Whenever someone discovers that I published a collection of short stories, their first question is the obvious, logical one: “What are they about?” Playing the role of Serious Author, my measured, thoughtful response is, “They are about gay men who navigate and survive trauma, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and often in ways that challenge and upend, even with humor, the expected tropes of how they are supposed to navigate and survive it.” But I frequently want to give in to the temptation of the direct answer: “My stories are about murder, suicide, sexual abuse, incest, rape, intergenerational relationships, gay men’s attraction to straight men, childhood terrors, bullying, physical and emotional abuse, racial conflict, male prostitution, and what is and isn’t appropriate for art to address,” immediately followed by a reassuring and defensive, “But honestly, I am a fun guy.”

Their second question is usually some variation of “Are they autobiographical?” That’s a fair and natural curiosity that I respect and believe should be answered honestly, however, never with any specific details that distinguish fact from fiction. “They are emotionally autobiographical,” I say truthfully before adding, “And that’s all that needs to be said” to curtail any further exploration of who I am and who I am not in what I write.

For the last four years, I’ve written, revised, abandoned, returned to, revised, let go, and returned to a story begun in August 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Titled “Not a Very Nice Person,” I nearly included it in my collection, Goes On, Without the World’s Understanding. It didn’t feel like a right fit, though. Besides being dissatisfied with the story as a complete realized work, there was something a little too mean, a little too bitter, about it. The empathy and poignancy woven within most of the book’s other stories were absent, so I thought it best to leave them out.

Yet I cannot let go of this story because I’ve slowly come to understand that it’s the first chapter of a novel that has been brewing for a long, long time. Perhaps even a lifetime.

I think it will be easier for both of us to move forward with more clarity if I first share the following passage from “Not a Very Nice Person,” as it provides the necessary anchoring point of reference. The third paragraph begins:

We are told Covid has induced a PTSD déjà vu for gay men who survived the classic years of AIDS, and as one from that era, I can attest this is true. Except the trauma I have been forced to relive because of coronavirus all-day, every day, never-ending, is that of someone who came out and of age during that time when it was automatically assumed HIV-negative gay men would be caregivers and activists, or, at the very least, happy earnest part-time volunteers, prioritizing AIDS as THE ONLY IMPORTANT THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD and making it the central organizing factor of one’s young gay life.

To be a HIV-negative gay man at that time and to divulge one’s occasional unsafe sex transgressions, or to question the lack of institutional support for HIV-negative men and their needs, or, even more horrible, to dare suggest that there should be something other to gay life besides AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, was to be scorned—condemned even—as superficial and selfish.

There was a subterranean, almost-romanticized idealization that the only “real gays” were those with AIDS, and all the rest of us were in some essential way imposters. Honestly, how could there have been such shock that the phenomenon of “bug-chasers” briefly flourished—HIV as the golden ticket which legitimized oneself as an authentic homosexual, with such factors in play? All those effusive, go-tell-it-on-the mountain eulogies for the recently departed Rabbi Kramer, who leveraged his anger fetish into such a profound career opportunity, left out this less savory side effect of his Old Testament exhortations to all of us “bad gays” he so professed to love and care about with every fiber of his ranting, hectoring being.

Every time I write, read, and revise these paragraphs, I hear the clear, harsh demand of “Don’t!”

“Don’t write about the AIDS era from the point of view of someone who is HIV negative.”

“Don’t write about the AIDS era from the point of view of someone who is HIV negative who resents the pressure to serve those with AIDS.”

“Don’t write about the AIDS era from the point of view of someone who is HIV negative who resents the pressure to serve those with AIDS first and to put his needs and desires second.”

“Don’t write about the leaders and heroes of the AIDS era with skepticism.”

“Don’t write about the leaders and heroes of the AIDS era with skepticism and sarcasm.”

I hate that self-censoring, silencing “Don’t!” “Don’t” is rooted in fear, of course. The fear many writers eventually confront when the story they want to tell, the story they feel they must tell, questions and challenges the given beliefs and dogma that have accrued around the subject they are writing about.

When I turned 70 years old last April, the realization hit me that I am history embodied, having journeyed through seven momentous decades in American gay life. That includes the harrowing opening decade of the AIDS era. This period defined my generation of gay men in ways we have not yet fully come to terms with. Its lasting impact on our psyches and souls has gone unexplored for too long.

At age 70, I would like to believe I have the courage to write what I want to write, without giving a damn about what other people think. After all, in another fifteen to twenty years, the odds are excellent that I will be dead. Why spend another precious second of what’s left in that time being afraid of stirring up potential offense and controversy? Why dread that I might get “cancelled” by complete strangers who have appointed themselves the gatekeepers of what is and is not allowed to be written about an era they never even lived through? Why, after all these years, should I care whether a reader believes what a character says and does is something I myself have said and done? Why should I be worried about the reactions of those who may not be pleased by what I write about a time they also lived through, but had a far different experience of?

It’s not just this passage about AIDS, though, that provokes the loud exhortation of “Don’t!” There are other aspects of gay life the narrator of “Not a Very Nice Person” has opinions on, which even he knows go “too far.” Which doesn’t necessarily mean they have no basis in truth. And which makes him all the more intriguing to me as a writer.

“My dog,” he said softly. “He died last year.”

“I’m sorry,” I replied, handing the framed photo back to him. “He’s a splendid animal. What was his name?”

“Harvey.” I must have sprouted a quizzical expression because Ron explained straightaway, “Milk. I was fourteen and had just seen the movie.”

Cautiousness prevented me from blurting out the instinctual sarcastic remark I would have normally made—that San Francisco’s cult of Harvey Milk necrophiliacs had finally fulfilled their fantasy with that one. During filming, the set decorators had returned the Castro to its 1970s glory days, when it was a hub for both sex and activism.

Unfair? Unkind? Cruel even? Or the exhilarating freedom of unvarnished honesty finally released? I just know I laughed out loud when I wrote the final sentence of that passage. Because when a character says something I had no idea they were going to say until the moment I am writing it, I know they’ve taken over the story. They are going to lead me to unplanned, unexpected places.

What’s fascinating about this character is the tension between his no longer gives a shit, let’s burn it all down attitude and his desire for one last attempt to connect with another man intimately. At least that’s where the story starts. As it develops into a novel, I want to find out if he reconciles these two elements of his personality or if he finds himself having to choose one over the other, and then, which one. Or possibly he will discover an alternative neither he nor I have yet imagined.

It strikes me that this is the very tension of being a writer—to stand alone, expressing a truth or at least an honest perspective, while disregarding all potential consequences, versus the desire to engage and move a reader deeply.

“It is better to be hated for what one is than to be loved for what one is not” is a quote by the French writer André Gide, which I discovered when I was nineteen. It has served as a guiding principle throughout my life as a gay man coming out in small steps in the 1970s and the irrevocable one of using my real name in an interview in the early 1980s with the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, my small Kentucky hometown’s newspaper. Gide’s words have also acted as a compass I repeatedly return to whenever I need to find my way through those difficult, uneasy moments in my writing where “Don’t!” is at its loudest and most demanding.

Gay men and writers know what it is like to be a target for criticism as well as confrontation and condemnation. To respond against “Don’t!” with “Yes, I will” is a risk that opens our lives to those things. But it is also a deliberate, conscious choice we must make if we are to create and give voice to our authentic selves. Even when we or the characters we write are “Not a Very Nice Person.”