Today I am so pleased to welcome Christopher Rice to Joyfully Jay. Christopher has come to share some thoughts on m/m romance and his books, Light Before Day, A Density of Souls, and The Snow Garden. Please join me in giving him a big welcome!
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I knew they existed. I had heard tell of them as if they were some exotic, rare animal species, infrequently spotted on the fringes of the Amazon jungle. They were women. They were straight. And they wrote romance novels where the lovers were â gulp, sigh, squee â two guys! But I told myself, “Surely, they’re not writing anything I’d be interested in. I’m sure it’s all too sweet. Too flowery. Too girly.” So basically this blog post is a confession.
Hi, I’m Christopher, and I’m a sexist bigot with one hell of a competitive streak.
I mean, who did these women think they were? Writing about myyyyyy life? (Don’t feel like you have to point out how narcissistic that statement is. Believe me. I’ve got close friends who patrol my self-obsession on a daily basis and they’ll do that job for you as soon as this posts.) Well, for starters, they weren’t writing about my life. The days of gay men looking, acting and living like a single unit are on the wane. As acceptance of homosexuality broadens, an increasingly diverse group of gay men have come out of hiding, calling into question the glib stereotypes society has applied to homosexuals for generations. Progress has thrown open the closet doors for many gay men who in previous decades might have felt compelled to stay hidden. Maybe they worked in professions once hostile to anyone who wasn’t straight and white, like law enforcement or the military, or maybe they didn’t have a passion for pursuits considered to be stereotypically gay, like theatre or interior design, so they decided it was easier to fly below the radar. Nowhere is this new diversity of gayness more reflected than in M/M romance, where the delicious cover models wear the costumes of firemen, Marines, royalty and wealthy CEO’s.
Also, since when are you only allowed to write about a group of which you are a member? Is there a writer truly believes this bunk? Better question: is there a writer who truly practices this bunk? How would any fiction get written? Would we have to limit Stephen King to only writing from the point of view of straight white male characters? (See you later, Wendy Torrance. After a while, Dolores Claiborne.) One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve read came from a screenwriting professor named Richard Krevolin. “Never let anyone tell you that you can only write what you know,” he wrote, “you can write anything you can feel.” Testify!
So back to the point here. Which is my bigotry, narcissism and resistance to new ideas. (I guess that’s points, plural.) Or more specifically, my refusal to read any M/M romance novels for about fifteen years after I first heard tell of them. I’m not exactly sure what happened. I’m not exactly sure why one night, I got up from the sofa, went to my computer and said, “I’ve got to download at least one or two of these books and see what’s happening here.” I can say, to my embarrassment, that a few years before, I was Board President of the Lambda Literary Foundation and partially responsible for a shortsighted and ultimately embarrassing decision to only give out awards to openly LGBT writers. At the time, I was woefully ignorant about M/M romance, and without telling tales out of school, the genre became collateral damage after the sexuality of a winner in a different category churned up the issue. But that’s all water under the bridgeâŚI hope. (I left the organization soon after for a different reason.) But that experience was the only brush with this genre I’d had before going to computer that fateful night.
And then, with some one-click ordering, everything changed.
We have Amazon’s crafty algorithms and some enticing cover art to thank for the fact that the first two M/M romance novels I downloaded were DRIFTWOOD by Harper Fox and SPECIAL DELIVERY by Heidi Cullinan. I devoured them both. DRIFTWOOD made me sigh and swoon. SPECIAL DELIVERY made my boyparts catch fire, but in a really healthy way. In fact, I loved them both so much, I read them together. Alternating a chapter in one with a chapter in the other, until I was sweaty puddle on the floor, barely able to hold my Kindle with both hands. (Shame on you and your filthy mind. Sometimes I was clutching my breast, alright? Except when I read HOT HEAD by Damon Suede. Sometimes I just had to put the Kindle on a flat surface and ..you know, read really vigorously.)
To my utter astonishment and arousal and sudden humility, I realized, “Holy crap. I’ve found my people.” And then I proceeded to publish an MMF called THE FLAME that’s been really well received, but it’s ticked off a few readers who thought I was going to write an MM. But mĂŠnage is a different animal, which means it should be the subject of a different blog post. I’m just saying this because maybe my people might not feel like I’ve found them, but I have. I swear. Really. And as is so often the case in my life, my people are mostly straight women.
This week, Thomas & Mercer is releasing my first three novels in digital for the first time. They were written long before publishers like Riptide and Dreamspinner existed. They were written when the only mainstream awareness of M/M writers came via a lot of shallow jokes about women who liked to scour the far corners of the Internet for stories about Spock and Kirk doing the nasty. When they were first published, they were given coy, “literary” covers with tree branches and shafts of sunlight. They were packaged in such a way as to keep secret the fact that gay characters were heroes and that these heroes confronted their deepest demons and won (and got laid a lot too). They were written during a time when a gay novel was understood to be either a cathartic AIDS chronicle or a ceaseless bathhouse fantasia in which the author rolled all of his anonymous hook-ups into a beautifully written paean to his loneliness and sexual desirability. In fact, I submit to you the reasons so many self-appointed gay literary critics have an issue with women writing gay romance is because the early gay novels they adore aren’t actually fiction; they’re thinly disguised memoirs written about a very specific time and place in which those critics lived. Or they just have a problem with romance in general which makes the whole conversation a non-starter. Don’t get me wrong. They are scores of great gay non-romance novels out there. But by the age of twenty-one, they were all starting to feel like the same grim exercise. I was sick of reading them, and I didn’t want to write anything that was like them.
I wanted love and sex. I wanted to inject characters like me into genres where they’d been historically excluded. I wanted there to be action and high-stakes and passionate love and mystery and murder and mayhem, but with gay heroes! And that’s what A DENSITY OF SOULS, THE SNOW GARDEN and LIGHT BEFORE DAY offer to varying degrees. The first is a suspense-driven coming of age story, the second a twisty murder mystery set on a college campus, and the third is my best attempt to tell a noir detective story set in gay Los Angeles, with a too-smart-for-his-own-good gay hero. Ultimately, it’s up to fans of the genre to decide whether or not my first three books can be considered M/M, but if it’s a label they choose to apply to them, I will be nothing but honored to be assigned a classification that also includes books as good as WHEN ALL THE WORLD SLEEPS by Lisa Henry and J.A. Rock or SCORPION by Aleksandr Voinov.
On the surface, most M/M writers seemed pretty different from a guy like me. (There are more men working in the genre now then there were when I first started reading it. Watch your back, Damon Suede!) But for some reason, they were committed to imagining happier endings for guys like me than we were willing to imagine for ourselves. It’s rare to find that kind of connection in the literary world, with its false factions and petty rivalries. It’s rare to find it. Period. But I have, and it makes me feel blessed.
Blurb
Adam Murphy wants to be a serious journalist. Unfortunately, he spends his days writing copy about underwear and abs for a gay lifestyle magazine. When a troubled young porn star brings him a tip about a recently deceased marineâs secret visit to an infamous pimp for underage boys, Adam is determined to break the storyâŚuntil someone starts threatening his life.
Undeterred, Adam begins to unravel a deadly conspiracy involving runaway sugar daddies, salacious A-list parties, and three handsome young men who have vanished without a trace. Now he must enter the seedy underbelly of LA to find the truth behind their disappearance, as well as the disappearance of his ex-lover, Coreyâwho may have some deadly secrets of his own.
In this supercharged modern noir tale of sex, drugs, and revenge from New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice, getting to the bottom of a scandalous story can be dangerousâŚif not downright fatal.
Bio
Christopher Rice published his bestselling debut novel, A Density of Souls, when he was twenty-two. By thirty, Rice had published four New York Times bestsellers, received a Lambda Literary Award, and been declared one of People magazineâs âSexiest Men Alive.â His noir thriller Light Before Day was hailed as a âbook of the yearâ by mega-bestselling author Lee Child. His most recent book, The Heavens Rise, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.
The son of legendary author Anne Rice, he has published short fiction in the anthologies Thriller and Los Angeles Noir. His writing has been featured in the Advocate, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on Salon.com. With his friend and cohost Eric Shaw Quinn, Rice recently launched his own internet radio broadcast, The Dinner Party Show (TheDinnerPartyShow.com). He also recently served on the board of directors of the West Hollywood Library Fund, which helped to secure funds for a new state-of-the-art library in the heart of the city he now calls home.
This is a great post! I already have Light Before Day pre-ordered and I’m looking forward to reading it again. It’s been a while since I’ve read my literary tree hardcover version.
Excellent – thanks for sharing. Â I am defintely going to check these out!Â
Excellent post – on so many points.Â
Fantastic post, parts of which I wish I could have printed on T-shirts and distributed to some family members. Speaking of, I find some of your points particularly ironic because this female M/M writer learned all about homoeroticism by reading your mom’s books. Glad talent runs in the family! đ
I saw you speak on a panel at RT this past year and became a major fan ever since, espcially of your Dinner Party show Can’t wait to read your work
Romance novels are about visualizing happy endings. They are a way for couples to figure out new fun things to try, certainly, but for single people they are a way to visualize what finding Mr. or Ms. Right might look like. For middle aged people, romance is a way to recapture the innocence we lost over years and years of failed relationships and broken trust. They are a thing that gives us hope and keeps us from getting jaded, and of course we all need hope.
I’m glad you want to inject characters like you into genres where they have been historically excluded. It’s something I very much admire about you and completely relate to. When I was a kid in the 70s, I was totally freaked out because the interracial couple on the Jeffersons had one white (actor) kid and one black (actress) kid and zero mixed kids, and also that they were being called zebras. The conspicuous absence of people like yourself in a genre leads to a strange kind of feeling, like you can’t be the star in your own life and people like you can only be at best comic relief — now who would want that?
Writing about characters from other genders and cultures and etc. is also pretty normal: especially if you see them every day in life. I tend to write about not only people like me, but people like those I interact with or are geographically associated with the area I’m in. That said, to want to make the world safe for the next generation of people like you is a very natural and laudable thing.
I was very interested to read this. I’ve read several of your books, Christopher, and would very much like to buy “Light Before Day” for my iPad, but alas, it’s not available from Amazon Australia. It’s very frustrating when books are only available to certain readers due to their location.
Chris,
This a good post. It feels like I’m sitting with you and you are telling me this story.
I like to read hot stories of two-somes and threesomes MMF or FFM or MMM( as in mmm good and not the soup!!).
I will order all the books you have written and the ones mentioned in this post. I grew went to college in Washington DC in the 1980’s before AID’s and after. I always got to have the best make out session with my gay friends, research or practice they both were delicious.
Denise PS I have two pussies too!!
As a fan of Rice’s work, it’s nice to read this. M/M gets a lot of criticism sometimes and very rarely gets the attention it deserves because I think it’s still a discreet genre for many…and that’s fine. That’s part of why so many readers and authors like it. But it’s also nice to hear about someone who discovered it in a positive way. And there are a lot of gay men writing M/M, too. I know several who hop genres and use pen names for M/M. I’ve been writing and getting gay fiction published for over 20 years with gay presses and I didn’t know much about M/M until a publisher asked me to write a few novels about eight years ago. Those few books for me turned into over fifty. But as a romance fan in general, I immediately loved the HEA aspect of M/M. Life’s not easy for anyone and I want my romances, M/M or otherwise to end happily. I think that’s the one thing almost everyone agrees with.
I love this post on so many levels. Thank you, Christopher. I can hardly wait to read more of your work…and yes, I agree. You have found your people. *nods* I’m glad we’ve found you as well.Â
Great post, Christopher. I’m glad your earlier novels are being released for a new generation of readers via e-book; I’ve read them all and greatly enjoyed them; Light Before Day is one of my all time favorites! I was glad to discover m/m romance, too, since as a teen I used to sneak my mother’s romance novels (Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Alexandra Ripley, etc). The HEA for gay romance is a great plus for me as a reader.
Fantastic post Chris đ It’s so true that sometimes a preconception about a ganre can make you ignorant. I’ve been like that about romance in general before I actually realised how much different styles and authors are out there. That it doesn’t have to be purple prose and a Fabio cover. I did my reasearch and now I love looking for new reads that suit MY interests, since there is so much to choose from đ
Chris, it’s nice of you to admit that your prejudices got in the way at first, and I’m glad that you’ve gotten past them. I often wonder if the M/M novels written by women reflect M/M erotic activity correctly, but then I thought about the many M/F novels I’ve read, and *none* of those novels has anything to do with what happens in real life, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief. There are a lot of very talented authors on the M/M side, and even though I’m a straight woman, I’ve enjoyed many of those novels. I hope to add you to the list (I found this post via a link posted on your mom’s Facebook profile).
Interesting post, Chris. Ooh and noir m/m with a journalist hero – I’ve gotta get that then!
“But for some reason, they were committed to imagining happier endings for guys like me than we were willing to imagine for ourselves.”
This quote made this post brilliant. It’s all of the things I have been trying to express for a few months in one sentence.
I’ve been a Christopher Rice since I first saw A Density of Souls on a bookshelf over a decade ago, and I continue to be one now. It’s a little weird  to see posts and comments from him in the M/M circle considering he is a writer I have admired since I was a kid, but I’m hoping that means we will see books from him in this genre.Â
OMG, like gay fiction is soo depressing. âIâm scared to come out of the closet, Iâll be shunned or persecuted, so Iâll stay in the closet and hate myself, or like go to a restroom and suck random dick.â Canât they write anything else? But, as you say, all they know how to write is their own stories. And M/M gives hope, not only for the âhappily ever aftersâ, but for being the “new normal”, where âgayâ isnât what you are but just what (who) you do (love). And the sex is H-O-T! So yeah, glad you finally found âyour peopleâ, itâs such a huge market and theyâre such voracious fans . . . youâre sure to be a big hit!
I liked this post a lot. Â But have to say Light Before Day is my fave of your books that I’ve read. Â I am mostly hetero, and just like a good read. Â What matters is whether the characters are human & if I can like at least one of them. Â A prolific reader, I don’t always remember what a good book was about. Â But Light Before Day was about two of my pet peeves, Â meth & child trafficking / abuse. Also, I mostly read crime fiction, and read a lot of it, & L B D stands out. Â Good job writing about a topic most people can’t bear to hear about (I am not alluding to being gay). Â Also good job on this post.