After yet another big blow-up in the M/M romance community, I was feeling pretty down. I blogged about The Incident last week, and you can read that here. I’m not going to rehash it. To be honest, I don’t have a dog in this fight in the sense of being part of the M/M community anyway. That’s the part I want to talk about today because I think it might be important.
A whole lot of people said their piece about The Incident, but this blog post was the one which really struck a chord. Not because I identify with the author’s specific journey (I obviously don’t) but because of this quote:
I started out writing stories as a form of therapy. It was my catharsis, my coping mechanism for processing my grief. I wrote from my core, from my very soul. It was never about appealing to the right demographic in order to sell a lot of copies.
I’ve been turning over in my mind what it is I get out of writing and why I do it. And I’ll be honest, whether or not I want to keep writing and/or keep reviewing books. I even had that conversation with some trusted friends and got some good advice. Namely, figure out why the hell I’m an author.
It was sort of an accident, but now that I’m here, I like it. I write because of the reason above. It provides a way for me to express some of the things I can’t say any other way. (I could write a whole blog post on why it makes me absolutely lose my shit when people demand “perfect” representation even in Own Voices books, but this is the main reason why. If I’m writing on a subject, it’s because there’s something deeply personal to me about it. Go away with expecting my actual life to look like your perfect representation or with telling me you’re “tired of” seeing people deal with issues.)
I don’t have a huge following, and I’m not sure I care. I have an oddly loyal fan group of open-minded straight men. I’ve also got a group of my fellow bi folk who like what I have to offer and a handful of others of various genders and orientations. Interestingly, even though I don’t write explicitly Christian fiction, I also have a following of Christians who like my work. Go figure.
What I’m missing, though, is the feeling of community. The biggest challenge for me has been in promotions. If I were self-publishing, it would be no big deal. But I’m not, which means I owe it to my publisher and colleagues to contribute to the company. That generally means having people review (and not hate) my books, as well as networking and some amount of marketing so I have actual sales.
Thus brings the difficulty: I don’t write romance.
That might not sound like a problem, but trust me, it is. Not writing in a specific genre can be a huge problem. Genre is, essentially, a marketing tool rather than a type of story. However, readers tend to get attached to their preferred genre. Books are categorized by various methods, but one thing I’ve found to be consistently true is that if there is a relationship between two LGBTQIA characters, it’s often classified as “romance” even if it’s also included in other genres. The problem with that is how it doesn’t match reader expectations, even if it’s true in a broad sense. The same thing can happen in any genre, but Romance as a category is one of the largest, regardless of the characters’ genders.
The other problem is in finding reviewers. There are a limited number of blogs reviewing LGBTQIA books in general. The majority of those cater to M/M romance because it’s the largest volume of books. Within the blogs which take other books, many reviewers still prefer or expect romance, even if it’s lesbian or trans or what have you. Even more narrowly, there’s still an expectation that within the context of those books, they will conform to certain standards. If a book’s genre is listed as Romance, then most people want the book to deliver. That’s not entirely unreasonable, but it does get frustrating when it comes to listing books which contain elements of different genres but don’t fit industry expectations.
With LGBTQIA books, there’s an emphasis on the “pairing” even when you make it clear you don’t write romance or that particular novel isn’t a romance. I’ve participated in a lot of promotional blogs/tours, and it’s unbelievable the number of places which want you to fill out data on the two romantic leads regardless of your stated genre. This is not always easy even when the story does involve some type of romantic plot. It’s downright impossible if there’s no pairing or the relationship is complex.
So what the heck do I do with a bisexual literary novel with a romantic plot involving a polyamorous family where there isn’t ménage? Or the one with a pair of men in a primary relationship, both of whom have partners unconnected to each other, including women? How about the one with a triad of a bisexual cisgender woman, a bisexual trans man, and their bisexual aromantic cisgender male partner? Those are the relationships, but neither the romantic elements nor the characters’ genders/orientations are the focus or the main plot.
I’m not the only one with this problem. A lot of us write crossover fiction (spanning more than one genre) or have a primary genre and a secondary one. It happens a lot in LGBTQIA fiction because the emphasis tends to be on people’s partner relationships. A constant struggle for me is that I often include a romantic/love plot, but it isn’t the biggest thing going on in the book. This puts people off who are looking for Romance Genre.
So here are some of the people affected by genre M/M Romance taking center stage:
- Authors writing romance that breaks genre boundaries or includes non-traditional elements
- Authors writing romance about sexualities, genders, and pairings other than cisgender male/male
- Authors of gay romance or erotica (distinctly different from M/M)
- Authors not writing romance, particularly literary fiction
- Readers looking for any of the above
My sense is that authors of romance outside traditional, genre M/M are finding each other and creating space. There’s an active lesbian romance community, and there are blogs dedicated to reviewing trans and non-binary romance. The asexual community is also connecting. So the people most affected are those of us who don’t write romance/exclusively romance.
There’s definitely some overlap, since some books may not be Genre Romance but contain a love story. Which is how we end up with muddled messes periodically, including fighting over what “belongs” in the category. A lot of us have felt that we didn’t have a home, so we needed to try to fit into the M/M community. I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience, only mine. After my first novel, which was absolutely not a romance, I learned exactly how people feel when they think they’re getting M/M and discover the book isn’t that. I tried to write a “real” romance, and let me tell you, I am not good at it. But I didn’t see any other place for my work than to try to conform.
Please excuse me while I go laugh my ass off at myself. There is no possible way I will ever conform to anything.
I don’t really know how to resolve this. I know that after last week’s mess, I want nothing to do with a community in which someone can behave like that and not care one iota about it while others sit back and do nothing (or actively contribute to hate). I’m not very interested in all just getting along and having a love-fest. That should’ve been a time for people to step up and tell these folks that what they did was unacceptable. Instead, over and over and over both allies and even some queer folk stomped on the people who were upset. I don’t feel welcome, especially since I was never wanted anyway as a non-romance-writer.
So that leaves us…where? Many of us rely on “LGBTQIA” (read: M/M romance) review blogs to boost sales and get our books noticed. But if we don’t feel safe or welcome for whatever reasons, then where do we turn? I don’t have a good answer.
I’m only one author, with a handful of colleagues and readers. Even this blog will probably be read by approximately 10 people, most of whom will agree but may not have an answer or be in a position to do anything about it. I’m open to ideas, though, and I definitely want to find my not-a-romance peers, especially if they’re open to a wide range of LGBTQIA stories. It would be great to be able to read and/or promote each other’s work.