The reasons these women give for reading gay romance range from curiosity and escapism to empowerment in seeing the age-old struggle between the sexes reconfigured. Nearly one book a day? A 36-year-old accountant named Ana Maria can top that: She reads 25 a month. “Two gorgeous men rubbing off on each other is flipping sexy,” she says. Emmy Frost, a young nurse in Hawaii, admits that she reads 15 to 20 gay romances a month. Through the safety and anonymity of e-mail, women from around the country responded to our questions and confessed their obsessive reading habits. Hot and steamy gay-romance literature is to women what Internet porn is to men: They get off on it, mostly in secret, and keep coming back for more.Īnd like porn, reading gay romance can be downright addictive. (The first house to take the plunge, Running Press, sent out its initial raft of books just this year.) In many ways the growing popularity of gay romance represents nothing less than a tectonic shift in a culture that says women don’t (and shouldn’t) consume porn. The genre really came into its own in the ’90s as an Internet and e-book phenomenon, and the old-school print-publishing houses are playing catch-up. This being the youngest of the romance disciplines, there are no definitive industry numbers on gay-themed love stories. That, in a nutshell, is the latest twist in romance fiction, a $1.37 billion industry that dominates the consumer-books market, and is in turn dominated by women, who buy more than 90 percent of all romance novels. In some ways it defeats the novelty, but it comes back to them being on equal ground. As the 20-year-old explains, “It’s more fun to read about men going through the stuff women have gone through for thousands of years. On the receiving end of these books are people like Nichols.
The licentious boy-band rock star couldn’t care less about the pretty female fan, but her cute boyfriend, on the other hand … The brooding sea captain falls not for the blushing maiden but his own dashing first mate. To read widely in this genre is to delve into the minds and hearts of male cops, detectives, private investigators, spies, assassins, pirates, sharpshooters and military officers who let nothing stand in the way of love. With an eager audience urging them on, Buchanan and other female authors are reinventing the ages-old romance novel to accommodate - and accentuate - gay love. In fact, most readers of gay-romance novels are - like most readers of straight-romance novels - women who devour 300-page stories of men falling in and out of love with each other, all the while having abundant, glorious and oh-so-graphic sex. The audience of some 20 is mostly female. Which leads us to the other oddity on display at the Hustler store this night. They know Buchanan is a woman, just as they know that most gay-romance novels are written by women like her. It’s an entirely hollow gesture to the genre’s growing number of fans.
She uses the pen name “James Buchanan” because in the niche of the gay-romance novel, publishers see male writers as more authentic and, more importantly, so do readers. “James is so great, so real,” whispers a fan, Zoe Nichols.Īt first glance, the reading seems fairly conventional - except for the fact that James Buchanan is not a man, she is a heterosexual mother of two, whose husband watches her read from the back of the room. Those in the Hustler store audience love it. Soon after, the men wake up to find a dead chicken on their car. Explore every inch.”Įxuberant, nasty sex ensues, explicitly described by Buchanan. Hard, passionate and warm, Enrique’s mouth devoured Chase’s senses. “The fabric of his slacks clung in all the right places. “That man’s butt was fine,” the author reads. In the book, a gay FBI agent is about to make love to his boyfriend, an LAPD officer. On a wet autumn evening, a small crowd gathers at the Hustler Hollywood store on Sunset Boulevard for a reading of James Buchanan’s new romance novel, Personal Demons. Click here for “Hot off the Press: A Gay-Romance Sampler.”Ĭlick here for “Pen Names and Prejudice,” by Gendy Alimurung.