Hello, all! I’d like start by offering my heartfelt congratulations to JMS Books on an impressive decade of continued growth and success, with my sincere hopes that there are many more decades to follow. Félicitations, JMS! Tous mes compliments.
From what I’ve seen in the indie publication industry, there is no guaranteed recipe for success. It takes a huge amount of willpower, determination, and drive, not to mention a whole lot of luck. But it also takes empathy, consideration, and a strong desire to take on someone else’s dream as your own. It means putting faith in another person’s vision, and offering them support in fulfilling those goals. It also means doing everything possible to gently guide and develop those ideas into something better than they started out as. That is no small feat, and one that I feel is worthy of my respect and appreciation. Thank you, JMS.
2020 has been a year of heartache, loss, confusion, and frustration. As we’ve done so many times before, our community has rallied together to offer up all the support and love that we can. Yet for every step forward, there seems to have been three steps backward. Be it illness, riots, or just the sheer lack of respect humanity can have for one another, it feels like the wheels of progress aren’t just grinding slowly, but that they might have slipped into reverse. In 1969 the LGTBQ+ community stood up and said they weren’t going to take any more of the bullshit and brought the fight for inclusion and human rights out into the streets. It’s been five decades since then, yet there are still people and communities who are fighting for their right to exist or to love.
And that right there, beyond the effort put into a business and on a much higher level of expectation than mere profit, is the true importance of what distributors like JMS are doing for our community. Because while every story — no, every word — that we write with respect to romance under the LGBTQ+ umbrella is one more step at normalizing love beyond the borders of cis expectations, every one that actually gets published shines a spotlight on the validity of the fact that love truly is love, regardless of whom loves who or how their parts fit together. It reminds the world that we all deserve the love we need to make us feel whole because it sets our stories up there alongside all the other ones, where they belong. It cements the idea that intimacy between consenting adults comes in many different examples of desire — and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Our stories, our love, and our experiences are beautiful. Thank you, JMS, for giving our community a platform to not only display and explore the brilliance of the entire rainbow, but to share it with others who feel the same way that we do.
Happy anniversary, JMS! Bonne chance pour l’avenir!
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