Chuck Tingle American Writer From Home of Truth

Early life

Chuck Tingle is a pseudonym, and very little about the writer's real identity has been confirmed. A photograph once circulated as a portrait of Tingle turned out to come from a stock photo website. At public appearances Tingle stays anonymous by wearing sunglasses and a pink sack over the head, with the words "love is real" written on it in marker.

The biography Tingle presents is deliberately playful. It gives a birthplace of Home of Truth, Utah, a ghost town founded in 1933 as a religious commune and abandoned in 1977, a doctorate in holistic massage from DeVry University, which does not award such a degree, a taekwondo grandmaster title, and a home in Billings, Montana. Wikidata records the birthplace as Home of Truth, but the details should be read as part of the persona, not as verified fact.

Career

Tingle began self-publishing erotic fiction through Amazon's ebook service in 2014, with the first titles including My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass, Pounded by President Bigfoot and Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker. The stories belong to a niche that is often described as monster erotica. Their partners include dinosaurs, imaginary creatures, personified objects such as a jet plane or a stack of donuts, and abstract ideas. Many titles refer to the news of the day, with sound-alike names for public figures, and others refer to earlier titles in the series.

Tingle calls the stories "Tinglers". The couples are usually men who appear to be cisgender, though some stories include bisexual, lesbian and trans characters. The writer stresses that every encounter is consensual and that each story ends happily with a moral about love and togetherness. Covers are made by Tingle in Photoshop and usually pair a photograph of a muscular, bare-chested man with an image of the creature or object at the centre of the story. Most books are self-published, mainly as ebooks but also in paperback and audio, while some titles are sold through Macmillan and Tor Publishing Group.

In 2016 the short story Space Raptor Butt Invasion was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. The nomination came from a voting campaign by a group called the Rabid Puppies, which Tingle rejected publicly, calling it the work of "devils". The story did not win. A second Hugo finalist place followed in 2017, in the Best Fan Writer category, and again no win. Each outcome was answered with a new book that made a joke of it.

In 2019 Tingle was one of the guests at a benefit livestream hosted by the YouTuber Hbomberguy for Mermaids, a British charity supporting transgender young people. Tingle has also spoken in support of transgender rights. From 2020 a series of Harry Potter parodies about a character named Trans Wizard Harriet Porber appeared, written in response to the views of J. K. Rowling on transgender topics. In 2022 Tingle bought the web domain governorabbott.com and used it to protest the policies of the Texas governor Greg Abbott affecting transgender people.

Tingle has worked in other formats as well. In 2016 the game designer Zoe Quinn announced an adventure game with Tingle, and a Kickstarter campaign for it, titled Kickstarted in the Butt, raised over $85,000 from 2,450 backers. As of 2026 the game has not been released. That year Tingle also created TrumpDebateFacts.com during the presidential campaign. A podcast made with the producers of Welcome to Night Vale, which presents audiobook versions of Tingle's novellas read by guests, began in 2018, and a podcast co-hosted with McKenzie Goodwin, My Friend Chuck, ran from 2019 to 2020.

In July 2022 Tor Books signed Tingle to a two-book deal with its Nightfire horror imprint. The first book, Camp Damascus, appeared in July 2023, reached number 32 on the USA Today bestseller list and deals with religious extremism and conversion camps. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. The second, Bury Your Gays, came out in July 2024 and won the 2025 Locus Award for Best Horror Novel, and was also a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Speculative Fiction.

Recognition

Tingle's honours include the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel in 2025 for Bury Your Gays. Nominations include the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 2016 for Space Raptor Butt Invasion, and the Bram Stoker Award for Novel in 2023 for Camp Damascus.