The Dare That Changed My Writing Life

How a friend’s challenge led me from MM romance into twelve years of writing unapologetic stories of lust, love, and queer male voices.

I didn’t set out to write homoerotic fiction.

For four solid years, I lived happily in the MM romance space—love stories, longing, happy endings, the slow burn of two men finding each other against the odds. I thought I knew exactly what kind of stories I wrote.

Then a close friend of mine, someone who knew my work and my obsessions a little too well, looked at me one day and said, “You know you should be writing the other parts too, right?”

I laughed it off at first.

But the idea stuck.

What would happen if I stopped fading to black or clinging to the sides without fully leaping? What if I leaned into the heat, the physicality, the charged moments that I was always circling but never fully stepping into?

What if I let myself explore male/male desire without apology, without restraint, without packaging it neatly into a romance arc?

So I tried.

And I never looked back.

Twelve years later, I’m still here, still deeply in love with writing about passion between men. Not just the tenderness, not just the emotional journey, but the lust, the hunger, the intimacy, the vulnerability that comes when two men meet each other body to body and soul to soul.

There is something profoundly human in those moments.

Something honest.

Something raw.

Those stories matter.

Because queer male desire has so often been hidden, softened, censored, or treated like something that needs to be made “acceptable” before it can be shared. For so long, stories about men loving men were either tragic, coded, or erased altogether. The heat, the joy, the messy, beautiful physical connection was rarely allowed to exist on the page without shame attached to it.

Writing homoerotic fiction became my way of saying: this is part of the story too.

These men deserve to want. They deserve to crave. They deserve to touch and be touched without their desire being treated like a footnote to the romance.

Today, with The Black Velvet Room, I finally have a space built exactly for those stories. A place where I can explore lust and love between men in ways that feel honest, bold, and deeply personal. A place where readers who crave those same stories can come without feeling like they’re asking for something they shouldn’t want.

And maybe most importantly, it’s a place where queer male voices get to be centered.

Because their stories of love matter.

Their stories of desire matter.

Their stories of intimacy, joy, confusion, fear, longing, and connection matter.

I write homoerotic fiction because those stories deserve to be told in full color, not in shadows.

And twelve years after a friend dared me to try, I’m still grateful I said yes.

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The friend who challenged me to grow.