The Words.

Erotica can have strong literary values. Some of the themes, which are part of the content in a book, are universal, and some are more specific to gay literature in my work.

In The Virgin and the Troll, Andre has fantasized for his whole life without doing anything about it. The themes are pretty simple. They include the need to be loved, or liked, or wanted. They include the need for friendship, and acceptance by others as well as ourselves.

One of the themes is about not judging yourself too harshly, or adopting someone else’s terms and agenda when going about labeling ourselves, something I would caution the reader to refrain from as much as humanly possible. One theme is about trust, and another is all about conquering our fears and in so doing achieving some mastery over self. The author had to be pretty comfortable in his own sexuality in order to write this sort of material. That’s not to say he didn’t learn something from it.

It led to a kind of revelation, and that is also reflected in the work. It’s in the bit about words.

One of the themes is words. That’s it, just words. And we all know the words. We learned them in the schoolyard, waiting for the bell to ring on our first day of kindergarten. It was quite a shock at the time. Other kids talked like this? We never did that at home…

Words like shit, piss, fuck and damn. Words like slut, bastard, bitch, and cocksucker.

The sort of descriptions we would prefer not to put on our resume because of the extremely negative connotations associated with them.

But is that who we are? Are we those words?

As a six year-old waiting in the schoolyard, I had no idea of who I would ultimately turn out to be as a man and a human being.

I adopted those words unthinkingly just as you did. The question is, can we drop them and let them quietly die the cold and lonely death they so richly deserve?

The story was fun to write. So much so that I wrote a series of three novellas, so the reader could follow the growth of the characters and even the writer to some extent.

Thank you for coming along on my journey.

The Virgin and the Troll. 

Throwing It Down.

Resolution. (Coming soon.)