Now, I’ve said before I find gay-for-you plots somewhat problematic. Coming at it from a few different angles, here, there are multiple factors that make me flinch. But the first one that I’ve seen a few times is the very dismissive “Gay-for-you is just a trope, like millionaires or big misunderstandings.”
Being queer is not on par with a career or a social misunderstanding. I get what is intended by what’s being said: that this is romance, and themes and plotlines recur in romance, and that this theme: the straight guy who falls for another guy, is a plotline, but saying that it’s a trope is insulting to those of us who’ve lived a queer life (and, often, suffered for doing so) when you’re equating it with the life of a fictional millionaire, or a guy and a gal who just need to stop for five minutes and talk to solve their problems. Unlike that fictional millionaire or a conversation, queerdom is an identity and a minority with a history of being stomped down on. How you portray a member of a living, breathing culture of people is important. And if you do it wrong—in ignorance or on purpose—it can’t surprise you to hear about it.
Like I said, I do understand what was intended by the sentiment: the goal of the gay-for-you story is to provide entertainment and deliver a romantic story for the enjoyment of the reader. And there’s an odd sense that a gay-for-you story can’t do that and still be harmful or painful to queer readers. It totally can. People have enjoyed and loved on things that are reductive or erasing or stigmatizing before, and they’ll do it again. Look at Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
So, no. We queerfolk? Not just a trope. – ‘Nathan Burgoine
An Impromptu, International Book Club – About a year ago, artist Shaheryar Malik has started The Reading Project, an unconventional book club that consists of stacks of books strategically placed around New York City and other locations around the world. Malik leaves a bookmark with his email in each book, hoping that people will contact him and let him know about their experience with the books. He likes the physicality of books and the way he can share his own connection to them with strangers. Check out more cool photos here.
Re: the gay-for-you thing, we had this discussion on a couple of posts on Jessewave’s old site, two or three years ago. My problem with gay-for-you is that that idea that someone can change their orientation for one person, if they can only find the right person, is poisonous. If a straight person could be gay with the right person, then a gay person could be straight with the right person. It has to work both ways, or it doesn’t work at all. And if it works, then all the douchebags who push “reparative therapy” for gay people are right, and gay people could be happily straight if they just found the right opposite-sex person to be straight with. Yeah, no. :( I’m sorry, but even as a straight person, I find gay-for-you pretty offensive. I can only imagine how it feels for a gay person to read a book using that trope.
Angie
Angie that’s my problem with gay for you trope as well, had been for a long while. As I said elsewhere , if you can magically turn gay, surely you can magically turn back as some bigots are claiming. Having said that, I also read the books and still read some about the guy being deeply in the closet, having buried these feelings and then discovering them, call it out for you or call it something else, but I can still deal with those books if I find them otherwise well executed. But if a gay or bisexual person tells me it hurts them, I will of course pay attention and agree that it is also problematic. I can like problematic stuff for whatever other reasons .
PS and I thought Nathan Burgoine’s post was great – read it yesterday.
I guess I’m struggling to see why gay-for-you is worse than many other nasty tropes in romance, like rape. Who buys it, anyway? Is this m/m romance written by and for straight women? If so, does that make a difference?
(Note, I dislike gay romance, so I’m not going to read any of it).
@SAO: I’m answering this not to start an argument, but just to put in my own two cents worth.
1. Other things being worse, doesn’t mean that we should continue to do something bad. (Ex. why do you are about gay marriage in the US when gays are being murdered in country XYZ.)
2. Even if most people who are being talked about aren’t reading it, the fact that it is informing in some way the majority opinion of the minority is an issue.
3. I think that m/m romance definitely has a large population of straight women, but I would be surprised to hear that no gay men are reading it. And letting people know how you feel is generally better than having people say, “well how was I to know?”.
Again I’m not trying to start an argument, just trying to articulate why this type of article is a good thing.
@SAO: I am honestly not sure how to answer your comment – why GFY is worse than rape? For me it is not, but it is annoying enough on its own. maybe some folks dislike it more than a rape trope in romance – I have no idea. Yes, I believe a lot of readers are still straight women, but I definitely know of gay writers/bi writers, and same of readers
@SAO:
OK, let me see if I can make this concise enough for you:
1. GFY is a trope that some consider to be biphobic and agreeable to the erasure of bisexual and queer sexualities. A lot of the people complaining are bisexual and queer.
2. There have been several M/M romance authors (mostly straight-identified women) who have basically stated that those complaining are being “silly” or “overreacting” because M/M books are for (presumably cis-gendered) women ONLY. Said authors had previously been considered LGTB+ allies since forever.
Can you see the arrogance and bigotry of people who do not belong to a marginalized group telling those people that books about them are NOT for them?
2.5 Since you’re not an M/M romance reader, you might not know this, but there’s been a huge debacle going on for about 3 weeks now with people going off on GoodReads, Twitter, FB, etc. The link that Janet put in this post is a great (if lengthy) summary of the whys and the hows of what’s been happening.
3. Although it is true that a lot of M/M romance authors happen to be women, not all of them are straight. There are also many gay, bisexual, queer, and trans male authors in the M/M romance genre.
As for readership, I’d say that the majority of readers happen to be female (though, again, not all of them straight), but there are also a lot of male readers (as well as people who are genderfluid, genderqueer, etc).
The GFY debate has been frustrating, infuriating, and pretty messed up. FTR, I’ve followed it from a distance because I don’t have FB (where some of the nastiest stuff went down).
One of the saddest things (for me) has been seeing authors I’d though of as straight allies do the internet equivalent of showing the bigotry underneath their facade.
I guess I’m interested in the issues around, “People have enjoyed and loved on things that are reductive or erasing or stigmatizing before, and they’ll do it again.” What gets shut down for being stigmatizing and why?
I don’t have a dog in the GFY fight, which I was unaware of until this post. I did love Gone with the Wind, admittedly I read it first when I was about 11, when I was very impressionable and it was hard to let go of a book that I had loved so much.
I think criticism informs readers, so discussing it is good.
@SAO: I have not seen people asking to shut down anything though – does not mean that I saw every comment, very far from it, so maybe some people did. People just said that this trope hurts some of them and explained why. To go back to rape fantasy – some people (and I follow this recurring debate very much at random) would insist that the books like that are hurtful to them and some find it empowering, etc. Shouldn’t POV of those who find it hurtful be heard as well? Just be heard, nothing is being shut down?
I am not going to stop reading the stories where the guy has repressed feelings for other men so much that he had been gone on like that for years before that special person comes along – and some argue that it is different from “magically becoming gay” and some say it still erases bisexual folks. I can see the possibility that somebody buried their feeling of sexual attraction to another gender that deep, whether it is real or not, so I am not going to ignore those types of stories. But some/ many readers will say that OFY (out for you) or GFY is the same kind of thing and that’s fine. What I am not going to do though when somebody will tell me – ouch, this hurts me, what I am not going to say is I don’t care, don’t sh*t on my happy. Nobody gets to dictate my choice of reading material, but I am going to acknowledge that my choice of reading material could be or already problematic in some areas. I may ask for clarification of why it is problematic if I don’t see that and if the person deems so inclined they may tell me or not, then it will be up to me what to do with it. I am just not going to say go away.
Hopefully this clarified it for you a bit?
I mean I see red very fast if anybody would try to dictate to me mu
Um, ignore the last sentence – I meant to say that I see red fast if somebody tries to tell me what read or not, but I already said it .
@SAO:
I guess I’m interested in the issues around, “People have enjoyed and loved on things that are reductive or erasing or stigmatizing before, and they’ll do it again.” What gets shut down for being stigmatizing and why?
Like Sirius said, no one is saying that GFY or any problematic trope or genre needs to be shut down. At least, I haven’t seen anything like that in any of the places I hang out online. Besides, people will read whatever they want to read and the book market literally has anything and everything available.
However, because some problematic genres and tropes also (in cases like GFY or, to use your simile, rape) actually hurt real people, it is important to listen to those people, learn the reasons, and try to do better as a consumer and general human being.
It’s kinda like something I read last night (gonna paraphrase) in which someone wrote that the best kind of reader would not only be aware of what they’re reading but also whether or not their views on things align with the author’s. I thought it was an interesting thought.
@SAO: I think a good comparison in m/f Romance is the use of Native American characters to represent “savagery” or some kind of social and cultural “innocence.” Like GFY, NA character tropes are based on a sense of identity (rape, for example, is not). If you think about the ways in which Native American characters are meant to *symbolize* something other than their identity, and the ways they have been *used* to serve particular Romance conventions, it gets very problematic very quickly.
I know people have been comparing GFY to the “millionaire” trope, but seriously: how likely is it that millionaires are going to complain about how their representation in Romance is damaging their sense of identity? It’s just not the same, in part because, again, GFY (like NA characters) is an appropriation and manipulation of a core identity, not a mutable characteristic or behavior. Also, millionaires tend to have a lot of social power, while a number of other character-centric tropes represent less powerful or socially marginalized characters, which makes a difference, too. Did you read Burgoine’s post? Because I think he does a good job of explaining a lot of the layers here.
@Maz: It’s kinda like something I read last night (gonna paraphrase) in which someone wrote that the best kind of reader would not only be aware of what they’re reading but also whether or not their views on things align with the author’s. I thought it was an interesting thought.
I’ve always been really wary of these arguments, in part because I don’t think most works of fiction are a clear reflection of their author’s belief systems. Or, rather, what is in a book may reflect an author’s true beliefs, but the author would not agree that is the case based on how others are reading the book. I also think many people overestimate the amount of control an author can assert over the “messages” readers get from a text, so while I agree that reader awareness is (mostly) a good thing, I think there’s too much complexity around both the relationship between an author and his/her work, and between that work and its many readers to rely on authorial intent when interpreting a text.
@Janet:
Interesting point. Personally, I don’t buy books with the idea of understanding authorial intent. However, I can see where you’re coming from.
What I’d meant in my last comment to Sao was my realization that I won’t use my power as a consumer to support authors whose public persona comes across as racist, bigoted, etc. In this age of social media, it’s moderately easy to gauge what kind of person authors might be. Well, that is, unless they choose not to participate in social or regular media (valid yet difficult–from a marketing point–choice).
Knowing that an author is fine with being oppressive is a major turn off for me. I won’t bad mouth said author, but I won’t buy their books/borrow them for the library either.
I managed to be completely unaware of the gfy kerfuffle before reading your link – and I’m happy about that. (I read mm but I’m a much happier mm fan if I severely limit my participation in the online mm world.) Thanks for linking to such a good, thoughtful overview.
I think the comparison to NA romances is a good one – but afaik, no fans or authors of “savage warrior” type romances claim they’re furthering NA civil rights. And no one claims that sheik romances help fight Islamaphobia (afaik). But a good number of mm authors and fans do champion (or claim to champion) LGBT rights and/or claim that reading/writing mm helps combat homophobia. And then they get hurt/angry when actual LGBT people object to some mm stories or tropes.
As a female bi mm fan, I have surprisingly few firm thoughts on gfy. I understand and mostly agree with the concerns outlined in the link. I do think that in the hands of a skillful, thoughtful author, gfy/ofy can be well done. But I get the concerns. And I’m always in favor of more bi representation :)
Coming back to mention one more about the whole gfy thing – one point of view left out of the link is that some queer / sexually fluid people like / relate to gfy stories.
Alexis Hall gives a good summary of that (yes, now that I know there’s a kerfuffle on, I couldn’t help myself – I had to check out some mm author blogs- it’s an illness). http://www.quicunquevult.com/on-problem-and-messes
I’m so glad to hear so many thoughts on this, and really the pushback on the gay-for-you theme. As to who is buying and reading these books, well — I’m bi, my gender’s kind of wibbly as I lived out as a man for 10 years but was raised and socialized as a woman, and the last 8 years I’ve been living as a woman, and now that I’m free from a rough relationship I… have absolutely no idea how I want to present or identify. Because honestly, gender and identity can be hard! But I’m me and super happy with me as a person, and my friends don’t care, and there are increasingly more places where I have more than just two boxes to tick in the gender field.
I love to read m/m (and f/f, and m/f, and plenty of identities and relationships in between), and the only time I find “Gay for you” to be a satisfying read is if it comes with a realization that they’re bi or can be bi and that’s okay, vs complete erasure. I mean, the first woman I fell in love with was a huge surprise for me, although hindsight being 20/20 it’s pretty obvious I was always attracted to women. A lot of my life was pre-internet, and a super uptight community, so I didn’t even know there were OPTIONS, y’know? I didn’t have a vocabulary, nevermind an understanding to go with it (I didn’t know the word lesbian until I was 18, easily, and it was mostly in relation to slurs).
Was I just “gay for her”? Nah. But my life isn’t a romance novel so we didn’t live happily ever after (although we’re still good friends). My last relationship was rough because it was very hetero, my partner was uncomfortable with my identifying as anything other than a woman, to the point that I felt uncomfortable being at my local Gaymer meetings because I felt like a fraud (and it upset me when people just assumed I was an “ally”).
Having lived as a man and been treated as a man (ie passing successfully) there are a LOT of things that are very much in-my-face, from being used to having my opinion asked on everything to now having it ignored on everything, from people listening when I spoke to people talking over me now, but also things like toxic masculinity and the absence of touch or platonic affection in anything other than approved ways. Toxic masculinity doesn’t go away just because you’re gay (or bi or trans, for that matter).
I know this is a lot of words! But bi erasure has always been a thing, even in the queer community (I’ve been told so many times I just need to “make up my mind”, that I’m a traitor to one side or the other, blah blah blah), so gay-for-you always reads to me, honestly, as “adamantly in denial about any previous attraction to that gender”. Because I was. Despite erotic dreams as early as like, 12, and wishing I could be a boyfriend for some of my friends because I saw so much to love about them in high school. Nope, I was totally straight. Until I wasn’t. And that’s OKAY.
Just to clarify, too: I don’t have a problem with people reading and writing and enjoying GFY, same as I don’t have a problem with people reading and writing and enjoying rape. I have a problem with people doing so uncritically, unaware that it’s hurtful to people, and dressing it up as somehow “helping” the real-life people it is absolutely not reflecting.
This is also why I want (and appreciate hugely) content warnings! Because I want to read a story and enjoy it, and I can’t do that if it’s going to slap me in the face with something as painful as seeing me-as-a-person denied, erased, or told I’m terrible or broken or awful because my real life doesn’t align with fantasy. If I go in knowing something exists, then I still might enjoy the story and ignore that part (because hey, I can enjoy stuff I find problematic AT THE SAME TIME because people have awesome complicated brains). I might read more by that author, and if I enjoy them will recommend them to others (I do, a lot — it’s actually my job sometimes!). If I don’t, if it’s written completely oblivious that a lot of someones might be hurt by this, not only will I be hurt by it, I’m not going to read anything else by that author, and they won’t be someone I recommend (or will even say “yikes this was not good and really upset me, stay away”).
For the comparison to First Nations trope — I was a judge for a book award a couple of years ago and the hero was FN/NA. The words “noble savage” showed up unironically in the first three pages of the book. I was done (even though I finished the book, because I had to). That author did not get a favourable judging from me. Does (to me) a gross and racist portrayal of real-life people influencing my judging make me mean? Or are we complex creatures and allowed to have books not exist in a vacuum but as part of our overall culture?
@Lindsay: I hope that was a rhetorical question! Of course it doesn’t make you mean.
@cleo:
That was a great read (thank you for the link!)
I did come across “this post by bisexual M/M author Santino Hassell regarding his perspective on the GFY kerkuffle. (TW for sexual/substance abuse).
And, earlier this evening, M/M author KJ Charles wrote this post about how to like bad or problematic things while being aware of the issues.
Both are, imho, great reads.
I’ve been largely listening to the debate about GFY because it’s not about me. I read and review m/m and queer romance and so I’m interested in it but as a straight girl who is straight, it’s not like it directly affects me and I’d rather magnify the queer voices who want to be heard and who deserve to be heard.
So I’ve been listening and taking it in. But I guess, now that it’s come up here at DA, I feel like it’s okay for me to say my piece from the perspective of a reader and review of queer romance.
I read a lot of GFY when I first started reading m/m but as I learned and grew and became more familiar with social issues and privilege and marginalisation and erasure, I’ve steered away from any queer romance which tends to fetishize the characters. I find, as a rule of thumb, this serves me well. Sometimes I stumble across a book which is unexpectedly fetishizing* but I’ve been getting better at identifying good recommenders and authors I trust vs. taglines and blurbs which are likely to be problematic for me as a reader. (*and, of course, sometimes I just miss stuff and it needs to be pointed out to me so I can spot it in future. I’m grateful to folks who point such things out to me.)
I still read books which might be referred to by some readers as GFY or OFY but the ones I go for tend to be ones where, like Sirius said above, the character comes to identify as bi, where there has been same-sex attraction before but it hadn’t been acted upon and/or had been repressed, or, if the attraction is apparently out of the blue, there is a meaningful context to it which is actively examined and is not merely an excuse to have two straight guys gettin’ it on. (I have also read books where the previously straight-identified character declines any label and this can be perfectly fine in context too.)
What I try to avoid is “Look! Straight guys gettin’ it on! Bow chicka wow wow!” It seems to me that the middle ground, the ground which doesn’t tend to offend or hurt people is just that – try not to fetishize queer folk in order to get your happy. They are real people and deserve to be treated with sensitivity and respect and they deserve to be heard.
I am happy to read bi romance, trans romance, menage romance, m/f romance and all the other types of romance. I don’t get shirty if a vagina turns up in a m/m book. I’m not offended or put off if one of the “m” characters has a vagina himself. I’m happy to read across the gender and sexuality spectrum and for all kinds of representation in my romance reading. In fact, I’m actively looking for it.
@cleo:
“I read mm but I’m a much happier mm fan if I severely limit my participation in the online mm world.”
God, yes. It gets incredibly vicious at times like this when questions are raised about the inherent homophobia, misogyny and bi-erasure of certain aspects of the genre. It gets even nastier when those pointing out the issues identify as LGBTQ; not only because of the instant ‘we write and read m/m so we’re allies, goddamnit’ defense, but the ‘how dare you criticise our gay fantasy tropes when it was het women who invented the genre and we’re the main ones who write it and read it, so there!’ attitude. It leaves a very sour taste in the mouth and, as far as I am concerned, brings the entire genre into disrepute.
@Kaetrin:
Very well said!
@Maz: That post from Charles reminded me a lot of this one from 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20110925002430/http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-fan-of-problematic-things (edited to add original link from the Wayback Machine)
“M/M author KJ Charles wrote this post about how to like bad or problematic things while being aware of the issues”
I recall her attitude in the past was that if you write problematic things, people should just let you do it because of reasons, and if anyone doesn’t like it, you should sic your minions on them that’s their problem, not yours. Unimpressed by another woman unaffected by the whole GFY thing weighing in on this.
@Ann Somerville:
Unimpressed by another woman unaffected by the whole GFY thing weighing in on this.
I’m not sure it’s a matter of being impressed or not. YMMV.
If anything, it’s pretty encouraging to know that someone who was not aware of her own privilege in the past has acknowledged it in the here and now. But then, what can I say? I’m at unrepentant optimist at heart. :)
As a bisexual woman, I’m very aware of the issues around bisexual erasure and biphobia when it comes to GFY. But… hot damn if it isn’t my catnip. Both m/m and f/f. And, occasionally, StraightForYou (which is even more problematic, and very rare to see done in a way that isn’t actively offensive).
I guess part of it comes from a lack of good representations of bisexuality; so often bi romances erase relationships with the other gender, or treat attraction to the other gender as an obstacle for the couple to overcome. GFY acknowledges that a person can have a long string of opposite gender love interests before meeting someone who makes them question whether that’s all they want from life. It doesn’t try and belittle those relationships.
I guess I view most GFY romances as being about people who are Kinsey 1s – mostly attracted to the opposite sex, slightly attracted to the same – with a dose of cultural conditioning on top. At least, that’s what a good GFY plot is for me. Obviously there are some that are absolutely bi and queer erasing, offensively biphobic, but I do think it’s possible to write GFY in a way that’s bi-positive in a way that a lot of supposedly bi-romances simply aren’t.