Dixploitation: thoughts on gay fiction. m/m & yaoi

[analect]

This was originally posted on the old version of my website, before I split my pen names up. It’s been rewritten somewhat, because it was full of outdated links, and it is strictly my personal opinions, but there might be a few interesting things here to pull apart. Oh, and it is long, so have a beverage handy. I’m a verbose cow. Also, references to my work appear, simply because it’s based on my own experiences; sorry about the pimpage.

***

Let me start with a little background. Prior to 2008, I had absolutely zero knowledge of the ebook market. I did have about a decade's worth of rejection slips from publishers and agents enthusing over my writing, but telling me I just wasn't commercial enough for a global market.

In a moment of speculative curiosity, I submitted a manuscript to a digital publisher, just to see what would happen. I'd written Breaking Faith over Christmas 2007, purely as a story that popped into my head, playing around with themes and ideas that are important to me. The novel is basically a romantic drama, set in northern Montana. White, middle-class Brett meets poor, mixed-race Tommy, who is struggling to keep the peace in a turbulent household ruled by a violent, drunken father. They begin a tentative, clandestine romance, and fall into one of those passionate ‘first love’ affairs that, for a while, blinkers them to the rest of the world… almost.

When Tommy’s father ends up dead, Brett is forced to make a decision that will impact on the rest of both their lives, and their intense, imperfect relationship takes on a new role.

It was a massive thrill when the novel was accepted, published, well received... I was delighted. Moreover, several people compared it to Brokeback Mountain, which I was really pleased by. Not just because I like Annie Proulx (and yeah, all right, the movie was good too!), but because the whole point of Brokeback as the cultural phenomenon it became – including the fact the damn film had to wait ten years for release – was that it was a love story outside of gender. Although it underlined the prejudice and persecution of the place and time of its setting, the loudest statement it made was not about sexuality, but about people.

That, to me, is tremendously important. As a human being and as a writer, I'm interested in other people's experiences. I have plenty of my own to draw on, but it's the act of getting behind my characters' eyes and really thinking outside of my own head that appeals to me. I'm the first to acknowledge I think more like a man than a woman – and I have both straight and gay male friends who claim they think more like women – but I'm not a man. That's one of the things that makes writing male characters enjoyably challenging for me.

Anyway, back to the point. I was surprised, when I started the slippery route of promoting my new release, to discover the following things about the digital market:

a)     Romance is far from just not dead; it is alive, pulsating, and it will rip you in two and suck out your brains. The genre is that big, that scary, and that complicated. Whoa, dude.

b)     Sex doesn't just sell, it appears to be mandatory.

c)      If you pause to blink, someone will slap a label on you. This is because the internet is a pulsing hub of a marketplace, driven by keywords and the assumption of immediacy. People want what they want right now, and they're not going to spend forever looking for it.

I didn’t know there was a thriving market for gay – or, as it is more usually termed, m/m – romance, with just as many subdivisions as the kinds you see in category romance novels. In my innocence, I didn’t even know romance was as heavily subdivided as it is. (‘Interracial’ is a genre? Really, internet?)

So, before I was really aware of it, I found I'd stumbled into being not just an author of gay fiction, but m/m. I was – and, in fact, I remain – confused by this.

Gradually, I came to learn the different strands of genre distinction commonly used in the market, and the implications they carry. And lo, they are (roughly) thus:

Gay fiction: Not necessarily, as I'd always thought, fiction that just references homosexuality in the context of a character's culture, society, identity, or similar (like one of my all time favourite reads: Sucking Sherbet Lemons by Michael Carson). There's a whole loaded subtext to do with the author's gender and orientation (just look at the recent controversy over the Lambdas...). I won't, right now, wade into the debate over what permutation of gender, orientation, and experience one has to possess to write 'gay fiction', though I have encountered gay male authors who get their panties bunched over women writing about gay men. I can, frankly – having also encountered several female authors who write gay men as if they were women with penises – see their point, even if I consider it a puerile and faintly ridiculous one.

It's my feeling that, if every writer wrote purely from their own experience, the market would be inundated with very dull, very insular stories in which a lot of laundry and data entry got done, but there were relatively few murders... and sci-fi and fantasy would really suffer.

However, I do agree, to a certain extent, that 'gay fiction' as a label is much more than gratuitous beans-and-franks on the page. I love Edmund White, Felice Picano... the whole Violet Quill deal. You can argue that, a lot of the time, that body of work is not so much about being gay, but being, for example, young in Fire Island Pines, or over forty in the 1990s. It's a cultural, Zeitgeist thing. But, of course, 'gay' is not a homogeneous cultural label (sorry about the pun). There's no hard-coded rule that says, for instance, leather culture is more definitive of the 'gay experience' than two legally married men raising a child, or, to be less politically correct, techno music and Special K. It's my opinion that people are people are people, and gender and orientation are simply aspects of that.

M/M: A strange one, to me, though I admit it's a classification I use for my work, largely because it’s an accepted shorthand, and it helps people find me, which in turn helps pay my rent. I originally took m/m to derive simply from the designation of male/male, as opposed to f/f or m/m/f, but there is another, rather more loaded meaning.

Increasingly, m/m books have been grabbing a growing market share with the tacit – or occasionally overt – understanding that they are somehow 'by women, for women'. Okaaaay. Well, I'd humbly suggest that this is complete bullsh-- not borne out by the fact many are indeed written and read by men.

To be blunt, while I do understand the concept of women writing and enjoying idealized male romance (or 'sensual romance', if you prefer) purely for its own sake, to me that seems to blur a distinction with yaoi (q.v.), and to simply say that any title including any form of gay male relationship is m/m, to some degree, robs it of a validity to be anything else. Is Brokeback Mountain m/m? Or is it a universal statement on the nature of love? Can it even be both?

I'm really not sure. To me, the widespread use of the term m/m, and the often attendant theorem that if the characters don't read like men – or spend the majority of the book navel-gazing like soppy teenage girls in between bouts of improbably athletic sex with their hairless, hunky, well-oiled lovers – it doesn't matter, is worrying. To drag in a rough analogy, if you set a book in present-day London, and then tell me your character gets off the Tube at Mansion House and walks down Shaftesbury Avenue, I'm going to know your research is faulty, and it is going to piss me off.

Naturally, this argument shoots itself in the foot after a while, viz.: I have known many men who genuinely do navel-gaze like teenage girls. However, if I chose to write them into a novel, I would make this a point of character, and not imply for the reader that is a given mental condition for most males of the species (or females, comes to that...). I admit, however, that this opinion comes from the woman who had to ask a male friend to explain what was happening in the Bridget Jones movie, because she didn’t understand.

These comments are a generalization, I know, and I don't mean to tar an entire genre with the same brush. It's just that, while I love how open and diverse the publishing industry is becoming, the apparent need to tag everything with labels, sub-genres, and ‘heat ratings’ concerns me. Josh Lanyon, Lambda Award finalist and author of the really rather good Adrien English mysteries, wrote, in 2008, a book entitled Man, oh Man: Writing M/M Fiction for Cash and Kinks, published by MLR Press.

I haven't read it. I have no intention of doing so, though it's probably worth a look, as how-to books on writing go. Reader reviews seem promising, and tell me that Lanyon decrees the difference between gay fiction and m/m to be that, in the latter, romance is the foundation of the story.

If this is so, then I'm not sure of the point at which a gay romance becomes m/m, or if a reclassification of, for example, Felice Picano's Like People in History (often accorded the epithet 'the gay Gone With the Wind') is now required. I don't know what happens if one has accidentally written a romantic fantasy suspense, or a mystery with elements of erotic horror. It's all very confusing. This brings me to the last classification in the current diatribe:

Yaoi: I confess, this is the one that still perplexes me. As far as I understand, both the term and the genre have changed both in their native Japan, and since their import into the West. Yaoi continues to change. It has multitudinous off-shoots, sub-genres and attendant terminology, but I'm still largely in the dark on all the nuances.

Essentially, yaoi proper seems to be governed by tropes of expectation regarding character, gender roles, target audiences and so forth. For my own understanding, I think of it as a mindset fairly well represented by a cross between the emotional bonds of Platonic pederasty, and the aesthetics of the kind of mildly philosophical Uranianism espoused by Oscar Wilde.

Wikipedia (it's on the internet; it must be true) tells me "Yuri [the manga equivalent of F/F] for actual lesbians tends to resemble the opposite of bara [the manga equivalent of M/M], while men's yuri manga is more like yaoi manga, since both are targeted at the opposite sex and are not about reflecting gay reality."

Confused yet? I am. Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

If you've stuck with me this far, kudos. I'll buy you a drink.

What worries me, from a writer's perspective, is not the fact that there is all this diversity in the marketplace. All the genres, sub-genres, and labels I have mentioned are, in their own way, valid. There is absolutely no reason that gay stroke stories should not be written, by men or by women, or that erotica should not feature the kind of lipstick lesbianism so beloved of the porn industry. There is nothing wrong with writing or reading romance, with any degree of sexual content (or ‘heat level’, as publishers like to call it), and designating that title M/M, F/F, M/M/F, F/M/F, W/X/Y/Z - or any other facetious acronym you care to apply.

But, to me, there remains something worrying. Romance, as a genre, still has dodgy connotations of slapdash writing, poor and hackneyed plotting, lacklustre characterisation… and there are worse stigmas attached to ebooks.

This is changing. It will change. As of June 2011, Amazon is proudly proclaiming their Kindle format is now outselling print books. There are ebook publishers (and self-publishing ebook authors) who present well-edited, tightly constructed titles, just as I’m sure we’ve all picked up poorly written mass-market print books with frustrating proof errors in them.

However, if romance continues to label itself with ever-decreasing sub-divisions, and if books are marketed purely on which variation of ‘insert-tab-a-into-slot-b-c-or-d’ they contain, I can’t help but think we’re all losing something.

The very trend that is opening up publishing and bringing readers wider choices in fiction than ever before is also developing a slightly scary side effect. The imperative for authors and publishers to make themselves heard in an increasingly crowded marketplace means tighter branding, more use of keywords, sub-genres, and any other way in which titles can be made immediately identifiable to readers in terms of style, content, and function. That’s true across all types of fiction, to an extent, but it seems to be at its worst in romance, where gender and orientation are not keywords tacked on to the book in order to enable readers to search by them, but genres in their own right.

That is the kernel I don’t really agree with and, as such, I can't help feeling that, every time I include a gay male character in a story, I'm adding a little bit to a culture not unlike the blaxploitation flicks of the Seventies. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I know, but I hear those funk guitar riffs drifting across my brain — bom-chicka-bow-wah! — and I wonder... is this dixploitation?

Just as the traditional stereotype of m/f romance novels – girly-girl heroine, chisel-jawed alpha-male hero etc. – pander to gender roles that may or may not be terribly current, and may or may not make post-feminists wet themselves in ire, I wonder if the explosion in popularity of m/m fiction doesn’t slightly undermine perceptions of LGBT romance as just another flavour of normal. I hope not. I truly do. To me, these are simply ways of classifying fiction for marketing purposes… but I do worry.

The more we label fiction according to who's doing whom in its pages, the more we close it off into ever-shrinking sub-genres and derivative categories, and where do we go from there?

 

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Note: Breaking Faith will be available in a new edition (print and ebook) from Dreamspinner Press this autumn, with a brand-new sequel following on behind. In case you wondered. I'll shut up now. ;)

Comments

[intothewood]

I had a writerly experience (sort of a cross between religious and orgasmic, which is what writing is, come to think of it) reading this - it's like finding the holy grail, or at least the promise of 5 day delivery thereof. *You'll have to make allowances for my prattle, but it is your fault, since you insisted on drinks.

What I mean to say is this is EXACTLY what I was wishing for, hoping for in beginning my exploration of writing communities - seems I made a fortunate stumble into the right one. This post is so useful to me, and has me shouting "yes' yes!" in that writerly way.

I've had many discussions with a friend on what constitutes genres, how gay/ lesbian/ other/ both fit into the equation and how classifications are morphing as the market evolves. Something he pointed out is that lesbians read m/m fic, as do straight women. Women seem to get it. His theory is gay men represent a sort of equality in relationship that isn't well represented in fiction aimed toward women - that whole bodice buster routine you pointed out. Equal footing in gay relationships is inherent, whether or not the partners involved choose to exercise it. In fact, they need to consciously choose to create roles if they're going to do so, as opposed to het roles, which are pretty much set in stone - or so society tells us. That fiction can bust out of these mythological roles and introduce a wide array of relationship practices is such a boon to us as writers, particularly as society is being forced to pull down some very old constructions that free not only gay men and lesbians, but also straight women, transgender, questioning and everyone else along the path. What fun! And maybe, just maybe straight men will begin to feel jealous of the great time we're all having and join in on the fun, too.

Where that leaves us now is this confusing middle ground in which people are scrambling for labels and categorizations, even as we're actively working to eliminate the very same. It's a mess, and it's going to remain messy for some time, but we're all working to redefine society and art that reflects changes in society. It's frustrating and maddening, but it's progress.

I of course want no classification of my work, other than fiction. That my characters are gay is not a purposeful issue, in my own mind. They're gay, and that's that, now let's get on with the story. Someday we may get there.

And now I must admit that I'm perpetuating my own prejudices against classifications like romance by thinking in terms of Harlequin and failing to really look at what is truly happening. I'm selling myself short, in that I may well be missing out on an important piece of the developing market. I really need to open up and do some examination beyond my preconceived notions.

It's all an adjustment, from how we categorize work to how we meet up with our markets.

[analect]

I'm so pleased to have provided something useful. I'll go fetch a damp towel. ;)

Seriously though, yes. Equality - the fact you have two men who, as you say, have to construct any roles they're going to assume in the course of the story - is a big part of why I prefer to write LGBT romance instead of het. It worries me that, even now, the predilection in straight romance is to often perpetuate the feminine heroine/alpha male hero thing. I understand that does it for a lot of women... but not me. It's worrying that, even if you write two women, they still have social baggage in the context of romance that men often don't. Does depend on the actual story you're writing, though - of course.

And yes... romance is worth looking at outside of the traditional Harlequin formats. As nightsfury points out, often it simply means 'has vague romantic elements in'. It is a big, complex, scary genre, but with very interesting things within it.

[niniane]

I definitely think that a lot of romances do the alpha man/beta female thing, but definitely not all do. (And there's no real reason to write a romance that way.) *shrugs* Catherine Asaro writes science fiction romances, and it's almost always the opposite, in fact...the alpha woman and the beta male. So there's no rule, and plenty who write things in any way imaginable.

One can of course, also, write f/f romances in order to avoid the "gender inequality" bit. TBH, I tend to prefer these (when they don't go into, "Oooh, lesbian porn! Wee!") as there are so few strong female protagonists in most genres, and it's refreshing to see female characters who don't depend on men to solve or fix things for them - they just pull up their bras and do it themselves. (Melissa Scott is a good example of this. If you're ever looking for cyberpunk, I'd totally recommend her.)

[scarylady]

I'm feeling fortunate to be somewhat new right now, as I haven't had to bang my head against this yet. The way I see it - and it's massively simplistic because I tend to be 'orribly black and white - is this:

If I write a piece for an erotica publisher, then I default to M/M (and mostly D/s BDSM if we want a couple more labels for the pile). I don't have a problem with this classification because I come from fanfic, therefore all that has changed in my labeling is that I've swapped slash for M/M. *shrugs* Big, fat hairy deal.

If I insert a gay pairing into anything else I write - which will be predominantly fantasy fiction - then I treat it exactly the same as I would inserting a het couple. It's not the main thrust of the story - the plot/politics/big nasty gribbly is the prominent theme.

If my readers get their knickers in a twist about finding such a pairing in a book without having been warned, well, tough. Yelling and screaming hasn't happened yet (and I have done it in fanfic - I got a truckload of 'I don't usually like slash, but...' comments), but I suppose at some point it's inevitable.

I'm going to try hard to continue to think this way once my living depends on writing because, blunt and simple though it is, I think it's important.

Fingers crossed on that one.

*edited for stupid fat fingers on keyboard error*

[analect]

I agree absolutely. The problem I find - and perhaps I've simply been unlucky - is that there is often precious little distinction between erotica and the super-genre that is romance, so anything with relationship or romantic elements, even mysteries with perfectly serviceable plots that simply include gay characters, all get labelled m/m, and the focus tends to fall on how much of said content is devoted to hawt boyz.

Meanwhile, the opportunities for non-explicit or 'mainstream' fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or anything else in the small press department are pretty slim, and larger publishers are - I hear anecdotally, and sadly also from personal experience - still often suggesting gay content gets rewritten as het, or simply reformatted as 'niche romance'.

It's one of those 'changes are in progress' things, I think.

[nightsfury]

Unfortunately, the type of sub-dividing and label slapping you describe isn't just happening in the 'gay fiction' market. It's showing up all across the publishing industry.

An acquaintance of mine who's been published for a long time blames it on the impact of big-business marketing concepts. His experience was that, at one time, a publishing house would nurture a writer along, helping them to develop themselves as a writer. Not anymore. Now, because big business has bought up many of the publishing houses, books have to be 'marketed', they need a label so that they can be put in the right slot in the bookstores. And to make it easier to write the advertising copy.

I know of one author who writes fantasy that tends to have a strong romantic element in it (hetero), and because of that her books get put in the romance section. Though, they really should be in the fantasy section since there's a lot more going on in them than just a romance.

One side effect of all this labeling, (from comments author friends of mine have made) is that the writer might also get stuck with that label. 'Oh, you're the gay writer' or the 'the romance writer.' So, that trying to branch out in another genre under the same name might become difficult, if not impossible. The marketing idea that you (the writer) become associated with a partiuclar genre/sub-genre (read 'brand'). I've even heard of panels at conventions that focus on how to market yourself as a 'brand.'

To a certain extent, I can understand this. People pick up a book expecting a certain kind of story from an author they've read before. So, I can see the commercial advantages of a 'brand.' But as a writer who likes to stretch herself, I want to be free to explore other genres, or even mix a few together.

Publishers are always saying they want something new and different, but then when presented with it, the response is that 'this is really good, but we're not sure how we could market it.' Maybe not quite that bluntly, but I can't recall the exact phrasing the person who told me this story used, something to that effect, though.

In the mad rush to categorize everything, it seems like it would be easy to forget that all stories (romance, m/m, etc,), at their heart, are about human experience. A label might make it easier to know which aspect of that an author has chosen to focus on, but it shouldn't become an exclusive box.

[analect]

YES! Exactly. On all points, and most especially the last one. I dislike the branding thing intensely, and although I understand it and why it is (arguably) necessary, it has already forced me to split myself across three pen names because of people's 'expectations'.

Absolutely my point about romance. As a genre, it now seems to mean anything from 'pr0n' to 'has mild romantic elements', which I find incomprehensible, and suspect wouldn't happen if it wasn't identified as a 'female' genre. (Whole other debate there.) Over-classification and labelling might make it easier to find things on Google, but I can't avoid feeling they don't really help anyone.

I completely, utterly agree about the dichotomy with publishers. They don't want 'new' or 'different', however much they say they do. They want 'pretty much the same as the rest of the market, along safe and marketable guidelines, but with enough minor differences to be mildly innovative'. Again, I can understand it, but I don't have to agree with it.

[scarylady]

It's probably worth making a clear mental distinction between labeling and tagging.

Labeling is, imo, saying 'such and such an author writes x type of book'

Tagging is a required part of e-marketing. It has sod all to do with sticking people in niche boxes and everything to do with ensuring that when a reader searches for something good to buy, you pop up in their list.

If possible I'd recommend embracing (and exploiting the crap out of) the latter without confusing it with the former. If a writer wants their website and their work found, then they need to tag for every classification they could conceivably fall under.

[analect]

Very true, although I do think the distinction can become blurred. The problem arises where books that are, let's say, fantasy with romantic/sexual elements get classified as romance with fantasy elements. If said elements are gay, said book tends to be regarded as m/m (or purposely marketed as same), and everything gets a little muddied.

I find this happens less at the level of authors' websites (where, true, it's a marketing issue) and more in the places you have no control over, like retailers' websites, review blogs, bookstores etc., and it's a matter of classification screwing with perception. Trying to explain what I mean (brain go splat...): one early review of Breaking Faith - which was nonetheless a very positive review - called it a difficult read because of the degree of emotional realism, which the reviewer felt was unusual in romance. So, because the book was tagged as m/m and romance (and I was in the process of being labelled an m/m author), there was already an expectation that didn't necessarily match the blurb.

I stop waffle go find coffee now.