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Selling Books with GLBTQ Characters

Why can't you sell your "gay" book into the mainstream? Here are some thoughts on it.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

"The characters don't act like any gay men I know" -- no, nor do the characters in Stephen McCauley's work, even though they strike me as dealing with some sorts of truth. Nor do the characters in Chris Hunt's books, which might be considered kind of slashy, though I think the term "slash" was just about being invented at the time of the first one or two. These stories are not about reflecting life, they're about drama, which has a strong, true, but really tangential relationship to life.

I wouldn't say that gay men's romance was lacking in emotional content, but I would say that the emotional content's general range, while overlapping a great deal, differs from that written for women. Again, I can't quite describe the difference. It's subtle.

Also, I think sometimes in this discussion we're comparing the wrong things. I don't think that comparing erotica written for men and romance written for women, or erotica written for women and romance written for men, is necessarily all that revealing. But if you took the whole lot of each and compared how erotica and romance interrelate in the two cases (written for men vs. written for women) you might see something interesting.

It's not that erotica and romance are deathly different, it's that their purpose, tone, and conventions are not identical.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

"It's not that erotica and romance are deathly different, it's that their purpose, tone, and conventions are not identical."

Well, the problem I was having in the previous post - and the reason I mixed apples with oranges - is that the romance versus erotica divide, which definitely exists in heterosexual fiction and GLBT fiction, doesn't exist in slash (IMHO). Except in a few extreme cases, I don't think there is any great difference in approach between G-rated slash, PG-13-rated slash, and NC-17-rated slash. That why it's hard to compare slash to non-erotica genres (such as romance or genre fiction) or to erotica genres.

I read a news article recently about the problems that librarians have in evaluating shonen ai books; the books will seem very kid-friendly (from an American point of view), and then bam, on the next page, the characters will be in bed together. Same problem with slash. Most PG slash fantasy novels read like mainstream fantasy novels. But god help you if you pore through the author's site to see what else they've written. You could find yourself reading a fetish tale - and with no discernable change in the author's style.