Authors of Erotic Romance

I recently discovered this great blog called Teach Me Tonight: Musings on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective.  There’s some really interesting reading over there, and I was fascinated by the discussions about gender and romance novels.

It was a couple years ago when I read my first m/m romance.  By accident.  I read the blurb on the publisher’s website, but the names were sort of androgynous and, apparently, I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the pronouns.

Needless to say, a few pages into the story I was a bit confused.  I had been reading romance novels my whole life, and this was not what I had been expecting.

But by the time I had finished that book I realized that, regardless of the gender of the characters, it was exactly the story I had been expecting.  It was a love story.  It was a romance.  And with that first book, I had discovered my new favorite romance sub-genre — both to read and to write.

Now it seems completely obvious to me that a romance is a romance, but there’s still a surprising amount of controversy surrounding the idea.

Over the past couple years there’s been discussion within RWA (Romance Writers of America) about “the definition of romance”, and one of the main debates is whether or not m/m romance qualifies.  The board of my local RWA chapter actually voted not to post the cover of my m/m story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, on the chapter website.  (The resulting brouhaha led to all book covers being taken down from their site.) 

Romantic Times BOOKreviews Magazine, THE source for information about romance novels, refuses to review m/m romances.  This has been a sort of hush-hush policy, but it was forced into the spotlight when Laura Baumbach was told she could not put out promotional material for the ManLoveRomance at this year’s RT Convention. (You can read about that HERE.)

I understand that, decades ago — in the days of the “bodice ripper” novels, the idea of women reading a m/m romance would be shocking.  This isn’t the 1960s.  A lot has changed in fifty years, and gay characters in love are now pervasive in our popular culture.

Old ideas die hard, and change, for many people, is scary — but you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.  M/m romances are here and, yes, they’re queer. 

Get used to it.

– Jeanne

www.jeannelaws.blogspot.com

* The title of this blog is a quote from the paper, “Re-writing the Romance”, by Rosalind Gill and Elena Herdieckerhoff.  It’s a really interesting piece — I recommend checking it out.