I was visiting some favorite blogs today and ran across a great post by Ellis Carrington (see her blog on my list below) called “You Haven’t Got the Balls For It.” It’s a discussion of woman who write male/male romance. It got me thinking about why so many of the readers and writers of these gay romances are female. I had a discussion with a group of writers one evening on this very topic. One writer said “aren’t women supposed to want to identify with the female character in romance novels? How can they do that with two men?” Lynn Lorenz replied “We like to watch.” I replied “women like men and two are better.” Both answers are kind of casual and probably don’t get to the heart of the matter. And i think the heart of the matter is — well, the heart.
Romance novels are not real life. (I’m sure that’s not a shock to you.) Whether shown between a man and a woman, two men, two women, or a group of six, romance is the loveliest form of fantasy. Seldom do six gay male couples live in harmonious bliss on one ranch like in the book i’m currently reading, Shifting Sands. Not many men can have three or four orgasms in succession as characters regularly do in erotic romance novels. The first experience of sex whether for a woman or a gay man is seldom exquisite and blissful — except in romance novels. I’ve never seen a man as beautiful as my hero, Roan Black, but there he is living on my pages. And few men are as emotionally available and deeply thoughtful about love as women portray them — in m/m romance novels.
For the people who say a woman can’t write m/m romance because she’s never experienced gay sex, i’ll say no one has ever experienced what is written in our books. It’s fantasy. And that is what other woman and gay men read. The beautiful fantasy of two men, both perfectly gorgeous, who give up the world for each other. Perhaps that’s why women write m/m romance so well. Men are fascinating, sexy and mysterious creatures to us, just as we often are to them. We know what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s arms. What would it be like to be a man in a man’s embrace? What is it like for a man to surrender? What if a man felt some of what women feel? That’s what we write. A union of two worlds. And it’s a fantasy. It doesn’t take balls. It takes heart.