You Must Remember This...

If you want to see something completely adorable, check out this particular post on The Closet Professor blog ("You Must Remember This...").

This is a blog we check out often and always find his posts interesting. We also have his blog link over to the right under "Some of our Fave Blogs."

The masthead describes his blog this way:

A blog about GLBT History, Art, Literature, Politics, and Culture. The Closet Professor is a fun (sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes very serious) approach to GLBT Culture.

We've never had any personal communication with the blogger, but this is how he describes himself in his profile:

I am a graduate student (working on my PhD) and a teacher (high school and college adjunct) who lives in the South. Life is not always easy. Sometimes it is quite stressful, but my blog helps me to procrastinate and (sometimes) get my creative juices flowing. Life will work out the way it is supposed to in the end, I just have to be patient.   Oh, oh. Here's another post you'll find smokin' hot: Charis. Hope everyone has a good weekend!

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Finding Pink Unicorns

Brad and I have been corresponding recently with a fellow blogger and we're learning we have a number of things in common with him.

If you get a chance, we'd like to introduce you to "JF" and the blog he's been keeping for the past three months.

His latest post was titled, Where are the pink unicorns when we need them?, and he wrote about what it was like when he came out to some friends of his. He even shared some things he learned in the hopes of helping others who might be preparing to come out.

We hope you check out this relatively new blog: Going Forward.

Welcome to the blogosphere, JF!

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My Summer of Missy

This is just a shout out to one of my fave MM romance authors, the one, the only, Missy Welsh!

Her book, My Summer of Wes, was the very first MM romance book I ever read. It was published about 3 months after I turned 18, and holds a special place in my heart. It told the story of two young guys who were very capable of falling in Love (with a capital L) and it gave both Brad and I a sense that if Mal and Wes could tackle the challenges, then maybe we could, too.

Missy is celebrating the anniversary of her book's publication, and we'd like to add our Happy Anniversary to her two boys, Mal and Wes!

Here's the post where I talked about her book in a little more detail: Click here.

And you can head over to Missy's blog to read the blurb and an excerpt: Blurb & Excerpt.

She also wrote a post on her blog celebrating the book's publication: Missy's blog post.

Happy Anniversary, Mal & Wes! (And thank you, Missy)

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Coming Out & Coming In

When both of us came out as gay four years ago, we were in our mid-teens (15 for Brad, 16 for Matt). It seemed at the time that we had done something pretty monumental...

Hi Everybody! We're guest posting over at one of our favorite blogs, Chicks & Dicks.

This month their theme is Living Out With Pride in celebration of Pride Month all over the world. Our guest post is one thing we're doing to celebrate the festivities.

We worked on this post together and we hope you head over and check it out. Oh, and while you're there leave us a comment to let us know you dropped by. Pretty please? ;-)



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Chicks and Dicks and a Uniform Fix

Since this is Final Exam Week here in The Wacky World of Matt and Brad, we're going to be posting some things that don't require a lot of time on our part. 

We've been trying to keep our brains from freezing up with all the studying we've done and we're happy to report that we've done a pretty good job of making sure we balanced all that with some fun time.

So today is Day One of exams. And while we're in class sweating our sweet little butts off trying to prove we've been paying attention and have taken the course work seriously, we want to direct your attention to one of our favorite blogs.


This month over at Chicks & Dicks, the theme is Men in Uniform. Edmond Manning started the month off with a post he called Sir, Yes, Sir! Well, that title certainly made us sit up and pay attention! He explained the month's theme this way:

"For all of May, come here to get your uniform fetish fix. I have it on good authority we'll be seeing a few explorations of cop uniforms, martial arts, and fire fighters. Oh, and futuristic military uniforms too, so you can feel confident there will be men to lust after in the future."

He was going through all the different uniforms men wear that many times cause a stirring in the nether regions, and I have to say Edmond now has a special place in my heart since he officially recognized one of my favorite "uniforms." Here's what he said:

"And swimmers in those tight, tight Speedos…that still counts as a uniform, right?"

If you know anything about me, you know I love, love, love men in Speedos. I wrote something about this about a year ago, and this is what I said:

"I practically grew up in Speedos. My parents said I took to water like a fish right after I was born. They said when I turned two years old and they would take me swimming I would have these huge temper tantrums when I took my clothes off and they tried to put on my swim suit. They said I would yell something like, 'But I'm a fish! I'm a fish!' And you can bet no amount of reasoning or threats would make me willingly agree to wear anything. They finally bought me one of those Speedos for little kids (probably had maybe 5 square inches of material). When they showed it to me, they said I lit up and just said, 'Okay'."

So, thank you, Edmond, for recognizing the Speedo as an official uniform!

And without further ado, while our little butts are warming the seats in the classroom, send your butts over to Chicks & Dicks and get your own Uniform Fix. After this week is over, you might find me at the beach in my Official Speedo Uniform.

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Pretty Eye Candy

Hi everybody!

If you haven't been over to MJ and Piper's blog today (Babes in Boyland), you might want to check it out.

They always have a feature called Tattoo Tuesday where they highlight a model showing off his tattoos, and today they have a model named Edurado "Edu" Beber and he's absolutely pretty and beautiful.

Here's a pic of him I found on tumblr, and MJ and Piper have the same one in color. Now go forth and enjoy!

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Check This Out!

I know many of you may have already seen this, but for those of you who haven't, click on the link below and head on over to Thorny Sterling's blog to read an amazing short-short story about these two Boys on a Train.

P.S. This may be the shortest post I've ever done!

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Hop Against Homophobia

We're so excited about Hop Against Homophobia we couldn't wait until the Official Beginning, which is the week of May 17 - 20.

We signed up our blog to participate for this important cause, and we hope you'll check it out by clicking here: Hop Against Homophobia.

The purpose is twofold: to raise awareness about homophobia and to strengthen the gay fiction genre.

We'll have more to say about this as we get closer to the Official Week, but for now, we hope you'll check it out. Again, it's at: Hop Against Homophobia.

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True Colors

Sometimes Brad and I like to check out blogs and websites that our Followers have. Well, a little birdie whispered in our ear that an artist had been inspired by our blog and had created and dedicated some recent work to us.

The artist refers to herself as a "scrapmaker" and "tutorial writer," and to be honest, neither of us had ever heard of scrapmaking before, so it's hard for us to even talk intelligently about this from a technical standpoint.

The end result is called a "kit," and you can download the kit (which is free) and use the individual images for digital scrapbooking or tags. Everything I just described is either on her blog or from some emailing we did with her.

What we can talk about intelligently is our personal response to her work. When we checked out her blog, we were initially at a loss for words to describe how impressed and beautiful we thought her work was. The colors and designs are simply breathtaking.

We asked her if she would mind us writing something today about her post so others here can go check it out, and she graciously agreed.

We want to thank her for dedicating the kit to us, and really appreciate the very kind words in her dedication.

Her blog is called Angel Flowers Scraps and Other Things and the image in this post of the double hearts is from her kit. Oh, she also says on her blog that she loves M/M books and one she lists (Clear Water by Amy Lane) is very dear to my heart.

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Matty's Guest Post About Non-Traditional MM Heroes

Now it's Matty's turn over at the Chicks 'n Dicks blog.

He's written a Guest Post on First Encounters and Lasting Impressions where he talks about some of his first encounters with M/M romance books in high school. Then he shares what kind of Heroes he looks for now, and mentions an especially important book that's made a lasting impression on him.

I got to read the whole thing before he sent it in, except for what he wrote right under the title. He only showed that to me last night. When you see it you'll understand why we went to bed early, but, well... didn't get much sleep.

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Our Guest Post About Non-Traditional M/M Heroes

If you head over to Chicks 'n Dicks, you'll find a Guest Post written by our very own Brad.

On Thursday, my post will go up.

Their topic for the entire month of February is:

The Non-Traditional Hero

in M/M Fiction

So, drop on by Chicks 'n Dicks and see what we think about Non-Traditional M/M heroes. 

This is the very first time we've ever done a guest post on another blog, and we want to thank Anne Tenino for inviting us. Thanks to this invitation, we're no longer virgins, that is, "virgin guest post bloggers"!

Hope you enjoy!

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The One Millionth and One New M/M Romance Blog!

Over this past weekend, during a sorry excuse for a snow storm here in the Boston area (only about 4" got dumped), we got word from two friends of ours over in Goodreads (Laddie and Lauraadriana) that they had given birth to a new Blog for M/M Romance Readers, which they say is one more to be added to the one million blogs on M/M romance out there! 

When we checked it out it was so smoking hot we tried to think of a way to take our laptops outside so the snow would melt and we wouldn't have to shovel (even though I love being outside shoveling snow!).

Here's a little preview of what they have in store for their blog:



We have a lot of plans, which mostly include having fun and messing around, but also we just want to do a few things that we had been looking around for in the M/M Romance Blog World and had not found.

Here is some of the stuff we will be posting:

Monday’s Most Wanted:Weekly list of the books that are upcoming from M/M publishing houses, and that we want to read.

Book Reviews: We will be posting our reviews from Goodreads to the blog, and adding a thing here or there that would be a bit too…Ahem…Controversial on the website.

Series Reviews:We will be going through the most popular, controversial and any other series in the genre that catch our eye, and reviewing them as a whole.

Top Ten Lists: We never get much out the Goodreads lists , they are too general and the titles are too lame, so we’re going to make our own. Those will come out periodically.

Treasure Hunting:We’re going be out there looking for awesome online fiction, and sharing the ones we love.

Crackattacks!: My mind is like a playground full of crack addicted monkeys, and it’s not fair that Laura’s the only one that gets to laugh her ass off with the shit I come up with, so I’m going cut loose on there.

We also will try and get some interesting interviews from authors and share our thoughts on whatever else catches our interest in the mad mad world of gay romance.

Here's the link to their first post (The LL Word Blog) which you have to read to get a good sense of how these "LLadies" think, which is a little scary at first, but you have to be brave! ;) Once you read their first post, click on their banner at the top of their page and you'll get to their current post. Enjoy!

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10 Things I Love About You

About a month ago, Brad and I discovered a new blog we've been following on a daily basis. And we were pleasantly surprised to learn she lives in the Boston area also!

On her blog profile, she describes herself this way (and the last sentence made me think I had found some kind of 'soul sister' in this person!):

Gemini Girl - that might describe me aptly. Nothing makes me more confused than a good book in hand and a good dancing music, at the same time. Read or Dance? A HUGE random queen. My thoughts are constantly flitting in different directions and I can only hope people can catch up to the speed of it!

She's been leaving comments on our blog and we emailed her and asked if she would mind if we highlighted a particular post we both really enjoyed. We particularly loved one sentence in the post that said, "I was always a believer that where there is respect there is love." 

She wrote us back and said she was happy for us to post whatever we liked. We think you might enjoy what Raji (or Brahmin in Boston) has to say. She's been blogging for 4 years now, writes about different things happening in her life, her marriage of almost 6 years, her love of M/M romance books, and even loves posting pics of really hot men (those posts usually have titles like, "Transit Hotness" (a "rear-view" of a guy she saw on the subway), "New Year Hotness", "Hotness...", well, you get the idea!

As a matter of fact, we told her she was inspiring the two of us to write our own "10 Things I Love About You" post and model it after hers. We hope to put our own post up sometime next week.

Here's the link to the post on January 2. After you read it, click on the banner at the top to get to her home page and enjoy what she means by, "My thoughts are constantly flitting in different directions and I can only hope people can catch up to the speed of it!"

10 Things I Love About You

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You Asked for Recipes!

Right before Thanksgiving I was writing a lot about all the baking I was doing and many of you left comments asking if I would post some of my favorite recipes. I'm still planning to do that but I'll have to wait until after the new year since there's so much going on right now with all our Christmas plans.

But wait! I've been spending some time over at a new blog some of you might really enjoy. If you've ever read anything by the author M.J. O'Shea (my personal favorite so far is Unintended), I think she does a really good job of writing about young m/m first love. She's has an author's page over at Goodreads with all her other other books, and I encourage you to check it out.

Also, she and Piper Vaughn have their own blog at Babes in Boyland and that's another site I'd recommend.

And now M.J. has started a new cooking blog and regardless of whether you're a "professional" cook or just somebody like me who's trying to learn the ropes of how to be a better cook, I think you'll love what she's doing over at The Salad Gourmet. She's posting recipes for meat courses, veggies, salads and all kinds of deserts and baked goods.

In addition to the scrumptious dishes she highlights, I really like the conversational tone of how she explains each step of preparation. It's more than just a list of ingredients and cooking instructions, she actually goes step-by-step and explains how she does things and gives you ideas of how you might modify the recipies.

The site is also really well-designed and the pictures of the dishes will literally make your mouth water. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to The Salad Gourmet and check it out!

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Thorny's Not Prickly!

You can only imagine how excited Brad and I were yesterday when we found out our friend (and former fellow blogger), Thorny, rejoined the blogosphere.

We contacted Thorny yesterday and asked his permission to put this up today and he gave the go ahead.

Many of you who follow us here already know Thorny, but we've had some new folks join us and we wanted to pimp his new blog and welcome him back. We started following Thorny's first blog from the beginning and he was a major inspiration for us starting ours. 

We think you'll agree there's never a dull moment with Thorny and we hope you'll check him out!

His blog is at: Thorny, Not Prickly. If, for some reason, that link doesn't work, here's his web address: http://thornynotprickly.wordpress.com/.

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We Have a Winner!

Congratulations to SueM   
 the winner of the
VIRGIN HERO WEEK Book Giveaway!

YAY, SueM! 

Everybody, help us congratulate, SueM, who was randomly selected from all the official Followers at Joyfully Jay's site. To claim your prize of any three books Joyfully Jay reviewed during her Virgin Hero Week, you just need to send us an email within 48 hours. At the top of this page, on the far right, you'll see a tab that says, "Contact Us." Just fill it out, along with a valid email address, and let us know which three books you would like, along with the format, and they're yours!

Again, this has been such a fun week for the two of us and I hope for all of you as well! We just want to say that Joyfully Jay really lives up to her name! During the planning of this contest and all throughout the past week, she has been a joy to work with. We've been emailing Joyfully Jay back and forth throughout the week when we started seeing her Follower numbers begin to climb. She also really helped us with some of the editing of our posts this past week (though any errors that remained are strictly ours).

It was originally Matty's idea to see if Joyfully Jay might be interested in us sponsoring this contest. When he found out she was going to have a Theme Week on Virgin Heroes, he got really excited, which then rubbed off on me.

Now, if you remember, Matty promised a "special treat" (his words... *rolling my eyes *) if Joyfully Jay's Followers numbered at least 76 at the end of the contest. Well, her numbers far exceed 76, so stay tuned tomorrow to see what he has in store for us. (Hint: He promised, to use Joyfully Jay's description, to provide an account of his own experience as a "virgin hero" and then how he became ineligible for that title... forever!) LOL. How do I put up with him, huh? Well, that's a topic for another post! ; )

Again, thanks to all of you for being excited with us about our very first Book Giveaway Contest. And thanks to you, Joyfully Jay, for truly being such a joy to get to know and work with.

And congratulations to SueM for being the Winner of three books!

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Almost There!

Okay! We're almost there! At 11:59 EST on Sunday, November 6 the Book Giveaway Contest ends! 

If you are an official Follower of Joyfully Jay by 11:59 EST on November 6, you are automatically entered in the Contest!

Then tomorrow, Monday, November 7, the winner will be announced on our site as well as Joyfully Jay's site. We will be sending an email to one lucky winner with instructions on how to claim the books.

If you head over to her site now, you can read reviews of all the books in the Giveaway, and decide which ones you might choose if you're the lucky winner!

And, well, just a reminder that if the total number of official Followers at Joyfully Jay's site is at least 76, our one and only (*rolling my eyes*) Matty will provide for our reading pleasure (*again rolling my eyes*) his own story of (in Joyfully Jay's words), "how I became ineligible to be a virgin hero." Oh Joy! LOL ; )

Good Luck!

P.S. We're not allowing comments today so you have to go to Joyfully Jay's site to see how many followers she has. I know, evil of us, but we thought it would be fun for everybody to find out there instead of here. Now, get moving!!!! ;)

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Don't Stop Now!

We're getting closer to the Big Book Giveaway! Joyfully Jay is almost at the end of her fabulous Virgin Hero Week.

If you head to her Site on Sunday, Nov. 6, she's announcing what she's doing for the upcoming week. And at midnight on Sunday, the contest will officially end. We'll be announcing the winner on Monday! And Joyfully Jay will also announce the winner on her site.

You are automatically in the drawing for the giveaway if you are an official Follower of Joyfully Jay's site by midnight, Sunday, Nov. 6. We'll make a random selection of all her official Followers for one winner.

Then on Monday morning Joyfully Jay and our site will announce the winner from a random selection of all official Followers of her site, and tell the winner how they can claim their prize.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check out what she posted for the entire week, and begin thinking about which books you might choose if you're the lucky winner! Good luck!

P.S. We're not allowing comments today and tomorrow so you have to go to Joyfully Jay's site to see how many followers she has. I know, evil of us, but we thought it would be fun for everybody to find out there instead of here. Now, get moving!!!! ;)

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Keep Going!

Okay. Just a reminder! I'm getting ready to publish this post, and at this very moment, there are 57 official Followers at Joyfully Jay's Blog. So, we know one of her Followers will be eligible for one free book at this point if the numbers stay right were they are on November 6.

However, if, on November 6, the number of "Followers" at her site are between 61 and 75, one of her followers will receive a gift of any 2 books she reviewed during the week.

And, if, on November 6, the number of "Followers" at her site is at least 76 (plus), one of her followers will receive a gift of any 3 books she reviewed during the week. And, Matty will write something on our blog about his own "deflowering." (*rolling my eyes*).

Again, the link to her site is: Joyfully Jay. So, what are you waiting for? Oh, you're already a Follower? Well... call, e-mail, or drag your friends to her site, have them check it out, and ask them sweetly to become a Follower!

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My Love of Tattooed Men

We interrupt this blog to bring you a special bulletin.

Since we started the week off pimping another blog (Click here to get to a wonderful review blog: Joyfully Jay), we just can't stop ourselves now.

Every Tuesday, Babes in Boyland has a special feature called, Tattoo Tuesday. Have I ever mentioned I have a "thing" for men with tats? I'm planning on getting at tat myself for my 21st birthday, so I have time to decide the perfect design.

Well, today, over at Babes in Boyland, they have a post called, Tattoo Tuesday: The Epic NSFW Edition. Just be forewarned that the pics are NSFW, meaning be sure you're in a setting where you have some privacy. Not recommended if you're at work or in a public library!

Now I'm headed back there to see if I can take my eyes away from certain parts of the guy's anatomy and study some tats I might want for myself!

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