I'm not sure when this obsession began.

For as long as I can remember, we've had an ancient copy of La Fantome de l'Opera by Gaston Leloux. Or rather, my parents did. It's an old brown book with colored illustration plates, gold-tipped pages (falling out these days), and tiny brownish print. Printed 1919 if memory serves (which it often does not). I don't know how old I was when I discovered it, or tried to read it for the first time. But I remember the pictures fascinating me, that I wanted to touch them, and Mom cautioned me to be gentle because it was so old.

There's an apocryphal family story swimming in my head about it being a gift from one grandparent to another, or great-grandparent, or aunt, and I associate it with my parents because their first date was to an opera. They both fell asleep.

So the details of my introduction are unclear, but I read the original very young, and read a few other versions, too. Like Phantom by Susan Kay when I was about 10. And that is what made me fall madly, completely, unendingly in love with Erik, also known as The Opera Ghost.

He's not tragic, he's MEAN. He's not pitiable, he's a complete bastard. He's melodramatic in that very operatic way. His love is chilling and obsessive, but also recognizably love. HE'S A STALKER. The bad kind that sucks you in with pretty words, then kidnaps you and tried to murder your real boyfriend out of cold, cruel jealousy.

But you love him anyway. ( The rest of the story: plus sexy pictures of Gerard Butler. )


Here's what Erik taught me in the end: Bad for you love can still be love. Just because it's disfunctional and creepy, obsessive and passionately harmful doesn't mean it isn't real, too. Heart-felt. Maybe not the kind of love I want, but at least a kind I can understand. Perhaps a little too well.

Part I can be found here.

Boyfriend #2 (although he came first in the timeline): Vanyel Ashkevron, from The Last Herald Mage Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey.

There's a bit of a pattern forming already with my boys. Omnipotent, arrogant, unattainable. Raistlin, as far as I can tell, had no penis, and Vanyel was Oh So Gay. (Which are only relevant in relation to their interest in me. My love was always unrequited.) So although I harbored no illusions about having Vanyel's babies (though I seem to recall he *did* produce heirs), Vanyel stands out for one big reason: I still love him now. But I'll get to that in a second.

At the time, Vanyel appealed to me because he suffered from emotastic self-torture. Plus, he was pretty and arrogant. (Pretty and arrogant still get me). He eventually got less arrogant, but it was replaced with genuine power. And of course, there was Great Tragedy and Great Romance and a totally cheating happy ending. :D And Ghosts! The books made me laugh and cry and long for that intangible, magical something that I've only recently been able to name. And that's pretty much everything I could as for from a story.

But what really stood out about Vanyel, and the reason I will always be grateful to Mercedes Lackey, was that he very literally changed my life - my waking life, my real, my Tess Gratton Middle-Schooler, going-to-be-a-paleontologist-or-a-writer life.

I was only 10 or so when I read these books, and completely insulated in the Catholic community. My immediate family and extended family was all Catholic. I went to a Catholic school on the same grounds as our Catholic church, and the Catholic high school was across the soccer field. Summer Bible school. I learned to sing in the youth choir. Everyone in the world was Catholic.

Of course, I knew there were other kinds of people in the world. My parents read all kinds of books to us, and National Geographic, we watched movies and TV and Nova - I knew a lot, intellectually, and was getting a great education - but it wasn't a part of my everyday world.

And one thing I did not know about was Teh Gay.

So here I am devouring this book, and all of a sudden Vanyel finds himself "lifebound" to another boy.

*blink*

I ran with it. I'd read crazier things* and this wasn't his fault anyway. It was Destiny.

By the end of the books, I was so in love with him (and his boyfriend) that I decided it didn't matter. I decided right then that anybody should be able to love anybody else. As long as they aren't hurting or being hurt, whatever. If I was weirded out or thought it was kind of gross (which, frankly, all sex was), that was my problem. Not theirs.

When I was ten, Mercedes Lackey gave that to me. She gave me a totally emo, powerful, arrogant, beautiful boy, and made me love him, and then used him to make me a better person.

And she kept doing it. So many of her books have gay or bi characters - just in the background sometimes, as though they're really real, and as main characters, important players, good guys and bad guys. When I was a kid, she taught me that was normal.

I haven't read any of those old Valdemar books in probably 13 years. I want them to be as pristine and wonderful as I remember them. I don't want to come at them from my jaded age. I might never read them again. But unlike the Dragonlance books (which I gave away years ago), these will remain on my shelf forever. Because when I'm having a hard day, when I'm not sure if writing this silly YA book is worth it, even though I put in some action that really queers up heteronormativity, and can't tell if it's really changing anything, I can look at the cover of Magic's Pawn and remember that it might.



* actually, I'd read a lot of Anne Rice already, but for some reason, vampires being gay didn't even ping my wtf radar. I mean, they need blood and are immortal and it's stupid to not get food and love where you can in that situation. I guess? I have no idea why my brain thought vampires were different from Herald-Mages.