About This Book
he Lesson of the Empty Chairs is a collection of stories that honors the teachers and heroes that guided the author through the most challenging moments in his life. The book stands as a testament to a faith journey where drag queens are ministers and the altar the dance floor of a gay club. Each chapter stands as an independent story focusing on how some souls discover the light by befriending the dark.
As a gay medium, Brian seeks to honor how the freaks of this world and the unacceptably gorgeous souls the world may judge have a spiritual journey worth honoring and celebrating. He shares how a leather daddy teaching him to kiss was one of his first lessons in witnessing those in grief and another story of how a sponsor in a twelve step program showed him how to pray to a God he could not understand. Brian speaks of needing to reject the God of his childhood to see the grace possible in the eyes of another God with heels.
You may, at first glance, think he is a religious person. If you get through the first chapter where he sees the universal energy of all beings when he is projectile vomiting on a ride called the Gravitron in his early teens, you'll soon understand he is a truth teller seeking only to remind those most forgotten or left out in every mainstream church their lives matter.
He honors his greatest teachers by telling the stories of their impact on his journey, and he addresses controversial topics with a compassion and clarity seldom offered. His sincerity and vulnerability paint a picture of a hopeful future our queer children will hopefully create. For now, this book will invite all of us to reconsider our own stories and allow the hardest truths of those tales to stand taller than our fears.
If Brian is willing to share in this way, when can we also know the light of God's love shines on every one of her children? How different of a world would we inhabit if we came to know this simple truth?
