Author of Contemporary Gay Romance
Day 4 of the Cold Book Tour and we’re over at the Purple Rose Tea House getting a little serious with a talk about incarcerated LGBT youth. Did you know LGBT youth have a pipeline right into the prison system built especially for them? Cold is a fictional story about two men in prison, but the reality, which you’ll see in this post is much, much different for lgbt youth. (Trigger Warning)
Welcome Michael Morgenstern, Writer and Director of Shabbat Dinner, a short film about gay youth. You can see the film online. It is a pay-what-you-want with 10% of the profits going to the Ali Forney Center which combats LGBT youth homelessness. (See the trailer below.)
Brandon: I really liked your film. Tell us what motivated you to create it.
Michael: Well, I’d been working on a TV pilot for years about growing up gay in Los Angeles at age sixteen. In the nineties, it wasn’t what it’s like now. There wasn’t a world for us–everyone who was out was older. As I worked on it, I was continually re-motivated to work on the script by all the articles in 2011 newspapers about gay teen bullying and suicide. Every time I read one I was powerfully affected to do something to reach these kids.
Brandon: How hard was it to make?
Michael: Every part of making a film, even a short one, is a challenge, and we set out diligently to find actors, locations, and a crew. I looked for theater actors, reasoning it would be easier to find an established and talented actor who was successful on stage and looking to get into film than it would to find an already established film actor. I sat down with my friend Matt, who listened to the character descriptions I gave him and came up with ten actors for each character. Then I looked up all their agents and called them. About sixty to 100 calls later…no joke…we had most of our actors. [Read more…] about Interview with Filmmaker Michael Morgenstern
This is a special guest post by my friend and fellow author, Sue Brown. She shares my passion, as you can see below. ~B.
Who am I talking to here? Probably not the people who should be reading this. So let me tell you about me. I grew up just outside of London, England. Nice area, nice parents, nice school. Everything just ‘nice’ and ‘normal’. And that’s it. Aside from my mum dying when I was eighteen there was nothing different about my life.
Scroll forward to today and I live about ten miles away, have two teenagers, and live in a pocket-sized house in a nice area. They go to nice schools and everything is just nice and normal.
What would happen if one day one of my kids told me they were gay or lesbian? What if they were transgender? Would it be nice and normal then? Yes, of course it would be. I don’t give a monkey’s who they are, who they love. It just doesn’t matter. I can’t emphasise that enough. I don’t care, and neither does their dad. [Read more…] about Rejecting Your LGBTQ Child by Sue Brown
Welcome Gareth Russell to the blog. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Gareth is an Irish YA author, published with Penguin and MadeGlobal. He is also a historian sought out by the media and is working on a third novel and a nonfiction book on the history of British royalty.
Welcome to the blog Gareth. Can you tell us a little about your Popular series?
Thanks for having me. The “Popular” books are a 6 book series with a comedy-drama theme. Two of the books are now published. The gay romance between Blake and Cameron, two of the central characters, is one of its main story-lines and I plan to have it run through all 6 books. Their storyline is in some way about portraying a hopeful or optimistic depiction of teen homosexuality. I hope ultimately that it’s a story of love that everyone can invest in. [Read more…] about Interview with LGBT Author Gareth Russell
Sacha Sacket is a member of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. He wrote this song in tribute to Jamey Rodemeyer, a 15 year old bisexual teen who took his own life. From Iran, and both bullied and harassed himself, Sacket’s song is a haunting tribute not only to Jamey but to all the youth we have lost.
#makealawforjamey
As writers we sometimes find ourselves becoming confidants for readers. I know it has happened to me more than once. The reader connects and they want to share something with you; something they have never divulged to another soul, and then you scramble…wondering what words touched their heart enough for their confidence, and more importantly, you ask yourself what you can do to help. Friend and author, Dave Arney, who writes under the pen name Michael Moye is here to tell us about his book and his own recent experience. ~B.
I write primarily for the Young Adult/New Adult audience, which means I try to at least keep up communication with various members of that age group via Google+ and Twitter so I’m not horribly out of date about what’s going on.
On Valentine’s Day, I received a chat from a beta reader I’d met in a few communities on Google+. He’s extremely talented with editing, and actually made some great suggestions on cleaning up some rough patches, in addition to helping me gauge interest, hook, all the good stuff.
He told me he was going to kill himself. [Read more…] about Amazon, Inclusivity and Suicide: Why I Bother To Write At All