Is it normal for a nerdy little gayboy to fall head over heels in love with the high school football hero? Didn't all of us gay kids have our crushes? Maybe it wasn't even a real-life person. Perhaps it was a movie star or singer or TV actor. For me, I was ga-ga over Luke Skywalker. And of course we cannot forget Shaun Cassidy, Michael J Fox, and Ricky Shroedder. I remember leafing through the pages of Tiger Beat magazine in the supermarket, wishing I wasn't too embarrassed to buy a copy and hating myself for being too honest to shoplift one.

But if you've read Dumb Jock (or even just read about it) you will realize that I did indeed have a wild crush on a real-life football hero when i was in high school. The reality of the situation was that he was only a friend of mine for a few months, during a time when I was helping out by tutoring him through his freshman English grammar class (which he'd flunked the first time around and was re-taking). Being placed in an intimate situation like that, where I was alone with him engaging in one-on-one dialogue, it was literally impossible for me not to feel something for him. After all he had a muscular and toned body, a gorgeous smile, perfect teeth, hair to die for (center part and feathered back of course), and he always smelled real good. Yeah, I was crazy bout him.

He wasn't gay. Still isn't, in fact. I just re-met him on facebook and he's happily married. When he heard about my book he was a bit freaked out, wondering why I'd harbored this secret crush on him all this time. LOL! No, it's not like that... really, I swear.

Jock/nerd love stories are an iconic theme in gay literature. If you've ever seen that crazy movie called Another Gay Movie, they poke fun at this subtext with two such characters. The jock is always dumb but gorgeous, and the nerd is a little cutie who just needs some advice on haircuts and choosing eyeglass frames. In gay porn, it is a very hot combo, I must say. I can't really think of many real-life examples of where this pairing has ever worked out though.

So when and if you do read the book and wonder about who the real Brett Willson is, the short answer is that he is only in the book. In real life, that gay superhero doesnt exist. He was the fantasy of a fourteen year old nerd. Now here I am a forty-something gay nerd, and I finally decided to turn this fantasy into a story. The purpose never was to reveal my secret crush. I've had a billion of them over the years. The point was that it's cool to imagine a world where such a possibility actually exists that a buff jock like that might actually notice a geek like me.

And one more thing I might add: When the real-life Bret and I became friends (be that friendship ever so fleeting as it was) he offered me an assurance. He swore a promise to me that he'd always protect me. If anyone ever gave me any hassles, I was to simply come to him and he'd take care of it. Nobody would ever mess with me again as long as he was around. Well, when he said such an awesome thing to a guy like me at my age, he might as well have been french kissing me in front of the whole school. I was head over heels.

So what I'd say in response to the real Brett Willson who asked me about this crush is simply this: If you didn't realize the possiblity of a nerdy little gayboy like me falling in love with a hot-looking star athlete like you, then perhaps you really were a Dumb Jock.