Lee has been writing for as long as he can remember, but only submitting stories for publication since 2001. He won a Stoker Award for his first novel, Stained, and went on to win  a Lambda Award for The Dust of Wonderland. Currently his short story collection, In the Closet, Under the Bed, is up for another Stoker.

Lee is gay, and writes horror feautring queer and straight protagonists for adults and young adults under the names Lee Thomas, Thomas Pendleton, and Dallas Reed. He has short fiction forthcoming in Dead Set, Darkness on the Edge, Armageddon Lightshow (Bloodletting Books), and Best Gay Stories 2010 (Lethe Press). Two of Lee’s novellas, The Black Sun Set (Burning Effigy Press) and Focus, co-written with Nate Southard, will also be released this year as standalone books.

In addition to his personal website, Lee maintains a LiveJournal and a Facebook page. He is the chair of the 2011 World Horror Convention, which will take place in his current hometown of Austin, Texas. He lives with one good dog, one good cat, and one evil cat.

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OA: You’ve already got one Stoker and one Lambda Award under your belt for Stained and The Dust of Wonderland, and now In the Closet, Under the Bed is up for another Stoker. How does it feel? Are you excited, or is it old hat by now?

LT: Excited. It never gets to be old hat.  I love to hear that a single reader has enjoyed my work, so for a group to come together and honor it with an award nomination is thrilling. I’ve been nominated for a number of awards multiple times (this is my fourth Stoker nomination), and it remains just as exciting now as when I received the first one.

OA: Stained and The Dust of Wonderland are both set in Louisiana. What keeps you coming back there in your fiction? Is there a personal connection, or does it fascinate you for other reasons entirely?

LT: Years ago, I flew to New Orleans to attend my first Mardi Gras, and I felt the oddest thing upon stepping off the plane.  I hadn’t seen the city or experienced a single thing in Louisiana yet, but there was this overwhelming sense of being “home.”  Strange.  I ended up moving to New Orleans for several years and loved every minute of it. It’s an amazing, unique place that nurtures the creative mind. Sadly, work took me to other parts of the country, but I still hope to move back one of these days.

OA: In the Closet, Under the Bed is a collection of stories featuring gay men. Did you set out to create the collection on that theme, or was it a matter of serendipity?

LT: Serendipity I suppose. I had written a number of stories featuring queer characters – quite a few about closeted men – and many had been published in horror magazines and anthologies.  A friend and fellow writer, Steve Berman, suggested I collect the stories and even suggested a publisher – an imprint of Haworth Press. Well, they bought the collection and then the imprint folded, leaving the collection orphaned. A new press (Dark Scribe) emerged a bit later. They were very open to horror and didn’t shy away from queer content, so when I proposed the collection, they snatched it up.

OA: As the chair of the 2011 World Horror Convention, you’re obviously very involved in the horror community. How do you feel it treats queerness? Have you encountered a lot of discrimination, or has your experience been mostly one of acceptance? Are there any things you’d like to see change?

LT: I’ve been fortunate. When I first started publishing, I made a number of friends and built a good readership in the horror community. They were open and friendly to me, and my work appeared in a number of publications that contained primarily “straight” content. That noted, horror is a conservative genre with a number of conservative people involved. Thirty years ago it was a club for straight white guys, and queer characters – along with women and people of color – were rarely treated with any level of respect. That was perfectly acceptable to the audience then, because it represented the status quo. What’s frustrating is that some writers (and editors) don’t seem to realize that the status quo has shifted in the last three decades, and this clinging to an outdated social norm severely limits the potential of horror fiction as social commentary. Certainly, there are instances of homophobia and a desperate clinging to tradition by some, but most horror writers and readers – as with any intelligent group – see beyond issues of sexual orientation and can assess the value of a work (and a writer) using legitimate criteria. So yeah, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Prejudice exists, but I don’t think it’s dominating the genre.

Still selling gay-themed books to mainstream publishers is difficult, not because they hate the gay community, but because the sales numbers on previous gay-themed works – with minor exception – have not been particularly high. Whether they’ve put promotion dollars behind those titles or not, who can say? I consider this an economic prejudice, and it applies to a number of minority groups. The track record for queer titles isn’t good so it makes it easy for editors to pass on them, even if they feel the work is exceptional. I’d like to see that change, but it will require a vocal and active readership, using their wallets to move things forward.

Fortunately, we have a thriving small press industry for queer books, and many of those publishers are open to speculative lit, whether it’s science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Titles can reach an audience. I’d just like to see them reach a much larger one.

OA: You write under several different names. Is there a logic behind which books are credited to which name? If so, how does that break down, and if not, how did that happen?

LT: I’ll try to make this comprehensible.  My given name is Thomas Lee Pendleton (friends call me “Lee.”) When I began submitting fiction, I did so under the name Lee Thomas, because I liked the way it sounded. It struck me as simple yet memorable. When I began writing for the Young Adult market, I wanted to delineate that work from my adult work so I used my given name. More or less, it was a courtesy to readers, because someone who likes what Lee Thomas writes may find what Thomas Pendleton writes a bit soft. I didn’t hide behind either name – never made it a secret I was the same guy. In the span of a little over a year, I had five or six titles coming out under the Thomas Pendleton name, so to keep the market flooding down, Dallas Reed was born. So far, those are the only names I’ve published under, but it’s still early in my career so who knows what people will be calling me in the years to come. Ha!

OA: How do you know your evil cat is evil? Are there signs the rest of us should be looking for in our own pets?

LT: There’s knowledge in his eyes – calculation and intent. The mayhem he creates has purpose, and I feel one day his dark plans will be revealed, and he will rise, but it will be too late for mankind by then.

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Thanks, Lee! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out In the Closet, Under the Bed.

Rick has written several novels, both speculative and not. His novel about reincarnation and love, Orientation, won the EPIC Award for Best GLBT Novel last year, and two of his books are currently EPIC 2010 Awards finalists. Dead End Street is nominated in the Young Adult category and VGL Male Seeks Same is nominated in the Contemporary Romance Category. He’s also got a new novel called Blue Moon Cafe coming out in March from Amber Allure, and a short story in the forthcoming I Do Two charity anthology from MLR Press (proceeds go to the Lambda Legal).

Rick currently lives in Seattle with his partner and their Boston terrier, Lily. He is on Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook, and he maintains a blog at http://rickrreedreality.blogspot.com/.

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OA: Blue Moon Cafe is set in your current home city of Seattle. Did you use any actual places as background for the events in the book? Is there perhaps a real life inspiration for the Blue Moon Cafe?

RR: There are many real places in the book, including having my main character live in my own neighborhood, Green Lake. I also use many locations in the gay neighborhood just east of downtown, Capitol Hill. And I have a werewolf mauling take place at night in the Washington Park Arboretum. There is no real life inspiration for the Blue Moon Cafe, although I have since heard of such-named establishments. I was just after the werewolf connection and thought it sounded romantic, as well.

OA: You’ve been involved in AIDS-related causes in the past, and one of your books features a character who finds out he’s HIV positive. If we can’t eradicate AIDS entirely within our lifetime, how much hope is there for more happy endings like the one in NEG UB2?

RR: HIV and AIDS awareness is a cause that’s very important to me, for many reasons. I have lost friends to the virus, though you don’t hear about that as often these days. But as in NEG UB2, I think that everyone who has HIV or AIDS has just as much right and expectation to happiness as anyone else. We live with all kinds of illnesses, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, and it doesn’t stop us from seeking the same kind of happiness as anyone else, so I don’t think AIDS needs to be “eradicated” in order to find happiness, but I would love to see that day come. What a happy day that would be!

OA: Do you have any advice for people who’d like to help, or recommended resources for people who are HIV positive?

RR: Advice? Most major metro areas have AIDS-organizations who help people out and I would recommend checking into what volunteer opportunities are available in your town, since these places are usually low on funds and in need of help. So even if you can’t afford to help out financially, perhaps you can afford to give a little of your time. Poz.com is a great place to go to find resources and information.

OA: Dead End Street and VGL Male Seeks Same are up for the EPIC 2010 Awards. Can you tell us a bit about them?

RR: Dead End Street is my young adult horror novel from Amber Quill Press. It’s about five misfit teenagers who band together to tell stories in a notorious abandoned house in their small town, but the house may not be as abandoned as they think. It’s my only young adult work so far. VGL Male Seeks Same was my first foray into writing romance, and it’s the prequel to NEG UB2. It’s the often funny story about a gay everyman who goes online looking for love and when he doesn’t find it, creates a more appealing persona to draw others to him. Of course, complications arise.

OA: Will you be at EPICon in New Orleans when the EPIC Awards are presented, or are there other events you’ll be attending this year where readers can meet you in person?

RR: I am going to New Orleans in March for the conference and awards and I’m very much looking forward to it. I went to EPICon last year in Vegas and had an amazing time meeting other writers, editors, and publishers…all united by their interest in ebooks. So far, that’s the only conference I have planned. Believe it or not, I’m kind of a shy person, although I hide it pretty well most of the time. So a lot of my “networking” takes place online.

OA: As a reviewer for Dark Scribe Magazine, you read a lot of new books. Have you got any recommendations for us?

RR: Oh yes…here’s just a few titles I’ve recently raved about that are well worth checking out: Alive on the Inside, The Monster in the Box, The Birthing House, Hater, Shatter, and The Suicide Collectors. All of them have that wonderful quality of making it next-to-impossible to stop turning the pages.

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Thanks, Rick! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out VGL Male Seeks Same.

Since 2004, Angelia since written seven novels, ten novellas, and many more short stories both on her own and together with her writing partner, Naomi Brooks. Their latest novel, Alive on the Inside, came out in December. An erotic horror novel about a traveling circus, Alive on the Inside has been nominated as a candidate for Best Horror Novel in the Preditors and Editors Readers’ Poll for works published in 2009.

Angelia and Naomi are planning to release a Western in 2010. Showdown at Yellowstone River will feature a drag king gunslinger and a bisexual sheriff. In addition to that novel, a couple of collections of previously published short stories are on the horizon. Angelia will be making appearances at several cons and events including MidSouthCon in March, Southern Delta Church of Wicca‘s Beltane, Hypericon in June, Either Memphit FurMeet or Dragon*Con in September, MidSouth Pride,  Summerland Grove‘s Festival of Souls in October, and  ConTraception in November.

Angelia is a truck driver and mother of four, who identifies as a bisexual, Butch Earth Mother. She grew up in Peculiar, Missouri, but has lived in the greater Memphis area for the past twelve years. She blogs about her writing at http://angelsparrow.blogspot.com/ (syndicated on LiveJournal here), and maintains a personal blog at http://valarltd.livejournal.com/. Angelia enjoys crochet and old movies, and donates both time and money to Memphis Area Gay Youth.

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OA: Alive on the Inside came out in December, and is up for Best Horror Novel in the Preditors and Editors Readers’ Poll. Can you tell us a bit about it?

AS: Nick Harper, small-town car salesman, gets swept away from his closeted little life by a dark carnival. He falls and falls hard for Jacob Plum, aka Torturo the Pain King. But as he is with the show, his toxic religion, Jacob’s abusiveness and the general weirdness come into harsher and harsher conflict.

Everyone reading it keeps saying “Not for the faint of heart,” and my publisher felt a warning was in order. There is also a fair bit of heterosexuality, since the acts in the Adult Show are all het, including Torturo and the conjoined twins. Torturo doesn’t just bear a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn, he is omnivorously sexual and lives by Flynn’s preferred epitaph: “If it moved, [he] fucked it.” And I know a lot of m/m only readers don’t like bisexuality (or omnisexuality) in their stories.

OA: Where did the idea for a twisted circus come from?

AS: Oh so MANY sources, fictional and real-life. Is there really anything creepier than a closed or deserted amusement park? I lived in Peculiar during the era described and visited the dying park, Fairyland, in its last season. I was 9 and it has stuck with me. And clowns? Who isn’t scared of clowns and mirror mazes, honestly?

The most immediate answer on the literary front is Bryan Smith’s The Freakshow, a horror novel I picked up the summer before I wrote Alive on the Inside. Bryan’s a lovely guy and gave us a nice blurb for Alive, by the way.  But I’d been kicking around the idea of full-length horror instead of just paranormal romance shorts as we’d been doing.  So, with some rereadings of Ray Bradbury and Tom Reamy (I always loved Bradbury’s dark carnival short stories), a few viewings of the movie Freaks, and a lot of web exploration on carnival illusions, deserted theme parks and the like, Naomi and I managed to get it together.

OA: You’ve written a lot of different kinds of queer characters from lesbian and gay to bi and trans, and currently Shell Shocked is in the number one spot for Best Gay Romance with a Disabled Lead at Good Reads. What were some of your most fun and/or most challenging characters to write?

The most fun were definitely Robin and Marion, along with Bess and Little John. How can you NOT have fun writing Robin Hood in love with King Richard’s bastard son, who has been raised as a princess? The fun we had really shows through Heart of a Forest. Edward Kilsby and Charlie Doyle from Curse of the Pharoah’s Manicurists were great guys. We’re glad they took us along on that trip and they’ve invited us along on a polar expedition very soon.

The challenging characters would be Chuck Hummingbird from Glad Hands and Adlai Goodman from Kestrel on the Horizon. They required a great deal or research on religion (Chuck’s), attitudes and mindsets. Chuck, I could do more with because he is a futuristic. He has some issues, but for the most part, he’s very comfortable with himself. But Adlai, being a character of color in the early 1800s, has ideas that are very different than our own 21st century ones. There’s always some doubt in a white writer’s mind when she sets down to write characters of color as to whether she is walking the fine line between stereotype and what Harlan Ellison calls “Julie Andrews in Man-Tan.”

OA: Do you have plans for further diversity in future books?

AS: Oh yes. We write as the muses move us. Most of our books have some sort of diversity, racial, ethnic, religious or class.

At the moment, we have a cross-dressing space chanteuse, Commander Cliff Cody and his two husbands facing down space-faring brain-eating dark elves, a useless young man being taken in by a wealthy benefactor, flower fairies and a vampire apocalypse, which includes immortals of every race and era, especially Samil, a soldier in the armies of King David who died under a Hittite sword, and Ursula, who was tortured to death for witchcraft in colonial New England. My dark future universe, with a Balkanized US, is moving into the third novel, Nick & Corban, and James Ligatos’ Jewish faith will be more prominent, as will the whole dominionist theocracy that runs the Confederated States of America.

OA: How did you and Naomi Brooks become writing partners, and how do you decide who writes what? Is there a methodical process there, or is it more random?

AS: Once upon a business class, Han Solo and Bagoas fell in love. We met in an online role-playing game called Fandom High. Although we both had to leave the game for work-related reasons, we continued writing together.

We each have stock characters, muses we call them. One of us will hit on a story idea and we’ll poke around to see who wants to play, to see who will fit the story line.

[The process] starts random. Then it grows out of AIM role-play and we find our plot. I usually do the outlining, with Naomi suggesting plot-twists. Sometimes I write, show her what there is and the muses pipe up with dialogue or actions.

She does a read of the rough draft before I ever touch it. Then we both work on re-writes.

OA: For writers everything is story fodder. How has your job as a truck driver influenced your writing?

AS: It has gotten me out, let me see more places, including a very creepy motel that is going to show up soon. It has given me a different skill set, which allows me to write more realistic trucker characters. You’ll never see mine lounging in the driver’s seat in his undershorts with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (the booze can cost him his license, even if he’s not driving impaired) Truckers are very popular in m/m, being all butch and macho.

Also, the sheer length of time behind the wheel lets me work out plot points, meditate on characters and even do dialogue. I’m not a long haul driver. I have a dedicated run and spend about 6 hours a day driving.

OA: As the mother of a queer teen, do you have any advice for other parents with queer kids?

AS: First and foremost: get support. Get it for yourself, get it for your child. The earlier a child comes out, the more peer group problems there can be. My daughter had other children (yes, age 13-15 is children) trying to kill her. Our local gay and lesbian youth group was a great help to her during the rougher patches.

Second, don’t be a hypocrite. If your straight child can date, let the queer one date, too. Don’t freak out over the same-sex kissing anymore than you freak out over the opposite sex kissing. Sleepovers are problematic, but know your child and who ze is romantically involved with and who ze considers a friend.

Third: safe sex. Talk about it. Provide for it. You cannot tell a queer teen “wait until you’re married” when they can’t marry in 45 states. Condoms and dental dams, learn them and be prepared to talk about them.

OA: Are there any resources you’d particularly recommend?

AS: PFLAG is an excellent one, especially if one parent is having problems with the notion.

Your local GLBT community center may have programs for youth or be able to direct you that way.

The Trevor Project is the only nationwide 24 hour help and suicide prevention hotline specifically for queer youth. Our kids commit suicide at a rate three times that of their straight peers. Consider supporting this.

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Thank you, Angelia! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Alive on the Inside.

A recent conference in New Zealand brought together leaders and youth from sexual minority communities across the Pacific; the article touches on Fa’afafine in Samoa and New Zealand.

On gay literature
Michael Stevens writes about the change in how important gay literature has been to him: “Now there are hundreds of books, by many different authors available. And yet I feel little compunction to follow the latest trends in gay fiction or poetry. It just doesn’t seem to matter to me any longer. Yet once it was central to me discovering who I was and how to negotiate the world.” and “By reading I learnt what it was to be a gay man.”

On LiveJournal community 50books_poc are three recent reviews of LGBT-focused writing:

• M+O4EVR by Tonya Cherie Hegamin, along with a general introduction about LGBT fiction, YA lit, race, and the few other books about African-American queer girls;
• Southland by Nina Revoyr
• “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” by Jin Haritaworn, with Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem

And GLBT Fantasy Fiction Resources “provides an opportunity for readers to express their thoughts regarding fantasy and sci-fi with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered protagonists through book reviews, essays, and reading lists in a non-commercial environment”.

Gay characters on TV
In the Bay Area Reporter, “Going, going, gone!: the case of the missing LGBT characters” looks at the dearth of gay characters on US television. [Though personally I'm disappointed that they describe Thirteen on House as "previously queer" and "now heterosexual" when the show itself has made it clear that she is and always has been bisexual and just happens to be dating a guy at present. The show does plenty else wrong, but - at least as far as I've seen - it doesn't deny her bisexuality.] An interview with writer/director Alan Ball discusses directions for gay characters (both existing ones and new ones) in season 3 of True Blood.

If you come across any links to share for next week’s linkdump, please post them to the Outer Alliance forum or bookmark them on delicious or diigo with tag “outeralliancelinks“.

Michele is bisexual and happily married to a straight ally. She thinks of herself as an inclusive writer, who doesn’t necessarily focus on including queer content, but instead on exploring the machinations of relationships, and how our sexual and gender identities develop. One of her two children is autistic, so Michele is also active in autism awareness.

Her short fiction has appeared in several places including Aoife’s Kiss, Black Ink Horror XXX, and Cthulhu Sex Magazine, and her novella, Rot is available through Skullvines Press. In addition to her personal book review blog, Book Love, Michele has written reviews for The Fix, Monster Librarian, and Dark Scribe. She is planning a Horror Day event in the Louisville area tentatively scheduled for the 14th of November, 2009, but she managed to carve out some time from her busy schedule to answer a few questions for us.

The zombies in Rot are real people with feelings and memories. In your personal opinion, does that make them more or less scary than traditionally mindless ones?

I’d say they were scarier, but the big secret is that I made my zombies human because I am truly terrified of the idea of zombies. Creatures that want to–need to–eat you and there is no killing them. You can cut them to bits and the bits will come after you. I wrote people-like zombies because I needed to make them a different kind of dangerous in order to work with them.

One of your three main characters in Rot is a gay male. Can you tell us a little bit more about him?

No one knows how exactly Patrick died. What we do know in Rot is that he’s in the zombie care facility, forcibly raised and held prisoner against his will so that his family can visit him weekly and try to convert him back to straightendom. They fear that if he is “dead” he’ll go to hell for being gay. However in their attempts to save Patrick from hell they’re forcing him to live in a body that’s slowly rotting around him, in a care facility where he is little more than a moving object. His family has completely taken his free will away from him, even his ability to die has been stripped.

The scariest thing is that I can see that happening. I do see it happening all the time in these gay “treatment” camps and classes. Prisons of guilt, shame and punishment are created for these people, and because of the belief system of the perpetrators even in death they can’t escape. As a metaphor it’s a very thin one.

Novellas are notorious for being hard to sell. How did you end up writing one, and how long did it take you to place it with a publisher?

I wrote Rot because a friend of mine had been talking about herding zombies on her blog. On one hand the visual was hilarious and I wanted to use it. On the other, zombies are so scary to me personally that I didn’t feel right making it just a humor piece.

It ended up a novella because the story is pretty fast. It happens in a short period of time, and the plot is very consuming. The two male characters, Patrick and Dean, are quite obsessed with their missing friend, Amy, and because of the nature of zombies if the story went on too long they would find Amy as a jar of goo, not a woman. I thought about cutting it down to short story length, but I didn’t think I could do it without losing something.

It took me about a year to sell it. Many places said no because it was zombies period, or because it wasn’t post-apocalyptic, Romero-style zombies. I ended up getting a few of Skullvines’ books sent to me as a reviewer and I was really impressed with them. So I asked if they looked at novellas and the publisher told me they love novellas.

I pitched Rot to them, and while they said they were zombied out they were willing to look at it since I insisted it was a different kind of zombies, and they ended up loving it. And that’s how we got here today.

You’ve had your share of difficulties with things like small presses collapsing before publishing your work, so I’m wondering if you have any tips for new writers who are trying to find out if a publisher is reliable before submitting.

Well the small press in question had no negative information out there when I submitted. You’ll see a lot of people say “Avoid a publisher with complaints against it, or a history of nonpayment,” but those things didn’t come out about the press until it was in the process of collapsing.

What I advise is go to Writer Beware and the Absolute Write Water Cooler and study what has happened to people taken by scams and to people who have been involved in these press collapses. They all read the same. When you learn how a normal and abnormal press operate it will help you identify suspicious presses before they go bad. Because a lot of the bad presses out there aren’t trying to be bad, they just get in over their heads. But we have a hard enough time as it is without getting caught in that.

Also, focus your submissions to markets and presses who put out work of good quality. Buy a book from them to see if that’s the kind of work you want your work to be associated with. Start with the top/best markets and work down. But “any publication” is not better than “no publication”. Don’t be afraid to think “My work is too good for you”. Being informed and having confidence in your work goes a long way to help avoid the desperation that leads to making you an easy target for publishers of questionable value.

And finally, do you have any book recommendations for us?

I am especially passionate about GLBTQ inclusion in SF/F/H so let’s start from there.

Ann Aguirre‘s Sirantha Jax series (Grimspace, Wanderlust, Doubleblind) features a lesbian spaceship mechanic as part of her Serenity-style crew. Likewise Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series features supernatural creatures with fluid senses of sexuality and sexual identity.

Jennifer Pelland should have won a Nebula for her twisted SF love story between two women, “Captive Girl” which is part of her Unwelcome Bodies collection.

I also recommend Queer Wolf, a collection of gay/lesbian werewolf stories and Body Parts by Adrianna Dane, an erotic retelling of Frankenstein which also tackles sexual and gender identity issues.

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Thanks, Michele! Look out for another Outer Alliance Spotlight Post next Friday, and in the meantime, check out Rot.