Becoming Yourself
Sometimes growing up means learning to accept what has always been true — and then deciding what to do with that truth.
Behind the Chronicles
About B. Mac
Stories about becoming yourself, finding your people, and building a life that feels like home.
Why Bear Houston?
A Question That Wouldn’t Go Away
Bear began with a question that stayed with me: What would it be like to grow up knowing that some important part of you did not fit the expectations of the place you called home?
That question became David “Bear” Houston, a big, gentle high school football lineman from a small Kansas town. From the outside, Bear seems to fit comfortably into the world around him. He is an athlete, a dependable friend, a devoted son, and someone people expect to follow a familiar path. Inside, however, he is trying to understand a truth that feels much harder to share.
That tension became the starting point for High School Lineman. But once Bear reached the end of high school, I realized his story was only beginning.
Growing up is not a single act of self-discovery. We keep changing as our world grows. We leave home. We meet people who challenge us. We fall in love. We make mistakes. We discover talents we did not know we possessed. Friendships become families, and the identities we thought were settled become more complicated.
That is the journey I wanted Bear to take.
Why the 1990s?
The Dates Are Deliberate
Bear is eighteen in 1994 because I was eighteen in 1994.
I wanted his college years to unfold in a world I could remember rather than reconstruct entirely from research. Eastern Missouri University is fictional, but much of its texture comes from memory: residence halls and art classrooms, campus routines, computer labs, friendships formed in hallways, and the strange combination of freedom and uncertainty that comes with leaving home for the first time. I changed names, locations, and circumstances, but the feelings underneath them are real.
The mid-1990s were also a fascinating moment to come of age. Email was beginning to enter everyday student life. Web browsers were new. The internet was hinting at what it might become, but smartphones and constant online connection were still far in the future.
Relationships moved differently. You called someone and hoped they were home. You left messages. You wrote letters. You met people because you were standing beside them in class, sitting across from them in a dining hall, or somehow ended up at the same meeting.
For a young gay man, that world could feel especially isolating. There were fewer visible examples of the lives we might someday build, and finding other people like ourselves often required taking frighteningly personal risks.
That makes the decade more than nostalgia to me. It shapes the way Bear learns to trust, love, communicate, and belong.
The stories I want to tell
Belonging Is Built in Small Moments
The series is interested in identity and struggle, but just as much in friendship, humor, creativity, desire, brotherhood, and queer joy.
Finding Your People
Friends, mentors, lovers, brothers, and unexpected allies can become the people who help us understand who we are.
Chosen Family
Family can surprise us, change with us, and sometimes be something we build deliberately one relationship at a time.
Quiet Turning Points
A conversation in a truck. Someone sitting beside you when you are overwhelmed. A professor who sees potential. A house that begins to feel like home.
I want Bear’s life to become larger as he becomes more comfortable inhabiting it.
The Bear Houston Chronicles
A World That Grows With Bear
What begins on a football field in small-town Kansas expands into college classrooms, art studios, fraternity houses, radio booths, friendships, first loves, and the complicated work of building an adult life.
The chronicles grow alongside Bear, revealing new characters, places, and relationships as his world expands from one book to the next.