Kal Cobalt

It was with bittersweet memories that I heard the news of Velvet Mafia’s upcoming closure. Waxing nostalgic and links to my free Mafia fic (up until the end of May) below.
I’m sure all Mafia authors have their own love-letter stories about the publication, and I am no different. Velvet Mafia was one of the first markets to publish me while I still lived in my tiny Eastern Oregon hometown. When they sent out an open invitation for Mafia authors to attend a publication party in New York, I ached to go, but it seemed impossible given my distance and the attendant cost. But in one of those odd twists of fate, my day job sent me to a conference in Boston the weekend of the publication party. It was also my birthday. I can’t make this kind of thing up; no one would believe it in a story.

I had never been to New York. I had never hailed a cab. I was enough of a country bumpkin to think making a reservation at the Travelodge conveniently located across the street from Grand Central would be perfect.

I had also never been with my own kind before — other writers of gay male fiction. At the time, it was all I wrote; it was how I handled not yet knowing enough to understand what was up with my gender identity and sexuality, so it took up more of the creative brainspace than it does now. I had no idea whether I would be overtly snubbed, prodded for explanations, or simply ignored.

What happened was so much better than any of that: I was simply accepted. Sean, Velvet Mafia’s publisher/managing editor, seemed to recognize my terminal shyness and expertly introduced me around. Although the response was often “wait — you write for Velvet Mafia?”, what followed was universally either a question about which story had been mine or an utterly unconcerned acceptance. It might not seem so mind-blowing now, but this was years ago, and I was being ripped apart by the twin tyrants of conforming to the only community I had ever known and my burgeoning awakening as an author. For me, right then, that was huge.

Nothing outrageous really happened. We walked from the reading to a bar, where Sean bought me a drink when he found out it was my birthday. We shot the shit, as authors do. It was a couple of hours of like-minded people hanging out. That’s how I would describe it now. At the time, though, it went like this: I walked down a New York City street in a pack of gay authors! And then we went into a gay bar and they let me in! And my publisher bought me a drink! And other authors talked to me! There was red velvet everywhere and fish in light fixtures and a giant video wall!

(Yes, Velvet Mafia, I still remember the light fixtures in that bar. It was that important to me.)

By now, you see how such a little event, by someone else’s standards, could have been life-changing for me at the time. And it was. At the end of the night, I went back to my Travelodge room — which I had to get to by walking across the roof, and which had a permanently open window with a pillow stuffed into it that was only slightly ameliorated by the space heater (it was November) — and called my then-girlfriend. I cried. I slept for about three hours. I got on a red-eye flight back to Boston and sat through the day’s conference sessions on administrative business with a huge grin on my face and drank enough caffeine to vibrate the entire cross-country flight home.

I wasn’t just coasting on a travel high, either. I didn’t get a full night’s sleep for over two weeks. I slept with a notebook in the bed to capture the ideas that would wake me hourly. The simple act of acceptance and the taste of what it would be like to actually have a social circle and a set of colleagues that were appropriate to my creative life busted my head wide open.

A lot of wonderful things have happened in my artistic life, but most of them wouldn’t have happened without Velvet Mafia. I completely understand and fully support the decision to shutter the site, and I will always smile when its name pops up in pixels in the years to come (as it surely will).

The site is up until the end of May. Please hop in my time machine and enjoy some of the very first pieces of fiction I got published. Let me know what you think of them!

Banging — Issue 11
In The Trenches — Issue 15
The Belt — Issue 21 (reprinted in Best Gay Romance 2008)