Romance Writer Witchhunt

My parents are both from Wyoming Valley, and I was born there. I still have a lot of family in that area, including my grandmother and a ton of aunts, uncles and cousins. Though I haven’t lived in the area since I was a young child, I still feel very attached to it.

So it was with great disappointment that I heard about this recent witch hunt of romance author Judy Mays, who, under her real name, has been a high school English teacher in the area for more than twenty-five years. Mays, by all reports (including the one that is outing her!), keeps her writing life completely separate from her work in the school, and the appalling muckrakers who sought to have her disciplined/fired had to perform amazing feats of Google-fu to link her image to an obscure You Tube video of Mays in author guise being interviewed at a romance writer’s conference.

The predominant theme of the unbalanced and potentially slanderous “news segment” is how the woman’s secret profession that was unknown to anyone before these brain donors dug it up might somehow be corrupting the children. That’s right — the point of the news segment is pretty much: “No one knew about this until we went and found it out and are now telling you, and now that everyone knows, well, the kids are going to be affected by this knowledge!”

Disgusting. Appalling. In the news segment, one concerntroll parent even indulges in the baseless and highly damaging accusation that the teacher is a pedophile. There is not a single positive or even neutral person quoted in the entire segment, just a group of parents who have banded together (the segment features shots of them sitting together in one’s backyard, presumably plotting their next dastardly move against an innocent public school teacher) in outrage over something that has not the slightest effect on their children or the teacher’s ability to teach them.

Guess what, folks? Mays is fully aware that the writing of sexy, *adult* novels is not an appropriate topic of conversation for the children in her class. That’s why she never mentioned it to the children in her class! She took a pen name! She kept her day job and her writing work COMPLETELY SEPARATE. If you’re so worried about what will happen to your kids now that they know their English teacher has written about sex, then WHY DID YOU MAKE SURE THEY KNEW?

If any Valley folks are reading this, please write to WNEP and complain about their horrible reporting. The reporter’s name is Kena Vernon and she definitely needs to learn a few things about the difference between journalism and muckraking. You can also support Ms. Mays on Facebook, or better yet (if you’re an adult) you can buy one of her books.

I write fiction under my real name, but I know many authors who do not for personal reasons just like this. They might wish to separate their writing persona from their daily life, either to protect their jobs or their families, or, as in Ms. Mays’ case, the young minds of her academic charges. Shouldn’t she be applauded for managing to hold two challenging jobs at once and not letting one distract her from another? Shouldn’t she be held up as a shining example of an industrious American worker?

Keep it up, Miss Mays. You just got yourself at least one new reader.