Brandon Shire

Author of Contemporary Gay Romance

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Playing Superhero by LGBT Author Hans Hirschi

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Hans Martin HirschiAs a young boy, my brother and I would play super heroes. I’d be the Flash, he’d be Batman. We’d save the world with our combined imaginations. That imagination also helped me write stories from a very young age. I had all but forgotten about it until I recently discovered some old writing from my preteen and teen years.

I also kept diaries. I lost those, however, to a “gay purging” fire after my first coming out at the age of seventeen, a few months before I headed west, to America, as an exchange student. There, encouraged by my English teacher, I took up writing again, a journal filled with teen angst and stories about saving the world, centaurs and other mythical creatures.

In 1991, inspired by hopeless love (he was straight), I wrote poetry and published my first book “Moments.” After that, it would take me nine years before I’d write again, and by that time I had gone nonfiction, publishing a book on e-learning in Swedish and in 2010, a management book, “Common Sense” in English. Oddly, majoring in literature had turned me away from reading and writing fiction, and traveling the globe on business for many years, didn’t help either. [Read more…] about Playing Superhero by LGBT Author Hans Hirschi

Interview with Filmmaker Michael Morgenstern

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Shabbat Dinner - Gay FilmWelcome 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

Interview with LGBT Author Dick O’Connor

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Welcome author Dick O’Connnor to the blog. 
Dick-O-Connor
Brandon: Poking around your social sites I noted that you’re gritty and raw, just like real life. I like that. Tell us a little something about yourself that we won’t find online.
Dick: I am a former model (I got too old and the binge drinking was hell on my abs) and a wannabe socialite. I’m originally from a desert cow town in Southern California and got into the gay club scene when I was eighteen once my best friend spotted my innocence in a club and took me under his wing, boozed me up, and taught me how to detach emotion from sex. Overall I’m a neo-Libertine.
B: Where did Stiff come from and what motivated you to write it?
D: STIFF: Memoirs of a Dick is my attempt to recount the stories to the best of my blacked-out memories in college; unfortunately, alcohol can make things a little hazy. If it didn’t happen the way I remember then it damn well should have.

Interview with LGBT Author Lichen Craig

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 I’m talking with friend and fellow author, Lichen Craig today. Often the interviewer, but rarely the interviewee, I thought it was time we switched the chairs around and found out a little more about her. ~B

 Can you tell us a little about your writing background?

I have been writing for many years – nonfiction up until 2012.  Sometimes I had other professions at the same time.  It all amounts to a lot of experience that helps in setting a scene!  I wrote on wildlife, environment, current events, and politics. I was fortunate to have a stellar education for it: I stumbled into the University of Iowa and the renowned Writers Workshop there. I actually double majored, with journalism, and that was great: the journalism school taught me to write tight and edit.

Where did the idea for Gentlemen’s Game come from?

Gentlemen's GameI don’t really know. I was in a place in my life where several things were haunting my mind. Chiefly was bisexuality. I had a few friends who seemed to be so lost . . . torn between two worlds: on the one hand was the straight community questioning and rejecting them, and on the other was the gay community looking down their noses at them. The idea that, because they were attracted to both sexes they were somehow in denial about their sexuality seemed awfully simplistic, judgmental, and condescending to me. I contacted a national expert on the subject, a psychologist, and learned a lot that was absolutely fascinating.  I had also been thinking about bisexual people in the closet – in heterosexual marriages, and perhaps never giving themselves permission to explore their own sexual orientations. So those things fed into it.  As I wrote, some of my own background in working with crime and abuse victims came into it. [Read more…] about Interview with LGBT Author Lichen Craig

My Favorite Book – LGBT Author Alan Chin

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Author Alan ChinChoosing one favorite book out of the seven I’ve written is a daunting task. Each novel was inspired by people and events that mean everything to me. If I had to choose one, however, it would have to be Match Maker, for several reasons.

 

Book Blurb:

In the four years since being forced off the professional tour for being gay, Daniel Bottega has taught tennis at a second-rate country club. He found a sanctuary to hide from an unkind world, while his lover, Jared Stoderling, fought a losing battle with alcohol addiction to cope with his disappointment of not playing on the pro circuit.

Now Daniel has another chance at the tour by coaching tennis prodigy Connor Lin to a Grand Slam championship win. He shares his chance with Jared by convincing him to return to the pro circuit as Connor’s doubles partner. [Read more…] about My Favorite Book – LGBT Author Alan Chin