I’ve been lying for a long time about being a novelist.
As an early adopter of the Internet, I wrote a seemingly improbable essay by today’s standards. It appeared in The Advocate with the title “Logging On, Coming Out.” It documented my using the Internet to accept being gay, which is so commonplace that it seems ridiculous it could ever appear in a magazine. The author bio at the end was the first telling of the lie: “Jeff Walsh is a reporter in Kingston, Pa., and is working on his first novel.”
In case you missed the lie, I was a reporter in Kingston at the time.
From there it just became part of my identity. People would ask about the novel, and I would tell them it was going well. No one asked for further details, and I had none to offer, so it all worked out.
Around that same time, I founded Oasis Magazine, which was an online support site for “queer and questioning youth,” its original descriptor. That site (which later was rebranded as Oasis Journals) ran for 19 years, starting in December 1995 until the rise of social media killed our traffic. It’s still difficult to contextualize having created something that helped tens of thousands (and probably far more) accept themselves, since it was just about being in the right place at the right time, and doing what seemed obvious.
But it also helped explain why “the novel” was taking longer.
After creating Oasis, since it was at the early stages of the Internet revolution, I moved to San Francisco and started working in more technology-focused jobs. I was working on some gay novel at the time that I can’t even remember, can’t find any remnant of in my digital archives, and may have been entirely in my head. But one night, I woke up around four in the morning with this strange voice and concept in my head and, despite my best efforts to return to sleep, I got up wrote the first seed of Haterobics. It changed my life.
That sounds impressive, provided it didn’t happen back around the turn of the century, and this is being written 25 years later.
I’ve been living this lie for a long time, but I finally made good on it.
I can’t say whether the book is any good, but at least I’m not lying about one anymore!
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