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Philadelphia Gay News www.epgn.com Oct. 11-17, 2013
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New eBook, blog for out Temple professor By Angela Thomas angela@epgn.com Most novelists were inspired to pick up a pen and write because of a certain book or an author. But for openly gay Philadelphiabased author Brad Windhauser, his inspiration came from a movie. Windhauser, 39, was born in Los Angeles but moved to Philadelphia in 2000. It was his very first viewing of Quentin Tarantino’s popular “Pulp Fiction” that led him to pursue a career as a writer. “I always enjoyed reading and was a big reader growing up and was going to be a poet at one point, and then I saw ‘Pulp Fiction’ in ’94 when I was an undergraduate and that movie changed the way I saw a story,” he said. “It made the ordinary extraordinary.” Windhauser completed his bachelor’s degree in literature/creative writing at the University of California, San Diego, and received his master’s in English/creative writing from Rutgers University Camden. He also earned his master of fine arts in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. He currently teaches in Temple University’s English Department. It wasn’t until Windhauser took a course about Ernest Hemingway that he began to appreciate 20th-century authors like
F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. “I really liked Hemingway the more I studied his short fiction and how he wrote everyday experiences,” he said. “It felt like you were eavesdropping on the lives of these characters, and to me that felt more real.” That class also helped him develop as a writer in connection with his emerging sexual identity. “Around this time I was coming out and it was the mid-’90s. We were getting more visibility and people were accepting but they weren’t rolling out the red carpet about it so I thought about writing about me and my experiences.” His first novel, “Regret,” was published in 2007 and recently released as an eBook. “Regret” is a murder mystery that focuses on three different intersecting plotlines — a religious group that is trying to “cure” gays, a detective investigating the group’s actions and a medical researcher recruited by the religious group.
BRAD WINDHAUSER
Windhauser said he got the idea for the storyline from a sexuality class he took in San Diego where he learned about Simon LeVay, who is often credited for research that supports the idea that being LGBT is genetic. “Reading that research and with what I was going through at the time, I thought, What would someone do with this info if they could prove it? Because my dad is very religious, that made me think, What if religion got involved and got a hold of this info? Would they try and cure us? With that, three storylines came together.” Windhauser recently finished his second book and is looking for an agent.
His second novel is set in the Graduate Hospital area of Philadelphia and looks at the fallout of a car accident involving a white driver and a black cyclist. “It is about gentrification and explores the lives that were indirectly affected and effected by this accident,” he said. In addition to his two novels, Windhauser had several short stories published and is currently working on a blog, “The Bible Project.” He launched the effort earlier this year to debunk the religious right’s Biblically based anti-LGBT claims, following his own reading of the text. “Having a strong literary background, people expect you to have read the Bible and I never, have nor was I remotely interested in it because it was used against the LGBT community,” he said. “I was convinced people were misquoting it and misrepresenting it to go against us. I started with Old Testament and just finished the Gospel in the New Testament. It has been interesting. I tried to read it with as open a mind as possible and predictably a lot of the stuff that is used against the gays, it doesn’t say anywhere.” Windhauser writes about his findings at BibleProjectBlog.com and also contributes to 5Writers.com. “Regret” can be found on Amazon or www.bradwindhauser.com. ■