Columnists
Jeff Baker, Boogieman in Lavender: “Extra Innings.”
Extra Innings by Jeff Baker I’m a writer. It’s who I am. It’s who I think I always wanted to be, even during Grade School and Jnr. High when I wasn’t sure “what you want to be when you grow up.” I always liked doing something creative, even if it was just drawing parodies of comic books in a notebook during class. Being a writer permeates my being, even more than my sexual orientation. I didn’t realize I was Bisexual until I was about twenty years old. But that isn’t as important as the writing. I lucked out in 2008 … Read more
Initially Yours, On Beyond Cisgender VI Jeff Baker, Boogieman in Lavender
Initially Yours: On Beyond Cisgender VI by Jeff Baker NOTE: This occasional series was inspired in 2019 by suggestion from A. M. Leibowitz about a reading list for High School beyond the straight, male paradigm. —jsb I am writing this during March 2023, which is Woman’s History Month. So here (a month or so late!) is a short overview of some (not all!) of the women who wrote sci-fi for the pulps and a little later. I fits in well with this ongoing series “On Beyond Cisgender” which started as recommendations for High School reading but these books are fine … Read more
Sources of Inspiration: A Special Writer
Ultimately what made me want to write were stories. Other people’s stories. They enthralled me so much, transporting me to other times and places. I fell in love, again and again with books. Certain characters haunted me, coming to when I was listening to music. I found myself playing out my favorite scenes in my imagination, sometimes going beyond what was on the printed page. I wanted to create such compelling characters, make them part of plots which would enthrall them. I wanted to sweep people off their feet with story. Too often my own weren’t worthy of even causing … Read more
Two Briggon Snow Podcasts – Boogieman in Lavender
Look Up & Roommates – Two Briggon Snow Podcasts Radio drama, the “theater of the mind” is alive and well, in podcast form anyway. Back in the days of “The Shadow” or even the later “Radio Mystery Theater,” there would not have even been a mention of any LGBT people or issues. Not so with modern-day podcasts. Two in particular are produced by actor/director Briggon Snow. “Look Up,” a 2020-21 podcast series from Atypical Artists and created by Snow involves Emmet (Evan Bittencourt) and Lincoln (Snow) in a sci-fi drama. They are two teenagers who encounter each other on the … Read more
“We’re Here” For a Best of the Year. New Yearly Anthology Series – Boogieman in Lavender
What would you have for your last meal? In Ann LeBlanc’s story “Twenty Thousand Last Meals on an Exploding Station,” an engineer on a doomed space station finds herself in a time loop and just has time to eat at a different one of the station’s thousands of restaurants before the end, an end which keeps repeating itself. This imaginative delicacy is just one of the delights in the 2021 edition of the new yearly anthology of Best Queer Speculative Fiction of the Year “We’re Here,” published by Neon Hemlock Press. The series stands as a fine replacement for Lethe … Read more
New Year’s 2023: Jeff Baker, Boogieman in Lavender
This Is Myyyyy New Years Resolution by Jeff Baker (title from Spike Jones) So here we are in Two-Thousand-Twenty-Three. As a guy who was watching reruns of “The Jetsons” back in 1969 I find that amazing. There are plenty of reasons for hope about 2023, if only from naive optimism. At the very least, Civil War did not break out in 2022 and the partisan hacks who thought they wanted civil war were shocked, shocked at any violence seemingly directed at them. And the possibility of turning back rights for LGBT people in the U.S. was squelched at least for … Read more