Julie Cohen is a novelist and vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.Romantic fiction and some fun romance facts. Because love is love, and everyone deserves a happy ending. It is heartening that these popular novels are at last starting to reflect the real diversity of human beings.
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Young adult romance is ahead of the adult romance trend, with books like Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (made into the film Love, Simon).Īuthors of romantic and relationship-driven fiction have long known that our stories reach beyond cliches and into readers’ hearts. In the US, Suzanne Brockmann has hit the New York Times bestseller list with her romances about navy Seals, some of them gay. Max Seventeen by Kate Johnson, which features a bisexual protagonist, won a Romantic Novel award in 2017, and my own novel Falling, which has a lesbian protagonist, was shortlisted in the same year. Much of this is with specialist publishers such as Dreamspinner Press and Bold StrokesBut there are indications that LGBT romantic novels are becoming more mainstream. Over the past 10-15 years male same-sex romantic fiction has become increasingly popular both in the US and the UK, and female same-sex romance has its own dedicated following. Internet fan fiction sites are the training grounds of tomorrow’s published genre writers – and they have no traditional gatekeepers. We can see it happening with the rise of fan fiction: writers who don’t see the LGBT relationships they want in mainstream culture write it themselves, using instant reader feedback to hone their craft. With society’s growing acceptance of LGBT people, romantic fiction is coming out of the closet. It’s even more effective when the reader can see people like themselves in a popular novel. It’s also important that LGBT authors are allowed to write stories that reflect their own truths.Īs a romantic novelist, I’ve had countless letters from readers telling me that romantic fiction helps them switch off, escape, believe that life can get better, and find strength to cope with their everyday lives. And because we know this has the taint of fact – a 2018 UK government survey found that LGBT people rated themselves significantly less happy than the general population did – it’s even more important that readers have escapist fiction about people finding love and happiness, no matter their gender or sexual orientation. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is not exactly “up lit”, and part of the beauty of Brokeback Mountain is in its unfulfilled emotion.Īnyone who is familiar with LGBT representation in fiction will also be depressingly familiar with the “bury your gays” or “tragic trans” tropes, where LGBT characters too often tragic endings. The hallmark of the romantic novel is its happy ending, and LGBT fiction so often hasn’t had that. While Mills & Boon has published subplots with gay characters since at least the early 90s, they still don’t have a dedicated LGBT print book line. It wasn’t just that mainstream publishers weren’t accepting queer stories. The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Maurice by EM Forster. But those novels of my youth in the 80s and 90s were overwhelmingly heterosexual, so I had to look elsewhere for a gay, bisexual or lesbian happy-ever-after. Even more importantly, like millions of readers, I put myself in the place of the protagonists, identified with them, and found my own identity in the things that they did. I knew they were fantasy, and yet they taught me valuable lessons about what love is, what love should be, and what I wanted in a romantic partner. They taught me that love is a transformative force that can make the world a better place. When I was a girl, I read romance after romance. It’s important that novels reinforce the message that everyone is deserving of love. Love is for everyone, no matter their gender or sexuality, and the fantasy of a happy-ever-after is popular and enduring. That’s why I’ve founded a rainbow chapter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, to nurture LGBT romantic authors and their novels.
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What about “boy meets boy” or “girl meets girl” – or simply “person meets person”? Those storylines are few and far between. Yet the cliche of a romantic novel is “boy meets girl”.
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R omantic novels are one of the bestselling genres of fiction worldwide one gets purchased every two seconds in the UK, and for good reason – love is probably the most profound emotion any of us will ever experience.