 at the San Francisco Public Library's virtual stage. Tonight we are very excited to host five acclaimed queer mystery writers discussing their work and the mystery genre. I'm Kevin, I am a librarian from the James C. Hermel LGBTQIA Center at the main library and I'm going to start us off with some information about the library and introduce our authors. We do want to begin with a land acknowledgement. Welcome to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people. We acknowledge the many Romutush Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the white with stewards of the lands on which we reside. SFPL is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. SFPL encourages you to learn more about first person culture and land rights and we are committed to hosting events and providing educational resources on these topics. And we want to highlight our summer stride program which began about two weeks ago. Summer stride is the library's annual summer learning, reading and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Reading for just 20 hours over the summer gets you one of our much sought after summer stride tote bags which you can see in the slide here. Go to our website or check the chat box for a link with all the details on summer stride. And I want to update you on a few upcoming Pride Month events. On June 17th Sarah Shulman will be here to discuss her latest book left the record show, The Political History of Active New York, 1997 to 1993. On June 22nd Tom Amiano will be here to discuss his recent memoir, Kiss My Gay Ass, my trip down the Yellowbrook Road through activism, stand-up and politics. On June 28th we have a book club featuring Brian Tarrant-Pernel's 100 Boyfriends. 100 Boyfriends is our Pride Month on the same page selection. You can join your fellow library patrons to discuss the book. And we want to thank the NorCal chapter of Mystery Writers of America for co-sponsoring this event. They are one of 11 regional chapters of the Mystery Writers of America, the country's oldest organization of professional mystery writers. They welcome traditionally published, self-published and aspiring writers, people in related professions, and simply those who love crime fiction. And now on to the main events. I am going to introduce the authors and I want to thank our authors from joining us from a variety of time zones. We have the Eastern Central Mountain and Pacific time zones covered this evening. So if you're on the East Coast, thank you for staying up late tonight. And I will introduce the authors. Michael Nava is our moderator this evening. Michael is the author of an acclaimed series of eight novels featuring gay Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios, who the New Yorker called a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir. The New York Times book review has called Nava one of our best writers. His most recent Rios novel is Lies with Man, which was published in April by Amble Press, an LGBT press, an imprint of Bywater Books, of which he is also managing editor. His award-winning historical novel, The City of Palaces, set at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, was published in September 2020 by Amble Press. Sheryl A. Head writes the Charlie Mack Motown mystery series, which includes Bury Me When I'm Dead, shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award, Catch Me When I'm Falling, a finalist for the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Award, and Judge Me When I'm Wrong, finalist for the Goldie Award and winner of the 2020 Golden Crown Literary Societies and Bannon Popular Choice Award. Her debut novel, Longway Home, a World War II novel, was a double finalist for the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award. In 2019, Head was inducted into the St. and Sinners Hall of Fame. Greg Herron is the award-winning author of over 30 novels and 50 short stories. He is also an award-winning editor with over 20 anthologies to his credit and an Anthony Award. His next book, Bury Me in Shadows, will be released in October of 2021. He is also currently serving as Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America. Darma Kelleher, author of the Jinx Baloo Bounty Hunter series, and the Shay Stevens Outlaw Biker series, writes action-driven thrillers that explore the complexities of society and criminal justice in a world that favors the privileged. She is one of the only openly transgender authors in the crime fiction genre. And P.J. Vernon has been called a rising star thriller writer by Library Journal. Vernon's debut, When You Find Me, was both an audible plus number one listen and associated press top 10 U.S. audiobook. His next novel, Bath House, pitched as Gone Girl with Gaze and Grindr, was released just today from Double Day. So perfect timing on that. And I am now ready to turn it over to our moderator, Michael Nava. So I will stop sharing my screen. Hi there. So let me start by thanking the San Francisco Public Library and Kevin in particular for helping to organize this and for being so generous and helpful in putting it together and to call out the Mystery Writers of America NorCal Chapter and Claire Johnson, its president, who was an avid supporter of this panel. And I'm also on the NorCal MWA Board of Directors and I encourage anyone who has an interest in crime fiction to join us because we do have a lot of very interesting programs, including crack programs throughout the year. In fact, I think next month I'm leading a program on Point of View. So I better get cracking. So I want to begin by imagining that two of our writers have just published books. Darma's book, Turf Wars, came out earlier this week. And today is PJ's pub date. So bravo, PJ. I wanted to start by asking about your coming out. When did you come out as a writer? And did that have any, was there any relation between you're coming out as a writer and you're coming out as a queer person? And since it's his big day, let's start with PJ. Thank you so much. And thank you to San Francisco Public Library for having me and Michael for organizing this and hanging out with y'all. It's an emotional day and I've been barely lucid for all of it. So I apologize. I also have ADHD and by now medicine is offline. So all that coming together, I'm going to try to be lucid. But as far as coming out goes, I was closeted the entire time I lived in, I grew up in a small town in South Carolina, which was very conservative with very conservative community and family and went to a Christian private school, which was kind of a way to keep schools segregated down there when I look at the population breakdown. And so no, it didn't feel safe for me to necessarily be out. I spent a lot of time trying to make myself not gay in different ways or sell a bit if I could have managed that as well. And having a lot of screwed up thoughts along those lines. And actually I didn't come out all the way until the end of college where I went to college there because it was cheaper and a scholarship there would have covered everything versus somewhere else. And so I went to grad school in Pittsburgh. And when I moved there, I felt like I could be me. And so that's what I did. As far as coming out in terms of being a writer, I always was out as a writer because I've also a late bloomer, so to speak. I had a totally different career before I became a writer. And by the time I took my dream seriously and wrote a broke enough books to be able to write one that was okay enough for folks to buy, I was okay telling folks who I am and all those sorts of things. But it's been a little bit different this go around because this is the first time I wrote a book with centered on queer characters like myself. I didn't do that before this book because I was scared shitless that no one would buy it. And I was naive. I didn't have access to there wasn't a gay bookstore down the street. For me growing up that was Walmart. And if there was a book on the Walmart bookshelves, that's what I had access to. And so this is actually today is the first day that book that I wrote that that I was able to draw on my own lived experiences in a way that a lot of authors do for theirs was published. So it's I kind of feel in a way that's different from what what you mean perhaps that it's almost like today is kind of a coming out in a way. And I it's on my debut but I think it's better. It's doing something a lot better than a debut. And so I'm happy to be here. And I wouldn't want to be in any other city and with any other folks tonight. So thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Jay. Zarma. You're muted. I'm not unmuted. Yeah. Yeah. I came out as a writer when I was a teenager. I had the dreams of becoming the next Lawrence Block or something like that next to Grafton. This is back in the early or late late seventies early eighties when I was a teenager. And then and so I went to college to get I got a degree in journalism hoping to that I could use that to still launch a novel writing career. But as I was in college the other part of myself started wanting to come out as far as my gender identity back then in the late eighties I really didn't have the language to describe myself as being transgender. I didn't know anyone else that was you know the closest I you know you'd hear jokes on sitcoms talking about Christina Jorgensen ha ha ha. And so for the longest time well for a few years I thought well I meant just must be a an effeminate effeminate gay man. So and when I was struggling with with all of my sexuality and gender identity all of my writing took a back seat because I just had to figure out who the heck I was. And so I lived for a few years thinking I was a gay man and then Caroline Cossey did a a spread in a men's magazine. I don't remember if it was Playboy or Penthouse or something like that. Not one that I normally picked up but she did and that was when I realized who and what I was. And so it wasn't until decades later when I was in my 40s that I got back into writing that I'd finally transitioned and started to build a new life that I finally felt comfortable enough in my own skin to start writing again. And that was we're talking 2007. So from the early 80s to the mid 2000s no writing. So I kind of had to I was in the closet as a writer. But I even with my writing I first started out I wouldn't I didn't have the courage to write about a trans protagonist especially not in crime fiction. So I started off writing about a lesbian protagonist because I was living in a same sex relationship. And I had trouble getting that published. I got an agent but then we kept hearing oh we've already published a trans or we've already published a lesbian crime story this year. So we're not really looking. We like the story but we don't know how to market it. You know the usual. So after after first two books I finally had the courage to come out as a trans author writing trans stories trans crime fiction. So it was a very long drawn out journey. Cheryl what about you? Well why don't we all let's all unmute so that we can ask each other questions. Oh good idea. Feel free to. Sorry. So I had a whole life before I knew I was gay but I still had another whole life. I was married to a man and had a child in Detroit and it wasn't until I came to Washington D.C. that I was out at work and with my family. So the writing itself it's kind of the same story. I was writing a lot of stuff that was not fiction. I was working in public media. So I'm writing scripts and writing proposals and reports to Congress when I moved to Washington. So my writing really morphed into fiction after I moved to D.C. And the first book I wrote I didn't have any queer protagonists until I was almost done with it and one of the characters whispered in my ear at dawn you know I'm gay right. So that was my first book and my first introduction that my either my subconscious or my characters were shaking me into consciousness about writing queer characters. And then when I started doing the Charlie Mac series my publisher at Bywater Books I'd self published a version of that mystery online and she came up to me and said I'm one of those traditional Noir writers where I don't think a lot of sex belongs in Noir. So I didn't have romancings and she came up to me and said do you think Charlie could be a lesbian? And I said well yeah. And then it turns out all my beta readers thought she wasn't lesbian anyways. So it was really easy to make good. And so Greg you published 30 books. So you started writing when you were like right out of the womb right. With a typewriter. Yeah I started writing. I always knew I was going to be a writer when I was a kid it was the only thing I ever wanted to be because I learned how to read when I was like three years old. And I was a little boy who played with dolls because I told stories with my sister's dolls. She didn't care about her dolls at all. She was given dolls and did nothing with them and my parents just thought I was weird. Been disappointing them since 1961. So so I knew I also knew from a really really young age that I wasn't into girls. I knew that I mean my I can remember that very distinctly like I don't want to get I don't want to get married. I don't want to I don't want a wife. I don't want that. But in the 1960s you know there really wasn't like well I guess I'm gonna have to do all of this stuff. I have to do this. I have to get I have to go to college. I have to have a career. I have to have a wife. I have to have kids. We're from Alabama so yeah totally get it. But I've lived in pretty much every conservative place in the country that you could possibly live with the possible with the exception of Chicago. My childhood was in Chicago. We moved to Chicago when I was really young. But when I was a teenager we moved to rural Kansas. I went from a high school a suburban high school with like 1800 students to a high school with 180 students. And that was scarring. And so yeah I had I always felt like I was the only one. And I remember there was a little bookstore in the county seat that I used to go to all the time and I found the frontrunner there in Gordon Merrick's books. And was always very very hungry for that kind of representation and there really wasn't much. And so I started we moved to California when I was 19 Fresno aka Topeka. But you know Kansas Kansas California wasn't really much of a choice. And so I left college there and went to California and I started feeling my way out of the closet trying to figure out how I could deal with it. How to deal with my parents my incredibly right wing evangelical southern parents. And knowing that it would not go well. And then you know I it's really hard to say talk about it but you know people started dying. And like all the people all the people I knew when I first started inching my way out of the closet started getting sick and started dying. And Fresno there was no internet back then. There wasn't much cable really not like there is now. And we weren't San Francisco. We weren't New York. We weren't Los Angeles. We weren't you know any major centers. So there wasn't really there wasn't really any information about HIV and AIDS. And I was watching my friends the people I connected with die. And basically well this is what's this is my future. I'm going to get sick. I'm going to get died. We don't know how this is spreading etc etc etc. So I was also doing the PJ thing. I like how can I not be gay. What can I do to not be gay. And so my 20s were a wasted decade really where I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid to be myself. I was afraid to embrace what I wanted out of life. And then then I moved away. I left California finally in 1989 and moved to Houston. And that's where I got the airline job we were talking about earlier. And surprise gay people everywhere. But I was still afraid. I was still very very very afraid but I started coming out inching my way out a little bit more. I finally officially started coming out to my friends and my college friends and all the people that I had never been honest with before when I was about 30 in 1991 when I was about 30 and then about three years later I was tired of being miserable and I was tired of being unhappy and I was I hated my job. I hated my life. I hated everything about it. I was like I'm not gonna be this way anymore. I don't want to live this. I'm gonna die anyway. We all die anyway. And I would much rather die having enjoyed my life and doing things that I want to do and and finding love and having friends and writing books and doing following my dreams. And so when I was 33 I made a significant change in my life and I decided to start pursuing everything that I wanted to pursue in life. And that's when that my partner started writing started getting my life together and then I was really then we moved to New Orleans because we were also having a long distance relationship PJ and we met in New Orleans and we moved to New Orleans. Eventually we moved to New Orleans. So I moved to the city I love with the man I love and now I get to do the work that I love so I'm you know pretty happy but my first and I also my partner got a job with the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival when we first moved about two years after we moved here and then all of a sudden I was going to literary there was a literary I was as the partner of the assistant director I was Mr. Volunteer 16 hour days for five days and I started meeting writers and celebrities and it was really interesting and I met a writer named Julie Smith who I was a huge fan of mystery writer named Julie Smith and I was also a personal trainer at the time and she wanted to get in shape and I wanted to be a writer so we traded services. I trained her and she was my editor and she taught me how to write crime novels and she walked me through the whole process how to get an agent how to do all of this and but I'm not very patient so when my first book was finished it was a starter book Murder in the Rudolphian was a spark starter book it was a practice book it was not we neither one of us thought it would ever be published I sent it to three agents and the first two agents were very polite they didn't know how to sell a gay book and and you know that was fine and then the third agent the third agent and now in retrospect I realized it was a mistake but at the time I didn't know it was a mistake because I just thought it was mean so basically the agent had read my manuscript and then scribbled on a piece of paper and given it to their assistant to send it back to me with a rejection letter she just put it in the envelope with his note and mailed it back to me and the note was just like the characters are neither interesting or compelling no one will publish this and I was like an eight literary agent agent used neither or and so in that same ironically ironically I had submitted I'd been told I was a book reviewer for a gay publication in New Orleans at the time and got to know the publicist's Alison books and he told he had told me that I should submit stories to their anthologies because that would get my name in front of their editors even if they didn't use them they would recognize my name and that's very day when I got home in a rage with this manuscript with this nasty note I had an email from the editor in chief at Alison books buying my story a story I had submitted and I just wrote him right back said would you be interested in the gay mystery set in New Orleans and he said yes send it to me and I sent that exact same manuscript to him and they bought it three weeks later and that's how I got started fantastic to this day I don't have an agent so I want to ask you all then to introduce your books and your characters and PD let's start again with you tell us a little bit about bathhouse which is getting incredible attention from all over the place including the post the post of the New York Times so tell us a little bit about the book absolutely it like you said it's pitched as gone girl with gays and grinder the novel's about a young gay man Oliver Park who comes from a conservative evangelical community not necessarily evangelical the way you know Greg you and I would understand that in South Carolina but a conservative community nonetheless in Indiana and before the book starts he has hit a rock bottom because he is in a situation in a community where if he is himself it's dangerous and you know of course we we're human and we're going to try to be ourselves however we can within you know the space that we're provided and so he had got into relationships and things that weren't great or were transgressive to the society there and that that sort of shame and layer of taboo that is internalized resulted in all sorts of things that didn't have to be that way but before the book opens he is in a place where he can finally make some positive changes and be pointed sort of in the right direction and he happens to meet his husband Dr. Nathan Klein who is an older trauma surgeon who comes from New York and hasn't had the sorts of experiences that Oliver has and comes from a very privileged background with money and and all sorts of things that Oliver has never had access to and so the whole book opens where he's on the cusp of making an epic mistake by visiting a bath house to cheat on his husband and things go very very very wrong and get very dangerous very quickly and then the novel kicks off with with him desperate to hide what happened there from his husband for a whole host of different reasons not the least of which is because it's you know he's lost control he's a victim of a traumatic incident in a place where he's feeling shame you know leaving and a place where you could be almost murdered and and not want to tell anyone about it which is a reality for for a lot of folks so that's that's the bottom and an abducted dog an abducted an abducted dog yes but the interesting thing about the dog is when when one of the characters is on the brink of death they think about the dog and hoping the dog is water in the toilet so that's that endeared me to you but god help me if i've ever tried to write like you know a missing person or a person that's abducted or i'm always like well where is my heart that's what i think if i we were talking about hating flying you know it's like there's turbulence or something i'm just like who's going to take care of my dog it's all all i'm thinking about i know i have my cats is my screen save them so darma talk about turf we're starting with the acronym turf for those people in our audience who may not know what that means yeah turf is acronym t e r f not t u r f and turf stands for trans exclusive or trans exclusionary radical feminist it's basically we back about a decade or so as the radical feminist movement became very popular and trans people started to make their presence known the radical feminist community was somewhat divided a lot of them were very inclusive they said you know trans women or women welcome to the sisterhood you know and then there was there were the others uh like those that organized the michigan women's music festival uh that did not do not consider uh people like me to be women they think that trans women are delusional men that are out to prey on cisgender women and that um uh transgender men are failed lesbians and they just they just have this whole thing going on and um it's a story that had been in the back of my mind for quite a while and then when a certain popular uh young adult fantasy writer uh who i shall not name began embracing turf philosophy uh and spewing hateful turf rhetoric and then came out with a book where the main character is a man that hide dresses in women's clothing in order to prey on cisgender women which is just feeding into these false negative harmful tropes meanwhile trans women especially trans women of color are being murdered at all time high rates and so i just got to a point where i said i have to write this story and uh this is the fourth book in the jinx blue series jinx blue is a transgender woman she transitioned years earlier uh she works as a professional bounty hunter when people jump bail or have their bail revoked she gets hired to pick them up and return them to custody that's her job and uh she's also into comic books and uh cosplays at conventions and she's got a nerdy side to her so she's a very three-dimensional character and in this story uh she's getting ready to get married she's uh heading out to her um uh bachelorette party in vegas and she's assigned to uh apprehend a woman that uh is charged with murdering a transgender woman in a public restroom and suddenly she jinx is putting ready to put all of her plans on hold because she knows that she needs to get this woman um and so uh the story is an exploration of a lot of the harmful rhetoric that is uh being spewed it's also an action thriller i mean it's it's not like a lecture on gender identity or anything like that this is a full-on hollywood action thriller with car chases and gun fights and murders and all kinds of craziness but it also explores the idea of identity intersectionality um uh and the consequences of uh of actions and of rhetoric because they say well people should be able to say whatever they want to say well words have consequences and they affect real human lives and so that's kind of what I wanted to explore I get into deep fake videos and media misinformation campaigns um and so I just wanted to kind of ride that balance between action thriller and exploring some of these issues that are very personal to me. One of the interesting things about jinx is she's a very emotionally well balanced yes I mean she's not traumatized by having transition no not at all because in that sense it's sort of different from some other trans trans fictional yeah um she um she was able to she she did have a kind of a crisis point when she was in middle school but she when she did come out as transgender as a teenager her parents were accepting and helped to facilitate her transition unlike me where I am estranged from my family and have been for many many years but um yeah she so and I I wanted to to show that yes I wanted to kind of normalize that accepting trans people for who they are is a normal thing it's not a big deal it's not weird in the same way that I you know I gave her a straight male boyfriend um he's not gay he's not bisexual he's a straight man but he's attracted to jinx because jinx is a woman so I wanted to help normalize that aspect of it as well great um sure I'll tell us about Charlie back no time yeah well Charlie um Mac is a black queer um private detective female prayer private detective in Troy in the mid-2000s yeah she was bisexual if I yeah she is bisexual she is choose the labels so she doesn't call herself that but clearly in the first two books that's kind of a a story line a plot line as the series progresses I'm up to book six she's entered a committed relationship with a woman that she loves but she she is bisexual um it's the stories are set in the mid-2000s in Detroit which is a low point for Detroit and I thought this was a good era to really talk about crime and greed and um the the the mayhem that could come with the city that is really on the brink of bankruptcy their mayor is being uh investigated by the FBI um you know Detroit is is um always got its foot in the in on the list of um being the murder capital of the world so it was a good time to really go in and look at all the um the fraud and crime that was going on um she is former homeland security and has left homeland security because she didn't like profiling of Muslims she takes a couple of her fellow agents with her and now she runs a firm a private investigation firm in Detroit when I'm when I'm writing the books I really don't want to write the same stuff so the first book is really a missing person case that goes awry it takes me from Detroit to Alabama Birmingham the second book is a more of a thriller it looks at a threat a domestic terrorist threat at the auto show the third book looks at murder of homeless people a serial killer who is killing homeless people the fourth book it's a little more personal it looks at Charlie on jury duty and there's some shenanigans going on in the courtroom and so I'm always trying to kind of um in to keep myself interested in the series the latest book is um warn me when it's time uh comes out in a couple of weeks um oh June 29th so I'm cool to be able to show the book this one I wrote and it's pretty topical it's about the nascent activities of hate groups in Detroit Michigan in the mid-2000s so it's the first term of the Barack Obama so it's early 2009 and at that time the FBI has a report out that anyone can see that talks about the proliferation of hate groups during this time people are just they're assassination attempts against Obama that are thwarted in the dozens and so when when the when the governor of Michigan was threatened with kidnapping and murder by this group of people I was curious about who these people were and in this book I talked about who these guys mostly white men of all ages of all stripes from all professions what's driving them what's in their heads and so I get in the head of at least one of these guys pretty good in first person point of view young guy who's becoming self-radicalized and Charlie and her team intervene to find the murder of a Muslim teacher and in doing so they upset the apple part of several conspiracies that these hate crimes are hate crime groups are involved in have fun writing it it was a little sobering too at the same time yeah I doubt it's scary yeah so uh Greg scottie ah you want scottie I was wondering who you who you'd want well you you choose who you want to talk about actually uh well my most the most recent book that I have available is a scottie book so I'll I'll talk about that and then I'll plug the new one all right later this year if you don't mind oh and I'm not looking away because I'm bored is because my cat which is supposed to be who is supposed to be locked up is not so I'm trying to make sure he's not doing anything he's not supposed to be doing Royal Street Revy on was the eighth scottie book and scottie was originally supposed to be a one-off it wasn't supposed to be a series when I pitched the book to Kensington they gave me a two book contract and I'm gonna figure it out later um but yeah I'll take the money please scottie was uh kind of a reaction to writing chance is my first series book I wanted to write sex chance is not a he's a darker character he's a lot more his his background is a lot more similar to mine than I would probably like to admit publicly great and so he's a little more hard hardboiled darker series and so I wanted to write something light and funny and I had this great idea to it just seemed like it just seemed like it would be fun to write a book a thriller caper set during southern decadence in New Orleans which is like the gay Mardi Gras that takes place over Labor Day when thousands and thousands and thousands of queer people descend on New Orleans just to party and have a lot of fun and I and I decided to make him a personal trainer slash stripper because that made it even more fun and it was the whole idea was just to be funny and fun and have and just be ridiculous and while it was writing that book my first the chance book came out and the first published review in a major newspaper basically that dismissed it as just another book full of gay stereotypes sounds like oh you want gay stereotypes you asked for it and then scottie became really popular he's never been called a stereotype they've never dismissed a scottie book as a stereotype and so over the years he's kind of grown and because he kind of accidentally backed into a three-way relationship Thrupple I guess is what it's called now um with a former FBI agent and an international um I really don't really know how to describe what Colin is he's kind of like a international agent I guess for hire and so he disappears a lot an international man of mystery exactly nobody ever nobody ever knows where he is or what he's doing because he can't tell them anything and shows up too and he just shows always shows up right in the nick of time in the nick of time in royal street ravi on I wanted to do a book set during Christmas season in New Orleans and ravi on is a Christmas meal it's traditionally it's you fast all day on Christmas even go to midnight mass and then you have ravi on after that where you break the fast on Christmas morning at like two o'clock am but now people it's you just have it like it's just dinner they do they do it all Christmas season and restaurants do it and I was fascinated with um reality television I will admit to watching real housewives I knew that's what it was based on and I kind of and my partner and I he he makes fun of me for watching but he knows who they all are and sometimes we would play a game while we were watching it's like well if we did a real housewives of New Orleans who would be who would they have on the show and we would come up with local people and it was we would just laugh laugh laugh I'm gonna write about that I'm gonna write about that and so that's kind of what the book is it's um there's a international intrigue aspect to it because I don't plan these books Scotty is a book that you can't plan it just happens and then I'd like I'll be going doing something funny and having fun with it it's like oh there's no mystery yet I'll just have a body drop out of the sky from somewhere and I'll figure it out later as I go and I'll figure it out later as I go and so it was a lot of fun to write and I really enjoyed writing it and it was a lot of fun and my book that's coming out this October is called bury me in shadows this is Zika and that one is about a young man who's going to Tulane University in New Orleans and has a bad breakup with his toxic boyfriend and goes on a drug and alcohol binge that winds him up in the hospital and his mother gives him a choice you can go stay with your dying grandmother in rural Alabama or you can go to rehab so he chooses Alabama and there's a lot of family legends and a lot of there's the ruins of the old plantation house dealing with the history of the family and the racism of the county and and homophobia in rural Alabama it's based I've loosely based it on where we're actually from only it's not quite I don't think it's quite as rustic and backwards as where I'm from where we're actually from and I'm really excited about it I think it's it's a departure for me and it's there's a supernatural element to ghosts in the woods and things from the from this from the horrible past and horrible crimes in the of the past come to fruition in the present it was a lot of fun to write cool what part of Alabama is it great um nowhere you'd know that covers the entire state all right the county seat has a population of less than 4,000 okay there's no major you'd have to I always tell people it's about an hour and 20 minutes northwest of Tuscaloosa oh yeah yeah and if you're on highway 20 coming in from Mississippi you get off a carbon hill and drive for 45 miles it is literally is in the middle of noise Fayette county Fayette county and not stop for gas do not stop for gas I'm sorry I need to stop to see if we have any questions since we're at 746 do we have questions how will I know if we have questions oh hey Michael um no questions yet that I'm seeing but I will I will let you know if we have any questions so well I see one oh one person right there oh okay let me check because I have questions I have more questions do you um okay I can't tell where the question is in that so let me oh here it is here it is I have a lot of trouble this is from dad Pierce I have a lot of trouble introducing my character some critiques seem to want to know everything right to birth order on the first page um my main character the most reason never happens to be gay he's older isn't in a relationship and has any specific event that needs calling out his sexuality it becomes apparent necessary near the midpoint but I'm more into plot than arcs since he is of the lone detective trope when should their sexuality come to play okay so that's an interesting question which sort of gets me something I was thinking about which is and we'll we'll get we'll we'll try to wrap this in but um you know my last panel here was called mysteries with a mission which talked about mystery writers who use social issues as a backdrop for their mysteries like transphobia homophobia racism and so forth and in those mysteries of course the sort of the identity of the protagonist as an outsider belonging to one of those groups is front and central um do you and listening to all of you I mean I think that being queer is fairly central to your character's identity do you think of yourself as mission driven writers I I don't um uh I look at it this way because you know this is the first book in the jinx blue series out of four that really dealt with the issue of transphobia and so I look at it this way my character's gender identity being trans shapes her experience of the world but it doesn't define her experience of the world in the same way that my shea stevens uh character outlaw biker she's she's a lesbian uh but her being lesbian doesn't define who she is but it shapes who she interacts with um it shapes um how she experiences the world and so I don't think it's necessary to um really focus on their queerness per se um but um I mean it's okay if you want to I mean uh you can have them in a relationship if that's what you want but um you don't have to necessarily have it be their defining factor and you know you could just have it the have it brought up in the subtle ways in which we you know we experience our queerness in our daily lives you know I'm not always going out saying I'm trans I'm trans I'm trans are you trans um but every once in a while it pops up and you know someone maybe I'll hear someone talk about an issue related to the queer community and my thought process whether I say anything or not my thought process is oh okay I could say this about my experience or I could not so I mean in introducing a character maybe they think about something even if they're not in a relationship or or their queerness is not a central part of the story so um I want to ask PJ this question I just finished reading Bad House which is a great book by the way I highly recommend it but um so you talked about Oliver's you know experiences in this small town in Indiana I think it is yeah right um you talk about his shame and how um this his shame and his guilt um do you think that that's a specifically gay trope or could Oliver have been Olivia would it have been the same book I think sort of at a at a very basic uh level shame is a emotion that human like I I think we only have a finite repertoire of emotions that all of us as humans regardless of where we come from access including shame and pain and love and sadness and betrayal and all those and all those kinds of things but within the context of a story like um like this it would have been it would have been wildly um different um the stakes would have been different um in different ways the conflict would have uh taken a different shape um as as Olivia is that Olivia Benson as Olivia if Liv Benson was navigating the story it would also be radically different um but uh but no because uh normalization if Oliver was a cis white het woman um society would have space um for for for that character um to uh that character's life is normalized at all at all levels and when when shitty things happen um that's the starting place and yet for a character like Oliver that's not the starting place because you know that's not a normalized behavior why the hell are you at a bath house um you know seeking anonymous sex feeding into gay tropes or you know whatever else um any of the characters might you know might say about that behavior um and and so no I think if Olivia was almost you know in the same exact situation um almost murdered at a bath a bath house I guess I don't know uh and you know cheating on her husband um there there would be that compulsion uh I would assume perhaps um to hide uh to hide that fact um but I don't think there would be the same conversations in front of a police officer um uh certainly um and also a willingness to maybe write it off as that um if a bunch of people die in a bath house um is that gonna make the news is that gonna get someone fired in law enforcement or is that gonna result in an election upset in some sort of positive way um I would like to to think so and I don't also think so um so it would be an entirely different story uh but the feeling the feeling is is the same um even though those characters would maybe get to it in different ways um and deal with the fallout quite differently that's a very illuminating answer what about you Cheryl do you think of yourself as a mission driven writer or that that part of your um task as a writer is to highlight racism homophobia or as in one of your knowledge homelessness to deal with those issues I absolutely do feel that responsibility and every book I write is going to talk about race tolerance class injustice and how it affects people who are not rich and famous and privileged I'm always going to write those kind of books like like Dharma there's going to be some shooting and killing and I think a protagonist who is black queer and female is a political act in and of itself I think when she goes out the door and walks down the street she's making a political statement um and so I don't think is a as a black queer woman I can afford to to not address those issues um and in a way that entertains but edifies um and helps bring people along so I'm I almost always have a picture of a person in my mind when I'm writing the book and it's not a black person you know it's a white person who needs to hear this stuff because black people know it but about it Greg what do you think um I think they're I mean you can go either way for me um I've dealt with a lot of you know homophobic homophobia based trauma in my life and so there are times when I'm writing that I do want to deal with those issues I want to deal with class I want to deal with racism I want to deal with homophobia I want to deal with misogyny I mean that was really what I was trying to get to the bottom of in royal street revion was the misogyny about the housewives and how they're treated and how women are looked at in those contexts I don't know if I actually was able to do that properly or not but that was what I was the goal was but with Scotty I my mentality behind Scotty when I created him was I wanted to create a gay man who had no issues with being gay whatsoever his parents are completely accepting of him he came out to them when he was a teenager his parents embraced him joined PFLAG his parents are hippie stoners who live in the quarter who you know have have the money to be able to be stoner hippies who live in the quarter and um so so sometimes it it comes up in the Scotty books I deal with it a lot more in the chance books because I see them as more darker I don't want to the Scotty books I always want to be I see those more they need to be wacky and funny and ridiculous but the nice thing about writing books that are set in New Orleans is wacky and ridiculous is every day here I mean every day there's material there's always material I've been reading a lot of history lately about New Orleans because I'm wanting to write something in the past something said in the past and it's been fascinating finding how far back the an openly gay trans only it wasn't called at then community existed in New Orleans and how far back it goes it goes back to the 1800s I mean there were gay bars in the french quarter in the 1800s which you know it's fascinating storyville the process the houses of the houses of ill repute in storyville all the madams if they needed if they had a customer who wanted a guy they knew where to send the bouncer to go get one who would do it and I think that's fascinating and it's history that's lost that doesn't really get talked about much that doesn't get written about much and I think it's kind of I'm off topic completely so actually I think Kevin are we almost out of time here um well we can keep going if you all would like to we have we do have two questions and a request okay what's the request uh well the request is for you they would like to hear about your yes yeah okay yay so uh I write uh I've written a series of um novels with a gay mexican-american criminal defense lawyer named Henry Rios and um I my books are very much driven by a sense of mission and um but I also recognize that because I chose to write mysteries my first obligation is to tell a story that keeps the readers turning that page so I'm not a sociologist I don't write polemics um but I do specifically write about issues that affect um the gay community queer community in lives with mad I go back to 1986 in Los Angeles when there was an initiative on the California ballot that would have allowed county health officials to quarantine people who are HIV positive into these sort of concentration camps um and that's an actual historical events and there was also um within the Los Angeles police department a group of evangelical christians who were uh prostitizing within the department in violation of their oaths and you know the first amendment um and really pushing a fairly radical christian agenda so um you know I write about things that piss me off there's no shortage of them if you're a queer person of color so that's me yeah let's see oh you um I can read the questions if you'd like okay great okay uh we have one from Stacy Miller this is not a queer related question but would love to hear the authors describe the benefits and difficulties associated with writing in a series versus a standalone um I've only written the series I've never written a series I imagine the degree of difficulty is about the same frankly every every book I start it's like I've never written the book before and it's like re-adventure it will that's true for me though there are the continuity issues that I have to keep up with that oh yeah you have to be a little more organized when you get about four books into a series so that you don't miss uh and so I'm doing profiles of all the characters so I can remember their personalities with cars they drive you know their idiosyncrasies because you know mystery readers are discerning and they'll say Charlie didn't have a white Corvette in the second book oh yeah they will oh yeah so but Darman Gray you don't write stand-alones but you alternate series so how how is that um I do do stand-alones too oh but um I do everything and short stories yeah but for me it's continuity like Cheryl said it's continuity and I meant to be better organized about that and then you get six or seven books and you're like Jesus Christ I can't go back and reread all of these books but but ebooks make it easier because you can search yeah without having to page through right but I've I've made I've made this especially with the Scotty series because it's so fly by the seat of my pants I've I've made colossal colossal continuity errors but I've always managed to explain my way out of them I always think of it like the letters to the comic books in the back where they would catch the continuity at the Marvel comics and then the editors would explain it that's kind of how I see it Scotty Scotty's mother's name changed yeah I think for me uh I mean the continuity is a is a big challenge and I've I've had a lot of uh I've tried to maintain kind of a story bible to keep track of a lot of the stuff you know what car they drive what kind of weapon they carry you know how they're related and who's still alive who's dead because you know what to bring back a character's like didn't he buy in book two the the other the other challenge that I find is trying to keep it fresh and not rehash the same old kind of plot devices over and over again so I'm always like you know when I um create a new jinx blue series it's like okay where is this fugitive hiding what are they doing to keep from being arrested and then what is jinx gonna have to do in order to track this person down and so it's it is like writing a whole it just it's like starting over from scratch again it's like because you don't want to just be so formulaic that it's just like okay yeah she's going to be hiding with her boyfriend in the mountains and then she's going to go to so trying to keep it fresh in that sense uh is my biggest challenge but on the plus side is with a series you have a little bit more and this is the business person in me talking you have a little bit more read through so that um you know when when you find a reader that falls in love with your main character they're more than likely just going to read the next book in the series and the next book in the next book whereas with the standalone okay we we really love this character wins it oh no who's this other character oh i was hoping for another so there's not as much of a read through um with standalone's also speaking of that after royal street ravion came out somebody emailed me and asked me how many car accidents has scottie actually been in and my response was that's why he hates driving i know i'm having to keep track of scars and bodily damage like wait a minute i love the comment uh below in the chat function that was like dream sequence he's talking about i don't remember who's alive in my mind i would was like how would you explain that away that pops up and like that's a great there you write the prequel so we have another question out there um yeah and we actually have two more okay so uh the first part of this question is for pj and then the second part is for everyone for pj how did you decide on the cover design of your book and then same question for everyone else if you um could pick one of your books and share an anecdote about how you decided on the cover design yeah the answer for me is really easy i did not at all but i'm i'm very thankful that i didn't have a chance to do so um because i don't have my brain isn't wired that way um to be able to look at a story and and really come up with an idea that that pops and you know isn't isn't intuitive so in my mind i was like oh it's like bath house there's going to be like humidity on glass and it's going to be all fogged up and wherever i'm guessing everyone else's mind would would would go immediately um and so that's what's the the great thing about working um or being able having the privilege of working with um a cover designer who is an artist who can interpret the story through the lens uh through their lens um and so john fontana uh double day created something that just it took my breath away um with with the pink spray painted x and and also the neck which is a very um a very primal i've got a sort of a medical background in a past life it's it's tiger territory when you start sticking things in here uh it's it becomes dangerous and a lot riskier um but it's also there's a sensuality and a sexuality uh sort of they're that you know it conjures those things when we think about like the neck because it there's the vulnerability and so i i'm in i'm in love with with the cover and i feel like i i feel weird on on one side for saying that because i'm like it's my book and i shouldn't you know i just it's so great i love it so much but but at the same time it is someone else's art and i could not be prouder that that's what bath house looks like and that's what um readers will think of uh when when they think of the book because it's a very striking cover it is yes it really is thank you and so no john if the cover is amazing thank you there it is there it is there it is easy answer my my cover would have been made in powerpoint um and it would not look like that at all i actually did design the cover for turf wars um i come from a let's see you haven't yeah i don't i don't actually have it with me right now i very unprepared i know very unprofessional of me um but um uh i you know i i'm not a professional cover designer but i do come from a graphic design background my mother was a professional graphic designer so i kind of grew up watching her work and everything and so um i'm really proficient i for an amateur i'm proficient in photoshop so um i drew on i for my first three books in the series i hired a cover designer who did a great job for those books but being an independent author myself um it's expensive to hire a cover designer uh so um i decided to to try my hand at it and it turned out really well i just kind of drew on uh kind of the colors that i i wanted to bring into it bringing in the the image of the desert and of course the the image of jinx with with the gun so the girl with the gun cover you know you can't go wrong with that Harold does Ed McMahon do your covers she does and i want to get one of my favorite ones which is this i mean she she's a brilliant designer she's also a brilliant writer um this is the auto show one and i usually i will she will have the synopsis she'll read it and she's almost don't have to tell her what to put on now um so this is the one about the auto show and it's conspiracy and it's murder and domestic terrorism and she came up with this cover i mean i think it invokes enough mystery that you want to want to buy it she's very good and very collaborative tree house studios is the the name of her company nice she also did the covers of my rip of my uh the latest edition of rios and this is my favorite i think uh which is set in san francisco in the 70s and 80s this is actually a photograph from polk street that i licensed from the san francisco public library and then i gave it to ann and she did this just amazing color thing yes yes she's really brilliant and an award and a lambda award winning writer also that's right who does your covers greg well when i was my original publishers you know it was always just well here's your cover i hope you like it but you know i i've been really lucky and that i've liked all of my covers i know there are some authors who've never been really happy with their covers this was my first scottie cover truth and advertising yeah i was actually kind of shocked when they sent it to me was like you're seriously yeah we're gonna get it on tables and barns and noble okay but now that i'm with bold strokes they're they really work with me on the covers um i am not a graphic designer i had a job where i had to learn graphic design on the job when i were random was the editor of a magazine 20 years ago you remember flambda book report michael oh yeah i was the editor and i had to learn on the job how to do covers and how to do layout and design and all of that it was quark and was the design program which i don't need to do this anymore and it was not user friendly at all and but i've been really really lucky with bold strokes they'll send me like 10 different cover choices they will they'll have me send them what i they have me at they have me tell them what i want and then they send me 10 options and then i end up like this part and i like this part and i like this fun i like this and i like this and then they'll put it all together i've been very very lucky on that regard so i have a lot more and bold strokes i have a lot more say in the cover and if i don't want i've never actually rejected any of the options that they've sent me there been i probably have made some bad choices that didn't sell the book the way i should that where i thought oh that's a great cover for the book because that's exactly what the story is but it didn't sell the book so but yeah it is what it is let's do that last question and then i'm going to ask each of you to name three queer mystery writers that people should be reading and then i guess we'll sign off so what's the last question here Kevin okay here it is i've often heard it said that sci-fi is an ideal queer genre because it explores otherness and alternate views of reality which is an everyday queer experience even in the present do you think that mystery crime is also particularly queer because it deals with injustice hidden lives and identities tension in relationships and secrets that can stay secret is there some commonality you have seen among queer mystery writers that is distinct from straight writers those are great questions so writing off now i don't have a complicated relationship with the truth so not at all never never held a secret in my life and i've never felt like an outsider i do like the new you know the the world building in sci-fi and especially with the young adult audience and the the young writers now who are doing sci-fi and their ability to just um take gender identity and morph it into so many unique and wonderful expressions of characters i think there's some fabulous work being done in the YA market around sci-fi octavia butler a lot and then there's the old school sci-fi well trans trans writers do in speculative that sci-fi fiction are also incredible oh yeah it's so it's so obvious that yeah in the future gender fluidity will be like a thing you know isaac asimov didn't think of this he sells his character smoking cigarettes yeah mallory cooper is a trans sci-fi writer who is she's like one of the most prolific writers that i i know personally and she her work is just absolutely amazing and i'll mention kt eighton and barbara and right who both do sci-fi i expect i'll mention kelvin gimble ditch gimble ditch kelvin gimble ditch who's a really wonderful writer um so okay three three queer misci writers that everyone should be reading so i'm going to start with jessith hanson kathleen force and ellen heart those are my three oh yeah yeah that's a good i'm going to go with eddie buddleton who is another canadian author in vancouver who wrote after alias and has the rebellious tide coming out i believe in august um which is just a gripping story uh sort of inspired by uh in some ways the german wings tragedy that occurred so it's it's you know what is how how does a queer uh a queer couple grieve um in the wake of something uh like that um also uh john frams uh the bright lands is an amazing horror gothic story he's got something great but he's cooking up it's coming out and i really really loved um i can never never ever's um these violent delights about sort of the eruptive um relation like when young people are in love um and they're not supposed to be uh and how fraught that is in any situation but it's certainly fraught fraught is how when society says they shouldn't be together and then how that finds outlets is is a very powerful book so um uh those are three for me oh darma uh let's see robin geigel who's i just yeah she's amazing uh her debut thriller uh legal thriller um uh by way of sorrow uh and she's got a second one coming out um i think later this year no Kensington yes yes um also brad shreve uh he wrote body in the bath house and body on a hill and i think he's got a third one coming out although i can't remember the name of that one uh his really really great stories um and uh christin lepionka um harox and weary series yeah good craig um jm redmond's mickey night series that dark hardboiled deeply flawed lesbian private eye in new orleans great titles she's also my boss sander scoppaton yeah oh yeah who also did y a also back in the 70s before anyone else really was and um james robert baker who nobody really seems to talk about much anymore we talked about him last night on a podcast with our me and darma uh james robert baker was basically um jim thompson if he was gay and on meth charo what were your three choices my three are um christel smith who is a young queer writer right spec fiction her debut novel was called two moons i think uh has the the the chops to be the next octavia butler um nicky baker who in the 1990s wrote a mystery series the virginia kelly series the first black queer mystery writer woman mystery writer that i know of i stand on her shoulders and then um someone in our publishing house michael ann apteker writes a series called the cantor series the writing is lovely the writing is terrific it's hard boiled it's um set in new york um and you should at least pick up one of ann's books and and taste it so thank you all for uh i wish we were all together yeah i'll go out and i'll go out and continue this discussion that thank you thank you claire jocelyn if you're still there thank you all for a great conversation and thanks to our audience and for the all the questions and we'll see you next time thank you happy for having us happy pride everybody pj dharma sharyl thank you for coming out yay buy all these books everyone buy all these bye thanks for coming bye bye