Imagining the Joys of a Progressive Political Future: Casey McQuiston's RED, WHITE, & ROYAL BLUE

Several of the workshops featured at this past weekend's "Let Your Imagination Take Flight" conference, hosted by my home chapter of Romance Writers of America, focused on "getting unstuck" and fighting writers' block. And I shared many conversations with fellow writers talking about the feeling that something is missing when we sit down to write these days, suggesting that this is an issue for many American romance authors at this particular point in history. Several colleagues pointed not to the prevalence of unpleasant weather currently plaguing America's northeast, but instead to the country's current political situation as the most likely reason why they are experiencing stress, lack of inspiration, and just plain burnout at the thought of writing about happily ever afters. It can be hard to imagine a more progressive future when you feel mired in an ever-expanding swamp of lies, constantly having to justify and defend the values, and the people, you hold dear.

Which was why it was such a joy to sit down post-conference and read Casey McQuiston's joyful but politically pointed romance comedy debut, Red, White, & Royal Blue. McQuiston originally came up with the hook-y premise for this book—the son of the American president falls for the youngest of England's royal princes—in early 2016, before the surprise of that fall's Presidential election. After said election, McQuiston herself felt blocked: "Suddenly what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek parallel universe needed to be escapist, trauma-soothing, alternate-but-realistic reality. Not a perfect world—one still believably fucked up, just a little better, a little more optimistic. I wasn't sure I was up to the task" (Acknowledgements).

I for one am amazingly grateful that McQuiston managed not to give up on this story. For rather than reading as a "tongue-in-cheek parallel universe," the love story of presidential son Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry of Wales served for me as a glorious vision of a more hopeful, progressive, and utterly achievable political future.

What does said future look like? It looks like a country willing to elect not only a female President, but a female amicably divorced from her first husband and happily married to her second. It looks like a country with two biracial first children (Mexican-American senator father, white President mother), who, with the "vaguely bisexual" granddaughter of the Vice President, serve as the country's most talked-about, and admired, twenty-somethings. It looks like a world in which the younger generation, comfortable both working and socializing in a multiracial, international, global world, serves as a model for their more cautious elders.

It also happens to look a lot like a classic enemies-to-lovers romance.

Staffers new to the White House are informed early on of three important things about FSOTUS Alex Claremont-Diaz: he lives at the White House, even though he's still in college (Georgetown is so close!); he often calls for coffee in the middle of the night while working on his college essays or his mother's reelection strategy; and he has a long-standing grudge against the youngest of Britain's royal princes.

A few years older than Alex, Prince Henry has always struck Alex as a dull stick-in-the-mud, undeserving of all the adulation and attention focused on him:

The tabloids—the world—decided to cast Alex as the American equivalent of Prince Henry from day one, since the White House Trio is the closest thing America has to royalty. It has never seemed fair. Alex's image is all charisma and genius and smirking wit, thoughtful interviews and the cover of GQ at eighteen; Henry's is placid smiles and gentle chivalry and generic charity appearances, a perfectly blank Prince Charming canvas. Henry's role, Alex thinks, is much easier to play.
     Maybe it is technically a rivalry. Whatever. (Loc 149)

Which is why attending the wedding of Henry's older brother is filling Alex not with delight, but with snark. As he tells elder sister June, "You can't just call him my 'arch nemesis'... 'Arch nemesis' implies he's actually a rival to me on any level and not, you know, a stuck-up product of inbreeding who probably jerks off to photos of himself" (93). And so, to the surprise of no-one, Alex can't restrain himself from taunting his "arch nemesis" during the very proper wedding reception:

The most annoying thing of all is Alex knows Henry hates him too—he must, they're naturally mutual antagonists—but he refuses outright to act like it. Alex is intimately aware politics involves a lot of making nice with people you loathe, but he wishes that once, just once, Henry would act like an actual human and not some polished little wind-up toy sold in a palace gift shop. He's too perfect. Alex wants to poke it. (229)

Poking polite Henry, however, quickly escalates into "Cakegate" (you have to read it to appreciate it), an international breach of etiquette so dire that requires major diplomatic efforts (and major acting) to patch up. As his mother's aide sternly informs Alex,

"Both sides need to come out of this looking good, and the only way to do that is to make it look like your little slap-fight at the wedding was some homoerotic frat bro mishap, okay? So, you can hate the heir to the throne all you want, write mean poems about him in your diary, but the minute you see a camera, you act like the sun shines out of his dick, and you make it convincing" (311).

All Alex is convinced of is that a person who lists his hobbies as "polo" and "competitive yachting" has about as much personality as a cabbage. But with his mother facing a challenger criticizing her for her chilly relationship with her British counterpart, Alex gives in and heads to London for a whirlwind weekend visit with his "close personal friend" Prince Henry.

Alex prides himself on his ability to read others, and is convinced that he knows all he needs to about the stuffy, dull prince before he even gets off the plane. But during their tour through charity events, television interviews, and a false-alarm assassination attempt, "he keeps getting these little glimpses into things he never thought Henry was. A bit of a fighter, for one. Intelligent, interested in other people. It's honestly disconcerting" (623).

Even more disconcerting is the friendship the two develop via text message, and occasional in-person meetings, in the ensuing months. Because while Alex prides himself on his ability to read others, his ability to understand himself could use a bit more work. Especially when it comes to his own latent attraction to a not-quite-so-proper prince.

But can the son of the American president date a British prince in the middle of a re-election campaign? Especially if mom needs to win their home state of Texas in order to guarantee a repeat?

I've quoted so often from Red, White, & Royal Blue in the above review because so much of the pleasure in this rom com comes from McQuiston's distinctive, laugh-out-loud voice, told entirely from the point of view of its hyper intelligent but emotionally clueless main character. Though the story is told in the third person, it's also told in the present tense, which gives the narration both immediacy and a certain wry distance, both of which are perfectly suited to conveying Alex's character and charm. For example, after Alex sees a picture of Henry with a "mysterious blonde," the narrator tells us "Faintly, under it all, it occurs to him: This is all a very not-straight way to react to seeing your male frenemy kissing someone else in a magazine" (1655). Or the scene where Alex is trying to figure out whether he might not be as straight as he's always assumed by calling his former (male) best friend and asking, "This might sound weird. But, um. Back in high school, did we have, like, a thing? Did I miss that?" (5485).

No romance reader will want to miss McQuiston's glorious celebration of snark, sentiment, and the progressive political possibilities of a not quite straight royal romance.

And no writer could find a better cure for political-despair-induced writers' block than McQuiston's sparkling, effervescent romance.


Photo credits:
British/US flag pin: Athletic awards
Royal wedding cake: Getty Images
Hate to Love trope sticker: RedBubble 

Casey McQuiston

Red, White & Royal Blue

St. Martins, 2019

Liz Jacobs' ABROAD: Book 1

Any reader of contemporary American gay and male/male romance will soon understand that acceptance of queerness varies markedly across the United States. Some areas of the country, and some subcultures within other sections of the country, openly champion gay rights. Romances with settings in the first group may occasionally depict their characters on the receiving end of negative words or actions against their queer identities or actions, but such narratives more often suggest that such words or actions are aberrations from the norm, rather than the norm itself. Romances set in the second group, though, still feature characters who struggle with social, cultural, and/or religious beliefs that insist that their sexual identities exist only beyond the pale. But even characters in romances set in the second group eventually meet with one, or many, who espouse more positive views towards queer identity. If you are growing up in 21st century America, positive models of queer identity are no longer as difficult to find as they were fifty years ago.

But what if you are from a different country? A country in which queerness is not acceptable in any segment of its cultures? Can a man who grew up in a society in which his identity is accepted ever be able to understand one who was raised in a country where queerness is outside the realm of accepted reality?

The logo of RUSA LGBT, a "network
for Russian-speaking LGBTQ
individuals, their friends, supporters,
and loved ones" which was formed in
2008

In Liz Jacobs' debut romance, Abroad (split into two separate books), readers meet twenty-year-old Nick (Nikolay) Melnikov on an airplane, en route from Michigan to London to study for a year abroad. Nick's family immigrated to the States from Russia when he was ten, and although he and his older sister have picked up American language and culture, their mother still holds tight to her Russian identity. Including a Russian antipathy to queerness. Nick had a girlfriend through late high school and early college, but he broke up with her before leaving for London, not liking the way being with Lena "had suffocated him, like a yoke pulled too tight" (Book 1, page 9). He'd loved her, but he'd never been sexually attracted to her, nor to any of the other girls in the States who had crushed on him.

At least, not like he is drawn to Dex, a fellow uni student he meets at a party for study abroad scholars soon after he arrives in London.  Dex may be a native Brit (born and raised in Birmingham, thank you very much, despite having a Nigerian mother and a English black father), not a fellow International student, but no matter; Nick is far too shy, far too anxious, and too far into denial about his own sexual desires to make any overtures to the grumpy but smart science nerd.

But Dex's best friend, Isabel, takes a shine to Nick, and gradually draws him into their mutual circle of friends, many of who embrace queer identities. Claiming such an identity is not easy for Nick, even as it becomes increasingly clear that Dex is as attracted to Nick as Nick is to him. As Nick explains during a conversation with Izzy, after she assumes (correctly, although deeply embarrassingly to Nick) that Nick is gay:

"I can't. Not with my family."
     "Would they be very angry?"
     "I don't know how to explain. It's never been an option. Not how I grew up."
     "Why?"
     "It's how they grew up, too. Back there, it was not talked about. If it was, it wasn't good." How to truly describe the insular circle of friends his parents had surrounded themselves with? Jewish intelligentsia who feared much and talked largely of high art, or science, and only sometimes politics—in hushed voices and in vetted company. Their kitchen table was always crowded with makeshift dinners and discussions of how cultural standards had fallen along with the government and taken intellectual thought with them. Queerness would never even enter into such conversation. Once, Nick remembered someone mentioning a particularly flamboyant pop star. Mom had wrinkled her nose. Distasteful. In her reality, being gay was like being a wizard. Outside her realm. (262)


Being Black in a predominantly white country, Dex can understand what it feels like to experience oppression due to his identity. Yet he still has a hard time understand how anyone, even a shy guy like Nick, can keep something so central about himself hidden for so long.

Nick's anxiety about his sexual desires, already pretty high, ratchets up to an entirely appalling level after he and Dex share a kiss:  "Nick felt himself splintering in two, a painful tearing of past and future. Before he knew and after. The truth of it laid bare and nestled inside him. He knew, now. He knew" (285).

Both Dex and Nick need some time apart before they can have an honest, and painful, conversation about why it is so difficult for Nick to accept his own sexuality, or to tell his family about it:

Queer activists, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2008

     "You told me once that you felt like you passed. Being Jewish, that is, that you didn't look it. Has being gay been like that?"
     Nick genuinely flinched. "It's been worse."
     Dex felt a dark shiver down his spine. "Why?"
     Nick took a long pull of his beer, which drew shadows across his throat. "Because I'm not supposed to exist."
     "Nick—"
     "No, really." Nick pushed on, and Dex forced himself to shut up. Nick was talking. Nick was talking. "I've never known another Russian gay person. I'm sure they exist, I mean, duh, of course they do. I know that. Now. But when I was a kid, I had never met one. I didn't know anyone. I didn't know any gay people."
     Dex was frozen.
     "I don't—I was alone. My parents never talked about anything like that, not ever. At least, not when I was a kid. And they they talked about it like it was something Americans did. Some Western thing. Not necessarily awful, just not for us. Not ours. So I couldn't be... that. I couldn't. I could be Jewish, I could be an immigrant, but I couldn't be gay." (321)


I really admired the way Jacobs shows how oppression manifests differently in different settings and cultures, as well as how difficult it can be to truly get someone else's experience of oppression even when you've experienced oppression yourself firsthand. She's also fabulous at capturing the cadence of young adult speech—the stops and starts, the repetitions, the meandering diversions and the conversational dead-ends—patterns of communicating that make it so very difficult to articulate, never mind to share, your most painful experiences and fears, even with your closest friends and lovers. Bonus points for a secondary storyline about Dex and Nick's friend Izzy, who is thrown for a loop after she discovers she's not as straight as she once thought she was, a discovery that unexpectedly leads to an estrangement between Izzy and her former best friend, lesbian Natali.

Can Dex and Nick actually pull off a romantic relationship, with Nick still keeping his sexuality a secret from his mother? And with his VISA expiring in only a few months? Will Natali's crush on Izzy lead to a shift in their relationship? Or will Izzy explore her newly discovered bisexuality in another way? I'm off to read Abroad: Book 2, eager to spend more time with these nuanced, sympathetically drawn characters.


Photo credits:
Rainbow Russian doll: RUSA LGBT
Russian queer activists: ABC

Liz Jacobs

Abroad: Book One

Brain Mill Press, 2017

Not your Typical Small-Town Romances: JL Merrow's SHAMWELL TALES

After logging a few too many hours in doctors offices and hospital waiting rooms (on behalf of a relative), and then coming down with a summertime cold in the aftermath, I was in dire need of a lighthearted, funny, but not mindless romance read. Lucky for me, I happened upon the small town romance books of new-to-me author J. L. Merrow at just the right moment. Merrow's Shamwell isn't the typical close-knit but decidedly middle-class small town most commonly found in romance. Shamwell is in England, not the States, and includes inhabitants whose jobs (from  teacher to ratcatcher, tax accountant to postman) and ways of speaking reflect their quite different class positions. Oh, and Shamwell has its share of gender queer inhabitants, too—non-binary, homosexual, bisexual, and presumably straight but surprisingly open to unexpected attraction to a member of the same sex inhabitants, rather than the predominantly heteronormative characters who typically populate small town romances. "Award-winning gay romance with a dash of humor—and no tea" is the logline adorning the home page of Merrow's web site, but these books had more than a dash of humor; they made me laugh out loud, not a feat easy to accomplish with this not-easy-to-amuse reader.

None of the four books features tormented protagonists, or deeply troubling problems that stand in the way of the romances that develop within each. Instead, Merrow gives us humorous, loving portraits of men across the class spectrum, men whose expectations about romance are challenged in funny but telling ways in their small town.

The first Shamwell book, Caught!, features bow-tie-sporting Robert, who has taken a job as a primary school teacher in Shamwell after a hinted-at but not explained dust-up at his previous post. Robert thinks there's little chance for romance in Shamwell, especially given his job: "I gazed out on the sea of female and/or wrinkly faces in the pews and wondered idly if there was any job in the world, anywhere, that was worse for meeting men than the average primary-school teaching post" (81). Yet the uncle of his most troublesome pupils (twin boys whose mother is undergoing cancer treatment) proves to be surprisingly open to chatting with him. Their initial encounter seems to get off to a bit of a bumpy start:

     "Guess it's not easy being gay and teaching in a place like that."
     I blinked at him. He knew I was gay? Who'd told him? No, I must have misheard him. He hadn't said that. Had he?
     "Pardon?"
     Sean took a step back. "Uh, sorry mate. No offense. It's just that you look . . .  Sorry."
     Oh. "That's quite all right," I muttered to my brogues. My face was hot. I suppose it was only fitting that it should turn a fetching shade of pink, seeing that the rest of me apparently proclaimed my sexual preferences to the world at large. (256)


But it's not Robert's queerness, but rather his far different education and background, that bisexual Sean is commenting on:

     "We're not really used to someone like you here," [Sean] said, which made me feel even worse.
     "Shamwell has hitherto be a queer-free zone, has it?" I snapped.
     "What? No, you got me wrong. I just meant, you're a bit of a cut above, you know?"
     "A cut above what?" I asked, suspicious. If there was a circumcision joke in the offing, I was . . . I was getting paranoid, I decided. 
     "Well, the way you talk—the way you dress, come to that—I'd have thought you'd be teaching royalty at Eton, not slumming it here with us." (261)


Since Sean grew up in council (public) housing, never went to college, and works as a pest control technician, his class position is decidedly different from Robert's. Yet in Shamwell, crossing class lines presents almost as few problems for potential romantic partners as does being queer. In fact, it's the romance trope-y "secret from the past," not queer-bashing or differing expectations stemming from economic or educational backgrounds, that threaten to keep Rob and Sean apart.

Despite their largely angst-free storylines, each of Merrow's Shamwell books asks important questions underneath their lighthearted comedy. When in a relationship does keeping quiet about some of the seamier details of one's past cross from an acceptable respect for privacy into a distrustful hiding of an important truth? When should a formerly closeted parent come out to his child? Where do you draw the line between appealingly "waspish camp and intellectual snobbery" and rude, insensitive disregard for the feelings of others? (Played! 940) Which should matter more—a long-time friendship, or protesting against thoughtless homophobia? Should you tell your fellow small-towners who assume you're sleeping with your new lodger that you're not, even if you're suddenly wishing you were?

I especially enjoyed book #3 of the Shamwell Tales, Out!, which features a thirty-nine-year-old father and a twenty-five-year-old bachelor who have radically different ideas about just how far "out" one should be. Despite finally accepting his queerness after years of living a straight life, recently-divorced tax accountant Mark chooses to move himself and his teen daughter to Shamwell determined "to put his daughter first and avoid looking for hookups while she was living with him" (371). Convinced that the divorce has already put enough stress on Florence (no longer willing to be called Florrie, but instead insisting on being called Fen), Mark is determined to keep his sexual orientation a secret from her. For Mark, "It'd been a revelation . . . seeing young men in their teens and early twenties casually kiss one another on the street after a night out. Had things really changed so much in the last twenty years? Mark couldn't imagine daring to kiss a boy on the street at a similar age" (Out! 361). And he certainly can't imagine explaining to Florrie—ah, Fen—just what another man might be doing in his bedroom . . .

Needless to say, such an attitude seems more than antiquated to the hot guy who catches Mark's eye at the Shamwell Spartans Fun and Funds Foundation, a local charity/drinking club which Mark joins at the urging of his daughter ("For God's sake, Dad, get some bloody hobbies. You're driving me mental hanging round the house all the time" [85]). At first, quick-tempered bisexual Patrick thinks Mark's reluctance to out himself to Fen is just an excuse to avoid Patrick—"It couldn't have been that different when he was growing up. Could it?" And, even worse, Patrick reads Mark's explanation as a form of internalized homophobia: "Didn't he realise how it sounded, him lumping in nonstraight people with all the bad crap he wanted to keep away from his daughter until she was thirty or something?" (1833). Yet after Patrick talks to his mom (who is only five years older that his would-be lover) about what it was like for gay kids when she was a teen, he gets a bit more perspective, and becomes more willing to listen to (if not accept) Mark's reservations about openly dating.

Generation gap, sure, but the idea that an age difference of only fourteen years could make such a big difference in two people's experiences of their society's attitudes toward sexual identity? That made think harder about how not just class and race can affect one's ideas about sexual identity, but how age (even small differences in age) can, as well.

Gobbling up all four of Merrow's Shamwell books over the course of my three-day cold recovery made those hours go by far more quickly than my typical bout with the tissues and decongestants usually does. I'm almost looking forward to my next germ infestation—Merrow has quite a few other series available, ready for my (and your) sick-day reading pleasure.

JL Merrow

Caught!

Played!

Out!

Spun!

Shamwell Tales

new editions from Riptide, 2017

The scars you choose: Roan Parrish's SMALL CHANGE

In her latest contemporary novel, Roan Parrish proves herself as adept at writing m/f romance as she in crafting compelling stories of m/m love. The narrator of Small Change, Ginger Holtzman, dropped out of high school at age sixteen to work as an apprentice in a Philadelphia tattoo shop. Eighteen years later, she's now the proprietor of said shop, the only female-owned tattoo business in the city. Being un-tattooed myself, I didn't know that the tattoo industry has a history and reputation of being so male-dominated. But Ginger certainly does:

The number of talented artists drummed out of the business by macho posturing, unwanted sexual behavior, and abuse, not to mention good old-fashioned misogyny, was staggering. I thought of them often, the ghost crew of talented women who were the casualties of that toxic attitude. I thought of how different the industry could be—how much better—if they had a place in it.  (Kindle Loc 918)

Ginger has actively tried to create a more accepting vibe in her own shop, a place where both men and women, no matter their race, sexuality, or gender identification, feel safe and welcomed. Employing a trans man and an African-American woman as co-workers goes a long way towards creating such a vibe, as does Ginger's own refusal to take shit from anyone.

Unlike many other romance novels, which give a protagonist a job in a male-dominated profession to establish said protagonist's feminist cred, but then don't portray said job making much of an impact on the character's actual values or goals, tattooing is deeply embedded not just in Ginger's skin, but in her soul:

It . . . confronts you with yourself. With the things you've thought, felt, done. You can't pretend something didn't happen if it's on your skin. You can't forget. And they're also a way to retell the story, I guess. You know, like, if something bad happens, a lot of people get a tattoo. Not because they want to remember the bad thing, but because once they've lived through it, or figured it out, then every time they look at the tattoo they remember that process. Tattoos are the scars you choose. (586-88)

Ginger's "unchosen" scars stem from her family, who have never understood why she could not mold herself into something closer to the feminine norm that her mother and sister both so easily inhabit. And from the reaction to her gender queerness from other kids when she was a child, and even now, as an adult:

I'd been teased and dismissed for not being pretty, for not dressing like I wanted people to think I was pretty, for being outspoken, for not taking shit. In other words, called a bitch or a dyke or a freak at school" (159)

I always looked mad, people told me. My mouth naturally turned down at the corners, so even my neutral repelled the world"(472).

Ginger might have tried to conform to please her family and schoolmates. But "instead of changing, [I] squared my shoulders and rejected their premises" (472). Choosing not to graduate high school, working in a job that her conventionally middle class parents feel is far beneath her, engaging in monogamous romantic relationships with both men and with women—all of Ginger's life decisions have been made on her own terms, and without shame.

Living such a "fuck you" life has made Ginger pretty reluctant to open herself up to other people: "I'm pretty bad at doing things that make me feel like I'm leaving myself open for a hit, you know?" Ginger confides. But ever since her best friend Daniel (of Parrish's first novel, The Middle of Somewhere) moved to rural Michigan for a teaching job and found himself a boyfriend, Ginger's been feeling at sea, "always about to reach for something I kept forgetting wasn't there anymore." Which may be part of the reason why she finds herself so attracted to the owner of a new sandwich shop that has opened just down the corner from Small Change.

Thirty-something Christopher Lucen has a personality as sunny as Ginger's is spiky. He greets each customer to his shop with a friendly smile and a personal inquiry about their food or their day, not just to gain a good tip but because he is really interested in knowing. He brings Ginger, who is so busy with work and with preparing for her own art show that she often forgets to eat, coffee and sandwiches without her even asking. And he enjoys giving hugs.

But despite of their differences, each is unaccountably drawn to the other. And they begin a tentative relationship, one in which caretaker Christopher gives all of himself. But Ginger has a hard time trusting Christopher, or perhaps herself, enough to do the same. And when a blow-up in the social online community of the tattoo world ends up misogynistically making Ginger a target, not even Christopher's good will and good intentions can keep Ginger from lashing out. Does Ginger have to make a choice between being with Christopher, and maintaining her hard-won independence? Or is there room in her life for both?

There are so many terrific feminist moments in Parrish's book, many focused on refusing the dominant romance trope of competing with other women by denigrating them. For example, Christopher has only good things to say about his female ex'es. And Ginger points out how

. . . a big part of sexism in the industry—and most industries—is this idea that they rightfully belong to men, so there's only a limited amount of space that women have access to. And that leads to this sense that we have to compete with each other in order to get the few spots that are set aside for us. But of course, it isn't actually that way—that's just the way they want it to feel. (2954)

And the response to the online bullying that Ginger's devises with other female tattoo artists, one that encourages women to "have one another's backs" rather than knock each other just to get a seat at the table. But the novel's feminism never seems tacked on, a message weighting down the romance. Instead, it feels vitally connected to who Ginger is, and how she wants any romantic relationship she engages in to be imbued with the same sense of egalitarian respect that her relationships with her friends and colleagues are.

In perhaps my favorite lines in the book, in response to Ginger asking him why he wants to get to know her better, Christopher tells her,

"Did you ever find a new band or author or director or something, and you were instantly fascinated? You heard one song and wanted to get all the rest of their stuff. Sure, you didn't know what it'd be, and yeah you probably weren't gonna like every single second of it the exact same way you like the bit you just found. But you can just tell from the part you've found that you want to know the rest?" (1075)

I haven't "liked every single second" of every single Roan Parrish romance novel I've read. But I've found myself "fascinated" by each, especially this latest.  It may just be my favorite feminist romance of 2017.


Photo credits:
Female tattoo-er: ImagesforTattoos.com
Women bird tattoos: Tattoogiiiirl on Instagram
LO-VE matching tattoos: Piercing Models

Roan Parrish

Small Change

Small Change, Book #1

Indie published, 2017

Queer for Me, not Gay for You: Alexis Hall's LOOKING FOR GROUP

Last week, I attended a panel at MIT on "The Turn to Tween," a panel discussion about the roots of the word, its connection to consumerism and marketing, and the way "tweens" are depicted in popular culture. During the Q & A period after the discussion, the issue of tweens and social media came up. One of the speakers, Tyler Bickford of the University of Pittsburgh, mentioned that most academic studies of kids' use of of social media indicate that they are typically not using these new technologies to meet and interact with strangers, but far more often with people they already know.

Even as I found myself shaking my head, wanting to disagree, or at least qualify, Bickford's statement, a student sitting beside me said the same thing that I was thinking: "That's not true for queer kids."

My doubt arose not from personal experience, but from having recently read Alexis Hall's loving tribute to online gamers and queerness, Looking for Group. As Hall himself notes on his blog, Group is a far cry from his RITA-award winning erotic romance For Real; no kink, not much sex, and lots of gaming jokes. Its narrator, college student Drew, is an avid player of the MMO (massively multiplayer online) game Heroes of Legend (loosely based on Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft). He's a bit burnt out though, both with his "guild," or group with whom he typically plays, and with the style of his own playing—methodical, aggressive, competitive, and, increasingly, joyless. And so after a major disagreement with his guild ("he pretty much admitted he ragequit his last guild over loot drama" [Kindle Loc 103]), Drew decides to apply for membership in a different one.

The book opens, in fact, with the post that draws Drew's attention:

<Same Crit Different Day> is Recruiting

SCDD is a tight-knit raiding guild (heroic and normal difficulty), currently looking for a main tank to join our mature, dedicated, and frankly fabulous team. Founded in 2011 by a group of friends with no fecking clue how to run a Heroes of Legend guild, but definite ideas about the right way to treat people—fairly, without harassment, and with equal opportunity to participate—SCDD roared past the traditional guild life expectancy of six months and has been getting awesomer ever since.

Following this post, the members of SCDD debate (online, of course) Drew's application, and ultimately decide to accept him and his game persona, Orcarella (Dread Knight tank) into the guild. During the days and nights of game play that follows, Drew finds himself increasingly drawn to the unusual ways of SCDD, "the most progressed casual guild on the server" (150). Not only do his fellow members praise him, and one another ("in Anni he'd only ever been told when he screwed up, and he wasn't sure how to handle having someone say he'd done well" [971]), but they also tackle their fights in entirely different ways than he is used to, making what was once routine for Drew into a challenge.

And Drew finds himself increasingly drawn to one member of the guild in particular: Solace, a healer elf who not only enjoys the fighting aspects of the game, but also loves wandering into unseen corners of the world just to see what they look and feel like. As Drew (as Orcarella) and Solace start hanging out in the game together, separate from the rest of the guild, they end up talking, not just about the game, but about where they go to school and what they hope to do with their lives after uni. And Drew begins to wonder: is Solace a girl in real life? Or is she, like he, female online but male offline?

Drew's upset when he finds out the answer. His fellow uni mates, Sanee and Tinuviel, have very different takes on Drew's response:

     "Man," sighed Sanee. "I know I totally told you this was going to happen, but I'm really sorry for you."
     Tinuviel pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. "Well, yes and no. I mean, I think what you need to ask yourself is how much this changes things."
     Drew gaped at her. "Um, it completely changes things?"
     "Why?"
     Sanee sat forward on the chair. "T, are you being deliberately dense?"
     'That's a very strange question. The way I see it, Drew's met somebody he likes. He's clearly sad at the thought of losing him. So the question is: why should he?"
     "How about: because he's not gay?"
     "Well, neither am I, but I've still had sexual relationships with people who defined as female."
     "Yes, but you're a girl."
     "Tinuviel sighed deeply. "If our friend wasn't in the middle of a crisis, I'd be quite cross with you now." (1905)

Cisgender heterosexual male Sanee thinks of gender and sexuality in a binary way: you are either a girl or a boy, and you're either attracted to members of the same sex, or to those of the opposite sex. Tinuviel, who identifies as female and pansexual, has a very different take on what is possible, both sexually and romantically, and tries to encourage Drew to think about the situation in a radically different way:

"Maybe I'm wrong, but your problem doesn't seem to be that you're not interested in this person, but that you still are."
     While Drew was sorting through that, Sanee steepled his fingers like a supervillain. "Dude, are you gay?" There was a pause. "Like, it's okay if you are."
     Drew glared at him. "I think I'd have noticed."
     Tinuviel raised a hand. "I suspect you'll think this is a weird question, but what would you have noticed?"
     "Well...." Drew hated it when T did this. She'd ask you something to which the answer was so screamingly obvious that you'd immediately start second-guessing yourself. And, right now, that was the last thing he needed. "Fancying guys for a start?"
     "Maybe you just haven't met any guys you fancy. I mean, I'm pretty sure you're not attracted to Sanee..."
     Sanee made a valiant attempt not to look horrified. "You're not, right?"
     Drew made no such attempt. "I'm really not."
     "Okay," Tinuviel went on. "And you don't fancy me either."
     "Jesus, just because I don't fancy every girl I meet, that doesn't make me gay."
     She looked smug. "And by the same argument, not fancying every boy you meet doesn't make you straight."
     There was a really long silence.
     "Holy shit," gasped Sanee. "That's a really scary thought."
     "I can imagine it would be to a lot of people, but actually there's nothing scary about rejecting heteronormative notions of binary sexuality."
     "So you're saying," said Drew slowly, "I could be gay and not know it? Because that sort of sounds like bollocks."
     Tinuviel pushed her hair out of her eyes. "No, I'm not saying that, Andrew. I'm saying that, for many people, sexuality is more fluid and less clear-cut than they're taught to assume. You might, in fact, be completely straight, but it's also possible that you're not. And, even if you aren't, you might have gone your whole life completely happy an not caring and not knowing. And that's fine. But it seems to me that right now you have an opportunity to have something with somebody, and it might work or it might not, but if your only reason for not trying is that you're scared of the idea of being gay, then that's probably quite silly and a little bit sad." (1956)

Drew spends hours going round and round in his head after Sanee and Tinuviel leave him to sleep away his sorrows, and really wishes he had someone else to talk to about it all. Someone like Solace. And once he realizes that the only thing he isn't confused about is that he really misses her (or him), Drew knows what he has to do.

And it turns out that gender and sexuality aren't really the issue, not once Drew and Solace meet in person. What does turn out to be a problem is the issue with which this post started: are the relationships you have with people online somehow different from, or lesser than, those with people you know and interact with in person? Are online gamers, who are often different in age from you, and may even live in different countries, somehow not really your friends? Should the people with whom you interact in person matter more than the ones you interact with online?

And if you're gay, or bi, or pan, or genderqueer, and looking for your own "group," do the answers to those questions matter more?


Illustration credits;
World of Warcraft orc: MMO Champion Forum
Dark Elf: DeviantArt Vmbui

Alexis Hall

Looking for Group

Riptide, 2016

Teens and Bisexuality: Dahlia Adler's UNDER THE LIGHTS and Hannah Moskowitz's NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED

I know it's going to make me sound like an old fogie, but since I turned 50 earlier this year, I've had a lot of moments of "wow, things are sure different now than when I was (insert much younger age)." I've been feeling that feeling a lot this week, after jotting down book recommendations for YA books with LGBTQIA main characters from posters over at the Queerromance site. Back in 1965, the year of my birth, no books for teenagers had been published that featured gay or lesbian characters. Not until 1969 did children's publishing foray into queer territory, with John Donovan's heartfelt but rather depressing I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. It would take thirteen more years before teen lesbians were featured in a book with a (sort-of) happy ending, with Nancy Garden's 1982 novel Annie on My Mind. As late as the mid-1990s, when I worked as an editor in the Children's Book department of a major trade publisher, I think I can count on one hand the number of manuscripts we received that contained any queer content, with the notable exception of stories with teens dealing with gay friends or relatives stricken by AIDS.

But today, in 2015, I can search Goodreads for "YA Books with LGBT Themes" and find 166 titles published this year alone. A far cry from the measly 200 titles that could be placed on such a list in the entire 35 years between 1969 and 2004.

My, how times have changed.

YA novels with bisexual protagonists have been slower to appear, no doubt due to controversies within academia, and within the queer community itself, over whether bisexuality does/should exist as a separate identity. It was a real pleasure, then, to spend several days last week reading two such books (even if one didn't in the end turn out to be a romance).

Dahlia Adler's Under the Lights is the second book in a series about the stars of a hit teen television show. At first, since the story is told in dual narratives—one by 17-year-old Korean-American good girl Vanessa Park, one of the stars of Daylight Falls, the other by 20 year-old (presumably white) bad boy Josh Chester, best friend of Vanessa's DF love interest—readers might suspect that Van and Josh are destined to make a love connection. Josh does, in fact, find himself coming to care for Van as a person, far different from the myriad hookups and easy lays his success as a model and occasional actor have tossed in his lap. But Van, dating a clean-cut boy band member, finds herself not falling for Josh (no Taylor Swift she!), but instead falling into friendship with red-headed Brianna, the intern/daughter of her agent.

Brianna's open about her own sexuality—"I'm an equal-opportunity-leave-relationship-destruction-in-my-wake kind of girl," she tells Van when Van is confused at her mentioning both an ex-boyfriend and an ex-girlfriend (66). Though she's a virgin (waiting to have sex until she falls in love), she's always assumed she was straight. But when Brianna calls her for flirting when she doesn't really mean anything by it, Van is more than a little confused. Was she really flirting with a girl? Is she only trying to fill the void in her life left by her best friend Ally's move to New York? Or could she truly be attracted to Brianna? And if she is, what would that do to her career? Hard enough being an Asian-American "America's Sweetheart"; is America really ready for an Asian American lesbian teen idol?

Adler's book does commit one of the no-nos listed in Bisexual Books' "The 6 Things That Need to Change About Bisexual Characters in YA": not allowing the bisexual character to narrate, especially when it comes to pivotal events in her/his life. We only see Brianna through Vanessa's (and Josh's) eyes. And Van's angst-ing about the impossibility of coming out gets resolved all too neatly ("I got my Hollywood ending," Van notes at book's end). But even if this isn't the deepest YA ever written, it has a breezy, raunchy appeal. And after reading so many YA romances with adolescent boys who declare their (seemingly) unrequited love to teen girls only to discover they are loved after all, it's hard not to smile at the way Adler flips expectations here to ensure gay/bisexual romance triumphs.

And I just couldn't end this post without giving a shout out to Hannah Moskowitz's Not Otherwise Specified, even though it is more a "learning to love oneself" kind of book than a learning to love someone else romance. The voice Moskowitz has created for her first-person protagonist, an outspoken African-American bisexual ballerina growing up in, of all places, Nebraska, is one that's going to stay with me for a very long time. Outspoken, ebullient, and outcast among outcasts (not gay enough for the lesbian clique; not skinny or white enough for the Nebraska ballet; not ill-looking enough for anyone to acknowledge the eating disorder she's vowed to herself she'll kick), Etta herself is unique in a way that none of these descriptors can even come close to capturing. It's pretty rare for me to want to jump up and cheer a YA protagonist's revelation, but when Etta finally realizes that fulfilling the dreams of others, rather than embracing her own, is not nearly good enough for such an amazing person as she is, I had a hard time wiping the smile off my face. I'm guess you might just, too.

Dahlia Adler

Under the Lights

A Daylight Falls novel

Spencer Hill Press, 2015

Hannah Moskowitz

Not Otherwise Specified

Simon Pulse, 2015

Bisexuality and Masculinity: Amber Lin and Shari Slade's ONE KISS WITH A ROCK STAR

A few days ago, I was trying to think of expletives that ring the same gendered vituperation toward men as "bitch" traditionally does towards women. "Ass," "asshole," and the like can be applied equally to women as to men. "Bastard," "son-of-a-bitch," and "motherfucker" are slurs as much against a man's mother as against himself. "Queer," "fairy," "faggot"* and their brethren all are slights suggesting a man is being too woman-like, rather than too something overly male. The only swear word I could come up with that referenced both male bodies and male actions was "cocksucker," a word that focuses less on identity and more on a specific bodily act.

The term kept coming to mind as I read the second book in Amber Lin and Shari Slade's Half-Life contemporary erotic romance series, One Kiss with a Rock Star. In book #1, Three Nights with a Rock Star, Krist Mellas, the bassist of the band Half-Life, had been caught on video participating in a three-way with his fellow band member Lock and Lock's girlfriend Hailey. Kiss opens with Krist attempting to purchase a classic bass in a dive guitar shop in Chicago, only to be turned down after the owners discover the incriminating video online while doing a fan-boy Internet search on Krist. Krist realizes he's broken the "golden rule" of male rock stardom:

   He could have blown up at a fan.

     He could have forgotten the fucking song onstage.

     He could have fucked an underage girl, even. Oops. Didn't know. It happened all the fucking time, and there was barely a blip.... Record sales actually went up. But God forbid he be bisexual with consenting adults—yeah, that was too fucking far (page 5).

"Bowie told the world he was bi and they didn't let him
be anything else for decades," Krist's agent warns him (27).

It's not just the fact of the three-way that has the guitar shop owners, and almost everyone else Krist meets in the following days, looking him askance. It's Krist's position in the threesome: "Rockers didn't suck other rocker's dicks" (5). But Krist had. And for calling rock's über-masculinity into question, Krist will have to pay. 

The band's agent informs Krist that he has an image problem. A problem that she's going to fix by setting up on some fake dates with pop-star princess Madeline Fox. Krist understands the hypocrisy of the whole thing—"Image problem. It was such bullshit. His image wasn't the problem. His sexuality was" (26)—and has no qualms about refusing to agree to date Miss Teenbopper Next Door, a girl who's been "packaged, pampered, pandering to the lowest common denominator" (25).

Nineteen-year-old Maddy, former KidMania television star now turned pop singer, is even less eager to partake in yet another image manipulation scheme than is Krist. Maddy knows all about the importance of image; though she's been drinking and having sex with boys and girls since her early teens, contractually she is required to maintain her girl-next-door identity (she's "got that good girl faith in a tight little skirt," just like fellow pop star Taylor Swift). Held together by guile and a smile, underneath Maddy seethes, tired not only of getting the evil eye from rocker boys like Krist—"one part disdain and two parts lust" (12)—but of pretending to be innocent when she's just as experienced, just as drawn sexually to both men and to women, as is Krist. Even though she's nursed a bit of a fan-girl crush on the Half-Life bassist since she was twelve, Maddy's not stupid enough to agree to her agent's plan.

Not until said agent suggests her refusal will condemn Krist's, and his band's, career to the toilet (and tells the same story about Maddy's career being endangered to Krist) do the two finally decide to take their fake-romance show on the road. In public, the two project a slick image of young love, but in private (young lovers will naturally share the same hotel room, won't they?), they yell, fight, fuck, and snarl. And discover that their privates selves are far different from their public personas, and far more compatible than either could ever have dreamed.

I'm not usually a big fan of rock star romance; too often its underlying message seems to be that you need to be validated by being loved by someone famous in order to feel good about yourself. But in One Kiss from a Rock Star, Lin and Slade create two fascinatingly complex characters, two people who project traditionally gendered images in order to maintain their place in the public spotlight, but who underneath the glitter and the tattoos gender-bend like pros (bad-boy Krist turns out to be the sensitive, submissive one, good-girl Maddy the one who gets off on bossing others, including Krist, around). Pulling back the masks of traditional gender, Lin and Slade ask readers not only to see beyond Krist and Maddy's mass-marketed images, but to consider the gendered constraints placed upon their own efforts at self-fashioning.

*Interestingly enough, the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the use of "faggot" as a derogatory term originated as a term of abuse or contempt applied to a woman.

Photo credits:

David Bowie: Rolling Stone

Taylor Swift: Daily Star

Amber Lin and Shari Slade

One Kiss with a Rock Star

Half-Life #2

published by the authors

2014

Hiding In/From the Man Cave: Amy Jo Cousins' OFF CAMPUS

As a freshman at Carlisle College, an elite private institution in western Massachusetts, Tom Middleton took his place among the privileged as a given. A white male with a wealthy investment banker for a father, a Beacon Hill home, a prep school education, and a coveted place on the track team, Tom never questioned "his towering feeling of waling the world as if a golden light shone down on him and there was nothing he couldn't do" (Kindle Loc 1603). That is, until the Feds came to arrest his father for "the largest price-fixing takedown in the history of white-collar-crime" (492). A father in jail, your college "requesting" that you take a leave of absence because of the disrupting caused by swarming reporters, your every possession taken to repay the people your father has scammed—yeah, that will make a guy stop and think.

When Tom returns to Carlisle after a fifteen-month leave, then, he's only too happy to be placed in off-campus housing, far away from the curious and prying eyes of his fellow undergraduates. Having to drive a cab every weekend to meet his tuition payments, Tom has no time for sports, or for hanging out with the guys, even if any of his former buddies cared enough to invite him back. No, Tom's ready to crash and hide, keeping the lowest of low profiles, far from the eyes of the curious and prying.

Too bad his new room in Perkins House comes complete with a roommate, an openly gay roommate who is even more upset that his promised single has turned into a double than Tom is. Reese Anders, who "looked like some kind of skinny British rock star, tight black jeans strung low and held up with a studded metal belt," seems equal parts outraged and terrified by the sight of Tom crashing in the midst of his carefully decorated dorm room. Determined to regain his single by driving Tom out, Reese starts to bring home a different guy every night, making sure that Tom, sitting outside in the hallway, can hear every single dirty move he makes with his hookups.

But Reese's actions aren't only about Tom, Tom quickly realizes; his roommate's casual hookups are just as much about Reese's ability to control others' as they are about grossing out Tom. And besides, Tom's not exactly grossed out by the noises coming from inside his room: "if he were honest, it wasn't exactly the first time he'd had a dream about another guy. He'd known for a while now that his dick was an equal opportunity pervhouse, something years at prep school had made clear" (429). A New Adult novel with a bisexual protagonist is pretty uncommon, and very welcome, especially when portrayed with the depth and nuance Cousins brings to her story.

Ex-Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice, fired for abusive actions and
language, including homophobic slurs

While the narrative is told entirely from Tom's point of view, Cousins gives us detailed portraits of both young men, each recovering from very different traumas, both gradually revealing their secrets and developing a sense of trust in the other. Cousins doesn't shy away from portraying the casual homophobia Tom's former "bros" (and once, Tom himself) deploy to cement their own relationships and to construct a vision of their own masculinity that insists they are precisely the opposite of gay. Cash, the one casual jock friend who sticks with Tom after Tom's father's disgrace, demonstrates this when he first meets Reese: "Don't get any ideas, dude. I don't take it up the ass," he declares, then asks "So, Reese. You're, like, a total fag, huh?.... Like, have you ever fucked a chick? Ever? Because maybe you'd like it." (880). Reese is shocked when Tom bawls Cash out: "You're... not like them. Are you? Jocks." (918). Tom, though, isn't so sure: "I don't know. There's a lot of different kinds of jocks," he tells Reese, but doesn't "mention that for most of his life he'd been pretty much the kind of guy Reese was describing with that word. A walking stereotype" (918). Tom and, at least in part, Cash, come to recognize how limiting the stereotype they inhabit/inhabited truly is, and how demeaning it is towards men who do not embody the masculinity it insists is the only true way to be male.

As Tom and Reese gradually begin to open up to one another, each begins to realize that he may have a friend with whom to hide from the rest of the world. And as friendship turns to sex, and perhaps even to love, hiding out in their own fortress of isolation becomes less and less appealing, especially for the naturally social Reese.

But there is no "love conquers all" message in Cousins's story; friendship, love, and even mind-blowing sex is not enough to heal all wounds. (One of my favorite passages: "He wondered if Reese was disappointed there hadn't been some kind of magical transformation of their relationship after he'd fucked Tom. As if anal were some kind of Holy Grail of gay relationships that would wipe out all of their other problems, not a goddamn one of which had been magically erased by Tom taking it up the ass, he was sorry to say" [4076]). Sometimes, you have to learn how to step out of the cave all on your own before you're ready to step out holding hands with the one you love.


Photo credits:
Rutgers coach homophobia: NY Daily News
Men holding hands: Jaefiction

Amy Jo Cousins

Off Campus (Bend or Break #1)

Samhain, 2014

Gay for You or Out for You?

While perusing Heroes and Heartbreakers' Tori Benson's recommendations for outstanding erotic romance reads for the month of January, I came across a phrase I had never heard before. To categorize River Jaymes' new release The Boyfriend Book, Benson used the common romance descriptors "sexy," "m/m" and "contemporary." But she added the unfamiliar (at least to me) expression "gay for you" to the mix. Intrigued by the synopsis of Jaymes' book, and interested in finding out more about a subgenre/trope whose title seemed to simultaneously convey both positive and negative connotations about homosexuality, I both purchased a copy of The Backup Boyfriend and began to poke around a bit on the Web in search of others who had written about the "gay for you" trend.

"Gay for you," I discovered, is a trope primarily found in m/m romance (although present in the occasional lesbian romance, too). The trope describes a story about a previously heterosexual person who suddenly finds him/herself attracted to a member of the same sex. The person who goes "gay for you" has never experienced any degree of sexual attraction to anyone of the same sex in the past, and still is not attracted to other people of the same sex in the present—except for his or her one new love interest. In such romances, the two same-sex lovers act on their attraction, the formerly heterosexual person turns "gay for" his or her new same-sex partner, and the two have a traditional romance HEA.

The best discussion of the trope I found was in a July 2011 post by JesseWave (of the now regrettably defunct Reviews by Jessewave blog, devoted to m/m romance novels). JesseWave argued against both the use of the term "gay for you" and m/m books that depict insta-love (or insta-chemistry) changing someone's sexual orientation. "I'm sure this does not happen in RL [real life]," JesseWave argued, adding "Many of you [readers] have said that you're not into reality you just want the fantasy, but shouldn't the fantasy have some basis in something that makes sense, or is that too much of an oxymoron?" Following the lead of m/m writer Marie Sexton, JesseWave suggested that a better term for books of this type would be "Out for You," not "Gay for You": the sexual orientation-switching protagonist might not have realized that he was gay, but in fact he was, all along. Writers who acknowledged this were writing better books than those who depicted sexual orientation as something one could take off and put on at the drop a hat, JesseWave implied.

JesseWave noted the popularity of this trope amongst heterosexual women readers, but wondered what gay male readers thought of it, and asked Damon Suede, a popular gay male romance writer, to weigh in with his thoughts. Suede echoed JesseWave's ideas, noting:

When a man realizes that he has romantic and erotic feelings about another man and acknowledges those feelings as a part of his identity, he COMES OUT of the closet. He isn't Gay-For-Anyone-But-Himself! He is Out-For-You.... for the record that is the way 80-90% of GLBT people discover their sexuality. Duh! Actually that's how ALL people explore sexuality in their adolescence: they meet someone that makes them feel differently than they have before.

Only when responding to the comments to the post, though, did Suede explicitly name the problem with the phrase "Gay for You":  "GfY is a weird hybrid, enshrining the logic of homophobia in a gay-positive genre." The logic of homophobia inherent in the trope being the idea that you can turn your sexual orientation on or off with the same ease you do a light switch (and if homosexuality is a choice, why shouldn't you just choice to be heterosexual?)

So: Gay for You, ideologically problematic; Out for You, OK. Now, time to actually read one...

Jaymes' The Backup Boyfriend is better written than your typical e-book romance novel. Her two main protagonists are well-realized and appealing, and their relationship both sweet and pleasure-inducingly hot. But I was disappointed, because the more I read, the more I feared the book going to turn out to be more "Gay for You" than "Out for You." The story's heterosexual half of the couple, working-class motorcycle repair shop owner Dylan, tells Alec, the sweet, slightly inept doctor whom he finds himself attracted to, that he's an "only-one-woman-a-night" kind of guy. Their mutual friend Noah asserts that "Dylan's as straight as they come." Dylan's only ever had sex with women, and his strong bond with his one true friend, Rick, who died five years earlier, did not include any erotic feelings, he assures both himself and Alec. When the two are at a football game, Dylan takes pleasure in ogling the cheerleaders. And twice during the story, Dylan deliberately looks at other men in bars, only to find that every other man besides Alec leaves him sexually cold.

But Jaymes showed herself conversant with the issues behind the "gay for you"/"out for you" debate, or at least sensitive to the potential homophobia in the overtly "gay for you" storyline. Dylan eventually realizes, and tells Alec, that his feelings for his dead friend Rick might have included sexual ones. His difficult past—he and Rick met as homeless teenagers, lived on the streets, and sold themselves sexually in order to survive—gave him no real chance to think about his sexuality, never mind begin to explore it. And Rick's romantic relationship with another man soon after he and Dylan managed to scrape enough money together to rent their first apartment meant that any such exploration was put on hold.

Interestingly, part of Jaymes' plotline revolves around Dylan's refusal to be labeled. Is his refusal to be called Alec's "boyfriend" a negative rejection of his own identity as gay or bisexual? A residue of the homophobia inherent in the "Gay for You" trope? Or is it a positive refusal to allow labels to define him? I'll leave you to read the novel and decide for yourself.

In her post, JesseWave wondered what it was about the "Gay for You" trope that so appealed to female heterosexual readers, a question that got a bit lost in the following slew of comments about GfY vs. OfY. It's a question worth exploring, though, one I'll be thinking about and hopefully will write about in the near future.

Have you read other GfY or OfY books? Do you, like JesseWave, think OfY books are better than GfY? Or less homophobic? What fantasies do GfY books fulfill that OfY books don't?