Q. Why do you call the stories you write about two guys male/male rather than gay?
A. This is actually a real question someone asked me. Okay, it wasn’t for this posting segment and once isn’t exactly frequent, but I’ll take what I can get :)
The answer is actually simple. Sometimes the men in the stories about two guys are gay. Sometimes they are bi. Sometimes they are… okay, I’ll grant that it’s not likely they are entirely straight if they’re having that much fun with another man, but still, they don’t always consider themselves to be gay.
In some of my stories – mostly the ones that have a paranormal or fantasy element – the characters don’t understand what “gay” is. If a werewolf finds his mate and that mate happens to be another man, so what? He has his mate – he’s happy. And if a vampire bites down on another guy, he’s more likely to think - He tastes nice! than ask deep and meaningful questions about his sexuality.
Even in the contemporary stories a lot of the characters think Oscar Wilde was right - people are not homosexual or hetrosexual, they are just sexual. If a guy happens to prefer guys to girls it doesn't define him any more than it would if he happened to like blondes more than brunettes. So, lot of my characters are not too keen on labels. So I suppose that’s what it comes down to for me really – labels.
If the stories are “gay erotic romance” it either implies the characters are gay – which isn’t always accurate, or the readership is expected to be gay – which certainly isn’t the case (Honestly, I’m very happy for anyone at all to buy the books, without prejudice over race, religion, sexuality or anything else you can think of!).
Male/male doesn’t label the characters or the readers, it labels the content. If you read the book you can expect the sex scenes to be between two men – you can expect male/male content.
Oh, and since I’m on the subject, I’ll also mention that I don’t label the stories I write about a man and a woman as heterosexual or straight stories – I write male/female.
And that's it for me - it was actually going to be a short post but I gave up on that idea about three paragraphs ago.
If you have any thoughts on the topic, feel free to leave a comment :)
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