Read more by Brandon Cloud
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Why I Write
I don’t write to be palatable. I write to be precise.
Every story I tell—regardless of genre—spins from the same thread: trauma, survival, and the queerness that lives just outside the margins. Not queerness as spectacle or theme. Not a coming-out arc. Not an after-school special. Just presence. Just reality. Just breath in a body that refuses to apologize for its shape.
Yes, I write about politics. Because politics is where performance and violence hold hands in broad daylight. Because survival in this country is not a given—it’s a negotiation. And because I have lived in rooms where truth was only useful when spoken by the right mouth, in the right suit, with the right optics.
My characters are never sanitized. They’re complex, contradictory, clawing at the walls of systems that reward cruelty and punish confession. If you’re looking for a safe queer narrative that ends in applause, keep scrolling. I don’t write for comfort. I write for the ones holding their breath in the silence between lines.
Why I Wrote Traditional Family Values
This book is personal. Brutally so.
I didn’t write it because I thought the world needed another fictionalized takedown of American hypocrisy. I wrote it because I got tired of watching politicians script their morality while erasing the very people who built their podiums.
Traditional Family Values is not a love story. It’s what happens after love is branded out of existence. After spin replaces speech. After a man like Whit Albright gets down on one knee in front of a crowd, proposes to a woman he doesn’t love, and makes sure the man he does love is standing just offstage, invisible but essential.
It’s satire only because reality wouldn’t let me write it straight.
The Setup
Whittaker Albright is the future of the Texas Senate. Polished, electable, market-tested. He has a brilliant fiancée, a flawless record, and a campaign built on carefully curated morality. The kind you can slap on a yard sign. The kind that doesn’t include Drew Wells.
Drew is the one who makes Whit look good. He’s the one who crafts the speeches, times the pauses, pulls the strings from the shadows. He’s also Whit’s ex.
So when Whit proposes on live television—to a woman—Drew has a choice to make.
Tell the truth, and become the scandal.
Stay quiet, and keep building the lie.
Either way, he loses.
The Characters
Drew Wells is the ghost behind the curtain. Brilliant, restrained, and unraveling in slow motion. He’s spent years sculpting rhetoric for men who treat him like a liability in daylight and a necessity after hours.
Whit Albright is the candidate America was trained to vote for—white, handsome, straight-passing, and soullessly sincere. He’s not the villain. Just the machinery. Just another man in a suit who calls it love until the cameras roll.
Alexandra Ames is the fiancée. The merger. The rebrand. She sees Drew. Knows what he is. Knows what he was. And she’s not threatened—she’s efficient. “Don’t let passion bleed into the brand, Mr. Wells.”
Sean Calloway is the campaign’s enforcer. Whit’s lifelong advisor. Loyal to a fault. Quietly cruel. He knows Drew is indispensable—and reminds him exactly what that means.
Meghan Keller is the journalist. The opportunist. The keyboard predator with perfect instincts and no mercy. She’s the one who sees the optics fracture before anyone else notices the tremor.
The Heart of It
This is a book about what gets buried under “optics.” About the men who stand behind speeches, writing their own erasure one press release at a time.
It’s about how shame becomes strategy. How desire gets repackaged as threat. How queer love is only ever allowed to exist if it doesn’t cost someone their legacy.
It’s also about what happens when you start to believe the version of yourself that’s been edited out of every photo.
“You make me sound whole,” Whit says.
“That’s my job, Whit,” Drew replies.
And that’s the problem.
Five Lines That Slice
- “He scripted my heartbreak, and I’m still clapping.”
- “Conviction without empathy is just dogma, Whit.”
- “Hope is for the weak. Strength wins votes.”
- “You burn too brightly to be unseen.”
- “We’re not selling a candidate. We’re selling a future.”
These lines aren’t meant to land gently. They’re meant to echo. To scrape. To stick under your ribs and whisper, I’ve seen this before.
Because you have. You’ve lived it. Maybe not in a Senate race—but in a job, a family, a relationship, a church. You’ve been the one behind the curtain, building a narrative that erases you to make someone else safe.
That’s what Traditional Family Values is about.
Queerness as Structure
There is no coming-out arc. No grand reveal. No gay best friend dropped in for seasoning. This book doesn’t make queerness digestible. It makes it structural.
The love in this book is real. So is the betrayal. So is the spin machine built to sanitize both. Whit doesn’t hate Drew. He just doesn’t pick him. Not in public. And Drew? Drew doesn’t leave. Not yet. Because complicity is also survival.
This is not a queer romance. It’s a queer reckoning.
Read It Free
Like all my books, Traditional Family Values is free for the first five days after release.
And after that, it’s always free with Kindle Unlimited.
Kindle Unlimited offers a three-month free trial if you’ve never used it. That means you can read the entire book—and everything else I’ve written—without paying a cent.
You just have to show up.
Final Thought
If you’ve ever been the secret someone built their success on…
If you’ve ever written someone’s truth knowing they’d never speak yours…
If you’ve ever stood in the wings while someone you loved lied under lights…
Then this story already knows you.
Read it. Share it. And if it stays with you, leave a review. That’s how indie authors survive. Not on bestseller lists—but in whispers, in links, in texts that say “You need to read this.”