Becoming the Monster: Five Years of Writing Monsters in the Closet

Five years. Five years of ink and blood, of rage and tenderness, of peeling back my own skin to see what lurked beneath. Five years of becoming the monster they told me I was.

Monsters in the Closet isn’t just a poetry collection—it’s a confession, a love letter, a battle cry. It’s what happens when you spend a lifetime being told your desire is unnatural, your love is wrong, your very existence something to be whispered about behind closed doors. So I cracked those doors open and let the monsters inside.

This book was born in the midnight hours, scrawled in notebooks stained with whiskey and longing. It grew in the shadow of queer history, where men like me were burned, buried, and forgotten. It took shape in the pulse of underground clubs, in the pages of forbidden love stories, in the bite of every sermon that tried to tell me I was broken.

But I am not broken. Neither are you.

These poems are full of vampires and wolves, ghosts and gods, all of them craving touch, fighting for love, refusing to be erased. They are me. They are you. They are every queer soul who has ever been told to dim their own light.

Five years of writing this book taught me one thing: If they call us monsters, we might as well be legendary.

– Ryder