Consider this.
My book, Afflicted came out in September. It is an HEA M/M novel that deals with a blind man and male prostitute who was thrown from the house as a young boy because he was gay. When I passed it on to my beta readers they loved the story, its eroticism, and its passion, but some of the comments I got back dismayed me:
Gay kid thrown from the house and becomes a hustler is a bit passe.
500,000 homeless gay kids on the street right now, more than a few of them selling their bodies for $10 for a warm bed (for one night) and the concept is passe? Is this where we have come to? That we can scream about a chicken sandwich but step over a 15 yr old kid whose parents didn’t think him worthy of being called human? What does that say about how homophobia has really affected us when we can, as a community, accept homeless kids as normal or passe? Even in a fictional story the idea insults my heart. [Read more…] about Assumption and prejudice – from beta readers
I want to thank everyone that left a comment on the Rainbow Book Reviews blog hop. There were so many overwhelmingly positive comments that I decided to give away 5 FREE COPIES of Afflicted instead of just one. Winners were chosen at random utilizing random.org.
Hunter knew this wasn’t one of those childish boy-whores trolling for perverts; this was a man. Young, but still a man. He couldn’t see him, but his voice told Hunter that he was a man that had done things of which he’d never spoken; a man who lent himself to situations where his precociousness could not have extracted him safely, yet he’d gone anyway. For the money, or the drugs, or the thrill, Hunter wasn’t sure which.
