For the record, this brings me no pleasure to write. I had hoped and prayed that Adam Gaffen, who is a self-proclaimed writer of LGBTQ+ science fiction, mostly sapphic in nature, would be the one writing this and not me, but his attempt at it has been tepid, and I don’t believe he understands the gravity of the situation or the harm he’s done. And I’ve rewritten this about a dozen times since then.

But as the intensity of this week continues, I can’t sit back on my hands any longer. (I will be using he/him pronouns as that is how I’ve seen Adam identify.)

I first met Adam in January when he signed up for my newsletter and responded to one of my automation sequences. We live in the same general area and started talking about conventions where we could sell books. During this exchange of emails, (3 separate times) he referenced another pen name he writes under.

AC Adams

Adam Gaffen is AC Adams.

This may be news to some of you, and I’m sorry. I really wanted him to do a better job of explaining what had happened and why. But his explanation leaves some very large holes.

At first, when Adam contacted me and shared his pen name, I didn’t think too much of it. I have several cis-male friends who write sapphic, and I have zero issue with that. I wouldn’t be publishing without one of those amazing friends. I also have three pen names myself, and understand the desire to keep genres separate, marketing separate, and to write under a pseudonym in order to protect myself. This was not a red flag for me.

It wasn’t until much later, when I finally looked at AC’s bio on Amazon, that I realized what I should have been more in tune with earlier. The bio has a stock picture of a woman and states very clearly that she is a lesbian, wife, professor of English and lives in Boston. I know none of this to be true.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

The sapphic community is small. In fact, the LGBTQ+ writing community is small, and when I started publishing ten years ago, it was even smaller. We all know each other in some way, and our readers know each other as well. We are a family, and we all love each other and take care of each other.

What happened is this. AC/Adam started posting an obnoxious amount in many different Facebook groups. He circumvented the self-promo rule in many Facebook groups by posting as AC promoting Adam or vice versa. He has wheedled his way into promotions for “debut authors” when he isn’t one. This is incredibly annoying and somewhat harmful but it’s not the devastating part.

The devastating part is the appropriation of an identity.

Adam is appropriating the lesbian identity. He has stolen our stories as queer people and used them for marketing purposes. His goal is to sell books and make money, not be true to an identity he hasn’t even taken the time to understand. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a cis-woman in this world, even though he claims to. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be queer and have to fight for our rights.

He has manipulated authors by befriending them as AC Adams, a person who doesn’t exist, playing with their emotions. He has manipulated authors by befriending them as AC and Adam, pretending to be two different people and not revealing the fact that he is one in the same. He has done significant harm to the pansexual/bisexual community with his understanding of our identity, which is incorrect.

Adam/AC has betrayed all of us.

Adam would not have come forward with this information if I hadn’t emailed him and told him enough was enough. He was caught, red handed, appropriating and exploiting us. And that is the only reason he broke his silence on what he’s doing.

I won’t stand for it, especially during Pride month. I won’t let him continue to use women and queer people for his own advantages. And I won’t support him being a part of the sapphic community any longer. He is making money off the very backs of the people he exploited, and it has to be stopped.

His plan is to continue his pen name and earn money. He changed his Amazon bio but not the picture, still appropriating the female experience. Adam Gaffen is a middle aged cis-het white American male who has zero experience with being a minority in this country. And he continues to use his privilege as a cis-het male to further exploit us for his own gain.

He doesn’t understand the full extent of what he did wrong. Or just how harmful this is for this community.

I’m a bisexual/pansexual woman married to a cis-het male, and I have had to fight to keep my place in this sapphic community daily. I get questioned frequently about whether or not I belong here because of my experience or lack of experience, and to have a cis-het male come in and pretend so he can avoid that? So he can make a few bucks off our backs?

No.

It’s wrong.

It’s fraud.

It’s disgusting.

I’m writing this post because people deserve to know the truth. And because he deleted AC’s socials and only sent it to her newsletter, and so many people are unaware of what happened and the full extent of the lies and manipulation.

We can’t heal if we don’t know what we’re healing from. This harms so many people, from those he was friends with, those he worked with, those he planned to work with in the future. It harms his readers, my readers, all sapphic readers. It harms every author who contemplates writing and publishing a book.

Our community has built itself on being authentic to who we are. All we want is for the world to be exactly who they were born to be. Being an author is such an isolated career, that making friends with other authors is something we desperately crave.

That’s all Adam had to do from the beginning. Be Adam. Use a pen name, or not, but be himself.

And he didn’t.

And I won’t stand for being trampled on again.

I’m hurt. I’m exhausted. I’m angry. I have cried more tears than I care to count this week, and I have spent more time in emails and on social media than I needed to while I dealt with this situation. A situation that I shouldn’t have to deal with. I have wasted more time on the “plight” of this cis-het male than he deserved. It’s not my responsibility to hold others accountable to their actions. It’s not my responsibility as a queer woman to point out to an “ally” how he’s being anything but.

So there it is. Fraud. Hurt. Anger. Broken trust.

Sincerely & Frustrated,

AJ