My High School Boyfriend by Gary Cottle ...hopefully it will be finished and published in the not too distant future.

When I was in high school, I wanted to write a story about two boys who fall in love and then run away together after they graduate. I started several times, but I could never make it go anywhere. Of course I was young, so my writing abilities weren’t well developed, but the main reason I couldn’t do it was because I had nothing to draw from except for my nascent desire to have a boyfriend. I didn’t know any boys who dated boys. There weren’t any gay couples in the books that I read, and there were very few in the movies I saw. I wanted to tell a sweet, romantic story about two boys, but I couldn’t imagine how it would work. I had the ambition for several years, but then I got older and I didn’t want to think about high school so much anymore. However, the basic concept has always stayed with me.

Not long ago, I decided that now was the time for me to write this story. I just finished the first draft of chapter 4. The story starts in 1983, and it takes place in Fayette County, West Virginia, which is where I grew up. The boys go to school at my old high school.

One of the reasons I couldn’t get the story off the ground thirty years ago is because I couldn’t imagine a romance between two boys being allowed to flourish. The boys would have been hounded, mercilessly attacked, and their parents would have stopped them from seeing each other. So I knew that these boys needed privacy, a lot of privacy.

Shannon’s parents have recently divorced, and Shannon ends up living in a house left to his mother by her grandparents. It’s been abandoned, more or less, for twenty years. Shannon lives there most of the time alone because his mother travels quite a lot.

The house is large, rambling and isolated. I imagine it to be something like the house in this picture, except with a wraparound porch. Glen and his parents just happen to live nearby. The two boys become friends, and over the course of the summer between their junior and senior years, they fall in love in this big house cut off from the rest of the world.