Although I wrote the first draft of You Are Here in the late 1990s, I didn’t really kick my writing into full gear until 2008-2009, the novel’s final time setting. As any good gay marriage historian knows, 2008 is the year that a slim majority of California voters shamefully voted to amend the state constitution to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry — a vote that even today feels like a personal slap in the face to me. So I channeled that anger into my fiction — specifically, into the character of Miles Bettencourt, a guy who had a lot of anger in previous versions of the novel, but now, thanks to the marriage ban, enough anger to make him truly terrifying.
Click on the audio file to listen to a brief passage introducing the reader to Miles. In it, he is very much in the dark. His struggle to find the light again was one of the many pleasures of writing this book.
