Gay Romance Novelist Will Freshwater On Loving And Losing But Still Winning

A year ago, author Will Freshwater quit his desk job as a lawyer for Verizon to dedicate himself to writing full-time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he began working from home and realized he didn’t miss the office or corporate life. Isolating with his husband and golden retriever during and after the lockdown, the Pennsylvania native turned his gaze inward and uncovered stories and characters he’d been too busy to bring to life after publishing his first book nearly a decade earlier.

“It was the best decision I’ve ever made,” says Freshwater, who talks about the recent publication of his second gay romance novel, The Light Reflected, in this Q & A.

Romance novelists are often women. What’s it like to write romance novels as a gay man?

Although it’s a generalization, most people assume gay men are more interested in sex than love. Honestly, I think the relationship between physical and emotional intimacy is decidedly more complicated and nuanced. In both of my novels, the protagonists have profound respect and deep admiration for the objects of their affection.

Too many novels set up a predictable, formulaic story — boy meets boy, boys inexplicably fall in love, and boys ride off into the sunset together. Most publishers of gay romance require a happily ever after or happy for now ending. That makes for a nice story, but for those of us who have loved and lost, it’s pure fiction.

Why write a three-book series set in Provincetown, Massachusetts?

I grew up in Pittsburgh, but I was lucky enough to attend Boston College. In 1989, my boyfriend drove me up to Cape Cod in the middle of winter. The experience of visiting Provincetown was like Dorothy seeing Oz in Technicolor. I was overwhelmed, overjoyed, and inspired by the sense of community and creative energy. Each time I returned, it was like coming back to a place I’d never been before, but that somehow felt like the only place I’d ever belonged. The Welsh have a great term for what I was feeling — hiraeth — loosely translated as “the longing or nostalgia for the home you never had.”

It also happens to give me a great reason to go back often and re-experience the place where my husband and I fell in love.

In your first novel, Favorite Son, protagonist John Wells becomes “Peter” when he moves to Provincetown. Angelo becomes Angel in your next book, The Light Reflected, when he performs in drag at the local nightclub. You were born with a twin brother who died shortly after birth. Does that influence the recurring theme of dual identities in your work?

I think everyone, especially gay men, struggles with the tension of knowing who you truly are and pretending to be who people want you to be. There’s a great book called The Velvet Rage that discusses how, at a very early age, gay children come to understand they are different. Afraid of not getting the love they need to survive, they too often create an alternate identity to conform to their parents’ and peers’ expectations.

John and Angelo have both lived under the weight of other people’s expectations about how they should act and who they should be. When they come to Provincetown, they are finally free to make their own way. It’s liberating and empowering.

As the surviving twin, I felt a lot of pressure growing up to be the kind of son my parents needed me to be. When I realized I was gay, I knew, right away, I’d never be able to live up to my family’s expectations. Initially, that was devastating, but ultimately it became the most liberating experience of my life. I could be whoever I wanted to be.

In both novels, you have a straight-identifying character fall for the gay protagonist. Why is that?

Romance is defined as “an ardent emotional attachment or involvement between two people.” Midway through the first draft of Favorite Son, I decided it would be more interesting, albeit a bit unconventional, to write a story about an intense “bromance” between two close friends. I never intended for them to fall in love until they did. Opposites attract, but how can there be any hope for love or romance when one character is gay and the other is straight?

Fortunately, Danny Cavanaugh is the common denominator in both books—the straight-identifying man who realizes he’s gay, but then retreats back into the closet when a tragedy rocks his world. When I started writing the second book, I considered whether or not to revisit the same theme again. Although I knew that it was risky to double down on the same tired cliché, it just felt right. Struggles with sexual identity are rarely linear.

Your characters have complicated, but substantive emotional and physical relationships with one another. Why?

Too often, secondary characters in romance novels become one-dimensional props to a story that revolves almost exclusively around two characters falling in love. I know from my own life experience how incredibly important and impactful different kinds of relationships can be in the timeline of your life.

A guy I casually dated a few times introduced me to my husband and inadvertently brought us together on an unusually warm, spring evening in [Washington, D.C.’s] DuPont Circle. Without him, we would never have been us. So, I’m profoundly grateful. That sounds like the plot of a romance novel, right? I thought so too, so I tried to incorporate those kinds of experiences into my novels.

The Light Reflected is one of those rare romance novels without a happy ending. Did you have the end of the story in mind when you started writing it?

Since my second book is a prequel to my first novel, Favorite Son, it was a foregone conclusion that the two central characters — Max and Danny — would not end up together. Going in, that inevitable conclusion actually made me more determined to make sure their love story was more intense and passionate.

I’ve been in two long-term relationships. The first lasted thirteen years and ended badly. The second is still going strong after twenty years. Both were incredibly important and impactful.

My first publisher passed on publishing The Light Reflected because it didn’t have a traditional happy ending. Unfortunately, I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that unless something is forever, it doesn’t have significance or value. I’m living proof that you can live and love and lose and still win in the end.