Let us explain. Throughout our reading we noticed an interesting trajectory in your protagonists’ relation to you, the author. We have a straight white male, a straight white woman, a gay Thai American man, a wealthy white man, and a person of undecidable identity. We’re not questioning your right to write from these perspectives; the problem isn’t appropriation, it’s candor. Not that such a scale really exists, but one could roughly plot these stories along an axis of increasing marginalization, the idea presumably being to consider the theme of rejection from different perspectives. Viewed less charitably, it could be read as a way to head off certain dreaded allegations of self-pity and navel-gazing; an attempt at misdirection, as you smuggle your own hang-ups into theirs, while scoring brownie points for imaginative empathy. However, we believe that these distancing attempts only end up drawing attention to you, in a way that feels embarrassingly unintentional. (Our speculations about your authorial intent might strike you as unfair and out-of-bounds, but this isn’t lit crit, it’s feedback. Fair or not, readers do think about this stuff, and as much as it seems you’d like to control the book’s context, no writer truly gets that luxury, even while alive.)