It really be like that

This is what I'm saying!! People keep being like "we can't possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don't have to deal with any of those things!"

Anybody else ever worry about gay romance being so dominated by straight women?

I dunno I worry a lot

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u/gaybutnotafaggot

As a gay man, I love yaoi and I do not think it's problematic. Just more gay media for me to enjoy!

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u/yaoi_time Oh thank god. The gays like us! (⇮ 27 ⇩)

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u/no_such_thing_as_a_forest

This post is kind of transphobic. You can't know that an AFAB m/m romance writer isn't a closeted trans man. Let's not talk about this subject.

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u/TheEnemy

As a closeted teen, I think I was immensely privileged to be able to go to a book store and find gay romance fiction. I really needed to feel like gay love was possible; the only representation I had seen before was punchlines about loveless promiscuity. I am so fortunate to have been able to read any gay fiction at all.

But I still feel like there's something weird going on. Seeing that same shelf with the gay romance on it now, the thing I notice is all those author names. "Sarah" and "Lauren" and "Jenny" and so on. I've seen gay romance bookshelves where every single name was a woman's name. I understand that there are far more women in the world than gay men, so maybe that's just the way it goes, but really? No men at all? Like, I don't want to ban women from writing gay male fiction, but it's just weird that it's straight up difficult to find anything but fiction written by women. If you as a man search for gay fiction, gay stuff by women is overwhelmingly what you will find.

Like, to some, this is a steamy vacation into another world, but to others, this is our world. I picture my closeted, terrified, teenage self and I imagine the boys who are going through the same thing right now, and I think about the fact that they are being introduced to the queer community by a bunch of straight women. Most of them are well-intentioned straight women, but it still just feels off. Like, imagine going to a workshop on black American culture and every single speaker was white. Wouldn't that feel weird, regardless of how informed each of them was? I kind of wish I had been able to speak to, or even just read the words of, another gay man a lot earlier than ended up being the case: someone older who'd gone through something similar, once, and ended up okay. It would have made a difference.

Besides, a lot of this fiction doesn't really depict a gay experience at all. I have never seen a gay romance novel depict gay culture meaningfully. If coming out or STDs are mentioned, it's treated with the tone of a Very Special Episode in an 80s sitcom. The leads are always either traditionally masculine, or unmasculine in a very particular, introverted, soft-boy-way that is nonthreatening to straight women who don't feel comfortable in gay bars.

The characters are always isolated from the gay community, too. If they have gay friends, maybe those friends throw in some slang the author learned from Drag Race (but the leads may never talk like that). More often than not the leads are the only gay people in the story (unless one, and only ever one, is bi, and unless it's one of those "oh no, they're not gay, it's some other thing going on" stories, in either which case there are even fewer than two gay people). It's like most of these books are depicting a fantasy of something guy-on-guy happening without having to worry about any gay baggage. Guy-on-guy without the gay.

And if the gay community is scarce, nevermind the broader queer community. How many of these novels have trans people? If they do, it's the gimmick of the whole book. Hell, how many of them have women in them? Oddly, I feel like some of these books are misogynistic.

I'm not saying we should ban women from writing gay fiction. I think it's probably a big structural problem in the whole industry that is really hard to fix on an individual level. I'd like to see gay male authors promoted a little bit at least. I wonder if there are writers out there, writing what I would like to see now and/or what I imagine my teenaged self needed to see then, that are drowning in the noise, so to speak. I sure hope so.

Edit: muting this post.

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