My First Byline: William Dameron
Author and freelancer
What is your current job?
During the day, I am a Senior Director of IT for one of the top global economic consulting firms headquartered in Boston, MA. I train employees on the cyber security dangers of social engineering. At night (and very early in the mornings) I pursue my passion for writing. I am currently working on my fourth book, a novel and co-writing a screenplay with a producer based on my first book, a memoir titled, The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing, & Coming Out.
What was your first byline?
My first byline was in Huffpost, which was then called The Huffington Post. It was unpaid, though I told everyone I was being paid in exposure. As writers, we deserve to be paid for our very real work with very real money, not just platitudes.
What was your first real job in journalism?
My first real job in journalism was also unpaid. I created a personal blog called The Authentic Life, which recounted weekly dispatches of my life after my wife of twenty years asked me in a Walmart Parking lot if I was gay. My reply to her was, “I don’t want to be.” What followed was the end of one marriage and the beginning of another to a man with three children. We have five kids between us. There were very few accounts that I could find at that time (2008) about coming out of a straight marriage and coming into a same sex marriage, because there was so much shame and stigma attached to these stories. I was determined to forge a path for others to follow.
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How did you get it?
HuffPost picked up one of my personal blog posts and published it for Father’s Day, titled “My Father, Myself.” I thought this was the pinnacle in my writing journey, and I published many posts in HuffPost about identity, family and coming out later in life, including one essay titled “Falling in Love with my Selfie.” But this was just the beginning. I wanted to be paid for the hard work of writing and sharing extremely personal essays. I became a freelancer.
My first paid byline was in The Boston Globe, an essay titled “Can you, Should You be Consumed with How You Walk,” in their Connections column. Around this same time my HuffPost profile photo was snagged by someone and used in a global catfishing scheme. The photo became enmeshed with the search phrase “Forty-Year-Old White Man,” which was tied to the “Loving my Selfie,” HuffPost article. I have received countless emails from women (and a few men) who have had an online relationship with someone who did not exist, and when they found out they were catfished, they used a reverse image search and found me.
I am keenly aware of the irony. The man who pretended to be someone he is not, became the one others pretended to be. I published an essay in Salon, with the click bait worthy title of “My Face is Catfish Bait,” based on this experience.
Eventually, I reached my publishing nirvana with a Modern Love essay in The New York Times, titled “After 264 Haircuts, a Marriage Ends.” It is one of the most popular Modern Love essays of all time. Christopher Schelling, the person who would become my literary agent read that essay and then found the Salon essay and contacted me. It was a circuitous route, but after two published books, many essays published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Telegraph, The Times, (UK), many others and the sale of the memoir movie rights, it feels like it was meant to be. Everyone’s journey is unique. It is never too late to become who you were meant to be.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
Based on my experience, my advice is that you don’t have to follow a well-worn path. Each step in my journey was taken one at a time, but they built a platform. The other piece of advice I would give is to write what you think you cannot say. When you do, you gain power over the truth. That is publishing gold.
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I was fully captivated by both of Dameron’s books. He’s as good a novelist as he is a memoirist.