Talking Shop: The Importance of Queer Stories in Paranormal Romance

As of this writing, a quick perusal of Amazon categories shows us this: the Romance category in Books contains a total of 604,105 titles. Of those, 7% make up the Paranormal Romance category. 39% of Romance books are Erotica, and of those, only 2% are Paranormal.

 In order to find out roughly how many LGBTQ Romance and Erotica books feature paranormal plots and characters, we have to piece together numbers from a special filter labeled "Erotic Characters". If you add up all the titles featuring angels, demons and devils, ghosts, shapeshifters, vampires and werewolves, you come up with less than .7% of titles in LGBTQ Romance and Erotica that are paranormal.

Just for comparison, "Billionaire" erotica makes up 1.4%.

Talking Shop: Queer Voices in Paranormal Romance

Writers, have you ever wanted to try your hand at queer romance? It's a very passionate subject to me. I feel strongly that the Romance genre as a whole, and especially it's speculative sub-genres like paranormal, fantasy and sci-fi, could do with a good deal more queer voices and stories.

But writing queer romance comes with a hefty research cost, especially if you're not queer yourself. This is not an area in which to charge blindly forward. The LGBTQ spectrum, like any medium for relationships, is a lot more nuanced than pop culture and mainstream media tends to express.

The following are some beginning points to research and writing LGBTQ romance, based on my own research and reading experience. I don't claim this post to be a "cheat sheet" so much as an introduction, for those who either haven't written queer romance before or want a little insight to different areas of it. I can't include all the details I'd like to include about each identity that makes up the queer community. I can, however, offer up what I've learned so far in writing the genre myself.

Talking Shop: Bisexuality and Reflections in Romance

I read a blog recently about coming out as bisexual, and it got me thinking. I hadn't realized until recently there's such a controversy about bisexuals and their place in the LGBTQ spectrum. We seem to fall between the cracks when it comes to gay issues, maybe because we can "pass" for straight. There are those who feel bisexuals aren't truly BI-sexual, but straight and "confused", or gay and "pretending".

 

I've been fortunate in that I've never run up against biphobia in my own experience, but it saddens me to see it exists, just as much as any other phobia against the LGBTQ community. And of course, much like the other orientations and gender identifications on the spectrum, bisexuals are greatly under-represented or mis-represented in romantic fiction.