Sharing my story with you....

I am Canadian author Robert Joseph Greene, and I’m a person of color who writes gay romantic stories from cultures around the world. I don’t usually share my writing process publicly, but I wanted to share a story about something that shaped me as a writer; something rooted in respect, listening, and learning from Indigenous homelands rather than imposing on them. When my first book, The Gay Icon Classics of the World, came out, it was a surprising success. Suddenly I had people, publishers, festivals, and even arts councils telling me what kinds of stories I should write next. As a Canadian, I was encouraged by a provincial arts council to write a “Canadian” romantic gay love story. A few people jokingly suggested that I write about two hockey players falling in love, or maybe two Mounties sharing a forbidden romance. But even as an outsider to Indigenous communities, I knew something important: Hockey and Mounties aren’t the root of Canadian culture.Indigenous stories are. Indigenous land is. If I was going to write a story to honor the spirit of this country, I couldn’t pretend that Canada began in 1867. So I wrote “Tukkuruq and Uquitchuq: The Story of Night and Day.”A gay love story woven through Inuit tradition and tells the story have the night met day. A story where love shapes the world the way night and day shape our lives. I wrote it carefully, slowly, and with humility, knowing that I was touching something that didn’t belong to me, and trying to do it with respect. A few years later, I was invited to Australia as a guest reader at the Midsumma Festival. Someone told me, “You should write an Australian outback romance — cowboys, red dirt, you know, the usual.” But just like in Canada, I knew where Australia’s true culture lives.It isn’t in the colonial outback myths. It’s in First Nations stories. So instead of the outback trope, I wrote “The Kuri Village,” an Indigenous Australian love story rooted in traditions older than anything Europe brought with it. Again, the responsibility weighed on me heavily to write in a way that honored a world I wasn't born into but deeply respected. What I learned is this: If you want to write about a place, you must first honor the people who have carried its stories since time immemorial. For me, writing queer love stories in Indigenous settings isn’t about taking but rather it’s about listening.Love, especially queer love, exists everywhere.It has always existed everywhere. But the land teaches you how to tell it. When they released my holiday book: The Gay Icon Classics of the World Volume I & II, I made sure that these two stories were in it. The collection includes: Three African stories Two Muslim based stories Two Asian stories Two Indigenous stories One story where the main character is trans. However, it was the two indigenous stories where I truly searched my heart for what was real within me and for that I feel honoured and humbled. Thank you for reading, and thank you to the Indigenous communities whose stories, teachings, and ways of seeing the world continue to inspire writers like me to slow down, listen, and show respect before putting a single word on the page. — Robert Joseph Greene