Chrissie Hynde, Deborah Harry and Me

As an author of fiction that always involves gay men, I may have given women short shrift in my ongoing learning process of writing. But women have held a strong role in my life, and the women in my fiction hopefully will continue to hold a strong place in my novels. 

Also, being in the romance genre for my pair of novels Every Time I Think of You and Message of Love, I'm happy to see that two women rock stars are being equally productive at the same time.

Chrissie Hynde

The title of my new novel, is of course based on the 1981 song by The Pretenders. Penned by Chrissie Hynde, the music and lyrics offer a hopeful and positive feeling and a kicky beat. Hynde, a former resident of Akron, Ohio, had to leave the U.S. to find success in the United Kingdom. About a decade before me, Hynde attended Kent State University. Considering the numerous band member deaths and break-ups, it's no small irony of that I used a Pretenders song title for a story about love and trust between two young men.

Message of Love: Play Along

If you haven't already watched and listened to Dudley Saunders' wonderful acoustic adaptation of The Pretenders' "Message of Love," which inspired the title of my new novel, please do so. 

And once again, I've created a fun and historic playlist of songs mentioned in the novel, in sequence. But I also found some informative and slightly disturbing TV clips from the era, dealing with the encroaching crisis that the gay community faced in the early 1980s. 

I'll be posting book excerpts and music videos, as I did for Every Time I Think of You and PINS.

One of my favorite songs from the era of Message of Love's setting is actually 'heard' in the book later on. But I used a few lyrics as the epigram in the book, so it sorta gets re-placed up front. 

Here's Blondie performing "Accidents Never Happen." When I last saw them last year on a double bill with Devo, sadly they didn't play it! 

Anyway, here are the lyrics I used. When you read the novel, you'll understand the reference.

"Like the magi on the hill,
I can divinate your presence from afar.
And I'll follow you until
I can bring you to a perfect world."

The Long March Home

A million people gather blocks away at City Hall, where soon I'll join them with friends and strangers. They'll wear rainbow shirts and leis and colorful clothes, and drink drinks, and listen to music, and nibble fried meat on a stick. Corporations will ply us with brochures, while we wave at celebrities in convertible cars. But it wasn't always that way.

Student Bodies

May 4. 

It's a day I avoid thinking about, a day somewhere in between the May Day protests that usually end up at nearby Civic Center Plaza, with resultant noisy media helicopters overhead, and Cinco de Mayo, with its accordant bar party invites.

But as someone who grew up in Ohio, and attended Kent State University, May 4 is a haunting morbid anniversary, historic proof of just how awful America can be.

These days, you can Google "campus shooting" and see dozens of horrifying events documents in thousands of news stories. Deranged students have been the culprits, usually.

But back in 1970, at the peak of U.S. anti-war protests, after several days of increasingly crowded student rallies, Ohio Governor Rhodes called out the National Guard, and after a tense stand-off, 60 shots were fired, four students were dead and nine others injured.

Livin' in the Eighties

Brits celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher

The death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher serves as the final nail in the coffin of the 1980s. While politicians, including our own duplicitous president, chose to commemorate Thatcher's "strength" and power, others, including British citizens who survived her  establishment, know from their life experience, that the decade was one of hardship, capitalist corruption, and utter cruelty.