See All My Books Here | Amazon Author Page
There’s a certain kind of story you only live if the world tries to erase you from the moment you can speak. And if you survive it, you either bury it so deep it rots you from the inside—or you put it on paper so nobody can pretend it didn’t happen.
For me, that paper became the Small Town Gayby series. These books are fictional memoirs, which is to say: the names have changed, some timelines have shifted, and a few scenes have been stitched together—but the bones are mine. Every heartbreak. Every small victory. Every impossible choice between survival and truth.
And Daisy—my little chihuahua who still sleeps curled against my side—is alive and thriving. But in While You Were Here, she’s already gone. That’s the thing about writing fictional memoir: you can imagine what the grief will feel like while you still have the warm body beside you. You can practice saying goodbye without losing her… yet.
This series is about trauma. It’s about surviving what should have broken you. And it’s about the way humor becomes armor when you’ve been forced to live bare-skinned for too long.
Small Town Gayby: If You’re Perfect
Before they tried to fix me, they taught me to disappear. This is where it begins—birth to fourteen. The boy I was before they called me broken.
It’s a haunting portrait of queerness in small-town Texas, where love is conditional and silence is survival. You learn quickly that attention is dangerous, and invisibility is a skill worth perfecting.
One of my favorite lines still catches in my throat:
“They taught me how to be quiet before I learned how to speak.”
This book is the ghost note before the song. The before-picture nobody likes to look at. It’s tender in places, but it’s also a warning—the kind you can only write after you’ve lived through what’s coming next.
Small Town Gayby: Rebirth Isn’t Painless
At fifteen, I was sent to a rural Christian camp to be “fixed.” Instead, I learned how to perform salvation like a role in a play, hitting every line so convincingly that even I started to believe it.
Conversion therapy doesn’t happen in dimly lit backrooms—it happens in broad daylight, with prayers and Bible verses and hands on your shoulders. It’s trauma in Sunday clothes.
There’s a moment in this book where Mykael (the fictional me) says:
“If I could have cut the gay out of me and handed it over, I would have. But there’s no altar big enough for that kind of sacrifice.”
This is the installment that still makes people cry when they message me after reading. Not because of what happens to me, but because of what it mirrors in their own lives. This isn’t just my story. It’s ours.
Small Town Gayby
This is the book where the dam breaks. I’d already lived cancer, heartbreak, and the kind of wrongful conviction that changes how you look at every door you walk through. But this memoir is not about victimhood—it’s about reclaiming joy from the jaws of everything that tried to eat it.
It’s sharp, funny, and brutally honest. There are days in this book where I don’t know whether to laugh or collapse—and so I do both.
“The trick to surviving isn’t just standing up again. It’s learning to dance while you’re still bleeding.”
That’s what Small Town Gayby is for me. The part where survival becomes an act of defiance.
Small Town Gayby: Where The Scar Remains
If Small Town Gayby was about learning to live again, this one is about the limits of compassion.
When a fellow survivor of conversion therapy spirals into addiction, Mykael has to decide whether saving him is worth losing himself. It’s a book about boundaries, the guilt of self-preservation, and the messy reality that not everyone can be saved—no matter how badly you want them to be.
One line still plays in my head like a warning bell:
“Sometimes the scar isn’t where the wound was—it’s where you held yourself together.”
This book hurts in a different way. But it’s honest. And sometimes, that’s harder to bear than the hurt itself.
Small Town Gayby: Heal. Swipe. Live.
This one’s a love story. But not the kind with swelling violins and neat endings. It’s about swiping right and finding August—a man who shows me that healing doesn’t have to be lonely work.
We take road trips. We fight. We vape in parking lots with Daisy snoring in the back seat. It’s love in the trenches, and it’s beautiful because it’s real.
“Healing isn’t a sunrise. It’s a string of streetlights you follow home in the dark.”
I didn’t write this book to make people believe in love. I wrote it to remind them that love can happen even after you’ve stopped believing it’s meant for you.
While You Were Here
I wrote this one as if Daisy had already passed. In real life, she’s still here—alive, bossy, and more opinionated than ever. But the grief I imagine in these pages is real in advance.
This is a book about how love for a dog can be the most human relationship you’ll ever have. Daisy was with me through the worst of it—trauma, heartbreak, and healing. She’s the one who stayed when people didn’t.
“She never asked me to be less than I was. She only asked to be next to me.”
Writing this book felt like practicing goodbye. It’s a love letter, not just to Daisy, but to anyone who’s ever loved a soul they couldn’t speak to but understood completely.
Why I Wrote These Books
I’ve been saying for years that trauma survivors—especially queer ones—deserve stories that don’t sand down the edges. Life isn’t clean. Recovery isn’t linear. And survival is never just about the moment you walk away—it’s about every moment after, when you choose to keep going.
These books span decades of my life. They’re messy. They’re raw. And they’re stitched with humor because if you can’t laugh while it’s falling apart, you probably won’t make it to the part where it comes together.
Found family is in every page. The ones who show up. The ones who leave. The ones who become your people not because you share blood, but because you share scars.
The Thread That Ties Them Together
Every book in the Small Town Gayby series is about the same thing:
You don’t have to be perfect to be worthy of love.
Whether it’s a teenage boy learning that survival can be an act of rebellion, an adult man setting boundaries to protect his peace, or a grieving pet parent holding onto every memory—these are stories about showing up for yourself even when the world tells you not to.
Read the Series Here | Amazon Author Page
Final Thought:
I wrote these books because I didn’t want the kid I used to be—or the adults we’ve all had to become—to think they were alone in it. The world may not want our stories, but that’s exactly why we need to tell them.