years later there is still talk of The Germantown Renaissance. This reminds me of all the news that short stories were poised for a comeback, its return to popularity fueled, in part, by shrinking attention spans and the proliferation of electronic devices. I am as dubious about the Short Story Renaissance as I am about The Germantown Renaissance.
Short stories seem to be the stepchild of literature. Publishers don’t seem to want to publish them. When I started shopping around my first collection of short stories, I was told that no one would publish a collection of short stories, unless I’d first written a novel length work. This seemed to me counterintuitive. How was I to write a novel without being able to write a short story?
Keep reading.
November 15, 2014
Outside the Margins: A Chat with Larry Benjamin by Andrew Q Gordon:
Today Andrew Q. Gordon makes his first Outside the Margins guest post on Prism Book Alliance. Instead of doing a traditional guest post, he opted to do a video interview with me, who he claims is one of his favorite authors. I, of course adore him and one of my favorite books is his Purpose - To see and hear more, head over to Prism's site and watch the interview, and leave a comment; one random commenter will win a $25 gift certificate.
November 3, 2014
My Interview with Rainbow Gold Reviews
Today, I’m talking about the state of LGBT fiction, why I write what I do, whether or not my fictional characters are based on real people, and what’s next from me over at Rainbow Gold Reviews. Read the interview here. And leave a comment sharing your thoughts.
Then read Marc's response to my take on m/m vs. gay fiction here.
Then read Marc's response to my take on m/m vs. gay fiction here.
October 21, 2014
The Christmas Present A New Story From Larry Benjamin
COMING SOON: “The Christmas Present:” A mother, unhappy her son is gay, turns to an Obeah practitioner to change him with surprising results.
Keep reading.
September 30, 2014
Is An Open Heart the Route to Happiness?
This week on my blog, I am challenging people to read a book they wouldn't normally read, or smile at a stranger on the street.
Find out why and how a stray dog and a marriage led me to make ths request, by reading the post here.
Then leave me a comment.
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