Tag Archives: queer

31Jul/26

Charles Close

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July 31, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 27: Charles Close!

Charles Close shares The Blood Thief 1: The Short Happy Life of Alex Rose. We discuss serendipity, gratitude, taking action in life, world-building, vampires, and human-level stories told as big supernatural adventures.

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Charles Lawrence Close III got his first published novel rolling during the pandemic when he should have been working on his capstone project for his master’s degree at Johns Hopkins in NGO management. He wrote enough to fill two books and still managed to pull straight A’s and graduate with high honors. The Blood Thief, Vol. 1: The Short Happy Life of Alex Rose is sort of his first book. He also wrote a Jack Kerouac style novel about his crazy times living in Mexico and Russia, but he felt it was a little self-indulgent and will probably revise it at some point when he gets all the fictional characters that are spinning around in his brain a home on paper. The next edition of Alex Rose’s adventures is well on the way with The Blood Thief, Vol. 2: My Own Personal Bethlehem coming out soon!

He cares deeply about giving back to the community and believes that doing unto others as you would have them do to you is the best way to live. When he isn’t volunteering for a nonprofit, you can find him skating Pride parades with a synchronized dance crew, practicing jian-fa, learning the piano or turntables, and climbing cliffs and gym walls like a savagely dazzling, inappropriately velvet-wearing creature of the night.

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24Jul/26

Skylar Lyralen Kaye

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July 24, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 26: Skylar Lyralen Kaye!

Skylar Lyralen Kaye shares faer memoir: Bachelorx! We dive into the power and importance of storytelling, the hope in queer identities, dating on the apps mid-life, coming out as nonbinary and having a plural identity, and heading out onto the water seeking balance in life.

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Skylar Lyralen Kaye has been starting fires with words for over three decades — on stages, on screens, on the page, and in the streets. Fae writes the stories other people are afraid to tell. The ones that keep you up at night, laughing and crying.

Kaye’s work has been produced on stages across the country, published in literary journals including Calyx, Phoebe, and Girlfriends, Diva, Out, Attitude and Happy Magazine. They exploded onto film with the web series Assigned Female at Birth, winner of 13 film festival awards and the 2021 NE Film Star Award. Fae’s one-person show My Preferred Pronoun Is We (AKA Many Trump Refugees in One Body) won Best in Fringe at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Add to that the Moth Story Slam, the Boston Story Slam, the 2015 Meryl Streep Writers Lab, and the 2002 Lipkin Prize in Playwriting — and you start to get the picture. Almost an unfair number of awards.
Kaye holds a BA in English from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College. Fae is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer, a winning slam poet and lifelong queer social justice activist.

Fae writes because silence is not an option — though fae has been known to laugh ‘til they cry while burning it all down.

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17Jul/26

Natalie Simone

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July 17, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 25: Natalie Simone!

Natalie Simone joins us to discuss queer art! We dive into topics like queer history and the overlap with art, the importance of art accessibility like street art, why art should challenge the artist AND the viewer, and the importance of visual storytelling.

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Natalie Simone (nicknamed “noot”) is a nonbinary, queer, and disabled mixed media artist. Their art explores feminism, gender, sexuality, sense of self, relationships, mental health, and other various avenues of self-expression drawn from the human experience. Natalie is also often inspired by music, movies, and other forms of media so they create a lot of fan art as well. They have an online store under the shop name Nootcreations and do local art markets when they are physically able to. They grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Syracuse University with a BFA degree in Studio Arts as well as a minor in LGBT+ Studies.

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05Jun/26

Russ López

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June 5, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 20: Russ López!

Russ López shares his novel, Provincetown Stories. We discuss him finding a home in Boston/Provincetown, the inspiration for the amazing characters that inspire his work, and then writing a fun collection of short fiction stories as a love-letter to this amazing area.

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Russ López is the author of Provincetown Stories, a collection set in the Portuguese fishing village/gay tourist mecca on the tip of Cape Cod. He’s written six nonfiction books including The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. He is the editor of Latin eLit, an online magazine that publishes fiction by and about Latinx people, and his work has appeared in The Fictional Café, Somos en escrito, Northeast Atlantic, Discretionary Love, Night Picnic, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and many other places. López has also written numerous academic articles, book reviews, and works in many formats, and has presented at numerous book festivals, podcasts, and special programming on books and literature. Originally from California, Russ has degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston University. He splits his time between Boston and Ptown year-round.

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27Feb/26

Rodney Rhoda Taylor

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February 27, 2026

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 11, Episode 7: Rodney Rhoda Taylor!

Rodney Rhoda Taylor joins to share their memoir, A Life in Letters: A story of resilience, sequins, and hope. We discuss the art of writing letters, infusing hope and humor into our works, and how stories show our shared humanity.

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Inspired by Carrie Bradshaw, Rodney Rhoda Taylor returned to school to purse writing and eventually graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Unsure of what to do after graduating, after all who does know what to do with their degree, they meandered about their writing career aimlessly for the first year until a friend suggested they join a writing group that focused primarily on plays. Their writing career soon took off. They soon found themselves writing, producing, directing and acting in plays. They are the author of the short plays Eros, Poolside, Good-Bye Cupid, My Fairy Godmother, Baby Christina, Motherly Advice, and P.S. I Love You. Their play writing eventually led them to co-found Left Coast Theatre Co., an LGBTQ theater in San Francisco with Joe Frank. After taking a break from writing for a few years to focus on themselves, they resumed their writing career with the publication of their first book, a memoir, A Life in Letters, A story of resilience, sequence and hope. They presently reside in the South, with their little chihuahua, Isabele, hoping one day Cupid will still pay them a visit. (Hopefully after a visit to the optometrist.)

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28Nov/25

West Ambrose

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November 28, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 47: West Ambrose!

West Ambrose shares his first novel The Last Boy On Earth. We discuss navigating our world when it’s unrecognizable and finding the agency to define one’s self! Plus a way to view climate fiction that addresses science and experience.

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West Ambrose is a scrivener and performing artist. Check out his art-works at westofcanon.com. If you want anything published in The HLK quarterly or The Crow’s Nest, just ring for the masthead, and let them know!

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26Sep/25

Elizabeth Roderick

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September 26, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 38: Elizabeth Roderick!

Elizabeth Roderick joins us with their series: Tales from Purgatory! We discuss books 1, The Commune, and 2, Deathwalkers, and the intersection of the afterlife and dreaming. We conclude with discussion on helping queer asylum-seeking immigrants.

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Elizabeth Roderick (or LIZ RODERICK when she’s writing YA) grew up as a barefoot ruffian on a fruit orchard near Yakima, in eastern Washington State. After moving all around the West Coast, she now lives in a space crammed full of crystals, dogs, small tinkling bells, and books. She spends her time gossiping with crows, conjuring tulpas, and vaguely wishing she had money.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and organic ag from The Evergreen State College, and worked for many years as a paralegal, interpreter, transcriptionist, editor and farmer. She is a musician and songwriter, and has played in many bands, rocking some instruments she doesn’t even know the real names for, but mostly guitar, bass and keyboards. She has an album of original music entitled Surviving the Rapture.

Elizabeth writes novels, short stories, and memoir which is way more interesting than it should be. Her stories are about love, death, gang warfare, and madness. Her characters tend to be of the type that society generally shuns: addicts, convicts, and the neurodivergent. She believes if you get to know these characters in books, you’ll find them more likable than you originally thought.

She applies Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo method to fiction writing. It often gets a little heavier than what she had in mind, but she chalks it up to forced consciousness expansion.

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04Jul/25

Bill Hulseman

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July 4, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 27: Bill Hulseman!

Bill Hulseman shares his essay collection: Six to Carry the Casket and One to Say the Mass. We dive into belonging, birth order trauma, pride parades, identity, pop culture (Madonna & Golden Girls as spiritual!), and reconciling religion with queer health!

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Bill Hulseman is a writer, ritual designer, and former educator whose work explores identity, belonging, and personal agency. His debut book, “six to carry the casket and one to say the mass,” is a collection of deeply personal essays examining the identities we inherit, the traditions we navigate, and the power we have to shape our own narratives. Through reflections on family, Catholicism, and queer identity, Hulseman offers a nuanced exploration of what it means to carve out space for oneself in a world that often seeks to define us.

Aformer middle school principal, teacher, and campus minister, Hulseman holds degrees in religious studies, the comparative study of religion, and education leadership. His time in Catholic schools gave him both a profound appreciation for faith and a firsthand understanding of the tensions between personal identity and institutional tradition. His writing is informed by this background, as well as his deep love for pop culture—where figures like Madonna and “The Golden Girls” helped him see himself long before the world was ready to.

Hulseman now lives in Seattle with his husband, Jonathon, where he continues to write, design rituals, and lead meaningful conversations about identity, faith, and belonging.

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16May/25

John R. Gordon

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May 16, 2025

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 10, Episode 17: John R. Gordon!

John R. Gordon shares his novel: Mother of Serpents. We discuss evil spirits & madness, blending history & myth, and why it’s important to write queer, interracial families!

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John R. Gordon lives in Shepherds Bush, London, England. He is a screenwriter, playwright and the author of nine novels, Black Butterflies and Warriors & Outlaws, both of which have been taught in the USA; Faggamuffin, Colour Scheme, Souljah, Drapetomania and the interracial YA romance Hark. He writes for the world’s first Black gay television show, Patrik-Ian Polk’s Noah’s Arc, for which he received an NAACP Image Award nomination. He is the creator of the Yemi & Femi comic, for adult readers.

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13Dec/24

Dale Corvino

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December 13, 2024

It gives us great pleasure to present Season 9, Episode 48: Dale Corvino!

Dale Corvino returns to share his memoir: Afterlife of a Kept Boy. We discuss the nuance of being a kept boy and how one untangles their emotions and learns to live after that relationship ends. We also touch on using different writing styles to highlight new phases of life, de-stigmatizing sex work, and finding closure.

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Recipient of the 2023 C&R Press Nonfiction Award, and a 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow, Dale Corvino found his voice at the underground literary salon “Dean Johnson’s Reading for Filth.” In 2018, he won the Gertrude Press Fiction contest, judged by Whiting Award recipient Brontez Purnell. Recent nonfiction includes a profile of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel for the Gay & Lesbian Review, an essay on queer longing in the digital era for Matt Keegan’s 1996, and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society. BONDS & BOUNDARIES, his debut short story collection, was released in 2023 from Rebel Satori Press.

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May 3, 2024

It gives us great pleasure to present a Season 9, Episode 17 Interview – Dale Corvino

Dale Corvino joins us to share his book Bonds and Boundaries! We discuss sex work, having beacons on our paths, estrangement, and human connection in this digital age.

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A 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in nonfiction, Dale Corvino’s essays have appeared in Salon, the Rumpus, and the Gay & Lesbian Review. Bonds & Boundaries, his debut collection of short stories, was released in 2023 by Rebel Satori Press. His memoir of sex work, Kept Boy in the Afterlife, won the 2023 Nonfiction Prize from C&R Press and will be released in September 2024.

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