How To Burn A Rainbow

How To Burn A Rainbow - My Gay Marriage Didn’t Make Me Whole, My Divorce Did.

It’s not about gay divorce. It’s about a human who went through a human experience.

When my divorce started in 2017, I went looking for a book on gay divorce. There wasn’t one. Which I guess shouldn’t have surprised me, we’d only just been allowed to marry.

But all the other books written by heterosexuals didn’t ring true for me. I wasn’t dealing with the battle of the sexes. Which, make no mistake, is the basis of so much divorce law.

Elizabeth Gilbert in Berlin and Dan Savage in Seattle

Plus they didn’t speak to the kinds of loss I was feeling; the loss of equality I had in the straight world, the pariah status I was given by my community for letting down the cause, and the loss of understanding - no gay man I knew at the time had been through what I was just embarking on.

Early on I decided to make my divorce my crisis of identity, that I would use this horrific event to become the human I always hoped I would be. And it worked.

Which is why HTBAR has found so many fans who aren’t in the community and not going through a divorce. They’re seeing themselves in the pages, because they’re humans going through it, just like you.

I went from a life that I had built with all the trappings of success; big job, big pay packet, big house, husband, lots of friends. I chased every rainbow I was told to, followed every script. And yet I was miserable. Little did I know that before the journey was over, I was going to be sleeping on an air mattress in a former squat in Berlin with no money left, no visas, and no end of my divorce in sight.

I published May 2024 and toured HTBAR through the States. What a ride! I met heroes like Elizabeth Gilbert and Dan Savage. I spoke at bookstores and LGBTQ+ community centres. I was on four national breakfast TV shows and countless podcasts.