Transpire Together by Mercy Zephyr

"They should get counseling for that. I can't imagine them having a happy ending until that was fixed."

I had just described my current work-in-progress to someone. Both main characters shared my orientation, drawn from my own lived experience and how I experience attraction. My characters living happily as they were had just been deemed too strange, too queer, for my listener to comprehend.

My heart heard this: "You are broken. Until pivotal parts of who you are beyond your control change, you can never be happy." It was a message I knew well; heard often from others, and sometimes myself.

When did you first see yourself reflected in a story? I saw the question posed recently, and the first reply was, "Cinderella, when I was three years old. She was a white blonde girl like me." For me, it was the Saturday Night Live series of skits "It's Pat", where an overweight, relentlessly androgynous person with a grating and whiny voice fended off horrifyingly inappropriate attempts to learn what was between their legs.

I was in high school then, and it was the first time that I saw a character, unflattering as they might be, confidently refusing to meet the expectations of the gender people tried to impose upon them. I saw the character fighting against the view wherein whatever was between their legs would magically bottle them into cultural expectations and demands. I knew I wasn't who I needed to pretend to be, and I resented it.

After that, the characters I saw myself in were all villains. For too long, characters have been framed as "against society" through defiance of gender and sexuality norms. Queer characters could be depicted only if they came to a horrific end. Queerness was literally evilness. Goodness was shown by desires I could not share. I saw myself reflected in the doomed and despised evildoers on the margins of the story, soon to be defeated by the heroes for the sake of "Good people".

Growing up, I never saw my favorite characters have a happy ending. I assumed I would be dead before the turn of the century, doomed like a character in a book or on screen. Years later, I still hadn't revised my estimate; I had no idea what to do with my life. Aimless, my peers achieved great things as I waited for death. I was starved for role models, for happy endings that would show me that it could work out, for a light at the end of the tunnel.

There are millions of readers like me out there, worthy, good people, hungry for hope—yet believing themselves too villainous, too deviant, too broken to deserve it. All are used to their own forms of being made to feel less than, broken, or monstrous.

Romance is about happy endings. A happy end to the story is mandatory, much like the solving of a mystery in a mystery story. It demands the happiness we crave.

Research shows views on issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and aphobia being affected by whether the people report knowing someone in those groups. Excitingly, or perhaps worryingly, characters in books, movies, and television count as "people known". "Coming Out", revealing oneself to the world, could be done in abstract—for good or for ill.

In 2012, asexual and aromantic people suffered a sudden spike in bigotry and social disapproval, created by the television show "House". An episode featured an asexual couple, pathologizing them, referring to them as "algae", then finally revealing their relationship to be a medical condition. The wife was portrayed as simply lying. At least two people I have spoken to lost family support and became estranged when that episode aired.

Many books containing LGBTQIA people written neither by nor for LGBTQIA people. The Amazon category "Transgender Romance", at last check, was dominated by a mixture of fetish pieces; some involved women with a fully functional penis, others involved "forced feminization"—cisgender men forced to adopt hyperfeminine presentation. The first is biologically implausible without biohacking, the second psychologically implausible because of the very dynamics of gender dysphoria that we live with every day.

Between those two fetishes, one can construct every absurd scenario used to attack the transgender community. Unrealistic and miserable narratives of trans people, by cis people, for cis people, weaponized against trans people.

My book Transpire Together shows this strain from our side. In it, a man struggles with the fear of the political campaign against his existence as he meets his high school girlfriend after a long absence. She doesn't recognize her old high school girlfriend in him at first, and he wrestles with these thoughts alone at first, scared into secrecy.

Many of the thoughts and happenings of Transpire Together came from my own and my husband's experiences of living near, yet in the shadow of, such a public fight over our lives between people informed solely by uneducated fiction. It showed that no matter the barriers, we must present our side; some will come away newly informed, others with new hope for their own happy ending.

AUTHOR MERCY ZEPHYR

Mercy Zephyr is a romance writer, focusing on low heat contemporary stories with transgender protagonists. 

An Alaska Native, asexual transgender woman, married 11 years so far, she quarantines with the family cat, occasionally entertains her granddaughter, and pines for the days of working at coffee shops.

Transpire Together can be bought from all your favorite ebook retailers at: https://books2read.com/b/mVr5B2

Why You Should Read (and Love) Gay Romance by Anne Tenino

 Often when blogging for a site that doesn’t focus on LGBTQ fiction, I’m asked to discuss why I write gay romance. Not only do I not have an easy answer to the question of “why,” I definitively (in my mind) put the issue to bed almost two years ago on my blog.

So naturally, when I was told I could choose any topic I liked for Romancing the Genres, the first one I thought of was Why I Write About Two Men Falling in Love.

Sigh. I’m really good at self-sabotage, I guess.

Eventually, through a long, convoluted dialogue which I won’t bore you with, I decided to address a different set of “why” questions: Why do people love gay romance? Why should someone who’s never read one want to give one a try?

The simplest answer is “love is love,” which can also be read as “romance is romance.” For the more complex answer, I’ll use the popular roller coaster analogy (i.e., equating the journey of two people falling in love to an emotional carnival ride).

As with a real-life roller coaster, the emotional one is most exciting when the highest peaks are reached after climbing up from the lowest valleys, and the loop-de-loops are truly death-defying. In romance novel terms, this means the author makes it as difficult as possible for the couple to get together and stay together. We throw up seemingly insurmountable barriers so that, when the couple overcomes them, the resulting surges of happiness, joy, hope, love, etc. are made even stronger in contrast. We make characters suffer so that they (and we) are more grateful when it ends.

In other words, best-loved romance novels evoke the most intense “feels.”

Gay romances take readers on exactly the same emotional roller coaster as straight romances do. I’d even argue that LGBTQ love stories have a built-in advantage because gay protagonists come with an inherent road block (no backstory needed).

For all the progress made recently in LGBTQ rights, prejudices still exist. There are still people who will publicly say they don’t think same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. Regardless of how the issue is treated in the story itself—in quite a few of my novels, the characters have supportive families and communities—we begin reading these stories knowing that there are people out there who think men loving men and women loving women is just plain wrong. When we reach the end, the characters have not only overcome the plot hurdles they’ve had to jump, but they’ve overcome the societal hurdle that actually exists.

ANNE TENINO

That’s what makes it so much more rewarding when love wins anyway. When reading romance, we already know it’s going to end with two people in love and happy, just as we know the roller coaster will eventually stop and let the riders exit. In both cases, the experience is all about the excitement of the journey. ~ Anne Tenino

Catalyzed by her discovery of LGBTQ romance, Anne Tenino left the lucrative fields of art history, non-profit fundraising, and domestic engineering to follow her dream of become a starving romance author. For good or ill, her snarky, silly, quasi-British sense of humor came along for the ride.

Anne applies her particular blend of romance, comedy and gay protagonists to contemporary, scifi and paranormal tales. Her works have won awards, she’s been featured in RT Book Reviews, and has achieved bestseller status on Amazon’s gay romance list.

Born and raised in Oregon, Anne lives in Portland with her husband and two kids, who have all taken a sacred oath to never read her books. She can usually be found at her computer, procrastinating. You can find out more about her works at http://annetenino.com

BLINKERED by E.J. Russell

E.J. Russell — certified geek, mother of three, recovering actor — lives in rural Oregon with her curmudgeonly husband. She enjoys visits from her wonderful adult children, and indulges in good books, red wine, and the occasional hyperbole.

NORTHERN LIGHT

Nothing blinds us like the filter of our own experience.

In the late 1970s, I was the assistant manager at a bookstore (we still had bookstores then). At a store party one night, one of the sales clerks (a man, who was making a serious attempt to hit on me) asked whether it bothered me to supervise men.

I was speechless—it had never occurred to me that it was an issue. I mean, the modern feminist movement had existed for more than ten years! (Yes, I was that oblivious, imagining that the battle had been won because from my perspective, I saw myself as his equal.)

Needless to say, attempt at seduction was unsuccessful.

Fast forward to 2010, when, after discovering the joys of reading romance thanks to my first e-reader and a romance bundle that included both Suzanne Brockmann and Jennifer Crusie, I was hard at work plotting a romance series of my own. In the spirit of “write what you know”, my books were set in a summer theater in the Berkshires (I have two theater degrees, and met my Curmudgeonly Husband while we were both working at a summer theater in Vermont).

Six books, I thought, with the first between an administrator and an actor; the second between an acting teacher and the company housekeeper; the third between the set designer and his stage manager husband; the fourth—

Stop. Right. There.

 Because my experience had been diverse in terms of the romantic relationships in the theater community, when I was planning the series, it made sense that at least a couple of the books should be about two men. It was normal for me, normal for the milieu, a reasonable expectation. Right?

In terms of the larger publishing industry, not so much.

When I attended the spring conference given by my local chapter of RWA, Rose City Romance Writers, in 2011, the editors and agents who attended were universal in their disinterest in A) a romance between two men and B) a series that included both M/F and M/M pairings. One editor, from Harlequin, said that Carina might be the only publisher who’d be willing to look at something so outré. I mean, Suzanne Brockmann had done it inside a big publishing house, but she was a big name, with a wildly popular series, and consequently an exception.

At this time, I had no idea that the LGBTQIA romance community existed. (Experience blindness strikes again!)  It wasn’t until a presentation at an RCRW meeting, when then-chaptermate Cathryn Cade mentioned Josh Lanyon, that I had any clue that a thriving M/M romance market was out there, and that my notion of writing a happily-ever-after love story between two men wasn’t a lonely unicorn.

LOST IN GEEKLANDIA

Thanks to that presentation, I found a wealth of books like the stories I wanted to tell. I also discovered that if you look in the right places, you can find houses interested in publishing those stories. My first official sale was to Entangled—Northern Light, a M/M ghost story submitted in response to a Halloween novella submission call.

Entangled publishes primarily M/F romances, and for at least a year, Northern Light was one of only two books in their impressive catalog in which the central love story was between two men. My second book with Entangled, Lost in Geeklandia, the first in my Geeklandia series, is a M/F rom-com. But the second in the series, Stumptown Spirits (a M/M romance), just sold to Riptide, the same publisher who contracted my M/M Legend Tripping series (which makes me deliriously happy, by the way).

So, just as I imagined with my summer theater stories, I’ll have a series with both M/F and M/M pairings, although they’ll be released by different publishers (one who publishes predominantly straight romance, one who only handles queer fiction). From the perspective of readers looking for a particular type of book, this makes sense—and as an author who wants my books to be discoverable to readers who might be interested, ditto.

E.J. RUSSELL

But for me as a person, as an avid romance reader, as the mother of gay sons, and with many friends in the LGBTQIA communities, I hope that someday, within the little universe of a romance series, it won’t matter whether the primary relationship is between a cisgendered man and woman, or some other pairing. That someday, all readers will be open to—and be able to find—happily-ever-afters for any combination of people in love.

Call me naive, clueless, or hopelessly optimistic.

Although it could be that our experience blinkers simply need an adjustment. ~ E.J.

I hope you'll check out the blurb below for my upcoming novel set in Portland, Oregon!

STUMPTOWN SPIRITS, coming from Riptide Publishing, May 16, 2016

What price would you pay to rescue a friend from hell?

STUMPTOWN SPIRITS

For Logan Conner, the answer is almost anything. Guilt-ridden over trapping his college roommate in a ghost war rooted in Portland’s pioneer past, Logan has spent years searching for a solution. Then his new boyfriend, folklorist Riley Morrel, inadvertently gives him the key. Determined to pay his debt—and keep Riley safe—Logan abandons Riley and returns to Portland, prepared to give up his freedom and his future to make things right.

Crushed by Logan’s betrayal, Riley drops out of school and takes a job on a lackluster paranormal investigation show. When the crew arrives in Portland to film an episode about a local legend of feuding ghosts, he stumbles across Logan working at a local bar, and learns the truth about Logan’s plan.

Their destinies once more intertwined, the two men attempt to reforge their relationship while dodging a narcissistic TV personality, a craven ex-ghost, and a curmudgeonly bar owner with a hidden agenda. But Logan’s date with destiny is looming, and his life might not be the only one at stake.

Find E.J. on her website, http://ejrussell.com, on Twitter @EJ_Russell, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/E.J.Russell.author