I became interested in writing in the seventh grade. Back then, I was a slow reader because of a retinal disorder that would eventually, unknown to me at the time, render me totally blind. So I didn’t do much reading.
But I had an English teacher, a guy named Mr. Rosenthal, who told stories so entrancingly that I actually stopped looking at the trees outside. One day he asked a few of us to write a play for the school. Five of us volunteered. But by the time the kids got to my house on the following Saturday, I had the play written.
After I graduated from high school, I was only able to read print if I held the page about ten inches from my nose. So I went to work as a laborer in the construction business, digging ditches, pushing wheelbarrows, mixing mortar and stuff like that. But after sixteen years, my eyesight had gotten to where falling off of a scaffold was inevitable. So I went to college, earned three degrees, much to my surprise, and began to write fulltime in 1980 in the hope of being able to tell stories the way Mr. Rosenthal had.
When a lesbian friend told me she was falling in love with a man, I got an idea for a short story, which I wrote and submitted to one of those women’s magazines, only to be told, “You’re a man. You should be writing for a man’s magazine.” After mentally making a few disparaging remarks about that person’s parentage and wishing chronic yeast infections on her, I turned the story into “Unlikely Love”, which is described below.
Since then, I’ve had other books and stories, ranging from sweet romances to scorchingly erotic, published. Should anyone want to reach me, my E-mail address is tfb@panix.com.
She is intelligent, attractive and fun to be with, and John realizes that. But they cannot have anything more than an employer/employee friendship because Kelly is content in a monogamous, loving relationship with Christine. When a former lesbian lover causes problems for Kelly, including a threat to kidnap her or harm Christine, she finds herself even closer to John. How can he lure a woman away from a lifestyle she is obviously happy with, despite a growing attraction to him? And how can she handle the problem of being torn between two hearts?
Can the police catch a murderer before another violent crime is committed? Had Christine been the intended victim, or had the neighbor who had been found shot just been in the wrong place at the wrong time? The investigation has Detective Sergeant Lance going to New York’s Greenwich Village and throughout two New Jersey counties. But he is always one step behind Marj Peterson, one of the murder suspects. Was there really a bearded burglar or had it been a woman with a disguise?
John’s ex-wife repeatedly adds waves to the uncertain sea of romance. She wants John back while seeing no reason to give up her escapades with other men.
Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Kathy, is caught in the middle and turns to her father for some degree of normalcy. But John has strong feelings about her being exposed to the two lesbians who are now living in his home.
“I don’t want my daughter to be a lesbian,” he tells Kelly. “It’s not normal.”
“If lesbianism is so disgusting,” she argues, “how can you love me?” The following argument temporarily damages their relationship.
How can he, indeed? But he does love Kelly and even prepares for a legal battle with his ex-wife to keep his daughter and his lover in the same house.
Although this story is fiction, it is based on some real life situations while containing some hard language and descriptions of sex. Meant for mature adults in the general public, the book presents lesbianism as an acceptable lifestyle to people who are open-minded enough to look at how others live. It is, therefore, not only intended for lesbians or women who are curious about bisexuality.
Johnny Dragona
