Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Vicksters!

Here's hoping that you have an absolutely fabulous day with your loved ones. Remember it's not about the gifts, it's about the love and the giving.

And the food.

Always about the food.

If you get a chance to read (or to buy a book to read) don't forget that "Chocolate Vanilla Swirl" released today from Silver Publishing. I'm SOOO excited! It was a great Christmas present from Silver to me and from me to you. The house in the story is the house I'm in right now and the location it's set in (Lakeland, Florida) is where I'm spending this holiday. I feel that makes it a little more special for me.

So Merry Christmas everyone and Merry Christmas Granny Mary, Christopher and Justin (RIP) miss you!


MERRY CHRISTMAS!!


-Vicktor Aleksandr B

Lucas Teague does Justin Bieber's "As Long As You Love Me"

Forgiveness & Reconciliation

Hey all! It's been a while I know. I was really trying hard to focus on bringing my grades up in school, so I've been away doing homework, schoolwork, exams, papers, projects, etc. But as this is finals week and I only have two more exams to take I decided to take a small break to write about something that's been swirling in my brain for a while. Reconciliation and forgiveness. Back in October I think it was, I got a letter from my birth mother. Let's call her Black Salsa (as that's her husband's nickname for her). I had to have it read to me because she hand wrote it, but in this letter she told me that she'd received news from a friend of hers and she finally believed me about some of the things I'd told her happened to me as a kid and that it "explained a lot." Now, that in and of itself wouldn't have made us reconcile. I can be stubborn sometimes. I'd been hurt, shunned, disbelieved for so long that now when someone doesn't believe me, I make a token protest and then shrug my shoulders. I know, that's bad and I'm working on it with my therapist but it's just how I am. Anyway, further on in the letter she told me that she'd gone on Amazon and looked up my books and bought each of them. Then she said how great of a writer I was and how she could visualize everything just from the excerpts (I'll admit I had to go back and have my screenreader read them to me because I wanted to know what she was talking about). She said (and I remembered this part verbatim) "When we reconcile we can sit and laugh about how your mother read your homosexual porn." LOL. Okay, that could be insulting but I saw it for what it was. She was trying to support me. Asking for forgiveness. Trying to reconcile. So I called her and left her a message, thanking her for the letter and the support, giving her my number. She called and left me a message telling me how deep my voice was (ummm....duh! LOL) and how good it was to hear from me directly. After that we started to text and call each other back and forth. I told her I forgave her, acknowledged that I am not the easiest person to love or live with, that I was such a problem, to which she responded that I wasn't a problem and she saw that now. So we reconciled and this knot that had been sitting in the pit of my stomach for over a year... okay for over 28 loosened. And then a few days ago she told me that my birth father, we'll call him Abba (which is the Hebrew word for father), wanted me to call him. So I called my rabbi, my therapist, my best friend Angel and then I called Abba the next day. We talked for three hours. We talked about what had been going on with me for the past year. He wanted to know about me being blind, my transitioning (why I felt that way, what step was I in, did I pray about it before I made that final step) and he actually listened to me when I answered this time, whereas he hadn't before. Then he told me that he'd come to a realization that out of all of his kids, I was the one he knew was going to make something of himself (ok, he said "herself" but still). He also told me that he'd looked my books up online and read the excerpts but unlike Black Salsa he didn't buy them. He did say they were very well written and encouraged me to keep writing. And then he told me that if they weren't "gay porn" he would have bought them and displayed them to everyone he knew. He told me that everyone was asking about me and told me what was going on with everyone. And yes, it's not the full on "We support you SON, everything you are and will be. Forgive us" that I dream about, but it is a "We still love you, forgive us, we're trying," that I never hoped I'd hear. And so I forgave them and now for Christmas I'm travelling down to Florida to spend the holidays with them. I missed spending Chanukah with them, but that's probably for the best. I spent it with people who encouraged me and helped give me the fortitude to go down there. I'm not going to lie and say that I'm not nervous and scared, because a big part of me is. A BIG part. But you know what? With everything going on with me and those I love around me, I don't want to get to the end of my life knowing that I hold unforgiveness in my heart for anyone. I want to know that I did everything I could to reconcile with those around me who deserved it, that I let go of those who didn't, and that I did all I could to improve myself and the world around me. And that knot inside of me is barely even there anymore. More than that, I can finally say that yes "It Gets Better." See, life is too short to spend it holding unforgiveness, bitterness, hatred, anger, resentment etc in your heart, in my heart. Forgive and if you must, forget, but be sure to forgive. And the biggest thing is that if you can reconcile with those who you have wronged or who have wronged you, then try to. You can never have too many friends, too much family or too much love. In the end, you want to have people remember you at your funeral and remember you fondly. That's my biggest driving force right now, that and unforgiveness, bitterness, hatred, anger, resentment, etc. are toxic inside of your body and make you sick. Everyone deserves a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chance (I grew up hearing "My lord, how many times should I forgive my brother?" "Seventy times seven." And it's something I'm trying to have my life reflect) for forgiveness. You can forgive and not forget, forgive and forget, or forgive and move on, but whatever you do, forgive. I've never been happier that I did that. Hope everyone has an awesome Christmas! Back to schoolwork/homework/finals (sigh). Hugz, Squeezes and French Kissez, -Vicktor A. B.

The End of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2

Yes, I'm going to see it. -sigh- What can I say? I've seen the first four: Twilight, Eclipse, New Moon, Breaking Dawn 1 (and why am I just now realizing that they all had something to do with the moon and the sky?) and the conclusion to this "saga" comes out on my birthday. I will be going to watch it with Chipmunk two days after its premiere. I wish I could say that I was dreading it, but I'm not. I've actually gotten invested in Jacob and Edward's story... oh yeah, Bella too (can't forget the angst queen at the center of it all) and I'm looking forward to finding out how it all plays out in the end. I am a little wary about going to see the movie when I can't actually "see" it and depending on Chipmunk to remember to relay what's happening on the screen, but I think I can imagine what's taking place there as I listen to all of the grunts and screams and flesh pounding flesh.... For the fight scenes-duh! Anyway. In light of some recent bullshit and fuckery and health stuff that's taken place I'm going to be seriously cutting down on my time online. I have to cut down on stress and shit and being online as much as I used to isn't helping that. I'm still going to be writing and I still have plans to finish getting my degree (holy hell, I've been in school for a long-ass time! I'm just ready for it to be over), but I am almost 30 and at some point you just get tired of... shit. Literally and figuratively. LOL. So I won't be posting as much, you may have already noticed an extreme decrease in posts from me, won't be on Twitter and Facebook as much as before, pretty much trying to focus on my health, school and writing. I'll still pop around every so often, but as the end of the year approaches I have decided that it's up to me to protect myself, to protect Vic, no one else is going to do that for me. So that's my birthday present to myself (in addition to a vacation down to Florida to see Chipmunk), wrapping myself in a bubble of my own creation and making sure that I take care of my health and my end goals first and foremost. I have some big dreams for myself and I have let them fall by the wayside, I can't and won't let that happen anymore. So it's time to take care of me. I have got to go now, I have like two days of homework/classwork to make up for and very little time to get it done in. I will talk to you all later. -Vic

A Haven Over the Rainbow

A Haven Over The Rainbow

Vicktor Alexander

I was fifteen years old. A sophomore at Escambia High School in Pensacola, Florida. An alcoholic and drug addict when I decided that I should probably change my life around. No, that’s not right, the murder I escaped at the hands of my abusive boyfriend is what let me know that I was on a destructive path heading straight for the grave. I was pretty much aware that I would never end up in jail, not because I’m special or anything, but because my life was too dangerous, the risks I took too great for me to wind up anywhere but as the guest star of my own funeral. It’s sobering to think about that now, at the wonderful age of twenty-eight, having made it four years past the age where doctors told me I would collapse from heart failure, thirteen years past the time when my ex-boyfriend told me I would “wake up dead” and ten years past the time when my biological family thought I would piss off the wrong person, sleep with the wrong people, take a bad hit and wind up dead.

I started being self-destructive at a young age. I can see that I wasn’t out to merely hurt myself, but to make my biological parents suffer as well. Why? Because their ideas and their beliefs had caged me in this impenetrable box of religious morality where being gay sends you to an eternal hell filled with hellfire, brimstone, weeping, gnashing of teeth and indescribable pain. And being transgender? Well, transgenders don’t exist so they’re not even worth talking about. So what do you do when you’re a young gay transgender male who has suffered abuse, trauma, torture, rape, etc. and you’re surrounded by religious fanatics who take great pains to “hate the sin, judge the sin, condemn the sin, but love the sinner”?

You drink. You smoke. You sleep around. You get involved in abusive relationships because hey someone wants you. You become suicidal, depressed. You run away. You become friends with people in gangs. You become violent towards yourself, others. You get as close to the edge as you can possibly get and then you throw yourself over and hope that you crash on the rocks on the way down.

Graphic and harsh? Yes. But then so was my life. So is the life of so many children and teens (and yes, even adults) out there.

Their lives aren’t candy canes and cotton candy. Bright, shiny rainbows in a world full of butterflies and unicorns. They run from the darkness every day, every minute. The screams from their broken spirit haunt them daily and they’re gasping for air, for breath, for life. For someone, anyone to love them enough to hold onto them while they flail around for something to stand on, something to believe in.

Someone to love them enough to stick around.

At fifteen I was one of those people and having left my home in Winter Haven, Florida where my religious mother and her family lived, I moved to Pensacola, Florida, where my even more religious, and even more hypocritical biological father lived. I’m thankful though. For while my life with him was not perfect at all, one night when he’d gone off to another revival church meeting I stayed home and came up with an idea, a group home, a shelter and safe haven in the storm that completely altered my world.

Promise House started off being called The Exodus Project because I come from a very religious family and growing up my biological mother (who is Messianic Jew) took great pains to always tell us the story of the Hebrews escaping slavery and persecution and arriving at the Promised Land, known as an exodus (see the book of Exodus. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the Bible or the Torah, whichever you prefer. I’ll wait).

As a kid the story of Moses and the Children of Israel always fascinated me and when I began drafting up the plans for what would later come to be known as the Promise House, it was the story of a people, looked down on and disparaged for being born a certain way that called out to me.

Notice any similarities?

I didn’t know that PH would become what it did, my only thought had been that I wished I’d had somewhere to run to when I felt unsafe, somewhere to go to when I ran away, somewhere to go just in case my parents ever kicked me out. There were shelters for teens who ran away, there always have been. Programs and group homes for teens who are addicted to drugs and alcohol, Teen Challenge is one off the top of my head (I personally know of T.C. having attended it myself). But the problem that I saw with most of them is the fact that there is so much emphasis being put on God curing whatever is broken. I have no problems with God. YHVH is someone I pray to and speak about on an almost daily basis and Jesus is my homeboy. The problem was the fact that sometimes religion just doesn’t cure everything. Sometimes there’s something bigger.

Sometimes you can’t tell a kid to just dress more like a girl and stop wearing boy clothes and then they’ll stop feeling like they were born in the wrong body.

Sometimes you can’t tell a boy to “man up and stop acting like a punk” and a girl to “stop acting like a dude and act like a lady” and they’ll just stop being gay.

Life doesn’t work like that. So as I started to write down my ideas, I wrote about all the things I saw that failed with different group homes and rehabilitation programs designed especially for teens and which ones succeeded. I wrote it from the standpoint of a teen who needed those services. I wrote down what I thought was needed: classrooms so that the kids can still go to school and not miss out on classes, a place to do rehab that’s beyond regular rehab for drugs & alcohol, rehab for the soul and spirit, a place to hang out, a place to grow, to meditate, opportunity for them to talk with parents/guardians/siblings, etc. in order to heal the family rift. Things that I wanted: a specially designed curriculum that will not only help the kids be able to graduate from high school but help them to heal and grow as people, to develop into mature, stable adults, a pool, a stable (horse therapy is good for kids with trauma), buildings to house the kids who live on campus-separating the boys from the girls). Then I started to write out the curriculum.

It took me five years of working on what I wanted before I felt comfortable enough to show T.E.P. to someone else. They were amazed that I came up with the idea at the age of fifteen and impressed by the research I had done.

They’d also told me that it was impossible.

But I’m a man who never thinks anything is impossible and purposefully crosses lines and barriers drawn in the sand, erasing them as I do so, created by a society, a world too afraid of the unknown, too comfortable to really make a difference. I’ve always been that way. I’m that way in my writing (What do you mean no one’s ever written about a gender-fluid character who’s deaf and a wolf shifter and is mated to a black cowboy? What do you mean no one has ever written about a flamboyant, cross-dressing gay man who’s the survivor of abuse who mates a big, overgrown wolf-shifting cowboy? What do you mean no one’s ever written a story about an interracial gay couple where one of the men is a transgender man?) and I’m that way in my life. I spent years going to churches and high schools speaking (in between working and school) and telling them about how I overcame addiction. I don’t hold back because staying silent means not invoking change and I’m a man who has dedicated his life to bringing about change.

That’s why I write. I love to write the stories in my head. Stories of men falling in love with each other, overcoming insurmountable odds, hatred, bigotry, racism, whatever to be together. They demand their time in spotlight. They want their story to be told. But my characters are a lot like me, they know what their main purpose is: to give me a damn good story so that I can make the money I need to start PH. They gladly tell me about their crazy exploits (You had sex in the carriage?!?! With the driver there listening??) and the villains who try to kill them or separate them from their true love(s) (Wait, you’re saying that he’s the head of the Galaxy Planetary Allegiance and he tried to kill you?) and in each story, in each book there’s the small kernel there, a seed that gets planted in the reader to bring change. More than that, with each book, each story, I get a little closer to that dream of my group home for at-risk teenagers and teenagers of the rainbow who have been kicked out, abandoned, those who are homeless, who need families, love, support, encouragement… help.

Because while there’s a bit of myself in every book, in each character, there’s a bit of my story in each teen that I talk to for whom something like this is needed. There’s a bit of my struggle, my life, my heartbreak and triumph in each story I hear of another teen being disowned and kicked out by their parents for being gay or being transgender. That was me. While I was an adult by the time I grew the balls to stand up and actually say “This is me. I’m Vicktor. Transgender man who identifies as gay. Love me or leave me but this is who I am,” there are those out there who did it when they were younger and suffered the consequences. I want to give them a safe haven, a shelter, a home and a family. It’s a big order. It’s daunting, it’s large and I’ve had people, boyfriends and friends who have told me that my  life goal is too intimidating for them to be a part of. But I’ve also met people who get it, who understand that for me, helping someone, changing the world, is all that I’ve ever wanted to do. They encourage me. They support me.

They tell me to hurry up and get the shelter started already.

And I’m working on it. Making connections, learning more and more every day.

More than that, I keep on writing, because it’s the characters who get to foot the bill for my dream. It’s Tommy, Tal, Elian, Tabansi, Mickey, Samuei, Michael, Luke, Matthew, Roman, and all the others with their impossible love stories and their triumphs who encourage me to keep going, who tell me to keep writing. To push through the painful memories, the hurt, to never stop fighting, to never stop speaking out against homophobia, transphobia, hatred, bigotry. To never stop being an advocate, to never stop being myself. Because at the end of the day it always comes back to Promise House.

It is the very reason that I write, for that haven over the rainbow.

-Vicktor Aleksandr Bailey

So Good It Makes You Wanna Slap Yo' Momma

Seriously. I jumped out of my chair and threw my hands up in the air after watching Trevin and Amanda sing together. The Voice did it up good and the two of them together................ WOW. Still got goosebumps two hours later.

Then again, I do keep replaying it over and over again, so that might be why.

After you watch it though, I'm sure you'll understand.

One Year Ago Today.....

I went to the home of my biological family and was exorcised because they'd found out that I was a transgender male and homosexual. My being born in the wrong body and being a gay man was not something they saw as being good and moral. I was instead an abomination, filled with the devil and needed to receive an exorcism.

Yeah, not cool.

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while remember how much that rocked me, how I was in a state of shock for a while, for those of you who didn't, you can read the post here.

So today I must admit to being a little on edge. Slightly paranoid and needing a shit load of liquor and cigarettes just to keep my body from shaking out of its skin in fear. I'm not saying that I think my new family would do that to me. They say that they accept me as I am and regardless of the ups and downs I believe that they do, so that's not where the fear is coming from. The fear is coming from the fact I wouldn't put it past my biological family to show up and snatch me. They're not the devil incarnate but they are fanatical about their beliefs.

And yes, I know that's mostly the paranoia talking, but I also know that last year was horrible for me. The rest of the month was filled with ups and downs as well. Between the passing of my Granny, my friend Mores, being disowned, last October sucked ass.

And not in a good way.

So I'm a little fragile today, a little sensitive, made even more so because I can't actually see if there's any danger coming. So I'm being gentle with myself, trying not to stress myself out too much, not pressuring myself to do something that I'm just not up to doing.

And I'm keeping my back to the wall.

Just for safety's sake.


-Vicktor Aleksandr B