Today’s Pride Month interview is with author, editor and book reviewer Jerry Wheeler:
Hi, Jerry! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during the current pandemic lockdowns. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?
I take early morning walks, listening to old sci-fi radio broadcasts and other spoken word recordings – not audiobooks or podcasts, though. I tend to stick to decades when radio drama and comedy was popular.
Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: how has being gay influenced or informed your writing and editing?
I think it’s responsible for my writing and editing. Ever since high school, I’d written for various publications, had newspaper internships during college, was a wire service stringer for a while – all journalistic experience. I never received much fulfillment or found any direction writing fiction until I stopped trying to write ‘straight’ and changed a story I’d been shopping around to reflect that difference. And that was my first short story sale.
You run the excellent Out In Print website, reviewing gay literature across the spectrum from science fiction to mysteries to stage plays. I’m not aware of any other review sites that focus on gay lit without also keeping a narrow focus on specific genres. Why is it important to you to cast such a broad net?
For the same reason you also won’t see any major publishers appearing in Out in Print. My goal is to create a space for the independent publisher and the unreviewed author—the books that don’t fit easily definable categories. That’s not to say my reviewers and I don’t read genre lit. We do. But we also read drama, poetry, biographies, and non-fiction. And I see no difference between gay lit and genre lit other than formula. A good story is a good story. The only thing I don’t usually review is M/M romance because those books already have a number of exclusive review outlets.
You’ve edited a number of anthologies centered on gay themes, and were shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award for Tented: Gay Erotic Tales From Under the Big Top. What’s your process like for bringing an anthology together, from concept to final ToC?
It depends. If it’s a closed call for submissions, I’ll contact the authors on my closed call list and see how much interest they have. If it’s an open call, I’ll put the specs out and wait for the stories to come in. For a recent anthology that didn’t come off, I got over 100 stories and only had at most 15 slots to fill. Then, you have to read. And read. And read. Stuff that fits the specs. Stuff that doesn’t. Stuff that isn’t even close. Alternate fonts. Little margins. Formatting from hell. Once you’ve made your choices, you send the letters, get the contracts signed, edit the stories, put them in order and get the final manuscript to the publisher. It’s as easy as that.
You’ve also recently re-released your Lamda-nominated story collection Strawberries and Other Erotic Fruits (with a stunning new cover by Matt Bright). Tell us about the book and why it was time to bring it back into print.
Well, had it not been for a dispute with Steve Berman at Lethe Press, it’d still be in print. It was an unfortunate casualty of my firing him. Since I retained the rights, I decided to update it with four new stories (more on that later) and self-publish it. To be fair, Matt Bright’s terrific cover was actually on the last version of the book as published on Lethe’s Unzipped imprint, so Steve paid for it (he’d want everyone to know that). It never got a push from Lethe, but that’s not a surprise. However, I did update the cover with the Lambda nominee medal, and it looks spiffy indeed.
Erotica tends to get a bad rap and a sneering reaction. As editor and author of multiple erotic short stories and anthologies, do think we’re slowly seeing a shift towards acceptance/”legitimacy” of erotica as a genre?
I hope not. Erotica should be ground-breaking and should always, always push the envelope. The closer it comes to telling its truth rather than an “acceptable” version of its truth, the closer it should be to the edge. The more acceptance it gets, the more mainstream and homogenized it becomes—and life is way too short to have the same kind of sex everyone else does.
What are you working on now and what do you have coming out soon?
Right now, I’m working on a novel about vampires who subsist on musical talent instead of blood. It’s called “Pangs,” and it’s an expansion of the novella with which I ended my short story collection. That novella is actually the first part of the book. I took it out of the short story collection and substituted four new stories (“T-Bone, Medium Rare,” an essay about a blind date, “Discodemius,” a time-traveling tale of a demon from the 1970s, “Necessary Elvis,” about Elvis’s return to glory, and “Wings,” my very first short short). I’m about 10K from finishing the novel, so I hope to have it out soon.
And finally, where can people find you and your work online?
I’m on Facebook (Jerry L. Wheeler), Twitter (@jw_den), and Instagram (wheeler_jerry). People can also visit my website at Write and Shine (https://jerrywheelerblog.wordpress.com/) for information about my editing services and where to buy my books. For the best in queer lit reviews, join me at Out in Print (https://outinprintblog.wordpress.com/)
Jerry L. Wheeler is the editor of the Lambda Literary Award finalist Tented: Gay Erotic Tales from Under the Big Top (Lethe Press, 2010) as well as Riding the Rails: Locomotive Lust and Carnal Cabooses, The Dirty Diner: Gay Erotica on the Menu, and is the author of Strawberries and Other Erotic Fruits (Lethe Press, 2012), also a Lambda Literary Award finalist.