I’m really happy to finally get to post about Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, edited by Sigrid Ellis (Chicks Dig Comics) and Michael Damian Thomas (Apex Magazine). It’s being released on June 4, 2013, already seems to have great buzz, and has one of my essays in it.
While the stuff I write is always personal on some level, my piece in this volume touches on a lot of things I tend not to talk about in public (yes, those exist) — including being Sicilian, wanting to be a boy, and the age of AIDS — because they’re just too difficult, too close, and too specific in my day-to-day life.
The through time and space nature of the Whoniverse, however, and Jack Harkness’s long-life on 20th century Earth have meant, however, that I couldn’t get away with contributing to this volume without telling my story in ways I’m a lot less practiced at, which is an opportunity I’m incredibly grateful for.
I think this volume is going to be incredible. It contains work from a lot of people I know, and a lot of people I know of, and I’m super excited to get my hands on it.
You can pre-order it at Amazon and other major booksellers, and it will also be available for early purchase at Wiscon.
Letters from Titan 
“Queers Dig Time Lords” popped up in my local library’s on line search engine when I looked for all things Barrowman.
And although I “dug” Time Lords, specifically Tom Baker, long before I knew the word “queer” applied to my sexuality (when I was 19 it meant just men who preferred men, not people who saw the tantric possiblities in all things as naturally as they breathed air). I’d not had cable television throughout the entire Dr. Who reboot. A nine-year-old friend (with a TARDIS in his living room) suggested I start watching the series from the “beginning” and thus I met Captain Jack Harkness just a couple months ago. I have waited for forty years to see someone like me on television programming that wasn’t porn. That it should be personified by Barrowman — gorgeous, the masculine “type” that floats my boat, and openly gay…produced by an openly gay man…
So I wrote RTD a fan letter immediately after seeing Jack’s nude lovemaking nude scene with Angelo, thanking him for bringing gay erotica to mainstream entertainment in the form of a naked John Barrowman in programming I can borrow from my local public library, stream into my home.
My fan letter to you, Racheline, who I met in the pages of this extremely well-worn copy of QDTL, is…thank you so much for singling out Captain Jack for attention. I have a mad crush on Captain Jack, I’m sixty years old, I have no hormones, and I am so grateful that I need not feel so alone because there are folks out there who appreciate my Gay Superhero. And his coat, of course. I’m amazed at how many people appreciate his coat.
I bought a giant stand-up of Captain Jack. During the day he is in my living room. When I exercise (if one does not, can not use her body, does not use her, why NOT become the Face of Boe?) I know I can do one more repetition, one more crunch, because Captain Jack resurrects one more time…
At night Captain Jack is at my bedside. I have not slept with a human, not even so much as having had one in my bedroom, not so much erotic contact as a hug, for a decade. But Captain Jack as a meditation before sleep lets me dream into the fifty-first century, where we don’t have quaint categories like “females too old to be loved because they’re no longer sexually interesting.
And then there’s Barrowman, who himself is a hero for putting himself out, living an authentic life, working, loving, sharing his life with fans…a beautiful, impossible thing.
So when you write about Jack and his Lessons for Cranky Old Queers…it feels like stumbling on a radio signal from outer space. Thank you. I shall read and re-read your essay (and the book) until I’ve absorbed as queer energy as possible. Perhaps release it and make someone immortal? And queer?