#some of the most misogynistic people in this fandom and depressingly a lot of it is coming from women 🤢

[mmbookreviews]

What This Tumblr Is For

Hello there, fellow readers of m/m novels. I’ve been reading a lot lately, and many of my favorite authors have let me down at the same time that some RL friends have roundly criticized my faves while reccing dreadful books that no one with sense or eyes could possibly like. ;D All of this inspires me to finally make a blog of honest reviews.

Why this blog: As we all know, the m/m book landscape is littered with self-published and small press books with a dubious grasp of English, no grasp at all of punctuation, bizarre plots that stop in the middle, and improbable anatomy. Most Goodreads reviews sound like they were written by the author’s friends. Most sites that let you search for m/m content make it hard to search for both m/m and some other genre, or they only recommend the same five most popular books, or they don’t clearly explain what genre something is. At the same time, my standards are not high, and I often just want something trope-y to read that I haven’t already reread fifty times.

Long ago, I used to read movie reviews in our local paper. They were always bullshit, but they were written by the same idiot with bad taste, and the flavor of their dislike always told me exactly what I would like about a movie. The things that bother me may not be the things that bother you, but having reviews from the same source with the same taste is invaluable. Hence this blog.

Below is some tl;dr about what types of books I’ll be reviewing.

I welcome recs and sufficiently entertaining anti-recs. Let me know if there’s a classic or a turkey I should review.

What is “m/m”: The most concise definition of “m/m” is:

Kind of like slash fanfic, but original.

These books sound like slash because they are intended as romance novels or because they are sff with gay relationships written by women or by people coming out of slash fandom. The audience that consumes these books is mostly women. Men do write in this field, but they are less successful--which is a source of misogynist rhetoric, butthurt whining, and people lying about their identities.

I’m making this distinction because Tumblr sometimes has trouble with it in ways that attack women but that also belittle and ignore gay men’s history and the history of queer literature, gay and otherwise.

“M/M” books primarily come from small contemporary presses like Riptide or are self-published ebooks. These are usually explicitly marketed as gay romance novels, even in the case of long series of detective stories where the primary couple has resolved their relationship problems a book or two into the series. Some are marketed as other genres (mystery novels, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, horror) but still feature a gay protagonist who falls in love.

Older books that fall into this genre are things like Swordspoint: i.e. genre fiction with major gay romances, written by women, most of them former slash fanfiction writers, and consumed by other women with the same tastes and background. I know a couple of queer guys for whom woobie yaoi cliche Vanyel Ashkevron was a lifesaver back when he was the first positive portrayal of a gay man you were likely to run across by accident in a Middle America bookstore, but overall, Mercedes Lackey’s gay characters have been part of a slash fanfic type tradition more than a gay literature type tradition.

What is Gay Lit (and gay genre fiction): Gay literature used to mostly come from gay presses and was written by cis gay men for an audience of cis gay men. Things have diversified in recent years.

Typical themes have been the trauma of being in the closet, coming out stories, and slice of life depictions of the gay community in a particular place and time. Typically, these books are more political and less happy than current m/m romance. The big focus is a gay identity, not the progression of a specific romantic relationship. Many of them are also trying to be Serious Literature, and as such have a different style of prose from genre fiction. (It can be florid or wannabe Hemingway, but it’s all trying for a more overt authorial Voice, while genre fiction typically tries to keep the prose out of the way of the plot. It’s a different aesthetic and you know it when you see it.)

By the 90s, there was more of a sense of solidarity between different queer identities, and the same presses might be publishing the works of trans authors and putting gay and lesbian literature together. However, it would be a mistake to think that gay lit throughout its history has been about “mlm” since much of it was actively hostile to bisexual men or ignored both them and trans gay men. I don’t like the term ‘mlm’, and I don’t like tumblr’s use of it to push an “I’m not like the other slash fans” agenda.

Books from 90s and pre-90s gay presses that had strong genre plots and a central romance with a happy ending often prove to be slash zine fic by female authors with the character names changed. Today, the same authors wouldn’t bother with this kind of gay press: they’d go straight to an erotica/romance press or self-publish. (Though, obviously, their ability to get published by gay presses shows that there’s overlap in tastes. I assume those presses thought that gay men would also enjoy these stories. There are certainly gay men who now turn to m/m romance novels to satisfy tastes gay presses aren’t catering to.)

Gay mystery novels by men have been and still are more common than gay sff/horror/paranormal by men. A prototypical 90s/00s example would be about an “everyman” in the person of a jerkass twink who spends all day at the gym, whining about how he isn’t physically perfect enough to steal his rich friend’s hot model boyfriend. He would still manage to have casual sex with half of the other characters but end up alone for the sequel where he’d do it all again. There’s a 99% chance this sort of book will be set in Provincetown or some other real world gay mecca and at least a 50% chance that every single female character is a shrieking harpy.

These books are clearly intended for an audience of cis gay men embedded in a particular kind of contemporary US cis gay men’s culture. They also feature much more casual sex and cheating and way less serious emotion than m/m romance novel readers typically enjoy. A m/m historical might have a loving description of absinthe use, but a contemporary m/m rarely has a banal and realistic description of poppers and gay clubs. The mystery plots aren’t bad in gay mystery novels from gay presses, but I often find the characters unlikable and the sex and romance unsatisfying. The last time I saw this category of book seriously recced to slash fans was before ebook publishing took off. Back then, you bought what paperbacks you could and hoped there was something enjoyable in there.

The bottom line is: If you want books that treat queer identities realistically, politically, and/or depressingly, there are plenty. They’re not marketed as romance novels and they don’t come from the same presses or authors as romance novels. Genre fiction by and for gay men also exists. A lot of it isn’t appealing to a typical slash fan or m/m reader.

I wish that the parts of tumblr with a yen for these genres would seek them out instead of being upset that slash fanfiction or m/m paranormal romance novels fail to scratch the same itch. Or if all of the above fail to satisfy, I at least wish people wouldn’t blame it on the existence of female readers of m/m.

I might review a few pieces of gay lit or a few gay mystery novels if I happen to reread them or if they’re awful in a funny way or they have an unusually strong romance, but I find most of this stuff irrelevant to "m/m” as a contemporary marketing category.

What else I’ll review: Anything I think is relevant to a m/m reader, pretty much, whether that’s the occasional m/m/f book I run across or a m/f or f/f side story to a major m/m series or some particularly good piece of nonfiction a m/m series used as research material.