Beyond Pride: Gregory Ashe’s Authentic Approach to LGBTQ+ Storytelling

In celebration of Pride Month, we were fortunate enough to grab time with Gregory Ashe, a prolific independent author who has carved out his own space in the mystery genre while authentically representing LGBTQ+ characters. As a school librarian turned successful writer, Ashe's journey from penning his first stories to building a substantial audiobook catalog offers valuable insights into the evolving landscape of queer literature and independent publishing. Best known for The Hazard and Somerset Mystery Series, his approach to storytelling—where gay characters simply exist as fully-realized people solving mysteries, falling in love, and living their lives—has resonated deeply with readers and listeners alike. In this candid conversation, Ashe opens up about his personal journey as a writer, the role writing played in his own coming-out process, and how independent publishing has created new opportunities for authentic LGBTQ+ storytelling. Emily Curran: Hello! I'm Emily Curran, Marketing & Communications manager for ACX. You might know me as the person behind ACX University and the ACX Blog, but I'm also an audiobook binge-listener, queer person, and major mystery fan, so I’m very excited today to be talking to author Gregory Ashe. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me! To start us off, could you introduce yourself for our readers? Gregory Ashe: Yeah, of course. My name is Gregory Ashe. I write mystery, romance, and speculative fiction almost always with gay men as the protagonists. I'm probably best known for a mystery series called The Hazard and Somerset Mysteries, and right now my work in progress is this cozy mystery series called The Last Picks. I am a school librarian as well, so I still have a full-time job. Emily: And how long have you been writing? Gregory: I was a big reader and writer in elementary, middle, and high school, like a lot of people who love books, and then I took a break in college because I was convinced I was going to be an academic, and I was only going to read really serious literature. Then when I was about 25, I was in grad school and I just started writing for fun again. Part of it was this realization that a lot of what was inhibiting me was like, I wasn't good at it [laughs]. But I really wanted to be able to tell stories because I loved books so much, so I was like, "Well, I'm just going to accept the fact that I'm going to have to work at it, unlike a lot of other things that I didn't have to work at quite so much.” [laughs] Emily: Yeah! Oh, I totally get that. So you talk about “working on it”—what did that look like? Gregory: I've tried a lot of different things—some creative writing classes at school, studying on my own, reading books about telling stories and the writing craft, things like that. And attending online workshops, which is much more common today—there are so many more opportunities today than there were 17 years ago. One big transformative experience for me was this six-week in-person summer camp called the Odyssey Writing Workshop. It’s big in the realm of sci-fi fantasy horror, and at the time I was writing a lot more fantasy, so I got to spend six weeks of my life living out being a writer full-time. But a lot of it just came down to setting myself a pretty strict goal to write 2000 words every day, and I've tried to do that every day for the last 17 years. I haven't hit every day, but I come pretty close! I have a pretty good track record on that. So that was the biggest thing, I think it's just putting in time, practicing and working on it. Emily: When did you make the transition to publishing your work? Gregory: So what I did is, I'd get every book as good as I could make it. And I really tried hard to follow Heinlein's Rules, which are these set of rules that some writers really believe in (and other writers don't) which is, you write it, you finish it, you only revise it to editorial demand, and then you send it out and you just see what happens. And so I was really trying to do that. I had self-published [through Kindle], I don't know, 20-something books before I wrote a book called Pretty Pretty Boys, which is the first book in my Hazard and Somerset Series. And that was the one that really found an audience. And so that's kind of where I track that “author moment”—the start of the career. Emily: What do you think was distinct about that book that helped it find an audience? Gregory: Well, I had not been marking my books as LGBTQ before that because I was really worried about having them trapped in this weird liminal space that nobody would see. But finally I got to a point with Pretty Pretty Boys where I thought, “I would want to be able to find this if I were looking for a mystery about a gay detective.” So I put it in there. So that was part of it, I think—categorizing it properly and making it easier for people to find. But part of it too, I think, is that the LGBTQ mystery category on Amazon was at that point very small, so it wasn't hard for people to see new books. What I write tends to be mystery-forward and not romance-forward, even though it has a pretty strong romance subplot. And I think there was an audience there that hadn't been tapped yet—there were people that were looking for something that was less of a romance, and more of a genre mystery. And so that worked to my advantage as well. Emily: You hit on something that I wanted to ask about—it’s like how books by Black authors will get featured on a “Black Writers” shelf in a bookstore, but then those authors won’t be represented in the shelves for their genre. When is it representation and when it is limiting? Can you talk a little more about being limited because of the LGBTQ+ label? Gregory: Yeah, that's, that was exactly what I was thinking—Black fiction is an example as well, and I had also thought about women’s fiction, which is another ones that’s kind of…stigmatizing isn’t quite the right word, but there’s something about it that’s signaling to the general population “this is different,” you know? It’s weird to me that we feel that need to signal, but I also understand it’s a finding aid for people—so it cuts both ways, I guess. Emily: Right! Do you find that’s the case with romance, too? Your books aren’t romance, but they do have a romantic subplot, like you were saying—do you think they tend to get coded as romance because they have gay main characters? Gregory: Nowadays, I think...unless it's a traditionally published book, it kind of codes it as romance by default, which is so interesting to me. There's a book series with a straight cis couple that I love, in the canon of great mysteries, the Kenzie and Gennaro series by Dennis Lahane. They’re incredibly well-written. And there is this ongoing slow burn relationship between the detective and his friend who's also his secretary. But I think nobody has ever thought of that as a romance series, right? I also think part of it has to do with the fact that so much of the readership right now of those LGBTQ sub-genres is a romance readership. So I think there's also that supply and demand question—romance readers are amazing, and one of the reasons they're amazing is because they're voracious. They love to read, and they consume so many books, which is awesome. But it also means that since the demand is so high, there's also a need to fill that demand. Emily: Does that help at all with finding new readers and listeners? Do you have a crossover audience? Gregory: Yeah, I think that crossover has really been where I have found my readership. A lot of people will talk about my books as being angsty and dark. And I think to some extent that's true, but I think a lot of what they're responding to is just the fact that they're not driven by a conventional romance plot, so I think they just have a different feel that I think people respond to when they're looking for something that's maybe adjacent to what they like already. Emily: So I wanted to talk about including gay main characters in your books—is that something that was important to you when you started writing? Did you set out to do that or did that intention evolve over time? Gregory: Yeah! [laughs] Yeah, that would be the politest way to put it, because writing was also how I came out. I was writing these books and the first I'd say 9, 12, 15 books, something like that, were all about queer couples. And I'd have friends who would read them and be like “You know, you always have these pairs of guys that have these really intense relationships. And I don't know, it just feels a lot like they're the same.” And now looking back, I'm like, "Well, duh. [laughs] Like, now we all know why." But at the time I was like, well, they're just really good friends. Like it wasn’t quite “they’re roommates,” but it was in that vein [laughs]. That was a big part of my coming out process, so then writing stories about gay protagonists eventually became a conscious decision. It was not intentional, but I think it became intentional. And then it became something that I was really passionate about because when I grew up, I read maybe a handful of books with gay characters represented in them. And of that handful, I think maybe all but one were pretty negative. Either they were very effeminate and campy, or they were bad, or both. There’s only one exception that I can think of—Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunners—where they felt like real people who had a story about them. They just happened to be gay. Emily: Yeah, I think for a lot of us, the reason it takes time to figure out we’re queer is because there was no real representation— the queer relationships we saw depicted in media were either hyper-sexualized or fetishized or from a cis male perspective or very, very tragic. So what you're saying about writing these characters that just happen to be gay into stories, where it’s not the focus of the story, they’re just people living their lives, being detectives or whatever [laughs]—that mirrors real life, real experiences. So it's in those stories that we see something relatable reflected back at us. Gregory: Right. Yeah, I think that's such a great point. I mean like, for all of us, sexuality has some defining factor on us, even if it's that we're asexual or demisexual, right? Like, we all have some way in which it is a part of our identity and that's important. But it's really hard sometimes because it feels like there's a lot of work being done around that as the most important part, or the only part. And to me that's so uninteresting [laughs] because people are just so much richer than that. And with what you said, I think most people at some level recognize when that's being done, even if they can't put it into words—they have like a knee-jerk reaction of either “I'm not interested in that” or “that doesn't resonate with me.” But I think we would all want stories about people who feel real that we can care about, regardless of who they love, right? Emily: Right! And is that something you’ve seen change at all? Have you seen an evolution in publishing since you’ve been an author? Gregory: I do think there's more stories of people who are queer in whatever flavor, but the story isn’t about that, it just happens to be true of them. I'm thinking of Becky Chambers' books, for example, where their queerness is just a part of them…and then you just keep telling the story. And then there’s the Gideon the Ninth books by Tamsyn Muir where queerness is just kind of built in. There’s a lot more of that than there used to be. So I think it’s better, but I also think there’s more of that fetishization and objectification on the other side because it sells. But I do think there’s a lot more queer fiction in general, which has been great. It’s awesome to see that growing. Emily: Yeah—it seems to me like we're almost there, right? [laughs] Gregory: Yeah! Yeah, part of me also wonders too, if there's like an angle of “this is what it means to be literary,” or “this one is more likely to win a prize.” A lot of them might be writing for other writers, you know, they're not really writing for a general readership, they're writing for prize judges and panels. I think that may be part of it too because those publishers want to sell an extra bunch of copies. Emily: Does independent publishing offer an escape from that at all? Is there a role you see it playing in pushing that evolution forward and giving authors more freedom to tell the stories they want to tell? Gregory: Yeah, I think traditional publishing has a lot to offer in a lot of different ways, but I think one of its limitations is they have to make a profit in some way, right? It’s their business. So what they produce is limited by what they think will sell to some extent. And I know there are things that get published because they believe in them as art, but bottom line, they’re businesses. And then there’s agents, who are themselves trying to make a living by picking out the manuscripts that they think they can sell. So they have a lot of caution. What I love about indie publishing is it lets people like, fly their freak flag, right? [laughs] And write whatever weird thing they love and find their audience for it—because there’s an audience for everything. And what’s really cool then is that sometimes that audience is way bigger than anybody realizes. So I see indie publishing giving people these opportunities, that then traditional publishing will pick up. And I really do think that happened with LGBTQ fiction. Especially in the last five years, the number of gay romances that have been published by mainstream publishers has skyrocketed because they realized there's this massive audience. Emily: How did audio enter the picture? Were you considering audio editions from the beginning? Gregory: No, so I must have had three books out in my Hazard and Somerset Series when Tantor made me an offer for the audio rights for the first three. And I said yes, because I was really still very new to publishing, and I was excited! I mean, it was a good offer. And I was at a point where I was like, "Yes, I want someone else to handle this. This is great, let's do it." But by the time the third one had come out, I'd been trying to research and learn the business better, and I decided I wanted to put the rest of them into audio myself. Because that's really the beauty of indie publishing—even if you don't sell as much, your royalty rates are so much higher. So they made me an offer on the remaining books in the series, and I said, "No, thank you." And I just went ahead and started doing them myself. I was really trying to think of it as a long-term investment in a career. And since then, I've been really lucky that my audio sales are self-sustaining, and it's been easy for me to continue to put new books into audio. Emily: Is representation something you're looking for in a narrator? Gregory: That's such a good question. It's not actually something that I had thought about. I mean, certainly experience specifically to the audiobook genre, right? But I had not thought about like, their lived experience or their identity. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think it's about half and half who I know either fall somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum or identify as straight. It’s pretty close to an even split. And I do always say, "Hey, just so you know, this is the genre I write in, there is some explicit content. Usually it's not excessive [laughs], but you will have to say some words that, if they make you uncomfortable…” But I do feel like I can talk about the opposite, where there couple of times I’ve done auditions, I’ve tried to be really clear in my instructions to people auditioning, like "Hey, I write gay men, but unless the script indicates that this character is fem, I'm not really looking for a campy, queenie voice." And I was really surprised the first time I did those open auditions, how many men ignored that, and just did like a very stereotypical, fem gay man's voice. And so first of all, they didn't read the instructions [laughs], but second of all that was their default. So when you asked that, I'm thinking, well, there's the advantage to having somebody with a background and a lived experience. They’re not putting on an act quite so much. Emily: Right! It’s like they're just embodying a character rather than embodying a stereotype. Gregory: Oh, yeah. That's an excellent way of putting it. Emily: So once you have hired a narrator and you're in the process, how much direction are you giving them? What’s the level of collaboration? Gregory: You know, I have been so lucky that I don't really give any. I have been really fortunate with my narrators that they are smart and insightful readers, so they do a fantastic job of reading and prepping the material. And then on their own, landing the dynamics of the conversation, like the inflections and the nuance that I would hope would come through, and the jokes that really only work if you land the punchline, you know? So I’ve been really pleased that I don’t have to do that coaching. And even though of course, I have a voice in my head for that character, I try not to project that onto the narrator because I understand that just because I hear it in my head, it’s not what the reader necessarily hears. So I’ve tried to be really open to letting the narrator hear what a reader is likely to hear, because they’re experiencing it first as a reader. Emily: Well, this has been a really enjoyable, well-rounded conversation! Is there anything you’d like to promote, any new releases coming soon? Gregory: Yeah, I think probably the next release is going to be early July and it's going to be book seven of my cozy mystery series called By the Book. I’m excited for people to hear it—the narrator is fantastic and if you want something that’s low angst, kind of like a Hallmark movie but with a gay mystery writer solving mysteries…[laughs] that’s my current work in progress. Emily: Perfect. I love it. [laughs] Thank you so much for your time and good luck on the next release! If you want to follow Gregory Ashe’s work, you can find him here: Instagram: @tekhne.makre Blue Sky: ‪@tekhnemakre.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gregory.ashe.author Website: https://www.gregoryashe.com Audible: https://www.audible.com/author/Gregory-Ashe/B004YYND70