With over 20 years of writing and editing under her fingers, Laura Antoniou has been a steady presence in alt-sex communities and sexuality publishing from queer ‘zines to glossy print, from pulp paperbacks to special editions. She’s edited folks as diverse as Dungeons and Dragons inventor Gary Gygax to Leatherman’s Handbook author Larry Townsend; written gay male smut under a dozen names, seen her work translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew and Korean; wrote the only continuing erotic BDSM series with a transman as the romantic hero and then banged out a queer, kinky comedy mystery that found itself nominated for half a dozen awards.

Laura will discuss how to write from the Gay perspective and make it believable.

Take advantage of her. Ask anything!

But don’t expect the usual answers, because this has not been a typical kind of writing career.

Laura Antoniou’s publishing career began when she started writing gay men’s smut to promote safer sex practices during the early 90’s. Emboldened by getting paid to do this, she then edited the groundbreaking “Leatherwomen” series, highlighting tales of kinky women. This was rapidly followed by half a dozen other anthologies and the Marketplace series of erotic BDSM novels which never reached the sales level of the 50 Shades books, but she’s not bitter. Instead, she wrote the 6th, titled The Inheritor, due to come out in 2015. 

In 2013, Laura turned her mind to mysteries and came out with the Rainbow Book Award for Best LGBT Mystery, The Killer Wore Leather. Now that she has achieved almost mainstream success with it, she plans a sequel, to be released via Cleis Press. She is also the editor for Best Lesbian Erotica 2015 and is planning many other writing and editing projects in order to fulfill a lifelong dream of actually making a living on this sort of thing. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter or check her out at www.lantoniou.com