Thoughts on M/M Romance and Gay Lit Debates
Saw yet another discussion on the perceived gap between M/M Romance and Gay Lit. This blog post by Marshall Thorton does a nice job laying out some of the genre differences.
Romance is primarily a genre focus on the development of monogamous relationships. The overall arc often includes:
- A meeting or other connection
- A set of conflicts that elaborate on or resolve differences
- A core conflict that must be resolved in order for the couple to get together
- Finally, a happily ever after or happily for now ending
There are, of course, a lot of variations on this, including polyamorous romance and asexual romance (aromantic romance?, nerodivergent romance?). Mainstream romance tends to follow from the cultural assumption that one's primary sexual partner is also going to be one's primary emotional partner. So a key historical difference is that this has only been legally and culturally supported for heterosexual relationships. Queer relationships have been significantly less supported. It is very nice that there has been a lot of effort to reclaim romance and long-term monogamy for groups that have been previously unsupported. But often this feels like a "one size fits most" effort.
One historical difference is that LGBTQ people who were adults before Obergefell often ended up creating a wide variety of relationship structures that are still not fully recognized within the romance publishing space. Many did have monogamous long-term relationships that, for all intents and purposes, were marriages regardless of state and federal law. (I'm strongly of the opinion that marriage should be defined by a person's community rather than law.) Some people are "monogamish" or non-monogamous. Others put our emotional energy into family of choice and activism networks. For others, our primary emotional connections were intergenerational, sometimes platonic.
And I want to add here that none of these things are unique to LGBTQ people. Just that the LGBTQ community was a lot more open to self-defined family and relationships than mainstream culture at the time.
Something else that falls outside of the domain of romance fiction are stories featuring LGBTQ people that don't center on the development of a relationship. These may include romance as a subplot, but the primary action is on building a new community, saving the universe, facing injustice, solving a mystery, surviving hardship, or some other conflict. My primary interest is in queer and trans feminist science fiction. A lot of that tries to imagine settings that have gone well beyond the perpetual current sniping between political conservatives and liberals regarding LGBTQ rights.
It occurs to me that this sort of conflict between what we are looking for informs some of the debate about contemporary television properties. Stranger Things drew a lot of drama because Will didn't have an endgame relationship. I found this a little bit odd because very few of the teen characters got endgame relationships. And Will got exactly what I always wanted as a Reagan-era surviving queer teen: superpowers and an opportunity to move out of Indiana. I realized that some people were really disappointed by the lack of M/M romance, while others were happy to see a gay superhero/survivor story. The survivor narrative is important because in 80s horror fiction, sympathetic gay-coded characters rarely lived past Act 2.
Both are good, and perhaps a solution is, as Thorton suggests, more explicit labeling about which kind of story you're looking at.