Talking with Heidi Belleau and Comment to WIN!

Hello hello! I’m Heidi Belleau, and welcome to the Riptide Books “Straight Shooter” blog tour! Straight Shooter is the third (and final?) novel in my Rear Entrance Video series, and is the story of roommate Austin, a homophobic hockey player with a kinky secret . . . and the Dominant porn star who helps him get his act together. For the next two weeks, I’ll be hopping blog to blog giving you an inside look at the novel . . . and also giving away a prize! Read on for details! Thanks to Dawn’s Reading Nook and to all of you for tuning in!

Today on the tour, I’m talking humiliation kink!

When I was planning Rear Entrance Video, I knew I wanted one book between co-workers (Christian and Max), one between clerk and customer (Bobby and Dylan), and one between a clerk and a porn star. I also knew I wanted to write a story about a hockey jock, preferably one that played on the (Gay For You) trope. I also knew I wanted one BDSM-themed story in the series.

My initial pitch to Riptide was this: “Douchebro typical porn consumer falls for porn star. He’s a sub whose perfect Dom happens to be a guy. Part of the appeal is the humiliation of performing sex acts with a man when he’s straight.”

Basically, I wanted to write a GFY novel from a BDSM angle, where someone who identifies as heterosexual falls for another man, but only in the context of a BDSM relationship. Austin has a kink for being humiliated and demeaned (more on that later), and due to his specific hang-ups, being dominated by a man is extra potent to him sexually. He doesn’t count on falling in love or becoming 24/7 with another man.

So what’s “humiliation kink”, you ask? Well, just like some people are fulfilled by service (sexual or otherwise), and others are fulfilled by receiving physical pain, people with humiliation kinks specifically derive pleasure and fulfillment from the pain of being humiliated. Being demeaned by your dom verbally: called names and insulted, sometimes using racial, homophobic, or ethnic slurs. Being treated as furniture or a toilet or a subhuman animal. Giving up your right to privacy. Doing embarrassing or private things in public or with an audience.

It’s not right for everybody, but just like with people who enjoy a good paddling, sometimes what from the outside can seem like pain actually—between consenting partners—is actually a source of pleasure and satisfaction.

I’m not talking about verbal or emotional abuse, of course, any more than pain-play is physical abuse. In BDSM consent is the name of the game, and humiliation play is only play so long as both parties are safe, sane and consenting. Nobody should ever put you down without your permission, your blessing, or your enthusiastic participation.

For Austin, who spends so much time and energy trying to live up to the hockey player ideal, having a loving Dom humiliate him with his worst fears—not being a real man, not being straight, not being virile and powerful and in control—gives him a kind of freedom from himself and society that he’s never found before. The deeper he falls into submission, the safer and more free he feels. His notion of masculinity and how he tries to perform it is strangling him, but with Liam he doesn’t have to play that part. The exact opposite, in fact: Liam forces him to confront and become everything he can’t let himself seem in public.

Of course, with that sense of freedom and safety comes a comfort he’s never known before . . . the kind of comfort that he might just want permanently.

About Straight Shooter

This macho jock has a crooked little secret.

College hockey player Austin Puett is in trouble. Unless he starts treating his flamboyantly gay roommate with respect, he’ll lose his room and his job at Rear Entrance Video. But Austin’s got a not-so-straight secret of his own: nothing turns him on more than insults implying he’s gay—even though he’s definitely not!—and all his old coping methods have stopped working.

Pure desperation drives him to rent a Mischievous Pictures porn flick about straight men tricked into servicing Puck, a male dominant. Instead of letting off steam, though, it just leaves him craving more, more, more, and suddenly, Austin finds himself at Mischievous Pictures Studios for an audition. After all, you can be Gay For Pay and still be straight . . . right?

But meeting Liam Williams, the real person behind Puck, confuses Austin even more. Liam really seems to like him as a person, and Austin likes him back. And while Gay For Pay’s okay, what does it make Austin if he still wants Liam when the cameras aren’t rolling?

About the Author

Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centered on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) Her writing reflects everything she loves: diverse casts of characters, a sense of history and place, equal parts witty and filthy dialogue, the occasional mythological twist, and most of all, love—in all its weird and wonderful forms. She also writes queer-flavoured M/F as Heloise Belleau.

Chat with her on twitter using the handle @HeidiBelleau.

Browse her website at HeidiBelleau.com or HeloiseBelleau.com.

Check out her books on Goodreads.

Follow her Facebook and Tumblr accounts.

Or contact her using good ole-fashioned email: heidi.heloise.belleau @ gmail.com

Contest

Comment to win! I’m giving away ebooks one and two of the Rear Entrance Video series (that’s “Apple Polisher” and “Wallflower”) to not one, but two lucky commenters on this tour! All you gotta do is leave a comment on this post with a way to contact you (and if your preferred method of contact is email, make sure to put that in the body of the comment, not just in the blog’s form—I can’t see that info! Each comment counts for another entry in the draw, so be sure and follow the entire tour. Entries close at midnight, Eastern Time, on April 21, and winners will be chosen on April 23rd. Contest is valid worldwide.