The Blind Season: Common Threads in the Life, Book 2

In The Blind Season, the second book in the series, the characters deal with another important thread—whether to have children by adoption, artificial insemination, some sort of surrogate relationship, or by raising the children they might have had through a previous heterosexual marriage. Again, as in Common Sons, I set the characters in a time and place distant from today, because I wanted them to have to come to terms with the issues of gay parenting themselves. Although it is probably less likely in the early 1970s that gay people dealt with gay parenting, I do not doubt that it occurred. The Blind Season also deals with other issues of family life that gay men and women must deal with on a daily basis. And that is how much to involve their families in the raising of their children with their aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins.

Another common thread that the vast majority of gay men and women experience is the way in which the religion they grew up in relates to them, or the way they relate to their religion. In the coming-out process, gay people either struggle with their religion, trying to find a way to retain it in their lives, or struggle with a way to reject it as being too alien or repressive. So in Common Sons, The Blind Season, and The Salvation Mongers (the third book in the series), I introduced characters who would explore this common thread. Before Stonewall, before Anita Bryant and her "Save Our Children" campaign—and even before the Metropolitan Community Church movement—gay people had very uneasy alliances with their religious upbringing.