“You’re mixing genres.”
This wasn’t said to me as a negative. It was an observation from my editor when I had the initial draft of my first novel, Drama Queens with Love Scenes, assessed. At the time, I didn’t realise this was such a big deal. Cinema had made an art of combining genres for a long time. Surely, literature was equally as experimental.
But when I described this novel as a romance, because I didn’t know better, I was chastised by a commissioning editor at a literary festival.
I’m proud that one reviewer said that ‘it flouts m/m convention throughout.’ In fact a recent review said the same. Yet when I wrote it, I was simply writing a farce. Hey, it’s about unrequited love in the theatre district of the Afterlife after all. It, and the rest of the Actors and Angels series, were influenced by the comedy novels of Joe Keenan.
Many of us grew up finding queer characters in books released through larger publishing houses, so to me, genre was irrelevant. Gays appeared in thrillers, in contemporary settings, in space, in mysteries, and pretty much anywhere a writer wanted to put them.
But still GLBTQ authors are pigeonholed as Romance Writers. This seems odd. Another Australian writer comes across this all the time. He never writes romance, yet with the explosion of male to male romance books available, he’s often introduced at festivals as a romance writer.
Getting back to Drama Queens with Love Scenes, I remember one review that said if you are expecting a HEA, you may be disappointed. Hell, I didn’t know what HEA meant. I had the perfect ending for this novel, and many other reviewers agreed.
Later I attempted a more traditional Romance novella, Nate and the New Yorker, followed by Nate’s Last Tango. Many people liked them. Some showed their lack of wide reading material by claiming:
How dare there be a twist? I wasn’t expecting this twist! Where was the sex? I was expecting sex!
As a friend studying painting told me ages ago, art is judged on whether the creator’s intention was realised. Critique should never be about what something isn’t. And whether that’s in a horror spiced up with comedy, sci-fi blended with magical realism, or historical fiction with a contemporary twist, don’t expect someone to fall in love just because several characters are gay. You’re showing your ignorance.
There’s going to be new queer writers as more find their voice, and just as classic gay literature has shown, it won’t be all about two guys or two girls who like each other but something is holding them back from their potential happy ever after.
As one meme I shared recently claimed – ‘I am an author, not a genre.’ And there’s as much to say about the queer experience now as there has been in the past.
A.Fae 