Man on Man: The New Gay Romance...
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Man on Man: The New Gay Romance... |
| Commentator: | Gendy Alimurun |
| Date(s): | December 16, 2009 |
| Venue: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| External Links: | Man on Man: The New Gay Romance ..., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Man on Man: The New Gay Romance... was an article in the L.A. Weekly by Gendy Alimurun.
The topics discussed are professional m/m romance, its appeal and popularity, and its roots in slash fic. It also had statements that reminded some fans of the McCaffrey Tent Pent Statement.
While the article is a fairly standard one on this topic, it became a huge flashpoint for fans discussing the legitimacy and appeal of slash fiction writing, female desire, disenfranchisement, cultural appropriation, and more.
This debate has been called "The Slash Debate" in some circles, somewhat of a misnomer due to the fact that this discussion was one in a long, long line of "slash debates."
See The Slash Debate.
Excerpts from the Article
It’s an entirely hollow gesture to the genre’s growing number of fans. They know Buchanan is a woman, just as they know that most gay-romance novels are written by women like her. Which leads us to the other oddity on display at the Hustler store this night. The audience of some 20 is mostly female. 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. 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. 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. The brooding sea captain falls not for the blushing maiden but his own dashing first mate. The licentious boy-band rock star couldn’t care less about the pretty female fan, but her cute boyfriend, on the other hand ...
Some respondents see these novels as a harmless way to “explore without ‘consequences,’ ” but others, like Toni Rapone, find deeper connections. Rapone, a retired commodities day trader in Montana, speaks of her love for the archetypal loners. Forced into isolation or desperate circumstances, these guys depend on each other to survive. “If they can find love,” Rapone says, “with someone who is their equal, so they can express themselves and be accepted for who they are, then it somehow feels like the chances of my doing it are increased.”
The male characters in gay romances, then, are perhaps men only superficially. At heart they’re women. They may look like boys, and make love with male bodies, but they think and act and love like girls.But can the body and mind be divorced so readily? Or at all? Desire, after all, is shadowy, the daughter of both flesh and mind.
Penley finds evolutionary biology too reductive, but ironically certain biological studies bear her out when she says that who we are aroused by, and who we identify with, is much more fluid than we might expect.
Women would write stories as part of what Prof. Penley calls a “gift economy.” In slash fandom, where almost everyone is a writer, you create something, hoping it will inspire someone else to write another story. It’s a sexed-up game of Exquisite Corpse. “In other words, I will write this really hot story, and maybe in turn you will write one for me. They’re doing it for their own pleasure,” she says.
Slash found its best, most perfect medium online, but it’s been around for decades. Penley first came across it in 1986, when slash stories were being distributed as photocopied zines, like comic books. She was blown away by them, at the writers’ transgressions; by the way the women rewrote popular culture to meet their own social and sexual desires.
In the process, their act of consumption had turned into an act of production. These writers picked up on the homoeroticism of every male pair on television and gleefully ran with it. They slashed Kirk and Spock. Or Starsky and Hutch. “They were just doing what the producers didn’t have the nerve to do,” Penley says. It was, she adds, the first time she’d ever really responded to porn.
Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 film that catapulted gay love stories into the mainstream, is often mistaken to be the work that started the gay-romance genre. But Brokeback did not go over well in the M/M community. It was slashed beyond recognition, online and off — much to the chagrin of author Annie Proulx, who was moved to complain to The Wall Street Journal about the endless “ghastly” and “pornish” manuscripts she receives. Gay-romancers believe Proulx — and her readers — need their help. “Proulx writes these stories about people who create their own hell and then die in it,” Riley says, her voice dripping with scorn. “The guy in that story ruins everybody’s life because he can’t accept who he is. It’s just all so horribly painful. If these people only had the balls to be happy.”
Authors James Buchanan and Jet Mykles are sitting in the dining room of Buchanan’s 100-year-old Pasadena craftsman house, hunched over coffee, talking about their favorite subject: sex. It’s a cozy place, with a scattering of kids’ toys, pets running around, the perfect picture of domesticity. No whips, chains or leather bondage gear lying about — at least not anywhere obvious. But then again, Buchanan’s real name is Amy, the married mother of two. “James” is the name she would have been given if she’d been born a boy.“Obviously, I am female,” she says. “But when I think of myself, if you say, Do you identify with being female? My answer is no. It’s just ... me.”
At times she has felt like she was born into the wrong body and wished she was a man. But not so much that she’s actively sought to change anything.
Buchanan is a lawyer. She once wanted to be a criminal prosecutor, and the cops, detectives and FBI agents she writes about come from that world.
Jet Mykles is also a pen name. While Buchanan is lean and compact, Mykles is as voluptuous as a fertility-goddess statue. She isn’t married but has been with the same man for 12 years.
Buchanan’s and Mykles’ real selves reflect their adopted genre — on the one hand conventional, and on the other ... not. The players have changed, but the romance novel remains essentially the same. Only one core story is told, after all: Two people meet, fall in love, overcome adversity and live happily ever after. Mix that with the naughty bits, and you have a killer, page-turning combination. Couched within the warm and fuzzy confines of a romance, the sex becomes safer, more palatable — even as it unfurls into ever more explicit and bizarre scenarios.