Heidi’s note: This interview is long, but I encourage you to read all the way to the end. Enjoy Vic’s answers to the usual interview questions, and then read on to find out how very extraordinary my baby brother is.

Tell us a little about yourself. What you do, either for a living or for fun or both.

Well, actually I am a writer. I guess you could say that’s what I do for a living. I am a proud disabled veteran of the United States Army and that gave me the wonderful opportunity to spend the rest of my life writing some delightfully delicious stories about men having some delightfully naughty times with each other.

Writing is actually very fun for me. But if I’m not writing, I’m reading or playing the Sims 3, or being distracted from my writing by talking, tweeting or Facebooking with the love of my life Daniel.

What’s a fun fact about you? Something unique, a particular talent?

A particular talent? My brain is extremely creative? I can hear a song once and get an idea for a music video, choreograph an entire dance, or sing it back to you, exactly the way it was sung. Other than that I’d say a fun fact is that I am an undercover nerd. I enjoy reading historicals and mythological books. I loved watching the History Channel and the Civil War is a definite obsession of mine.

 

Ideal man/woman/one of each:

Ideal man….Hhmmm….can I just tell you their names? If you put John Barrowman, Shemar Moore and Daniel all in the same body…

Seriously, a man with a sense of humor, who can have intelligent conversations with me. Someone who doesn’t mind the fact that I’m possessive, territorial, I’m the extreme Dom in my relationship. Someone who is just as quirky as I am. Who is loyal and faithful, honest, trustworthy, open, passionate, loves to have sex as much as I do. Can be both sub AND partner to me. Someone who wants kids. Who likes to watch action and horror films and laugh at them. Someone who loves romance. Who likes to be taken care of and wants to take care of me. Someone who’s into family, who wants to travel. A man who is a mixture of my dad Aleks, my older brother Damon, but who has that special uniqueness and brand of Sub-ness, that makes him perfect for me.

Did I mention that he had to be hot? Oh man I totally just described Daniel. LOL. Totally not kidding about that.

 

Favorite movies/books/TV shows

I love watching comedies. I love watching horror and action films as well. I like watching horror because none of it is ever scary to me and I spend the whole movie scaring other people. There are a few movies that I can watch every day and never get tired of them: One Fine Day, Remember the Titans, Legally Blonde, The Butterfly Effect, Gone With the Wind, The Godfather Trilogy” and even though Daniel is going to groan at this part: The Twilight Series.”

I love reading romance books. But it’s mainly M/M romance. I rarely read M/F and when I do it’s only one by a few authors who I am very loyal to. I also love reading biographies and history books and books about mythology and I even enjoy reading about law and society (I told you I was a nerd).

 

What brought you to Coffee and Porn in the Morning? Favorite part?

I actually found C&P in the Morning from following Mary Calmes’s blog about a year ago, but when I went to GRL and met Heidi and subsequently got adopted by her I knew that I had to do more than just casually follow the site, I now had to study every single post and pimp it out. It’s what a good little brother does.

My favorite part? I’d have to say the Goodnight Kiss. I’m a sucker for a really good kiss. It can totally make me weak in the knees. Although the Nooner is always a fun time as well.

If you could travel anywhere in the world (money and time and travel is no object), where would you go? Why? And for how long?

Right now at this point? I would travel to Middlesbrough, England, today, this year 2011. I’d go to be with Daniel and I’d be there for as long as it would take him to pack up all of his stuff so he could move to New York with me.

But outside of being the total romantic that I am, I’d have to say that I would love to travel back to the time of the Renaissance. The art, music, poetry and the writings that came out during that time period are some of the most soul-stirring pieces that I’ve ever seen. I’d want to go just to bask in the genius that seemed to permeate the air during that timeframe over in Europe.

 

Would you travel to space on a commercial flight, or are you Earth-bound for good?

I spend so much time creating new worlds in my head I’d LOVE to have the opportunity to see if there really is a planet full of wolf shifters, and one full of snake shifters, and one with blue bird shifters. Earth is nice but I’m all about going to the very edge of things and then pushing beyond that line.

 

Which fictional character do you most wish were real?

Hhmm…this is a tough question. In almost every book I’ve read I see faint characteristics of people that I know in the characters, but you know what? I have read Mary Calmes’s book “Trusted Bond” over 30 times (I’m a little obsessed) and I am so in love with Jin and Logan, that I’d be hard-pressed to just pick one, but I’d have to say Jin, because I’m a lot like Logan already and I think that Jin and I could be very, very happy together.

 

Social Media: Love it? Hate it? Discuss.

I have a Facebook, Twitter (VVeeB), a Tumblr (a predominantly NSFW picture blog: v-vee.tumblr.com), a Google+, a Blogger Blog (I actually have 3. One is my personal one: imstillvic.blogspot.com. One is my author blog: vicktor-alexander.blogspot.com. And one is my blog for the much more intimate side of me, the Dom side of me, it’s a blog that I run with two other people, one of which is Daniel, my sub: psdandt.blogspot.com)

I love social media though. I believe that it has both its good and its bad points. I have an author page on Goodreads and I’m a member of a few groups on there. Social media definitely has its good and it’s bad parts, but social media has been good to me, I’ve found family members, true family members, I met Daniel through Goodreads, but it’s been bad to me as well. I think it’s like dealing with people, you have to realize that every person, or in this case every social media site, has the propensity to be both amazingly good and horrifically bad, but you can’t toss out the baby with the bath water. You know the song: “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and then you have, the facts of life…” Did I just show my age there?

 

Do you have any guilty pleasures you’d like to confess?

That I’d like to confess? LOL. Well honestly, Daniel and some other friends of mine think that it’s a travesty but, I am a major Twilight fan. I’ve read all four books, seen the first three movies and the only reason I haven’t seen Breaking Dawn: Part One is because I’ve been hurt. But the Twilight series is something that I watch with unabashed pleasure while simultaneously feeling as if I need to go and find a priest and confess that I love the “sparkly vampires”, and I’m not even Catholic.

 

If you’re game, can you give us a little story of how you’ve come to be awesome in New York? Because it’s a rocking story. (Maybe a link to Cherie’s story on that one blog you sent me to also.)

Well I don’t know about me being awesome in New York but I know that I find it pretty awesome that I’m here.

I wish that I could say that it’s a boring story, but I’d be lying. My life very much plays out like a LGBT soap opera.

I grew up in a very religious family. My birth father was a Pentacostal Christian pastor, who was a former Muslim and my birth mother was a fanatical Messianic Judaic follower, so needless to say I grew up knowing that God was real, Jesus was the son of God and that I had to be the best daughter that ever lived or I’d be spending the rest of my life in hell. The only problem with that was that I didn’t really feel like I was supposed to be a good “daughter,” I felt like I was supposed to be a good “son.” I always knew that how I felt inside and what I saw on the outside just didn’t match up, but at the age of 10, when I told my birth mother that I didn’t want to be a “stinkin’ girl” (yeah, that was my profanity back then) but that I wanted to be a boy and she dragged me into a dressing room where she whipped me with the belt from her pants, I forced down those desires. For the most part. I still hung out with the guys, I acted like the guys, I watched and played sports, all of that whenever I wasn’t with my family. When I turned 18 I discovered strap-ons and knew that even though I was much more comfortable with a dick hanging in between my legs, and my breasts bound down and no make-up on, being African-American, I’d be termed “dyke” or “abomination”, because I didn’t just feel like I should have been a boy, but I was still attracted to boys, so didn’t that make me gay as well?

One of the things that people are very unaware of is how dangerous and almost inconceivable it is to be gay and a member of the African-American community. Because for all that we’re shown on tv (which isn’t a whole lot), for the most part, we’re attacked, beaten, killed, disowned, kicked out, etc. JUST for being gay, being transgender? Practically unheard of. So me telling my family that I was transgender AND homosexual was asking for trouble.

Fast forward a few years and now I’m wearing a strap on underneath the clothes that I wear. Pretending to be a girl, a good little Christian woman in front of my family, and then being “Vic” with my friends. I’d discovered the book Change of Heart, by Mary Calmes, on my Audible account and listened to it, because from the cover I thought it was a M/F book, I was so turned on and fascinated after I got over my initial shock that it was a M/M book that I immediately went and bought every M/M book by Mary Calmes I could find, and then I discovered “Keeping Promise Rock” by Amy Lane and I was hooked on the genre. I’ve had gay friends since freshman year of high school and around the time that I was discovering this genre, I was finding out that my friend Justin had contracted AIDS (I talk about it on my blog here). Losing Justin sent me into a tailspin of grief and so I threw myself into reading M/M and then writing M/M (because I’ve been writing since I was 10, books where animals talked and shifted and where the guys seemed to spend more time with each other than with their wives). I went online one day and decided that I’d finally start putting in some of the books that I’d read on Goodreads. That led to me being friended by people who liked my reviews, which led me to a group, which led me to Thorny, Matt, Brad and the group chat, which led me to GRL, which is when my life turned around.

I had just come out as being transgender to my birth family and had been both disowned and exorcised. I had begun taking steps to transition and my boyfriend at the time seemed completely supportive of the steps I was taking. Two days before GRL began, my granny (great-grandmother) passed away and I almost didn’t go, but I was talked into it and Cherie promised to help me celebrate my granny’s passing. So I went, and I got adopted while I was there, because I didn’t have any more family. I was essentially an orphan and since my birth family hadn’t been a true family to me, I didn’t really know what it was. I was amazed by the people who gave me phone numbers and email addresses and told me to keep in contact with them and to let them know what was going on. I was amazed when they truly meant what they’d said.

My boyfriend and I had been having problems since the day that I’d left for GRL and when I got back, things got worse. That first day I returned was the first day that he hit me. And it continued every day. Pushing and hitting, punching and each time he said “You want to be a man, then take it like a man.” Cherie could tell something was up by the email responses that she got from me, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. If I left my boyfriend’s place I would have been homeless and I only get $243 a month for military disability, that’s not enough to live on, so I stayed in order to have somewhere to live. Around this time, Daniel and I had begun talking and getting closer as well, and I knew that Daniel was the one for me, but neither of us was ready to actually take that step right then. Then one day I got an email from Cherie inviting me to come and stay with her. And another email, five minutes later, letting me know that she was absolutely serious.

I cried.

I literally, sobbed my eyes out. It was from relief, from happiness, from shock, and because that was my salvation. I was at the point in my life where I knew that I’d either end up being killed by my abusive boyfriend or by my fanatically religious biological family. So I accepted and we made plans for me to move up there in three weeks.

The beatings got worse, however, and my friend Keesha came and got me and brought me to her parent’s house, after telling me to beg Cherie if I could come earlier. Cherie’s words: “Yes. Come as soon as you can. You just keep yourself safe. That’s the biggest and number one priority.”

So I waited until the bruises faded from my face and body and then I moved to New York (you can read our blog post for Transgender Day of Remembrance where we talk about all of this from our different POVs on the “Chicks & Dicks Blog” here.)

So I moved to New York and became surrounded by family. Daniel and I also stopped running from our feelings for each other and fell into deep “L” with each other. He makes me want to be a better man, so that I can be the best man for him and being around Cherie makes me a better person, a better writer.

Since moving up here, the nightmares have stopped, the crying myself to sleep every night has stopped, denying my truth has stopped. I’m living my life as it was meant to be. I don’t have to hide the fact that I’m a transgender man, that I’m a man who loves other men…or rather one man (Daniel would get very growly if I left “men” there). I don’t have to hide the fact that I am a gay man, living in New York, planning to spend the rest of his life with a British gay man, both of us are authors of M/M romance and I finally, finally, have a true, loving family, who care when I’m sick or hurt. Who want me to have a good birthday (this past birthday was the first time in 13 years where I celebrated it. No one forgot and I got presents. I even got a dad-Aleksandr Voinov, for my birthday and I’ve never truly had a real one of those). I have older brothers and sisters who tweet, email, call, text, facebook and blog me all the time, to check up on me, to say they love me, to tell me to go to the hospital when I’m being stubborn and don’t want to go. Family who want me to be happy, who have embraced Daniel (whose favorite author is Heidi Cullinan—how awesome is it that she’s my big sister?) and who don’t even twitch an eyebrow at the fact that their little brother is a Dom, but even think it’s pretty cool.

Moving to New York was the best thing that ever happened to me and it all happened because I decided to go to GRL after coming out with my truth, which happened because I joined a group, which happened because I made a friend on Goodreads, which happened because I started reading M/M books, which happened because I started reading Mary Calmes, which happened because the cover of her book fooled me on Audible. I don’t know who I should thank more, but I know that I thank them all. They have truly made this gay boy, very, very happy.

 

Tell us about your blog, please. How it got started, what you love about it, etc.

Well I guess I’ll talk about all three of them and how they got started. (Note: there are actually four, as Vic contributes to the Chicks & Dicks blog as well.)

“Call Me Vic” is my personal blog. I started it because I thought I was way too cool to keep a diary. LOL. No, honestly, I’d decided to become a writer and a friend of mine told me that keeping a blog was a good way to improve your writing and to get in the habit of writing every day. She was right. I love this blog because I can go on there and write about the transphobic asshole doctor who refused to treat my knee injury properly because she thought that transgenderism is contagious and not have to worry about my “author image”. I love it because I can be myself, lay it all out there and people respond to that openness. The people that follow my personal blog are the ones who were there when I realized that I was transgender, who stuck with me when I freaked out, when I was exorcised and they were the ones who encouraged me to move to New York.

“The Purple Fantasy Den” is my author blog. I started that because my “author Vicktor Alexander madness” was getting lost among the posts of my “Vicktor Aleksandr madness” and one is my author name and the other is my name and while they are the same person one is the gay, trans* man who is still wading through all of the bullshit that was heaped upon him since birth, and foraging through the deep, murky waters of a new, deep, long-lasting relationship, while the other is a smoothly confident, talented, hard-hitting, dark, gritty, passionate, smexy writer of gay romance. They are the same man but they show two totally different sides. Vicktor Alexander is very professional, I only talk about my books, and my WIPs and how I’m not writing my current WIP because I’m getting too many “flat puppies” to keep up with them all. On “The Purple Fantasy Den” (which is a nod to both a lot of what I write, where I write, and the purple in the transgender flag): vicktor-alexander.blogspot.com, I am very much the author. I post up blurbs, ideas, excerpts, Saturday Snark, Six Sentence Sundays…it’s very much an author’s blog. Nothing too personal. I leave that for “Call Me Vic” and “Poker, Sex, Doms and Toys.”

“Poker, Sex, Doms and Toys” or affectionately called: PSD&T came about because of a thread I started in a group on Goodreads. When I left the group because I didn’t feel comfortable and safe there any more, I turned the thread into a blog. The thread started for a number of reasons. I was, apparently, the only true Dom in the entire group (I was a Dom surrounded by subs, I was a very, very happy man) and I had made mention of the fact that none of the BDSM books I read ever looked at things, like a scene from the Dom’s POV. So I was encouraged to talk about things from a Dom’s point of view. Subsequently, I also had quite a number of women, straight and gay, asking me about keeping the fire alive in their relationships and getting their partners to expand their minds and try new things. I still don’t know, to this day, how I became known as the Sex Guru, but it is a title that I wear proudly. I started off giving ideas to married women about how to spice up their relationships and then it turned into helping people understand the BDSM Lifestyle, helping people understand and identify if they were sub or Dom and what that means, how to get into the Lifestyle, how to stay safe. When the thread became a blog, I knew that I had more freedom. I can go more into depth about the Lifestyle, I can go into depth about sex positions, toys, games, etc. Just this past week we talked about being both Dom/sub and partners as well. It was eye-opening to many of the followers of the blog and to those of us who posted as well, because we all remembered how we got into the Lifestyle and how our relationships started and how we feel about our partners. I love this blog: psdandt.blogspot.com, because it’s tearing down the myths and the misconceptions about the Lifestyle, and because that other part of me, the Dom side of me, gets a chance to speak as well. I love that there are authors who are finding out about the blog and reading it and getting a chance to see both sides of a scene, the viewpoint of the subs (given from Katharina and Daniel’s POV) and the viewpoint of the Dom (mine) and we will have guest bloggers (we just recently had Jerome and Jamie) who have been in the Lifestyle for years as well. I love that this blog is helping new and potential subs be safe, helping new and potential Doms know how to keep their subs safe and showing others how being a part of the Lifestyle is definitely one of the safest things out there if handled properly and knowing how to distinguish a Dom from a sadist. I love that marriages are getting stronger because people try the games or the positions or just try something new and I love that people are discovering things about themselves that they didn’t know before, just by reading something that I wrote.

I think that’s what I love about being who I am. Being a transgender male who is gay and a Dom and involved in a committed, lifelong relationship, who is a writer of M/M romance makes me someone who has a very unique voice and I’m very glad that I’ve chosen to use my voice to make lives and relationships better and help to save the world however I can, even if it’s one blog post at a time.

Because truly, that’s my ultimate goal anyway.

-Vicktor Alexander, writer

Vicktor Aleksandr Bailey, man

Vic, person

***

Vicktor Alexander “Vic” wrote his first story at the age of 10 about his youngest sister and her destruction of the world…with her breath.  Much to his youngest sister’s dismay the story was a hit and became the first story of a series all dealing with the planets that were destroyed by his siblings and their strange quirks and body odors.  Vic moved on to horror stories and then to stories about his friends.  Always one who pushed the edge of convention, it wasn’t long or much of a shock, before he was writing interracial historical romances.  However, Vic realized that his heroes seemed much happier when they were hanging out with other guys and that was when he discovered the M/M genre.

Vic now enjoys writing about shifters, humanoids, cowboys, firemen, rent boys, fairies, elves, dancers, doctors, Doms, Subs, and anything else that catches his fancy, all sexy men falling in love with each other and having lots of naughty, dirty, man-on-man sex.  He already has two books published about shape-shifting cowboys, a dancer and a cross-dresser: Unthinkable and Inconceivable, books One and Two of The Tate Pack Series.  Vic is a huge fan of the “happily-ever-after” ending but while his characters all ride off into the proverbial sunset, all sexually satisfied and in love, they all bear the scars of fighting for that love, just like in real life.  No fluff writer here, Vic’s stories can be slightly gritty, dark and hard hitting, but the reason for that, is that love is sweeter when it’s been fought for and won. Never satisfied with only one genre, every book that Vic writes falls into more than one category and has each main character experiencing more than one orgasm.

Out and proud, Vic does not believe that love only comes in one form, one race, one gender and that not only is gender fluid, by sexuality as well.  Vic loves to make people laugh and when he’s not writing, or rather, procrastinating in writing, he’s reading, playing the Sims 3, hanging out with his very supportive adopted family, being distracted from his writing by his partner Daniel and drooling over pictures of John Barrowman and Shemar Moore behind Daniel’s back.