David’s Comments (group member since Nov 18, 2014)

David’s comments from the Ask David Dalton group.

Strangely enough, it was my old friend Orson Scott Card from whom I first heard the words, "We are the stories we tell about ourselves." Card is no friend of gay people, and I've not really talked with him since the 1980s, when I ran a computer bulletin board for science fiction writers.

But I've never forgotten the truth of that sentence and how the words of a homophobe could point to a powerful antidote for homophobia and for the isolation we so often feel in our lives.

Frankly, we gay people have not done a particularly good job of telling stories about ourselves. Way back in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin started telling a completely new kind of stories, and his stories changed many people's lives, including my own. But then the AIDS era came upon us, and suddenly we were telling stories about death and grief again. Our literature has still has not recovered from the dark era of AIDS.

In "Fugue in Ursa Major," I have set out to tell a difference kind of story. I wanted to take a look at our history, starting with Greece, and try to figure out how things went wrong. And, having identified the culprit (ask me!), I wanted to imagine how we might recover what has been lost.

This exploration takes place within a story. The main character is Jake, who is young, and hot, and straight. Jake has some secrets, though! Jake meets a mysterious old hermit, Phaedrus, who lives up in the mountains. Phaedrus has some secrets, too. Then things begin to happen, and, ready or not, the world is headed for some drastic changes. And Jake is going to learn some things about love.