John Preston, born in Medfield, Massachusetts, was an author of gay erotica and an editor of gay nonfiction anthologies. Preston was among the first writers to popularize the genre of safe sex stories, editing a safe sex anthology entitled Hot Living in 1985. He helped to found the AIDS Project of Southern Maine. In the late 1980s, he discovered that he himself was HIV positive. Some of his last essays, found in his nonfiction anthologies and in his posthumous collection Winter's Light, describe his struggle to come emotionally to terms with a disease that had already killed many of his friends and fellow writers.