Lightning ⚡ Pride 🌈

I'm _Bolt. (My real name is Bill/William.) ⚡😁👍 I'm a 61-year-old white bisexual man engaged to be married to a 34-year-old black gay man.

I didn't come out as being bisexual until 2020, when I met & fell in love with my fiancé. His name is Demetrious. He's Eighteen Kinds of Awesome. He completely changed my life, upending my paradigm in the most glorious way.

I never dreamed I'd ever write poetry to another man. Before I met Dee, I had only been romantically involved with women. My future husband rocked my 🌍! A couple months ago, I spontaneously wrote this testament of my love for him. 👇

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Ever since I was teenager, I've always aspired to being a storyteller. Growing up, Stephen King was my idol. Over the last four decades, I've written several unpublished novels (vampires, and werewolves, and alchemists, oh my!) I've seen a few of my short stories and poems published in different magazines, most notably one in Weird Tales, issue #346, called Bob Bodey's Body Parts (republished here.) I write dark comedy 🔥, disturbing-but-beautiful sci fi, and a lot of horror stories.

I love making monsters! 🤷‍♂️

Before I started publishing here on Vocal a year ago, one thing I had only dabbled in was writing characters that were gay. I'm extremely attracted to women too, so writing heterosexual characters was easy and perfectly natural for me. I've always been okay with my own bisexuality. I was never open about it, simply because I never felt there was a need for everyone to know. I was in a loving, complicated relationship with a bratty woman for over twenty years. I lived a basic heterosexual lifestyle most of my adult life, with only heterosexual friends. My ladyfriend knew I was bi. My BFF knew I was bi. I never told anyone else.

Then my brat lady passed away in September 2019. I came home one night after work and found her dead in bed. She'd had health issues for years....

I loved her. I tried to be good to her. Sometimes, I failed. But I took care of her right up to the bitter end. She passed away here in our house, instead of in a hospital or nursing home (places she'd been many times and loathed.) She died surrounded by the cats she loved.

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Two months later, I met the Man of My Dreams.

His gorgeous eyes and dazzling smile enchanted me.

We had talked for a while online, but we had never met in person. When we finally did get together, there were fireworks. 🎆🎇 It was kinda like Love (lust) at First Sight.

💚+💙=💘

Very quickly we fell deeper and deeper in love.

B💙&💚D 4evah!

Months later, I found Vocal. By then, after living with Demetrious for months, and having made special new friends because of him, I was not just ready to write gay and bisexual characters, I was eager to explore those new vehicles of personal expression.

Demetrious is twenty-seven years younger than me. That difference is often even more daunting than being an old white dude suddenly emersed in black culture (my first interracial romance), or being in my first romantic same-sex relationship— both of which can be discombobulating at times! I wrote about generational conflicts when I debuted on Vocal in June of 2021. This sci-fi story entitled Where Spider-Horses Roam was written for the Heart-Shaped Locket Challenge. The theme I explored is how the old & the young have distinctly different ways of witnessing the same events.

Over the last year, I've entered practically every fiction challenge that Vocal has sponsored. I was honored to be chosen as a runner-up for the 2021 Year End Fiction Challenge for my historical horror story, When the Pain is Too Great to Swallow.

And as I've developed an audience on Vocal and grown as a writer here, I have broadened my perspective, writing several stories with gay, lesbian, and bisexual protagonists.

{In our house, we lovingly refer to the LGBTQIA+ Community as "the Alphabet People."🌈}

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My SUPERHERO Series

I didn't originally set out to write a Pride series when I created a superpowered setting. Focusing on lesbian, bisexual, and gay characters just happened organically over time. I was inspired.

Vocal had a fiction challenge where authors were required to mention a slice of chocolate cake in their story. The entry I wrote explains my premise for a comic book-like reality, a unique world because of a cosmic-level event that gives every person on Earth a paranormal ability, at a time when they need it most.

The protagonist in part one of this series becomes a member of a sisterhood with superpowers, in a tale called Death By Chocolate?

{Every chapter in this series is an independent story with different characters and can be read in any order.}

My second story set in this same superpowered universe was written for a challenge that was supposed to include marigolds. (I made mine dance!) Vocal also had a green light challenge that I missed entering. With this next entry, I used both those prompts.

At the time I wrote Part 2 of this series (last year, at the age of 60) it felt brave to write it. 😂 It wasn't brave; it just felt that way because I had never revealed this side of myself in my fiction. In Green is My Love? the main character is a bisexual man. His situation only mirrors mine in vague ways, but some of the personal feelings he expresses are mine. 👇

The 3rd installment of Wishworld was written at the end of last summer. After seeing how Green is My Love? was so well-received, I intentionally invoked a rainbow mindset to conceive the premise for Knowledge is Power? You'll see what I mean if you check it out. 👇 I entered this the Pear Tree Challenge. The main character is a Hollywood associate producer on a television show called Paranormal Love Stories. 🌈

I intend to write more stories set in that same universe, but have recently been involved in other projects. I did write the backstory for Wishworld, If You Want To Know More. ⚡😁👇

This one☝️ was published in a completely different community than the others... because Vocal doesn't have the Superhero subcategory that it needs under Fiction!

There should also be a Pride subcategory under Fiction... and/or a Fiction subcategory under Pride!

Just sayin, Vocal.

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Speculative Fiction set in an Alternate America

I wrote a story set on a world where bisexuality had always been the accepted societal norm. In this other 21st Century USA, marriage has always been between three willing partners... until a controversial Supreme Court ruling in 2016 suddenly makes heterosexual (and homosexual) couplings legal.

A famous national news anchorwoman suddenly finds herself embroiled in a controversy when she dissolves her own conventional throuple in order to marry only one other partner. She has a religious wedding, a highly controversial decision in a traditional atheist America... which turns violent in Part Two. ⚡

Part One- The Motive to the Massacre

... and Part 2- The Deadly Conclusion! 👇

Part two is one of my least read stories. ☝️Both parts could use some love.

MAKE AMERICA BI AGAIN!

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Yet Another Alternate Sci-fi-ish kinda World

Covid is bad, certainly, but can you imagine being diagnosed with feliocanthropy, a condition where you will turn into a raging werecat during the next full moon?

I envisioned that very possibility in entirely too much detail! 😼 Meet a proud hardworking lesbian named Ricki Roskowski, who is about to become a Rebel With a Lot of Claws.

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As I continue to write more LQBTQIA+ stories, I'll add them to this directory.

This is my most recent one👇, a poem I wrote to Demetrious this Pride Month, 2022. I don't know how good it is... but it's heartfelt.

I'm Proud to Be His.

If you want to see for yourself how handsome my 'husband' is, you gotta click on that one. ☝️

Like & Subscribe if you're so inclined. All comments are appreciated. Daddy is poor and really needs $💵$... so a tip of $6,969 would be 🔥!

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Thanks bunches for your readership!

_____________Bolt ⚡