Episode 30 - Insider Interview Transcript
Insider Interview Transcript
Host: emmagrant01
Emma Grant: Welcome to the Insider Interview for Slashcast Episode 30, this is Emma Grant and my guest today is Dr Sarah Frantz. Dr Frantz is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Fayetteville State University and her academic research focuses on Romantic Era British women novelists. But she’s also interested in popular romantic fiction. She’s currently the president of the International Association of the Study of Popular Romance and she reviews gay male romance and BDSM fiction for the Dear Author website. She’s here today to share her expertise about positive depictions of sex and romance in both of those genres and that’s something that is obviously going to be of great interest to our listeners who are all slash fans. Welcome, Sarah.
Dr Sarah Frantz: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Emma: So I guess I wanted to first just start off by asking you how did you come to your current field of study? And how did you become interested in popular romantic fiction?
Sarah: I’ve been reading popular romance fiction since I was 12, and I picked up one of my mother’s Mills and Boone when she left it lying in her living room. Our living room, I guess. It was an Anne Weale, Harlequin presents with the very domineering alpha male and the submissive female secretary character. And I’ve been romance ever since. One of the things I asked my mother at one point was if she had any different romances to give me and she gave me Georgette Heyer. She was writing historical romance, she was writing in the twentieth century, writing historical romance of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. And when I finished all the Heyer I said to my mother “What else can I read?” and she gave me Jane Austen and then the combination of those things took me into grad school where I studied Regency Era and Romantic Era British women novelists so I had a dissertation that had a chapter on Jane Austen, as well as a chapter on three other Romantic Era women novelists. But my very first published article was about romance fiction, so I’ve always done both. So my dissertation and my training have been in rise of the novel, the eighteenth century, and British women novelists, um, but it’s also been popular fiction. And my very first published article, as I said, was on ‘Scenes in Which the Hero Breastfeeds from the Heroine’ if you can believe it or not.
Emma: Oh wow. [Sarah laughs] We like to refer to that as lactation kink.
Sarah: Yes, in fact. And it was called “Expressing” Herself, with quotation marks around the expressing part. [Emma laughs] In 2007 I went, two weeks apart, I went to the Eighteenth Century Society conference and the Popular Culture Association conference because I was interested in doing both and presenting at both. And then I quit the Eighteenth Century and moved into Romance Fiction, so since 2007 I’ve been doing almost exclusively romance fiction, although I’ve been publishing a bit in Jane Austen.
Emma: So before we go any further, just as a general disclaimer I should probably say that you’re not actually a fanfiction reader.
Sarah: No I’m not.
Emma: You read fiction by people who get paid to do it.
Sarah: Yes!
Emma: But one of the things that you’re really interested in reading and reviewing, at least one of the things you do for Dear Author is you read and review professional gay male fiction.
Sarah: Yes.
Emma: And I’ve read that you don’t have anything aga- it’s not that you have something against fanfiction, it’s just not something that interested in, correct?
Sarah: That is right. Yes. I know I have a lot of authors that I adore who started in fanfiction, both het romance, actually, and gay male romance. And I have a lot of authors who still write fanfiction. I think it’s a great thing. I’ve read some great fanfiction, but it’s not my thing. Voice to me in fiction is incredibly important so I can’t read fanfiction of fiction and I don’t watch enough TV [laughs] to really get fanfiction of TV shows, or films.
Emma: Yeah. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about these two organisations that you work with. First the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, what is that organisation about and what’s your role there?
Sarah: In 2007 at the Pop Culture Association conference that I went to those of us who were doing Romance- and this is not just romance fiction but Romance writ large across popular media across any time and any culture - and we all sat down around a table at the end of the conference and said ‘Hey this conference was great, we had a great time, this is a great community that we have here, but it’s not going to get much bigger. And Romance is not really going to be a field unless we make it a field. What do we need to make it a field?’ And we decided that we needed four things to make Popular Romance Studies a field in and of itself, rather than just as an addendum to Pop Fiction Studies. And those four things were: a dedicated academic organisation; dedicated academic conferences; a dedicated academic peer reviewed journal, and somebody teaching Popular Romance at a PhD institution so that we could teach the next generation of grad students. And we figured we could do those first three and hopefully the fourth would come. So in 2008 I organised the, kind of, beginnings of IASPR and in 2009 we actually signed up our first member at the Pop Culture Association in 2009. And I came up with the name, and I had a friend help me with the logo, and I did the website. The organiser of the romance area of the Pop Culture Association at the time was Eric Salinger and I had him, I signed him on as our Executive Editor for our journal. So we now have our dedicated academic organisation, which sponsors dedicated academic conferences, we have our fourth annual conference in York, England this year in September and we have a dedicated journal, which is Journal of Popular Romance Studies, it is online, open-access, anybody can read it, anybody can comment at it. So it a blind peer-reviewed journal that is being aggregated in all of the academic databases like EBSCOhost and then hopefully the fourth will still come. We still don’t have anybody teaching Popular Romance Fiction at a PhD granting institution.
Emma: Fantastic, and we’ll link to that from our, um, Post Show Post so people can go and check that out, and check out the journal too, which sounds really interesting. And what the site- the website, Dear Author, what can you tell us about that, for people who aren’t familiar with it?
Sarah: Dear Author is one of the three largest romance review websites out there. We have All About Romance, which is under the link likesbooks.com, they were one of the original romance review websites. The second site is Smartbitchestrashybooks.com which is an amazing resource, it has a fabulous community online, it has a little bit of a reputation for being a mean girl website - as does Dear Author - but that’s because we both are dedicated to actually reviewing romance honestly. So if there’s a bad book, we’ll say that it’s a bad book, and if it’s a good book, we’ll say it’s a good book. And then I’m with Dear Author. It started in 2006 just two people started it, but now there’s a stable, probably of about ten or twelve different reviewers, we all have our own thing that we like reviewing. Also the person that owns the website, Jane, does fabulous reviews of digital media, so it is the go-to website if you want to know anything about e-readers and how to load your e-reader with right books, and where to buy books from, and Digital Rights Management - DRM - and all that kind of stuff. So it’s not just romance reviews it’s also a resource for information about the Romance world. And in 2008 I read the most amazing BDSM romance in the world and I wanted to tell the world about it. And so I emailed Jane and said ‘Hey, could I do a guest review?’ and she said yes, and I’ve been reviewing for them ever since.
Emma: Not a site I was terribly familiar with until recently and it’s been really interesting to reviews [Sarah makes noise of agreement] and I read almost exclusively fanfiction these days but now I’m very intrigued about many of the things that I’ve read reviewed there and I’m like ‘Hmm, maybe I should branch out a little bit [Sarah laughs] and read things where I don’t already know who the characters are and what the world is all about’.
Sarah: Right.
Emma: That’s great and so for that site you, you review primarily - as we said before - gay male romance and BDSM romance, so those were genres that you were already very interested in before coming to that site, obviously. What attracted you to those two genres?
Sarah: In 2007, I think, I started reading male/male romance, maybe even a little bit later than that. Suzanne Brockmann is a romance author who writes military romance and I was a big fan of hers, so I was on one of her message boards and somebody I met on the messageboard recommended this author called Matthew Haldeman Time who wrote male/male romance. He also writes a lot of fanfiction, a lot of real person slash with boybands, but he also writes a lot of original fiction, a lot of it free, especially the short stories so I went on to his website and started reading male/male romance and that was the first time I’d ever read anything. And then the person who recommended me also started writing her own, so I read some of hers and she recommended me some more names and I just kind of got into the field that way, from my reading.
Um, BDSM romance I actually found through the male/male romance because I was trolling some of the presses that I like reading from, and I found BDSM fiction that way and then I expanded out to heterosexual BDSM fiction from the male/male fiction. And I’m interested in BDSM fiction because I’m a BDSM practitioner in my own life so it’s just something that has always interested me because it’s part of who I am.
Emma: Right, and I think that’s true for people that I know in fandom as well. I mean there are a lot of people who I know in fandom who read BDSM fiction first and then said ‘this is, this sounds like what I want to do’ and it kind of helped open doors for them to move forward in their sexuality.
Sarah: Right.
Emma: And also from the other direction: people who were kinksters in real life and then said ‘ooh, here’s something that depicts what I like to do’.
Sarah: Right. Yeah. For me it was the other way around. Honestly, actually, I think I also read the queen, the mother of BDSM fiction is Joey Hill and her BDSM fiction is amazing. And I don’t remember when I first started reading her. She’s the BDSM author who writes both male/male and heterosexual BDSM fiction and I love her stuff and I don’t remember if I started reading her before or after I started reading male/male.
Emma: Since you review BDSM stories, and I’ve read some of your reviews, and it’s very interesting to me [Sarah laughs] to see what are the things that you- it’s fascinating to see the things that you pick out and the things that you pick as good and the things that you say ‘okay, this isn’t good, this isn’t realistic.’
Sarah: Right.
Emma: Can you talk to us about - what do you look for in a BDSM story? What makes a good BDSM story for you?
Sarah: For me it’s the psychology. The woman I just talked about, Joey Hill, she writes some fantastical things in her BDSM fiction, you know, toys that are amazing and wonderful, unguents or lotions that are just like ‘oh if those existed in real life wouldn’t that be amazing’, um, so it’s not that I necessarily want the activity to be exactly right. The BDSM romance story that started me writing reviews is On a Crow’s Uneven which is one of the first sadomasochistic romances I’ve read as opposed to Dominant/submission romances. Most BDSM romances are D/s romances where they focus on the Dominance/submission aspect of BDSM, Uneven focuses on the sadomasochistic aspects more than anything else. So it’s an incredibly violent book, it’s hardcore it’s very violent and I don’t think that it’s a particularly healthy relationship in real life, if those people acted like that in real life, but the psychology of it is what makes it incredible. So I’m not necessarily looking for things to be exactly the way they might be in real life, but I’m looking for things to be psychologically and emotionally the way they would be in real life. You can write some fantastical things in the story and I’ll accept that as long as the reasons behind it and the motivations and psychology is to my mind ‘correct’, quote-unquote.
Emma: That’s really interesting and I think that one of the things that, when we talk about BDSM in the fanfiction world there is often this push and pull between fantasy and reality, I think almost the way that you’ve just delineated there. People say, you know, I want it to be, I want to see the scene set up, I want to make sure that the partners are doing, are- look like they’re acting responsibly and do all the things that you’re supposed to do for a scene. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who’re like, ‘you know what I just want it to be hot’. [Sarah laughs] I don’t really care, I don’t care if this would be a horribly abusive relationship in reality, I don’t want any of that actually detracts from my enjoyment of it. Is there the same kind of push and pull in the stories that you read as well?
Sarah: I read a story, that I will not call a romance, that was about a boy who’d been in sexual slavery since he was 9, um, and he’d finally broken his way out, and he was probably about 19, so he’d been in it for 10 years. And he had been hideously abused at the e- I mean he’d been hideously abused all the way through obviously - but certainly at the end and he’d got his way out and he had a broken arm, and broken ribs and all of that kind of stuff, and, like, three months later some guy is saying ‘oh, yeah, you know he’s really damaged, but he’s really hot and I think we could have some great scenes with him’, while admitting, like in the same paragraph, that he didn’t really know if he was submissive, and he didn’t really know if he was gay because that’s all he’d ever known. And some of the scenes that they wrote were hot if you just separated them out from that psychological motivational aspect of it, but I couldn’t get beyond the fact that this kid had been in sexual slavery for 10 years and he’d been emotionally and physically abused his whole life and... I don’t think that going into a BDSM relationship three months later is necessarily the way to go. Um. [slight laugh]
Emma: Right.
Sarah: So, on the one hand yes, hot is important, but for me it comes to does the motivation really work behind the hotness? And, you know, a lot of authors say that they won’t write a sex scene unless it forwards the story, unless it’s part of the emotional arc, and the plot arc of the book, and to me that’s very important. I just read a book where they don’t actually have sex on page, they have, I think, two blowjobs on page, but those blowjobs were the hottest blowjobs I’ve ever read because of the motivation, the tension and the lead up to those blowjobs was just incredible and so they’re hotter than any kind of, I don’t know, random full on sex scene, because of who the characters were and how they were motivated and how it got to that point.
Emma: This may be a good time to segue into talking about erotica in romance in general. How do you define Romance as a genre? And then how does erotica fit into the big picture from an academic perspective, because I have no idea?
Sarah: From the academic perspective there’s a couple of ways to define Romance. The Romance Writers of America defines the Romance as a ‘central love story with an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending’. And apparently they had big fights about that because that actually would include Gone With the Wind, because Gone With the Wind has an optimistic ending, you know, ‘tomorrow is another day’. But that generally means, that ‘the emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending’ generally means the happy ever after. There’s a woman called Pamela Regis who wrote a book in 2003 called The Natural History of the Romance Novel and in that she has an eight part definition, that is I think is the most quoted definition of Romance in academic circles. I just edited a book with eighteen essays in it about Romance, and all of them used Pamela Regis’ eight part definition. [Emma laughs] Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements of the courtship narrative is: ‘The Romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of courtship and betrothal of protagonists.’ - and she used to actually say one or more heroines, but I convinced her that male/male romance counts, and so now it’s protagonists -so you have: the first one is society defined, and it’s usually defined as in some way flawed - the characters have to fix something in society, or the characters have a problem internally that needs to be fixed; then you have the meeting between the characters; the barrier - the thing that keeps them apart; the attraction - the reason they want to go together; the point of ritual death - which is the moment at which everything looks like it’s lost, that they will never be together; the recognition between the characters of how to overcome the barrier; the declaration scene between them when they declare their love for each other and then the betrothal at the end. And the betrothal is not necessarily a wedding, or even a betrothal, but it is a commitment to each other, and so a lot of romances, especially male/male romances have a happy for now ending, instead of a happy ever after ending, and that counts as the betrothal. And those eight essential elements, Regis’ Eight Essential Elements, really do help you, kind of, talk about a Romance when you’re talking about it academically. They can happen in any order, they can happen off page, they can happen in previous books, they don’t necessarily have to happen in the individual book, but they’re really a great way to think about the stories, especially the point of ritual death, the barrier, and the recognition.
Emma: That’s really, that’s really amazing because as you were describing those I was thinking about some of the fanfiction pieces that I’ve read lately. And I’m going down them, ‘yes, yes’, checking them all off.
Sarah: Right. It’s a great way to be able to systematise an understanding of the romance narrative. Actually in that book that I mentioned that I edited, um, it’s called New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction- and it has just come out on Kindle, yay, for $10- but in New Approaches we actually have an essay by Deborah Kaplan about, about fanfiction, about slash fiction. It compares the romance narrative, and those eight essential elements, to the conventions of slash fiction in particular. So certainly the happy ending, the betrothal at the end, and the declaration are very, very different in fanfiction than they are in Romance, and so if you’re conversant with both genres you can see that there’s a big difference between them. If you’re in slash fiction you’re used to the betrothal at the end that’s kind of sort of an underlying declaration, you know that they have just declared their commitment to each other and their love for each other, but they never actually say I love you on a page, whereas that’s an essential element - the I love you on a page is an essential element in Romance. And so it’s actually really interesting watching the two conventions side by side, where yeah, those eight elements are there, but they’re there in very, very different ways in slash fiction than they are in Romance.
Emma: And then what is - how does erotica play into all of this?
Sarah: There is certainly erotic romance, where the eight essential elements are explored through sex. And I think to me that defines erotic romance fiction, is the barrier, and, well obviously, the attraction, but certainly the barrier, and the point of ritual death, and the recognition between the characters happen through sex rather than because they’re trying to save the world, or something like that. Erotica is, I think, very different it doesn’t focus on the romance narrative, it might not have any of the elements except maybe attraction, and not even then sometimes. I’ve certainly read some erotica where people are having sex for different reasons, besides attraction. So I think that erotica might have its own essential elements, but I don’t think that any of them necessarily have anything to do with romance fiction itself.
Emma: Are there any differences between gay male romance and heterosexual romance?
Sarah: I think that gay male romance has a lot of the slash and fanfiction conventions, I’m reading one at the moment and it has a declaration at the end that I can recognise because I’ve read a lot of male romance, but I think that people that just read heterosexual romance wouldn’t be satisfied with the ending, because it’s not a declaration, ‘I love you,’ ‘Yes, I love you too’, it’s more of a kind of an underlying declaration between the characters where they recognise what they’ve said, and you as a reader recognise what they’ve said but it’s never actually out there on the page. So I think that male/male romance has some of those conventions from, um, slash and fanfiction in them. I think another difference is that part of the reason that I like to read them is because male/male romance doesn’t have a lot of the gender dynamics between them. I can read a D/s romance, in particular, one that focuses on Dominance and submission and I’m not tripping over the gender expectations as well as trying to work out the D/s expectations. So that’s a large part of the reason I read male/male romance is because I don’t want to have to deal with the gender expectations and gender dynamics. So I think that that is a difference, but the male/male romance in particular that does really well at the digital publishers is the romance that adheres to the eight essential elements of generic romance fiction. So they might adhere to it in just slightly different ways, but still the ones that do best, and the authors that sell best have all of those eight essential elements. I’ve read a lot of male/male romances that have the meeting and the attraction, and then you kind of work your way through a fabulous little romance, but there’s no barrier, so there’s no recognition, so there’s no narrative tension. And every time I read one of those and I review them, I’m like, okay, nice to read a nice story where two people meet and they fall in love and everything’s great and wonderful and they have a happy ending, but a romance story needs the barrier and it needs the recognition of how to overcome that barrier in order to have the tension that is required of any sort of fiction, right?
Emma: Right.
Sarah: I mean, otherwise we’re just writing a diary, as opposed to actually having a story with a narrative arc. So that arc requires tension and if you’re talking about a romance that tension comes in that there’s a barrier between these two people. And whether that’s an external or internal barrier, or both doesn’t matter; there has to be a barrier and then a way to overcome that barrier.
Emma: Oh that’s really fascinating. I’m going to think about that quite a lot. [Sarah laughs] Wow, that’s cool. Well, um, so another question that I wanted to ask you - I know this is something you’ve actually written about as well - often in fandom this topic comes up and it can be a bit contentious, this idea that slash or gay male romance is written primarily by women for women, it’s something that, you know, it happens- it’s true in the slash fanfiction world, it seems like it’s also probably true in the gay male romance world.
Sarah: Yes.
Emma: And so, often when this discussion comes up there’s always someone who will say we’re really just fetishizing gay men, and that’s no different from what straight men have done to, you know, women all along.
Sarah: In lesbian porn, right.
Emma: Exactly. I guess I just wanted to ask you to comment on that. [Sarah laughs] What is your perspective on that as someone who studies ac romance, academically?
Sarah: There’s a couple of layers there because the word you left out, of course, is by straight women, for straight women.
Emma: Yeah, intentionally.
Sarah: I know, I would to hasten to add that a lot of certainly my favourite gay male romance by the authors that I think are most competent, a lot of those authors, certainly not all, but a lot of them are in some way, um, queer themselves. So I think that that might, I don’t know if it helps them write better, but it certainly helps inflect their stories in ways that I seem to recognise when I’m reading them. One of my academic specialties is female constructed masculinity.
Emma: Ooh, that sounds fascinating.
Sarah: Yes. [laughs slightly] Female constructed masculinity is about the way women write men. I have always been interested in the way women write men and the romances that I have read have always been the ones that focus on the male characters more than on the female characters. And there are certainly authors out there who focus on the female characters, and they fascinating books, and I love some of them, but the ones I’m drawn to all the time are the ones with the really, really strong male characters. Right? So you’re focussing on the hero rather than the heroine. So, I don’t know that gay male romance written by women for women is any more or less fetishistic - if that is a word - than Romance to begin with, you know? Some of the most successful romances out there, and certainly some of the most successful romance series are series’ that focus on men. So I’ve always been drawn to that what romance authors are doing there are just as much fetishising men, maybe, as in gay male romance. But what happens in gay male romance, of course, is that you drop out the heroine. And are we expected to realistically portray what it means to be gay? Or are these male/male romances written by women for women exploring things that are important to women, but doing it by looking at men because men are who we have to deal with all the time in order to have life, because there’s men all around us and they hold more power than we do in some situations? So, I don’t know that there’s an answer to that question. I certainly can see why gay men would look at this field and kind of go ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ [Emma laughs slightly] Um, but there are increasingly gay men writing romance for a female audience. Now, problematically they’re getting, potentially, more interest from readers precisely because they’re gay men. And, you know, yes some of the readers have fetishised gay men and so, ‘ooh, we have a real live gay man here, let’s read his book because he’s obviously more authentic than any of these other authors writing out there.’ And I think that that’s potentially a problem, but I don’t know that romances haven’t always been about exploring men and fetishising men, and figuring out our relationship to men. It’s just that some of them drop the heroine and have two heroes instead of one.
Emma: Do you find it problematic that in addition to the heroine being dropped out completely that women are often vilified?
Sarah: Yes.
Emma: In, in, yeah. This is- we talk about this in the fanfiction world as well, it’s a big topic of conversation.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s certainly - it’s something that comes up again and again in my reviews, or in responses to my reviews. Because, and I’m ashamed to admit this, but honestly sometimes I don’t notice the way that women are treated because I’m so focused on the male characters when I read, no matter what, but yes there are problems with the way women are treated. There was a big upset about three weeks ago on one of the message boards that I follow, one of the blogs that I follow, because their policy is that if there is any heterosexual sex mentioned at all in a male/male romance they will not review it. And that is, I find that very problematic. And so it’s not only the authors who won’t write it, but in some ways the authors won’t write it because the readers won’t read it. And, you know what? Gay men have women in their lives too, and, you know, some of these gay men are actually bisexual men, or some of these gay men are only gay men who figured out they were gay in their twenties and they’ve had sex with women and so not even being able to mention that, you know, if we want to talk about realistic representations of gay men, well that’s not it.
Emma: Yeah. There’s a striking amount of similarity, and actually you’ve written a bit of that, haven’t you? [Sarah chuckles] And you talked about it a bit already, that there are a lot of writers that you follow who have written fanfiction, or even still write it. What do you see, then, as the relationship between the slash fanfiction world and the gay male romance pro-fiction world, I guess?
Sarah: I think a lot of the authors and the presses who started the whole genre of male/male romance certainly grew out of slash fiction because that’s where they started writing. I certainly think there’s a lot of authors still coming out of slash fiction who then discover that there’s pro fic and that they can write pro fiction as well, original fiction. But I know that there’s increasingly authors who have had nothing to do with slash fiction and fanfiction, and who just started writing pro fiction. Like I said I think a lot of the tropes from fanfiction follow into gay male fiction, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I know that, problematically, there are presses who do a lot of pull to publish, you know, obviously we’ve had the whole E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey thing going on at the moment, which was a pull to publish from Twilight fanfiction, but I know that there’s a- Dear Author will no longer review a press called Dreamspinner Press because they have a very problematic relationship with pull to publish, um, and with publishing slash fiction and with explicitly saying ‘here’s how to file off the serial numbers off your fanfiction so that you can publish it with us’. [Emma makes a noise of understanding] Um, and I - me and the other male/male reviewer there have a, have a big problem with that because we don’t think that that’s ethical. I think that authors writing slash is fabulous, and I know that it helps a lot of authors really figure out their craft, but I think that there’s a lot of authors who wind up taking shortcuts that work in fanfiction and then moving to pro fic and then taking those same shortcuts and then they don’t work anymore. And so they have to figure out how to rewrite and write differently for pro fic than they would for fanfic.
Emma: I’ve been in internet fandom for about ten years now and I know that ten years ago, when I first started writing slash and posting it online, there was a sense among people that this was not something that you could do professionally.
Sarah: Right.
Emma: I mean, there just wasn’t going to be a market for it. And so there were people who wrote fanfiction, and then they would write, you know, traditional romances, you know, het romances or whatever and- but there was not really a sense that the two had anything to do with each other. But that- ten years on it’s not like that anymore, I mean, there seems to be a market now for gay male romance that definitely we didn’t see ten years ago.
Sarah: Oh absolutely, there’s a large market. I think part of it is that it’s digital and so there’s always a backlist, because the backlist is always available and so it’s never out of print. So if somebody discovers your new book they can go and buy all your old books because they’re all still available. This is why there’s three presses, at least, that I know of that publish only male/male fiction, Dreamspinner is one of them, Riptide is another and Torquere Press is a third. And they publish only male/male fiction, and then a lot of the digital publishers, that started publishing het fiction, they now publish male/male as well. Um, so Lucid is one that started publishing male/male fiction and is, I mean it still publishes het, but it’s known now for its male/male fiction, Samhain Publishing is another one that publishes a lot of male/male fiction, although they’re still primarily a heterosexual fiction publisher. So, you know, that’s five presses there that put out a lot of stuff. There’s, it’s not HBO, Showtime show Queer as Folk, and I mean that was huge, and their audience was not just gay men right? I mean...
Emma: Right. There was a big fandom. Which I was a part of.
Sarah: Right, there was a huge fandom, there was a huge audience for that show, and, you know, the audience there was mostly women. And apparently it was a shock to the producers, when it first came out, how popular they were among women. But I don’t think it would be a shock to anyone who had written fanfiction. And, so that was 2000, that was, that was 12 years ago, and I think that it started right around the same time period that the first male/male only press started in 2003, which must mean that the people who started it felt that there was a market for it. And they’re still around, so they’re almost ten years old. [both chuckle]
Emma: You know, just as a consumer of this, this is great, because yeah, I mean I love reading fanfiction, but honestly there was nowhere, there was nowhere else to get it really, before.
Sarah: Right, oh absolutely.
Emma: It’s nice to know that there’s- it’s, it’s there.
Sarah: Yeah, there certainly is now.
Emma: So, what are your current projects? What are you working on now?
Sarah: Well, I have just finished, um, a huge project which was the publication of New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, which is an edited anthology of eighteen essays about romance fiction that covers anything from slash, to historical fiction, to BDSM romance. We have historians and sociologists, literary critics, editors, the woman who runs Smart Bitches Trashy Books is on there. My projects are always ongoing because I’m working with IASPR to do their conferences and their journal, so that’s always, always part of what I’m doing. But the big project that I’m applying for grants for time to write is called Alpha Male: Gender, Genre and Power in American Romance Fiction since 1970, and it’ll be an exploration of the alpha male romance hero, in romance fiction since 1970. 1972 is when The Flame and the Flower was published, which is seen as the beginning of Popular Romance Fiction Mass Market fiction. So I’m looking from the 1970s and how the hero has changed, again, the representation of female constructed masculinity and how it’s changed. So I’m actually reading the Kathleen Woodwiss against the 1970s feminist polemics: Brownmiller, and Germaine Greer, and Betty Freidan, who’s from the 60s, but I’m looking at the way the novels, kind of, hold up against the feminist polemics of the time.
Emma: Oh wow.
Sarah: So I’m starting 1970s, 1980s, I have three chapters on the 1990s, and then I move into the 2000s and I talk about male/male gay for you fiction, I talk about erotic BDSM romance, and I talk about Suzanne Brockmann. That’s the big project, and then the other project in my head is a project about BDSM romance and how the romance narrative and how those eight essential elements of romance work through the BDSM narrative, both classical narratives like de Sade and Mr. Benson, as well as modern digital romance.
Emma: Well, all that sounds really fantastic, and we’ll definitely- we’ll put links to anything that there are, that links exist for.
Sarah: Okay.
Emma: We’ll put those in our post show post and people can keep their eyes open-
Sarah: Right, that would be fabulous, thank you.
Emma: - I’m sure that lots of our listeners would be interested in reading any and all of that, it sounds really fantastic.
Sarah: Thank you. I’d like to get it written, so...[both laugh]
Emma: Okay, so I guess we’ll move on to the final questions, um these are my questions that I ask everyone, you know, à la James Lipton. Um, and I’ve adjusted them a bit for you, since you’re not into- you’re not in fandom. But I’ll start with this one. What is your favourite gay male romance story of all time?
Sarah: It is K.A. Mitchell’s No Souvenirs. I just think it’s the perfect romance, it’s actually a sequel to another book with different characters, but you- but they’re stand alone and it’s just perfect.
Emma: Nice. And that’s something that people could buy, it’s available?
Sarah: Oh absolutely, it’s at Samhain Publishing, you just search K.A. Mitchell and all of her books come up.
Emma: Cool. And we’ll link to that too. What’s your favourite BDSM story?
Sarah: That would be Anna Crow’s Uneven, which I talked about before, the S/m romance, as opposed to D/s romance. There’s also Joey Hill, my two favourite books of hers areNatural Law, which is a femme dom romance, and Rough Canvas which is a male/male romance and they are both D/s romances.
Emma: What’s the most interesting feedback you’ve ever gotten, for either a review you’ve written or a post you’ve done?
Sarah: I don’t know that I get much feedback, I adore the feedback where, like, you know, a post from 2009 somebody will post a ‘oh my god I just bought this book and read it and I loved it’. So that’s the feedback that I like, there’s also... I wrote a ‘wow this book sucks’ post, and I had the author come on and she was very passive-aggressive, so...
Emma: Oh, wow. [both laugh]
Sarah: So, it, it became a much longer comment stream because of, because of the way the author responded to it. But that’s always true, no matter what kind of review you write.
Emma: What’s your biggest kink?
Sarah: So my biggest kink that I like to read is the grovel at the end, especially the man, it has to be the hero who grovels at the end, um, for me. Again, because I focus on the hero, um, so when there’s two heroes and they’re both grovelling that’s the best! [Emma laughs]
Emma: Can you give an example? Is there a story you can think of that does that well? I don’t think I’ve ever heard grovelling listed as a kink in all the interviews I’ve ever done, so that’s really fascinating. [Sarah laughs]
Sarah: I think No Souvenirs has a great grovel at the end, and again it’s a very understated one, that’s the one thing I love about Mitchell’s writing, is that it’s very understated. And so there’s the barrier and they split and it looks like they’re never going to get back together, and then he kind of just comes to a realisation and he goes to this other guy, you know, his lover and he just, you know, they have this great conversation. And the- so the point of that conversation is the underlying stuff, but it’s still, it’s a really great grovel and it’s one of the reasons why I love that book.
Emma: Do you have any guilty pleasures that you like to read, maybe things you would kind be embarrassed to admit that you really enjoy, but you really do?
Sarah: Yeah. To go back to that whole thing about appropriating and fetishising gay men, the gay for you trope, I really enjoy that, and I’m kind of ashamed that I enjoy it. [both laugh]
Emma: I know what you mean.
Sarah: So my secret guilty pleasure is a book called The Assignment by Evangeline Anderson, which I have since discovered is Starsky and Hutch fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off.
Emma: Ohhhh.
Sarah: Which I did not know until somebody told me that years and years later. But it’s gay for you to the, like, hundredth degree.
Emma: I think I’ve read your review of that on Dear Author.
Sarah: Yeah.
Emma: And was it disappointing to you, then to find out-
Sarah: Yes it was.
Emma: - it had been fanfiction?
Sarah: [laughing] It was. Yeah, I don’t know how or why it came up, but it came up in some conversation on Dear Author, and somebody said ‘Yeah, that was Starsky and Hutch fanfiction, and apparently she wrote it even before the internet! So it was like memeographed and passed around.’
Emma: Oh, right.
Sarah: So it was a very long, long time ago. And I’m- you know it’s a great book and I really enjoyed it, and it was really, really interesting, and it didn’t feel like it was fanfiction. It didn’t feel like there were any of the characterisation shortcuts that are sometimes the downfall of fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, but yeah it was kind of disappointing to find out that it was fanfiction. Just, I prefer to keep them separate and again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fanfiction, I think what is wrong is when it’s pulled to publish. But that’s me, I know other people feel differently.
Emma: What advice do you have for people who want to get into this field? So you’ve talked about how this is a new field and you’re doing some groundbreaking stuff. If there are people listening who are in graduate school, or are thinking about going to school and this is intriguing to them, what would you tell them?
Sarah: I would tell them that they need to ground their research in Romance in something else. So they need to have- they can’t just be going to grad school in order to do romance fiction, they have to have something else. So my something else is my obsession with female authored masculinity. That is really how I came to romance fiction in the first place, but I would say that - and this is advice that I’ve been giving to grad students recently, who are trying to get into grad school - is that they need something else as well. So they need a theory that they really enjoy, or a time period that they really like, or, um, some sort of focus that isn’t necessarily just romance fiction. So you can’t go into grad school saying ‘I want to study romance fiction’, but you can go into grad school saying ‘I want to study popular fiction by women that focuses on a romantic relationship’ and there you’re focussing on the popular fiction for women part, and so that’s going to guide where you apply to schools, and that kind of thing. Because there’s programs that focus on that, and programs that, you know, aren’t interested in focussing on that, so...
Emma: Thank you so much, Sarah, for taking the time.
Sarah: Well, thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure.
Emma: Fantastic. You can find links to many of the things that we’ve talked about on the Post Show Post, and if have any questions or comments about what you’ve heard in this interview please feel free to leave those comments on the post show post, or email islashdoyou at gmail dot com. And that’s it for the Insider Interview for this episode, happy slashing!
Transcribed by: angelbabe_cj
Host: emmagrant01
Emma Grant: Welcome to the Insider Interview for Slashcast Episode 30, this is Emma Grant and my guest today is Dr Sarah Frantz. Dr Frantz is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Fayetteville State University and her academic research focuses on Romantic Era British women novelists. But she’s also interested in popular romantic fiction. She’s currently the president of the International Association of the Study of Popular Romance and she reviews gay male romance and BDSM fiction for the Dear Author website. She’s here today to share her expertise about positive depictions of sex and romance in both of those genres and that’s something that is obviously going to be of great interest to our listeners who are all slash fans. Welcome, Sarah.
Dr Sarah Frantz: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Emma: So I guess I wanted to first just start off by asking you how did you come to your current field of study? And how did you become interested in popular romantic fiction?
Sarah: I’ve been reading popular romance fiction since I was 12, and I picked up one of my mother’s Mills and Boone when she left it lying in her living room. Our living room, I guess. It was an Anne Weale, Harlequin presents with the very domineering alpha male and the submissive female secretary character. And I’ve been romance ever since. One of the things I asked my mother at one point was if she had any different romances to give me and she gave me Georgette Heyer. She was writing historical romance, she was writing in the twentieth century, writing historical romance of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. And when I finished all the Heyer I said to my mother “What else can I read?” and she gave me Jane Austen and then the combination of those things took me into grad school where I studied Regency Era and Romantic Era British women novelists so I had a dissertation that had a chapter on Jane Austen, as well as a chapter on three other Romantic Era women novelists. But my very first published article was about romance fiction, so I’ve always done both. So my dissertation and my training have been in rise of the novel, the eighteenth century, and British women novelists, um, but it’s also been popular fiction. And my very first published article, as I said, was on ‘Scenes in Which the Hero Breastfeeds from the Heroine’ if you can believe it or not.
Emma: Oh wow. [Sarah laughs] We like to refer to that as lactation kink.
Sarah: Yes, in fact. And it was called “Expressing” Herself, with quotation marks around the expressing part. [Emma laughs] In 2007 I went, two weeks apart, I went to the Eighteenth Century Society conference and the Popular Culture Association conference because I was interested in doing both and presenting at both. And then I quit the Eighteenth Century and moved into Romance Fiction, so since 2007 I’ve been doing almost exclusively romance fiction, although I’ve been publishing a bit in Jane Austen.
Emma: So before we go any further, just as a general disclaimer I should probably say that you’re not actually a fanfiction reader.
Sarah: No I’m not.
Emma: You read fiction by people who get paid to do it.
Sarah: Yes!
Emma: But one of the things that you’re really interested in reading and reviewing, at least one of the things you do for Dear Author is you read and review professional gay male fiction.
Sarah: Yes.
Emma: And I’ve read that you don’t have anything aga- it’s not that you have something against fanfiction, it’s just not something that interested in, correct?
Sarah: That is right. Yes. I know I have a lot of authors that I adore who started in fanfiction, both het romance, actually, and gay male romance. And I have a lot of authors who still write fanfiction. I think it’s a great thing. I’ve read some great fanfiction, but it’s not my thing. Voice to me in fiction is incredibly important so I can’t read fanfiction of fiction and I don’t watch enough TV [laughs] to really get fanfiction of TV shows, or films.
Emma: Yeah. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about these two organisations that you work with. First the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, what is that organisation about and what’s your role there?
Sarah: In 2007 at the Pop Culture Association conference that I went to those of us who were doing Romance- and this is not just romance fiction but Romance writ large across popular media across any time and any culture - and we all sat down around a table at the end of the conference and said ‘Hey this conference was great, we had a great time, this is a great community that we have here, but it’s not going to get much bigger. And Romance is not really going to be a field unless we make it a field. What do we need to make it a field?’ And we decided that we needed four things to make Popular Romance Studies a field in and of itself, rather than just as an addendum to Pop Fiction Studies. And those four things were: a dedicated academic organisation; dedicated academic conferences; a dedicated academic peer reviewed journal, and somebody teaching Popular Romance at a PhD institution so that we could teach the next generation of grad students. And we figured we could do those first three and hopefully the fourth would come. So in 2008 I organised the, kind of, beginnings of IASPR and in 2009 we actually signed up our first member at the Pop Culture Association in 2009. And I came up with the name, and I had a friend help me with the logo, and I did the website. The organiser of the romance area of the Pop Culture Association at the time was Eric Salinger and I had him, I signed him on as our Executive Editor for our journal. So we now have our dedicated academic organisation, which sponsors dedicated academic conferences, we have our fourth annual conference in York, England this year in September and we have a dedicated journal, which is Journal of Popular Romance Studies, it is online, open-access, anybody can read it, anybody can comment at it. So it a blind peer-reviewed journal that is being aggregated in all of the academic databases like EBSCOhost and then hopefully the fourth will still come. We still don’t have anybody teaching Popular Romance Fiction at a PhD granting institution.
Emma: Fantastic, and we’ll link to that from our, um, Post Show Post so people can go and check that out, and check out the journal too, which sounds really interesting. And what the site- the website, Dear Author, what can you tell us about that, for people who aren’t familiar with it?
Sarah: Dear Author is one of the three largest romance review websites out there. We have All About Romance, which is under the link likesbooks.com, they were one of the original romance review websites. The second site is Smartbitchestrashybooks.com which is an amazing resource, it has a fabulous community online, it has a little bit of a reputation for being a mean girl website - as does Dear Author - but that’s because we both are dedicated to actually reviewing romance honestly. So if there’s a bad book, we’ll say that it’s a bad book, and if it’s a good book, we’ll say it’s a good book. And then I’m with Dear Author. It started in 2006 just two people started it, but now there’s a stable, probably of about ten or twelve different reviewers, we all have our own thing that we like reviewing. Also the person that owns the website, Jane, does fabulous reviews of digital media, so it is the go-to website if you want to know anything about e-readers and how to load your e-reader with right books, and where to buy books from, and Digital Rights Management - DRM - and all that kind of stuff. So it’s not just romance reviews it’s also a resource for information about the Romance world. And in 2008 I read the most amazing BDSM romance in the world and I wanted to tell the world about it. And so I emailed Jane and said ‘Hey, could I do a guest review?’ and she said yes, and I’ve been reviewing for them ever since.
Emma: Not a site I was terribly familiar with until recently and it’s been really interesting to reviews [Sarah makes noise of agreement] and I read almost exclusively fanfiction these days but now I’m very intrigued about many of the things that I’ve read reviewed there and I’m like ‘Hmm, maybe I should branch out a little bit [Sarah laughs] and read things where I don’t already know who the characters are and what the world is all about’.
Sarah: Right.
Emma: That’s great and so for that site you, you review primarily - as we said before - gay male romance and BDSM romance, so those were genres that you were already very interested in before coming to that site, obviously. What attracted you to those two genres?
Sarah: In 2007, I think, I started reading male/male romance, maybe even a little bit later than that. Suzanne Brockmann is a romance author who writes military romance and I was a big fan of hers, so I was on one of her message boards and somebody I met on the messageboard recommended this author called Matthew Haldeman Time who wrote male/male romance. He also writes a lot of fanfiction, a lot of real person slash with boybands, but he also writes a lot of original fiction, a lot of it free, especially the short stories so I went on to his website and started reading male/male romance and that was the first time I’d ever read anything. And then the person who recommended me also started writing her own, so I read some of hers and she recommended me some more names and I just kind of got into the field that way, from my reading.
Um, BDSM romance I actually found through the male/male romance because I was trolling some of the presses that I like reading from, and I found BDSM fiction that way and then I expanded out to heterosexual BDSM fiction from the male/male fiction. And I’m interested in BDSM fiction because I’m a BDSM practitioner in my own life so it’s just something that has always interested me because it’s part of who I am.
Emma: Right, and I think that’s true for people that I know in fandom as well. I mean there are a lot of people who I know in fandom who read BDSM fiction first and then said ‘this is, this sounds like what I want to do’ and it kind of helped open doors for them to move forward in their sexuality.
Sarah: Right.
Emma: And also from the other direction: people who were kinksters in real life and then said ‘ooh, here’s something that depicts what I like to do’.
Sarah: Right. Yeah. For me it was the other way around. Honestly, actually, I think I also read the queen, the mother of BDSM fiction is Joey Hill and her BDSM fiction is amazing. And I don’t remember when I first started reading her. She’s the BDSM author who writes both male/male and heterosexual BDSM fiction and I love her stuff and I don’t remember if I started reading her before or after I started reading male/male.
Emma: Since you review BDSM stories, and I’ve read some of your reviews, and it’s very interesting to me [Sarah laughs] to see what are the things that you- it’s fascinating to see the things that you pick out and the things that you pick as good and the things that you say ‘okay, this isn’t good, this isn’t realistic.’
Sarah: Right.
Emma: Can you talk to us about - what do you look for in a BDSM story? What makes a good BDSM story for you?
Sarah: For me it’s the psychology. The woman I just talked about, Joey Hill, she writes some fantastical things in her BDSM fiction, you know, toys that are amazing and wonderful, unguents or lotions that are just like ‘oh if those existed in real life wouldn’t that be amazing’, um, so it’s not that I necessarily want the activity to be exactly right. The BDSM romance story that started me writing reviews is On a Crow’s Uneven which is one of the first sadomasochistic romances I’ve read as opposed to Dominant/submission romances. Most BDSM romances are D/s romances where they focus on the Dominance/submission aspect of BDSM, Uneven focuses on the sadomasochistic aspects more than anything else. So it’s an incredibly violent book, it’s hardcore it’s very violent and I don’t think that it’s a particularly healthy relationship in real life, if those people acted like that in real life, but the psychology of it is what makes it incredible. So I’m not necessarily looking for things to be exactly the way they might be in real life, but I’m looking for things to be psychologically and emotionally the way they would be in real life. You can write some fantastical things in the story and I’ll accept that as long as the reasons behind it and the motivations and psychology is to my mind ‘correct’, quote-unquote.
Emma: That’s really interesting and I think that one of the things that, when we talk about BDSM in the fanfiction world there is often this push and pull between fantasy and reality, I think almost the way that you’ve just delineated there. People say, you know, I want it to be, I want to see the scene set up, I want to make sure that the partners are doing, are- look like they’re acting responsibly and do all the things that you’re supposed to do for a scene. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who’re like, ‘you know what I just want it to be hot’. [Sarah laughs] I don’t really care, I don’t care if this would be a horribly abusive relationship in reality, I don’t want any of that actually detracts from my enjoyment of it. Is there the same kind of push and pull in the stories that you read as well?
Sarah: I read a story, that I will not call a romance, that was about a boy who’d been in sexual slavery since he was 9, um, and he’d finally broken his way out, and he was probably about 19, so he’d been in it for 10 years. And he had been hideously abused at the e- I mean he’d been hideously abused all the way through obviously - but certainly at the end and he’d got his way out and he had a broken arm, and broken ribs and all of that kind of stuff, and, like, three months later some guy is saying ‘oh, yeah, you know he’s really damaged, but he’s really hot and I think we could have some great scenes with him’, while admitting, like in the same paragraph, that he didn’t really know if he was submissive, and he didn’t really know if he was gay because that’s all he’d ever known. And some of the scenes that they wrote were hot if you just separated them out from that psychological motivational aspect of it, but I couldn’t get beyond the fact that this kid had been in sexual slavery for 10 years and he’d been emotionally and physically abused his whole life and... I don’t think that going into a BDSM relationship three months later is necessarily the way to go. Um. [slight laugh]
Emma: Right.
Sarah: So, on the one hand yes, hot is important, but for me it comes to does the motivation really work behind the hotness? And, you know, a lot of authors say that they won’t write a sex scene unless it forwards the story, unless it’s part of the emotional arc, and the plot arc of the book, and to me that’s very important. I just read a book where they don’t actually have sex on page, they have, I think, two blowjobs on page, but those blowjobs were the hottest blowjobs I’ve ever read because of the motivation, the tension and the lead up to those blowjobs was just incredible and so they’re hotter than any kind of, I don’t know, random full on sex scene, because of who the characters were and how they were motivated and how it got to that point.
Emma: This may be a good time to segue into talking about erotica in romance in general. How do you define Romance as a genre? And then how does erotica fit into the big picture from an academic perspective, because I have no idea?
Sarah: From the academic perspective there’s a couple of ways to define Romance. The Romance Writers of America defines the Romance as a ‘central love story with an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending’. And apparently they had big fights about that because that actually would include Gone With the Wind, because Gone With the Wind has an optimistic ending, you know, ‘tomorrow is another day’. But that generally means, that ‘the emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending’ generally means the happy ever after. There’s a woman called Pamela Regis who wrote a book in 2003 called The Natural History of the Romance Novel and in that she has an eight part definition, that is I think is the most quoted definition of Romance in academic circles. I just edited a book with eighteen essays in it about Romance, and all of them used Pamela Regis’ eight part definition. [Emma laughs] Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements of the courtship narrative is: ‘The Romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of courtship and betrothal of protagonists.’ - and she used to actually say one or more heroines, but I convinced her that male/male romance counts, and so now it’s protagonists -so you have: the first one is society defined, and it’s usually defined as in some way flawed - the characters have to fix something in society, or the characters have a problem internally that needs to be fixed; then you have the meeting between the characters; the barrier - the thing that keeps them apart; the attraction - the reason they want to go together; the point of ritual death - which is the moment at which everything looks like it’s lost, that they will never be together; the recognition between the characters of how to overcome the barrier; the declaration scene between them when they declare their love for each other and then the betrothal at the end. And the betrothal is not necessarily a wedding, or even a betrothal, but it is a commitment to each other, and so a lot of romances, especially male/male romances have a happy for now ending, instead of a happy ever after ending, and that counts as the betrothal. And those eight essential elements, Regis’ Eight Essential Elements, really do help you, kind of, talk about a Romance when you’re talking about it academically. They can happen in any order, they can happen off page, they can happen in previous books, they don’t necessarily have to happen in the individual book, but they’re really a great way to think about the stories, especially the point of ritual death, the barrier, and the recognition.
Emma: That’s really, that’s really amazing because as you were describing those I was thinking about some of the fanfiction pieces that I’ve read lately. And I’m going down them, ‘yes, yes’, checking them all off.
Sarah: Right. It’s a great way to be able to systematise an understanding of the romance narrative. Actually in that book that I mentioned that I edited, um, it’s called New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction- and it has just come out on Kindle, yay, for $10- but in New Approaches we actually have an essay by Deborah Kaplan about, about fanfiction, about slash fiction. It compares the romance narrative, and those eight essential elements, to the conventions of slash fiction in particular. So certainly the happy ending, the betrothal at the end, and the declaration are very, very different in fanfiction than they are in Romance, and so if you’re conversant with both genres you can see that there’s a big difference between them. If you’re in slash fiction you’re used to the betrothal at the end that’s kind of sort of an underlying declaration, you know that they have just declared their commitment to each other and their love for each other, but they never actually say I love you on a page, whereas that’s an essential element - the I love you on a page is an essential element in Romance. And so it’s actually really interesting watching the two conventions side by side, where yeah, those eight elements are there, but they’re there in very, very different ways in slash fiction than they are in Romance.
Emma: And then what is - how does erotica play into all of this?
Sarah: There is certainly erotic romance, where the eight essential elements are explored through sex. And I think to me that defines erotic romance fiction, is the barrier, and, well obviously, the attraction, but certainly the barrier, and the point of ritual death, and the recognition between the characters happen through sex rather than because they’re trying to save the world, or something like that. Erotica is, I think, very different it doesn’t focus on the romance narrative, it might not have any of the elements except maybe attraction, and not even then sometimes. I’ve certainly read some erotica where people are having sex for different reasons, besides attraction. So I think that erotica might have its own essential elements, but I don’t think that any of them necessarily have anything to do with romance fiction itself.
Emma: Are there any differences between gay male romance and heterosexual romance?
Sarah: I think that gay male romance has a lot of the slash and fanfiction conventions, I’m reading one at the moment and it has a declaration at the end that I can recognise because I’ve read a lot of male romance, but I think that people that just read heterosexual romance wouldn’t be satisfied with the ending, because it’s not a declaration, ‘I love you,’ ‘Yes, I love you too’, it’s more of a kind of an underlying declaration between the characters where they recognise what they’ve said, and you as a reader recognise what they’ve said but it’s never actually out there on the page. So I think that male/male romance has some of those conventions from, um, slash and fanfiction in them. I think another difference is that part of the reason that I like to read them is because male/male romance doesn’t have a lot of the gender dynamics between them. I can read a D/s romance, in particular, one that focuses on Dominance and submission and I’m not tripping over the gender expectations as well as trying to work out the D/s expectations. So that’s a large part of the reason I read male/male romance is because I don’t want to have to deal with the gender expectations and gender dynamics. So I think that that is a difference, but the male/male romance in particular that does really well at the digital publishers is the romance that adheres to the eight essential elements of generic romance fiction. So they might adhere to it in just slightly different ways, but still the ones that do best, and the authors that sell best have all of those eight essential elements. I’ve read a lot of male/male romances that have the meeting and the attraction, and then you kind of work your way through a fabulous little romance, but there’s no barrier, so there’s no recognition, so there’s no narrative tension. And every time I read one of those and I review them, I’m like, okay, nice to read a nice story where two people meet and they fall in love and everything’s great and wonderful and they have a happy ending, but a romance story needs the barrier and it needs the recognition of how to overcome that barrier in order to have the tension that is required of any sort of fiction, right?
Emma: Right.
Sarah: I mean, otherwise we’re just writing a diary, as opposed to actually having a story with a narrative arc. So that arc requires tension and if you’re talking about a romance that tension comes in that there’s a barrier between these two people. And whether that’s an external or internal barrier, or both doesn’t matter; there has to be a barrier and then a way to overcome that barrier.
Emma: Oh that’s really fascinating. I’m going to think about that quite a lot. [Sarah laughs] Wow, that’s cool. Well, um, so another question that I wanted to ask you - I know this is something you’ve actually written about as well - often in fandom this topic comes up and it can be a bit contentious, this idea that slash or gay male romance is written primarily by women for women, it’s something that, you know, it happens- it’s true in the slash fanfiction world, it seems like it’s also probably true in the gay male romance world.
Sarah: Yes.
Emma: And so, often when this discussion comes up there’s always someone who will say we’re really just fetishizing gay men, and that’s no different from what straight men have done to, you know, women all along.
Sarah: In lesbian porn, right.
Emma: Exactly. I guess I just wanted to ask you to comment on that. [Sarah laughs] What is your perspective on that as someone who studies ac romance, academically?
Sarah: There’s a couple of layers there because the word you left out, of course, is by straight women, for straight women.
Emma: Yeah, intentionally.
Sarah: I know, I would to hasten to add that a lot of certainly my favourite gay male romance by the authors that I think are most competent, a lot of those authors, certainly not all, but a lot of them are in some way, um, queer themselves. So I think that that might, I don’t know if it helps them write better, but it certainly helps inflect their stories in ways that I seem to recognise when I’m reading them. One of my academic specialties is female constructed masculinity.
Emma: Ooh, that sounds fascinating.
Sarah: Yes. [laughs slightly] Female constructed masculinity is about the way women write men. I have always been interested in the way women write men and the romances that I have read have always been the ones that focus on the male characters more than on the female characters. And there are certainly authors out there who focus on the female characters, and they fascinating books, and I love some of them, but the ones I’m drawn to all the time are the ones with the really, really strong male characters. Right? So you’re focussing on the hero rather than the heroine. So, I don’t know that gay male romance written by women for women is any more or less fetishistic - if that is a word - than Romance to begin with, you know? Some of the most successful romances out there, and certainly some of the most successful romance series are series’ that focus on men. So I’ve always been drawn to that what romance authors are doing there are just as much fetishising men, maybe, as in gay male romance. But what happens in gay male romance, of course, is that you drop out the heroine. And are we expected to realistically portray what it means to be gay? Or are these male/male romances written by women for women exploring things that are important to women, but doing it by looking at men because men are who we have to deal with all the time in order to have life, because there’s men all around us and they hold more power than we do in some situations? So, I don’t know that there’s an answer to that question. I certainly can see why gay men would look at this field and kind of go ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ [Emma laughs slightly] Um, but there are increasingly gay men writing romance for a female audience. Now, problematically they’re getting, potentially, more interest from readers precisely because they’re gay men. And, you know, yes some of the readers have fetishised gay men and so, ‘ooh, we have a real live gay man here, let’s read his book because he’s obviously more authentic than any of these other authors writing out there.’ And I think that that’s potentially a problem, but I don’t know that romances haven’t always been about exploring men and fetishising men, and figuring out our relationship to men. It’s just that some of them drop the heroine and have two heroes instead of one.
Emma: Do you find it problematic that in addition to the heroine being dropped out completely that women are often vilified?
Sarah: Yes.
Emma: In, in, yeah. This is- we talk about this in the fanfiction world as well, it’s a big topic of conversation.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s certainly - it’s something that comes up again and again in my reviews, or in responses to my reviews. Because, and I’m ashamed to admit this, but honestly sometimes I don’t notice the way that women are treated because I’m so focused on the male characters when I read, no matter what, but yes there are problems with the way women are treated. There was a big upset about three weeks ago on one of the message boards that I follow, one of the blogs that I follow, because their policy is that if there is any heterosexual sex mentioned at all in a male/male romance they will not review it. And that is, I find that very problematic. And so it’s not only the authors who won’t write it, but in some ways the authors won’t write it because the readers won’t read it. And, you know what? Gay men have women in their lives too, and, you know, some of these gay men are actually bisexual men, or some of these gay men are only gay men who figured out they were gay in their twenties and they’ve had sex with women and so not even being able to mention that, you know, if we want to talk about realistic representations of gay men, well that’s not it.
Emma: Yeah. There’s a striking amount of similarity, and actually you’ve written a bit of that, haven’t you? [Sarah chuckles] And you talked about it a bit already, that there are a lot of writers that you follow who have written fanfiction, or even still write it. What do you see, then, as the relationship between the slash fanfiction world and the gay male romance pro-fiction world, I guess?
Sarah: I think a lot of the authors and the presses who started the whole genre of male/male romance certainly grew out of slash fiction because that’s where they started writing. I certainly think there’s a lot of authors still coming out of slash fiction who then discover that there’s pro fic and that they can write pro fiction as well, original fiction. But I know that there’s increasingly authors who have had nothing to do with slash fiction and fanfiction, and who just started writing pro fiction. Like I said I think a lot of the tropes from fanfiction follow into gay male fiction, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I know that, problematically, there are presses who do a lot of pull to publish, you know, obviously we’ve had the whole E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey thing going on at the moment, which was a pull to publish from Twilight fanfiction, but I know that there’s a- Dear Author will no longer review a press called Dreamspinner Press because they have a very problematic relationship with pull to publish, um, and with publishing slash fiction and with explicitly saying ‘here’s how to file off the serial numbers off your fanfiction so that you can publish it with us’. [Emma makes a noise of understanding] Um, and I - me and the other male/male reviewer there have a, have a big problem with that because we don’t think that that’s ethical. I think that authors writing slash is fabulous, and I know that it helps a lot of authors really figure out their craft, but I think that there’s a lot of authors who wind up taking shortcuts that work in fanfiction and then moving to pro fic and then taking those same shortcuts and then they don’t work anymore. And so they have to figure out how to rewrite and write differently for pro fic than they would for fanfic.
Emma: I’ve been in internet fandom for about ten years now and I know that ten years ago, when I first started writing slash and posting it online, there was a sense among people that this was not something that you could do professionally.
Sarah: Right.
Emma: I mean, there just wasn’t going to be a market for it. And so there were people who wrote fanfiction, and then they would write, you know, traditional romances, you know, het romances or whatever and- but there was not really a sense that the two had anything to do with each other. But that- ten years on it’s not like that anymore, I mean, there seems to be a market now for gay male romance that definitely we didn’t see ten years ago.
Sarah: Oh absolutely, there’s a large market. I think part of it is that it’s digital and so there’s always a backlist, because the backlist is always available and so it’s never out of print. So if somebody discovers your new book they can go and buy all your old books because they’re all still available. This is why there’s three presses, at least, that I know of that publish only male/male fiction, Dreamspinner is one of them, Riptide is another and Torquere Press is a third. And they publish only male/male fiction, and then a lot of the digital publishers, that started publishing het fiction, they now publish male/male as well. Um, so Lucid is one that started publishing male/male fiction and is, I mean it still publishes het, but it’s known now for its male/male fiction, Samhain Publishing is another one that publishes a lot of male/male fiction, although they’re still primarily a heterosexual fiction publisher. So, you know, that’s five presses there that put out a lot of stuff. There’s, it’s not HBO, Showtime show Queer as Folk, and I mean that was huge, and their audience was not just gay men right? I mean...
Emma: Right. There was a big fandom. Which I was a part of.
Sarah: Right, there was a huge fandom, there was a huge audience for that show, and, you know, the audience there was mostly women. And apparently it was a shock to the producers, when it first came out, how popular they were among women. But I don’t think it would be a shock to anyone who had written fanfiction. And, so that was 2000, that was, that was 12 years ago, and I think that it started right around the same time period that the first male/male only press started in 2003, which must mean that the people who started it felt that there was a market for it. And they’re still around, so they’re almost ten years old. [both chuckle]
Emma: You know, just as a consumer of this, this is great, because yeah, I mean I love reading fanfiction, but honestly there was nowhere, there was nowhere else to get it really, before.
Sarah: Right, oh absolutely.
Emma: It’s nice to know that there’s- it’s, it’s there.
Sarah: Yeah, there certainly is now.
Emma: So, what are your current projects? What are you working on now?
Sarah: Well, I have just finished, um, a huge project which was the publication of New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, which is an edited anthology of eighteen essays about romance fiction that covers anything from slash, to historical fiction, to BDSM romance. We have historians and sociologists, literary critics, editors, the woman who runs Smart Bitches Trashy Books is on there. My projects are always ongoing because I’m working with IASPR to do their conferences and their journal, so that’s always, always part of what I’m doing. But the big project that I’m applying for grants for time to write is called Alpha Male: Gender, Genre and Power in American Romance Fiction since 1970, and it’ll be an exploration of the alpha male romance hero, in romance fiction since 1970. 1972 is when The Flame and the Flower was published, which is seen as the beginning of Popular Romance Fiction Mass Market fiction. So I’m looking from the 1970s and how the hero has changed, again, the representation of female constructed masculinity and how it’s changed. So I’m actually reading the Kathleen Woodwiss against the 1970s feminist polemics: Brownmiller, and Germaine Greer, and Betty Freidan, who’s from the 60s, but I’m looking at the way the novels, kind of, hold up against the feminist polemics of the time.
Emma: Oh wow.
Sarah: So I’m starting 1970s, 1980s, I have three chapters on the 1990s, and then I move into the 2000s and I talk about male/male gay for you fiction, I talk about erotic BDSM romance, and I talk about Suzanne Brockmann. That’s the big project, and then the other project in my head is a project about BDSM romance and how the romance narrative and how those eight essential elements of romance work through the BDSM narrative, both classical narratives like de Sade and Mr. Benson, as well as modern digital romance.
Emma: Well, all that sounds really fantastic, and we’ll definitely- we’ll put links to anything that there are, that links exist for.
Sarah: Okay.
Emma: We’ll put those in our post show post and people can keep their eyes open-
Sarah: Right, that would be fabulous, thank you.
Emma: - I’m sure that lots of our listeners would be interested in reading any and all of that, it sounds really fantastic.
Sarah: Thank you. I’d like to get it written, so...[both laugh]
Emma: Okay, so I guess we’ll move on to the final questions, um these are my questions that I ask everyone, you know, à la James Lipton. Um, and I’ve adjusted them a bit for you, since you’re not into- you’re not in fandom. But I’ll start with this one. What is your favourite gay male romance story of all time?
Sarah: It is K.A. Mitchell’s No Souvenirs. I just think it’s the perfect romance, it’s actually a sequel to another book with different characters, but you- but they’re stand alone and it’s just perfect.
Emma: Nice. And that’s something that people could buy, it’s available?
Sarah: Oh absolutely, it’s at Samhain Publishing, you just search K.A. Mitchell and all of her books come up.
Emma: Cool. And we’ll link to that too. What’s your favourite BDSM story?
Sarah: That would be Anna Crow’s Uneven, which I talked about before, the S/m romance, as opposed to D/s romance. There’s also Joey Hill, my two favourite books of hers areNatural Law, which is a femme dom romance, and Rough Canvas which is a male/male romance and they are both D/s romances.
Emma: What’s the most interesting feedback you’ve ever gotten, for either a review you’ve written or a post you’ve done?
Sarah: I don’t know that I get much feedback, I adore the feedback where, like, you know, a post from 2009 somebody will post a ‘oh my god I just bought this book and read it and I loved it’. So that’s the feedback that I like, there’s also... I wrote a ‘wow this book sucks’ post, and I had the author come on and she was very passive-aggressive, so...
Emma: Oh, wow. [both laugh]
Sarah: So, it, it became a much longer comment stream because of, because of the way the author responded to it. But that’s always true, no matter what kind of review you write.
Emma: What’s your biggest kink?
Sarah: So my biggest kink that I like to read is the grovel at the end, especially the man, it has to be the hero who grovels at the end, um, for me. Again, because I focus on the hero, um, so when there’s two heroes and they’re both grovelling that’s the best! [Emma laughs]
Emma: Can you give an example? Is there a story you can think of that does that well? I don’t think I’ve ever heard grovelling listed as a kink in all the interviews I’ve ever done, so that’s really fascinating. [Sarah laughs]
Sarah: I think No Souvenirs has a great grovel at the end, and again it’s a very understated one, that’s the one thing I love about Mitchell’s writing, is that it’s very understated. And so there’s the barrier and they split and it looks like they’re never going to get back together, and then he kind of just comes to a realisation and he goes to this other guy, you know, his lover and he just, you know, they have this great conversation. And the- so the point of that conversation is the underlying stuff, but it’s still, it’s a really great grovel and it’s one of the reasons why I love that book.
Emma: Do you have any guilty pleasures that you like to read, maybe things you would kind be embarrassed to admit that you really enjoy, but you really do?
Sarah: Yeah. To go back to that whole thing about appropriating and fetishising gay men, the gay for you trope, I really enjoy that, and I’m kind of ashamed that I enjoy it. [both laugh]
Emma: I know what you mean.
Sarah: So my secret guilty pleasure is a book called The Assignment by Evangeline Anderson, which I have since discovered is Starsky and Hutch fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off.
Emma: Ohhhh.
Sarah: Which I did not know until somebody told me that years and years later. But it’s gay for you to the, like, hundredth degree.
Emma: I think I’ve read your review of that on Dear Author.
Sarah: Yeah.
Emma: And was it disappointing to you, then to find out-
Sarah: Yes it was.
Emma: - it had been fanfiction?
Sarah: [laughing] It was. Yeah, I don’t know how or why it came up, but it came up in some conversation on Dear Author, and somebody said ‘Yeah, that was Starsky and Hutch fanfiction, and apparently she wrote it even before the internet! So it was like memeographed and passed around.’
Emma: Oh, right.
Sarah: So it was a very long, long time ago. And I’m- you know it’s a great book and I really enjoyed it, and it was really, really interesting, and it didn’t feel like it was fanfiction. It didn’t feel like there were any of the characterisation shortcuts that are sometimes the downfall of fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, but yeah it was kind of disappointing to find out that it was fanfiction. Just, I prefer to keep them separate and again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fanfiction, I think what is wrong is when it’s pulled to publish. But that’s me, I know other people feel differently.
Emma: What advice do you have for people who want to get into this field? So you’ve talked about how this is a new field and you’re doing some groundbreaking stuff. If there are people listening who are in graduate school, or are thinking about going to school and this is intriguing to them, what would you tell them?
Sarah: I would tell them that they need to ground their research in Romance in something else. So they need to have- they can’t just be going to grad school in order to do romance fiction, they have to have something else. So my something else is my obsession with female authored masculinity. That is really how I came to romance fiction in the first place, but I would say that - and this is advice that I’ve been giving to grad students recently, who are trying to get into grad school - is that they need something else as well. So they need a theory that they really enjoy, or a time period that they really like, or, um, some sort of focus that isn’t necessarily just romance fiction. So you can’t go into grad school saying ‘I want to study romance fiction’, but you can go into grad school saying ‘I want to study popular fiction by women that focuses on a romantic relationship’ and there you’re focussing on the popular fiction for women part, and so that’s going to guide where you apply to schools, and that kind of thing. Because there’s programs that focus on that, and programs that, you know, aren’t interested in focussing on that, so...
Emma: Thank you so much, Sarah, for taking the time.
Sarah: Well, thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure.
Emma: Fantastic. You can find links to many of the things that we’ve talked about on the Post Show Post, and if have any questions or comments about what you’ve heard in this interview please feel free to leave those comments on the post show post, or email islashdoyou at gmail dot com. And that’s it for the Insider Interview for this episode, happy slashing!
Transcribed by: angelbabe_cj