Why I Didn't Write "A Military Romance" — I Wrote DADT

A lot of readers describe this series as "military romance," and that's fair as far as it goes — there are officers, ships, uniforms, all of it. But that label always undersells what I was actually trying to do. I didn't want to write a love story that happened to be set in the military. I wanted to write a love story that could only have existed the way it did because of a specific, real, legally enforced silence — one I lived through myself.

The Timeline Is Real, On Purpose

The series doesn't float in a vague "military-ish" past. It moves through an actual, specific timeline: starting in 1990, before Don't Ask, Don't Tell even existed — when being gay wasn't something you carefully managed, it was something that could get you discharged outright, no policy required. Then through the DADT years themselves, when survival meant a very particular kind of vigilance. Then into the world after repeal, where the rules changed but the habits built over decades of hiding didn't disappear just because the law did.

I built the books around that real chronology deliberately. Alex and Patrick meet in 1990. Their relationship has to survive the actual legal and cultural conditions of each of those distinct periods — not a single flattened "back then," but three genuinely different eras of risk, each with its own rules for how carefully you had to live.

Why the Distinction Matters

Here's what gets lost when a story is set in "the military" generically instead of in this specific history: DADT wasn't one thing. Before it existed, the danger was blunt — any suspicion could end a career instantly. Under DADT, the danger became more psychological — you were technically "tolerated" as long as you actively participated in your own erasure, which is its own particular kind of damage. After repeal, the danger didn't vanish; it just changed shape, into the much longer project of unlearning years of self-protective instinct.

Writing all three, accurately, mattered to me because I lived versions of all three myself. I served through parts of this history. I know what it felt like to calculate a sentence before I said it out loud, to memorize which words were safe in which rooms. I also know what it felt like when the law finally changed and I realized the fear didn't leave with it — that the habit of hiding had become part of how I moved through the world, and unlearning it took far longer than the policy did to repeal.

What I Wanted Readers to Understand

I didn't write this series to make a political point, even though the politics are real and unavoidable in it. I wrote it because I wanted people who never lived through this — and honestly, some people who did — to understand what it actually costs to love someone inside a system engineered to make that love invisible. Not abstractly. Specifically. The exact rules changing under your feet, year by year, and two people trying to build something real anyway, inside whatever version of the danger they happened to be living through.

That's why it's not just "a military romance" to me. It's a record of a specific, lived history, wrapped around a love story that could only have unfolded exactly the way it did because of when and where it happened.