ABOUT Slade James
Slade James is a gay man writing gay romance.
I write about real gay men — our friendships, our desire, our humor, our complicated hearts — drawn from a life lived inside all of it. The drama and the comedy. The wild spectrum of it. The queer spaces that exist just outside mainstream culture where men have always found each other, built community, and fallen in love.
When readers write to say "I feel seen," that's the whole point. We were here. Here's what it was really like.
Books
The Bear Camp series is built from years spent at clothing-optional campgrounds and gay resorts across the American South — places that feel fantastical to readers who've never been anywhere like them, and feel like home to the men who have. Contemporary MM romance about sexy Southern men who live, work, and play at a gay campground in the mountains of North Georgia called Bear Mountain Lodge.
Cool Town is a time recovered. I grew up gay in the South in the 1980s. I know what it was like to come of age in that particular decade, in that particular landscape — in a time before gay culture had role models you could point to, before there was a blueprint. When you had to find it and build it entirely on your own. Cool Town is a series of coming-of-age MM romance novellas set in a fictional Georgia university town — the same town as Bear Camp, only forty years in the past. Literary in voice, intimate in scale, and deeply autobiographical in spirit.
Backstory
In seventh grade, I had girlfriends who rode the same school bus. We wrote serialized soap operas for each other — episodic romances passed around at school, chapter by chapter. And in a detail that feels almost too on-the-nose in retrospect, I recorded stories on a cassette boom box, fully narrated with character voices.
Forty years later, I write, design my own cover art, and narrate my own audiobooks.
In my early twenties, I was part of the music scene in Athens, Georgia. I was drawn to the practice spaces where songs were being written, the studios where the music was being mixed. That instinct toward process, toward the work behind the work, never left. It eventually became a podcast — the MM Author Podcast at GayRomance.show — where I interviewed some of the most talented writers in the genre about their creative lives.
I've been a blogger, a podcaster, and a podcaster again. I wrote two fantasy novels under the pen name Eric Slade. I spent fifteen years in the New Age and personal development world producing a show called Shift Your Spirits.
I turned fifty, met the love of my life, and started writing gay romance.
In that order. In a matter of weeks.
I live with my partner Steven on twelve acres in a magical corner of the Southeast where Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee converge — a place we call GeorBamaSee.
We've built a replica 19th century farmhouse. There's a barn, a creek, and a pond. There are beloved dogs.
There is, by all accounts, a real-life romance happening here.
Want to know more about the stories behind the stories? My newsletter Backstory is where I share the personal experiences that become my fiction — the real people, real places, and real moments that end up on the page.