Happy Anniversary to Me by Rick Beck A Reflection of 25 Years of Writing - 1997 to 2022 Proudly presented by You can translate this page. Choose your language.

        In January of 1997, I had been writing for a couple of years, after losing my truck driving license because I could not pass the eye test. I'd written On Winning by then, and I had written Autumn Allies and Fleeting Fall. I had a computer for two years, when Windows 95 hit the market, access to what wasn't much of an Internet became easier.         I'd lived in California and I moved to Alabama to be a writer, because it was cheaper living in Alabama. In January of 1997, I went in search of gay love stories on that fairly new Internet. January, February, and into March, I tried to find any gay stories at all by searching the Internet. I came up empty.
        On March 30, 1997, I ran across a website, Nifty Archives. There were 4800 of what they called stories. They were the worst kind of child porn. I never got past the first sentence of even one story. To describe it, each seemed to be about twelve year old boys falling in love with a middle aged man.
        Give me a fucking break!
        I left Nifty Archives and I went to wash my hands and use mouthwash. Those writings were that horrible but, it struck me, as I went back to my search, if they'll post that crap. If I wrote a gay love story, maybe they'd post that.
        I sat down the day I found the Nifty Archives and I began writing Billie Joe's Journey, the first of Billie Joe's Journals three books. That day I was writing for people like me. At first I called it, It Happened on a Bus. A gay boy decides to run away, after his best friend commits suicide, because he won't live in a world that hates him for being gay. Neither him or his best friend knows they are both gay. Billie Joe decides to run away. He's going to find out what being gay means.
        Billie Joe doesn't have far to go. On the bus, he is taking to supposedly spend summer vacation at his brother's in Seattle, he meets Carl. Billie Joe meets his first gay man. Carl is seventeen, in the army, and on the bus to Seattle.
        I wrote the first chapter of Billie Joe's Journey the afternoon of March 30, 1997, the day I found Nifty. At 3 that afternoon, I sent the chapter to the webmaster of the Archives.
        Then, I had a thought. What if no one reads it. I know I could write. I didn't know I wrote anything anyone would want to read, but I was giving it a shot. Immediately I begin to worry. What if no one writes my email address. I won't know if I can write or not. I vowed to never check my email again.
        My vow lasted until eight o'clock on March 30, 1997, I went to my email inbox. I had twenty emails. Today, with over a hundred stories, most novels, and adding up to close to 4,000,000 words, I don't get twenty emails a month, but email was the coin of the realm in March 1997 and I got twenty emails.
        Okay, I could write something gay men would read. I continued writing Billie Joe's Journey and then I began writing Discovering Gregory. I was averaging ten to twenty emails a day in 1997.
        On that first day, after writing that first chapter of a gay love story, each of those twenty emails contained the same phrase, "Don't stop writing this story."
        I haven't stopped. I continue to write four to five to six hours a day, depending on the day and the mood of my computer.
        This week I've been writing for gay literary sites for twenty-eight years. I am about to post my 4,000,000th word for people like me. I've decided I should croak about the time I hit 5,000,000 words. So, check me out at Tarheel Writer, tarheelwriter.com.
        I've been trying to write a story describing all the ways there are to be gay, and put gay people, LGBTQ+ people, where they can be found. EVERYWHERE!
        Because we have entered troubled waters, it's up to each of us to preserve our history as told in stories at gay literary sites.
        Happy Anniversary to Me!
        Peace & Love,
        Rick

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