His name is Christopher Rice. And, yes, he’s gay.

A successful author and strong advocate for gay issues (he has a column in the Advocate and has been honored by many associations for his work in the gay and lesbian community), the now 27-year-old Rice lives in West Hollywood, where he’s busy writing, reading, and after a three year marriage, back on the dating scene.

We caught up with Rice on a recent hot, summer Los Angeles day to hear about the trials and tribulations of being an openly gay best-selling author.

AfterElton.com: Tell us about Light Before Day.
Christopher Rice: It was the first book I’d written in the first person. And it was also the first book that had a gay main character and not a straight female counterpart. It was a lot more difficult to write. The mystery was more complex. I was consciously trying to write in the style of Raymond Chandler. The first person was incredibly challenging. I thought it would be easier and it wasn’t. It’s almost like if I had it to do over again, which I don’t, I don’t think I’d attempt that complicated a mystery. Adam Murphy, the main character, had to hear and see everything. That said, I’m not sure it was a bad thing.

AE: Was it hard pitching a book with a gay main character?
CR: It’s interesting how it happened. I had signed a contract with the same publisher who did my first two novels to write a sequel to The Snow Garden. In publishing, if you have any sort of track record, you can pitch in the most general way. You can say “Oh, it’s a mystery and there’s a fire,” and they’ll do it. I imagined the sequel to take place in Southeast Asian. It was a great excuse to go there. But I didn’t get to go because my dad got very sick. If you’re going to write a sequel to The Snow Garden, it’s clear that a character has to leave the country. But I’m not good at writing places I haven’t been.

So I said I need to write a different book. I flew to New York and gave the publisher a short story that I had published in Genre magazine. It was very gay. It wasn’t a mystery. It was about a gay man living in West Hollywood who becomes obsessed with the idea that there’s a serial killer out there. It’s about his loneliness and obsessions. The publisher said “Yes,” but it was not the book he expected. The response was “This is your gayest book yet.” And it did not sell as well as the other two.

AE: Because of the gay lead?
CR: I think that had a lot to do with it. And Miramax, my publisher, was in complete turmoil. But, I wasn’t surprised.

AE: Will you then continue to write gay characters in your work?
CR: Absolutely. That will always be there. The idea that I toy with is that if I wrote something that had no gay characters in it, I might do it under a pen name, so as not to confuse my readers. That’s nicely ironic. I have ideas for high concept thrillers with no gay characters and I wonder if it should be under a different persona. I wouldn’t want my readers to be cheated.

AE: Would you say your audience is primarily gay?
CR: I think the majority are in the gay community. But gay men are not enough to put a book on the New York Times best seller list. So, who put those books on there is anybody’s guess. I get lots of correspondence from straight women.

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