Straight Women/Gay Romance
Josh Lanyon, author of the popular Adrien English M/M mystery series, says, “The antecedents of M/M romance are fan fiction, and fan fiction is dominated by women.” In Lanyon’s magisterial Man, Oh, Man! Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks and Ca$h (MLR Press, 2008), he explains that fan or slash fan fiction is a subgenre of traditional women’s romance that involves male/male (hence the name, slash) pairings of characters borrowed from other fictional sources, such as Kirk and Spock from Star Trek, or celebrity personalities, and he writes, “Men have never been a huge part of the slash fandom.” Author and publisher Laura Baumbach of MLR (ManLoveRomance) Press says that she started out writing slash fan fiction. She says, “I moved into original characters when a publisher of my fan fiction had a distributor ask for more of my work.” She opened her own publishing house when readers wanted to see her M/M romance work in both print and e-book form.
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Although it would seem like gay male readers would be an obvious untapped market for M/M romance, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Press is quoted by Lanyon as saying, “It’s two different audiences. Readers who are reading M/M fiction aren’t reading gay fiction. It’s two different types of books.”
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As hot and heavy as some M/M romance sex gets, the bottom line is that it is predominately written by women for women.
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Why do straight women like to read gay erotica? One can see straight men getting off on pseudo-lesbian porn because they fantasize about protruding into the scene, but M/M erotica is about gay sex, pure and simple, not bisexual three-ways. The happily ever after is two men in love. For Laura Baumbach of MLR Press it’s obvious: “One man is good, two are better. Hotter, more fascinating to women who read this genre.”