LGBTQIA, sometimes LGBTQ, sometimes just LGBT.
Mostly, just G.
I swear, it's not a week anymore if I'm not stumbling
across some new review site or publishing company or website or blog that touts
how much it supports the LGBTQ community and how they're great allies…
… only to read further and find that by LGBTQ community,
they mean the M/M community. That they'll only review M/M books because well,
they don't have any reviewers on staff who want to read lesbian romance or romance
with trans characters (and heaven forbid if you lob a curveball and throw an
asexual romance or 'worse' at them). Or they'll say LGBTQ, but if you look through their site, you'll find nothing but
reviews of M/M books.
That, by publishing LGBTQ romance (wait, wait, I've got
this wrong, GLBTQ romance, there we go), they mean they publish M/M. And
yes, I know that's where the big sales are. I run a publishing company and I'm
heavily involved in the finances of said company. M/M romance does very well
for itself. I've also seen lesbian romance do very well for itself (some of
LT3's best sellers in 2014 were lesbian books).
Trans and other queer books don't sell well.
Because on the whole, (1) readers don't buy them, (2) reviewers
won't read them, (3) writers won't write them, and (4) publishers won't publish
them. (Obviously there are exceptions. But on the whole, this is true.) There
are queer books out there (sometimes they're hard to find, though that will hopefully
be less of a problem in the near future when Amazon revamps their categories). There's
fewer of them than there are M/M romances, but they are there. That they don't
sell, however, is not the point of this post.
I'm sure you're wondering, well, what the fuck is the
point of this post, then?
The point of this post is that these books deserve the same treatment as M/M romance
books. They don't get it. They don't get it, and I'm fed up with reviewers,
readers, writers, and publishers who pull themselves up on high pedestals and
trumpet their liberal viewpoints to the world. They're diverse! They're allies!
They support the LGBTQ community!
Except, here's a novel concept: You do not get to call
yourself a supporter of or ally to a broad and diverse community because you like
and focus on one specific segment of that community. Full stop.
(Related: you do not get to call yourself an ally in your
own defense when a marginalized person is telling you that you're being a
bigot. I don't give any fucks about your self-appointed allyship. Your Ally Card
is currently being burned in effigy.)
If you want to be an ally, you cannot limit yourself to simply
M/M romance. That's just not good enough. I don't begrudge anyone a preference
for M/M romance. I do begrudge people claiming that they support the LGBTQ
community, but who then follow that up by doing nothing for the L, B, T, or Q
(or I, or A).
I'm not the best writer when it comes to diversity in my fiction.
The majority of my books feature bisexual romance (*). It's a problem I'm
actively working on. I want to write more lesbian romance. I want to write
asexual romance. I want to write more trans romance. I will write these books, because it's important, because supporting
the entire community is important.
(*Most of these books pass as gay romance since two
cisgender men end up together at the end, but I pretty much always write my characters
as bisexual. It only occurred to me recently that people would read that wrong,
so I'm getting better at explicitly saying
so in-book.)
The point of this post? To issue a challenge to you. Step
up. Give something other than an M/M romance a chance. At some point you gave
an M/M book a shot and fell in love with that genre. What's stopping you from
giving that same chance to a lesbian or trans or other queer book?
What were the popular lesbian romances? I'm always looking for recommendations.
ReplyDeleteThe three most popular at LT3 were Safe Passage by Kate Owen, The Only Way by Jamie Sullivan, and The List by Tina Kunkle. (It's a good mix, two contemporary, one fantasy, short stories to longer novellas.)
DeleteSafe Passage is a contemporary short story featuring two teachers solving a mystery from the past (dun dun dun)?
The Only Way is a fantasy novella. It's about a young woman who pretends to be a man to take on the world of no-holds-barred fighting to help her family survive...
The List is a contemporary short story/novella (not sure where the divide hits there) about a former FBI agent who works at a horse farm, and has just gotten a promotion when she starts to notice hinky things going on...
Camellia by Cari Z. and Caitlin Ricci has done very well, too, but mostly in awards (less in sales). It's a contemporary (and BDSM) novella featuring a model and a tea house mistress (I'm sorry, I'm doing terrible at describing these). It's super adorable.
For a not LT3 book, I really enjoyed Hellcat's Bounty by Renae Jones, which is a sci-fi western thing featuring an (acidic ameoba) bounty hunter and the stereotypical good girl. ^^
Hopefully one of those will pique your interest, but I can dig more up if you're looking for a specific genre or something. ^^
Thanks for the recommendations--reading more lesbian romance is one of my resolutions for this year. :)
DeleteYay! I hope you like one or more of them. :-)
DeleteI picked up some E. E. Ottoman's stories at the end of the Christmas period - looking forward to reading them as the descriptions of the main characters were very varied and different to the standard handsome gay men in so much LGBT fiction.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to read stories with a trans main character, where them be in trans is pretty much incidental - there is a story and they are the focus, they just happen to be trans. Especially in science fiction or fantasy. The same for lesbian characters. I really enjoy reading m/m, it would just be nice for the other letters to come out and play a little more often.
E.'s work is good! I think my favorite of theirs was Selume Proferre, the magic system in that story is just amazing. (And the characters are super cool, too, but I am nothing if not a magic geek.)
DeleteTo plug LT3, that's pretty much 90% of what we publish. Most of our stories are sweet (low on the erotic content) and focus on the plot. I won't say they're all like that, but the majority are, and we do a lot of sci-fi and fantasy (which makes me 508239 kinds of happy, I'm definitely a huge fan of sci-fi and fantasy). So if you're looking for the other letters, that's a good place to start. ^^ (Though if you've got E.'s books, you're probably well aware of what LT3 publishes.)
I second the request for trans and other queer main characters, particularly in sci-fi romance (my favorite genre).
ReplyDeleteThough it was a tad rough around the edges, I very much enjoyed SKY PIRATE: SAFE HARBOR (Spring Horton), which features a trans hero in a steampunk setting. It's the only SFR with a trans main character I've come across.
I also enjoyed Renae Jones' HELLCAT'S BOUNTY. Other f/f SFRs/romantic SFs I've enjoyed are:
WAR GAMES - KS Augustin
RULEBREAKER and DEEP DECEPTION - Cathy Pegau
UNKNOWN FUTURES and NEVER GONNA DESERT YOU - Jessica E. Subject
OH CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN - Katherine V. Forrest
Joselle Vanderhooft's STEAM POWERED anthologies also include some romantic SF stories.
There are also two SF films featuring lesbian romances that I really enjoyed:
STRANGE FRAME - directed by G.B. Hajim (beautiful animation!)
CODEPENDENT LESBIAN SPACE ALIEN SEEKS SAME - a hilarious comedic SFR film directed by Madeleine Olnek.
I've blogged about all of the above books in one way or another and would love to cover more!
I'm begging anyone reading this that if you know of similar trans and queer SFR titles, please let me know! (sfrgalaxy "at" gmail DOT com). I hope the apparent lack of titles is because I'm not looking in the right places rather than a case of the books having not been written.
Yeah, sci-fi! Sci-fi is awesome. ^^ I am definitely going to look up the books you've mentioned, thank you for those recs!
DeleteLT3 has sadly no trans sci-fi (yet, I live on in hope ;3), but we do have some lesbian titles you might could be interested in?
A&A Salvage by Lucy Kemnitzer. It's light on the romance, but it's a solid sci-fi and it's got a sweet, sort of melancholy, sort of dreamy style to the writing. I liked it a lot, though I don't know many authors who could've pulled off the tone.
Circus Escape by Lilliana Rose. It's a sci-fi steampunky short story, and it's, again, a bit of a light touch on the romance, but it's fighting space bots and two women who are on opposite sides of the social spectrum who find a way to meet in the middle. ^^
Hakusan Angel by Alex Powell. It's a sci-fi military book, and Kaede (the lead MC) is such a sweetheart, I love her. ^^
Taijiku by Elizabeth Andre is a coming soon title (due out in March). Ladies in sci-fi underwater prison, facing down fearsome beasts and forming friendships (and maybe more /waggles eyebrows).
For bi, we've got Lexi Ander's amazing Valespian Pact series. Fair warning here, only books 1 and 2 are out (no major cliffhangers), and it does feature a threesome and m-preg. But the worldbuilding and relationships are amazing, and I am in awe of the way she does world building, character building, and plot building without infodumping or rushing anything. (Book 1 is Alpha Trine, Book 2 is Striker.)
Incursion by Aleksandr Voinov - Voinov is trans* and while, iirc, the story isn't explicitly trans*, it plays with gender and queerness. It's a little light on the romance but I enjoyed the worldbuilding.
DeleteSasha, thanks so much for the recs! I bought Hakusan Angel and Circus Escape and have tucked the other titles away for future reference & reading.
Delete@Cleo Thanks for your rec! I'd heard about Incursion but hadn't dipped my toes into it yet only because I'd heard what you shared, that it's light on the romance. I'll definitely keep it in on my TBR list, though, because I do enjoy romantic SF.