When I was in college, many of my friends (men and women) were gay, and at the time going through the painful process of facing that fact. One of my acquaintances was a gay young man. Shortly after I graduated, he came out to his parents. His mother promptly committed suicide and left a note blaming the trauma of finding out her son was homosexual. A true story, unfortunately.

While writing this, I searched the web for statistics on what percentage of otherwise straight men had had at least one homosexual experience during adult life. (The best figure I could get was about 2%, no indication of how many were men in prison, etc.) During this search, I found a truly amazing collection of anti-gay documents and websites, spending pages on ‘proving’ things like gay men are more likely to molest children (not true) or that gay men deliberately choose to be homosexual because they are obsessed with sex (so ridiculous I won’t bother to deny it).

What’s the point? Some readers might question whether a man like Wes, at the age of twenty-eight, would still be in complete denial. In the face of this kind of continued bigotry, and with his tendency to be insecure and to seek approval, I think it’s very believable. I know for a fact that some men (and some women) get married, have kids, and then finally admit their homosexuality in their thirties, forties, or later; many either have affairs behind their spouse’s back or come out, usually leaving spouse and children angry and alienated.

Wes denies that he is gay because he’s terrified of what other people will think of him, and of what he’ll think of himself. He convinces himself that he’s in love with Jen, as a way of hiding the truth from himself, but it’s a love with very little sexual aspect. This happens too, I was the woman in that situation twice in college.

I really can’t say how likely it is that Wes would have made such an effort to keep Eric in his life when he must have sensed the attraction between them, or that he would have had sex with him in the way it happened in the story, and then denied that it meant anything and tried so hard to forget it (but still managed to stay close to Eric). The story’s premise is that he's falling in love with Eric during this time without quite realizing it. Love and sex are powerful impulses; my gut feeling is that it could easily happen.

Anyway, enough social commentary and psychology. I found this a surprisingly fun story to write. It was a challenge, taking a character (Wes), who’s obviously intended to be straight in the series, and putting a very different spin on him. (I could have made him bisexual, but that seemed too easy and is done so often I wanted to avoid it if possible.) The show, of course, played right into my hands, by rather prudishly not letting Wes and Jen kiss, and not having them even admit they love each other until literally the last possible moment.

Eric is another matter, he was never shown being romantically interested in anyone or anything outside of a little teasing and flirting with Taylor in 'Reinforcements from the Future', which is not at all difficult to interpret non-sexually. He did seem quite obsessed with Wes, in a hostile way, and it’s not much of a leap to spin that into frustrated desire. The whole love-at-first-sight thing may seem unlikely, expecially for someone like Eric, but he fell for Wes when he was very young, very inexperienced, and very lonely. It turned out to be one of the rare cases in which infatuation eventually becomes real love. I found it surprisingly easy to write a Wes/Eric romantic relationship, they really are perfect for each other in personality. Hopefully that came through in a believable way.

My beta reader surprised me too, first of all by enjoying the story (she didn’t like the idea of Wes and Eric being gay). Then there was the day we discussed it at lunch. She casually remarked that she had gotten the sneaky little joke/pun I had put in, about Wes coming in the ‘back door’. (In the first chapter, when he and Eric are planning to go into the warehouse to catch the thieves, he says he’ll go around and in the back.) Of course, I hadn’t intended any hidden meaning when I wrote it, and spent the next five minutes cracking up, having discovered she has an even dirtier mind than I do.

The title, of course, is based on Time Ranger, the original Japanese series, a combination of the ‘Wes’ and ‘Eric’ characters’ Ranger names, Time Red and Time Fire. By pure coincidence, the term ‘Red Fire’ also means a combusible compound that burns bright red... I know the story is shamelessly romantic, I very much think of it, especially the ending, as an oldfashioned romance, just like in the movies.

Hope everyone enjoyed reading this. I’m already thinking about a sequel…