Vent post: When I was a little boy, I always dreamed that I'd be 37, stuck in my hometown in a dead-end teaching job; biochemically handcuffed to methadone after years of carpet-bombing my receptor systems; physically and emotionally separated from my fiancé, who is geographically so far away that he couldn't be any more distant without leaving planet Earth (although, to be fair, I have become such a ghost of myself that it arguably wouldn't matter if we were physically toget

A scene sketch that I wrote to help me develop two characters who have been in my head for a while. I'm disappointed by the representation of relationships between gay men and straight women in modern fiction; typically, such relationships are peripheral to gay or straight love stories, and they tend to present as lukewarm cliches. I think that there's room for something both darker and deeper - a dynamic that I've tried to get at through Luke and Lila in the story below.