Love To Love You, Baby

… or, How I Started Writing Gay Romance.

October is Queer Romance Month. Which is a wondrous thing. A lovely thing. A thing about love even. It's great to see something celebrating the things that are important to me, that have changed me and, hell, quite frankly that I love - queer love, romance and taking your time getting there (a whole month to celebrate something? That's the longest fangasm ever, surely).

Quick note: The title uses Queer quite deliberately. To me this is the 1990's version of Queer, when it meant something that was open, welcoming, edgy and non-conforming . It does so because of the huge diversity of people involved in Queer Romance, a very broad community that is entirely enriched by that diversity.

But I'm going to talk from a personal perspective here, so I mostly refer to gay and male, because that is who I am and this is quite a personal post.

There are phases in our lives that are transformative. We don't know it at the time, we don't always want it or expect it, but it happens anyway. These changes occur and we have to deal with them. It's how we deal with them that helps shape who we become. I had one of those about seven years ago - it was all very dramatic, including hospital treatment, near death experiences, relationship break-up, yadda-yadda, you get the picture - and I'm happy to have been changed by it. The process of dealing with it led me to some strange and unexpected places. Here is that part of the story …

I've spent the last five years looking out for queer-romance representation in various forms of culture. Do you know how difficult it is to see a gay person get romantically involved in any form of modern culture? It's still the exception rather than the norm to see/hear about gay men and the reality of dealing with a love life that includes a sex life.

It all started innocently enough. There I was, one Saturday night well after X-Factor was finished, rooting through my DVD collection to find a movie to watch. An idea hit me that I wanted to watch a gay film. You know, a film about gay people. Their lives, their relationships, their fun times, without it being all coming-out stories, AIDS drama or family rejection (I'm old enough to have lived through all those 'periods' of gay culture). When I realised that I didn't own such a thing I was a bit dumbstruck. How could I be so lax? How could I not have what I wanted?

Well this is the age of the instant fix. So I fixed it. Kinda.

I Googled, I researched, I spent my evening looking for films that I wanted to watch that said something about my life. Specifically about the gay part of my life. I wanted a rom-com, a thriller, a drama, hell I even wanted a horror should the mood take me. By the end of the evening I had found all those things. It was too late to actually watch one, but I had found enough weekend entertainment to keep me going for months. And months. And then some more. I stumbled across movies based on books (so I bought the books, but more of that later), I found movies that would make great books. I also found movies with great soundtracks.*

The soundtracks though. That brought me into another area that I love - music. I looked through my music collection and was slightly appalled to see that the limit of gay artists stopped somewhere in the 1990s. Why? I have bought new music almost every month for about twenty years. Yet why was my collection so deficient? Where had all the gay musicians gone? Why wasn't I hearing about them?

Probably because by that point I had stopped buying any of the gay lifestyle magazines (because they didn't really speak to me about my life). So off I went again, to search out the music. Again I was astounded. There they all were, the men and women proudly singing their hearts out about queer love, of romance and relationships good and bad. From folk to pop, jazz and blues, and pop to rock they are all out there. Yet we rarely hear of them. Certainly not on the radio, and only occasionally do the gay media cover the gay artists making music about gay life. It's ridiculous, but it's true.**

So of course I went next to books. I blame the love songs.

I love to read. I have done all my life. As a secret wannabe writer it's the best camouflage you can find - hide yourself in someone else's writing and hope no one notices that you are drinking in every line, each character and every last nuanced detail that the writer has created. Books are bliss in a way that's different to music and film. Also, I've had some fairly hefty commutes and travelling the country with work over the last few years. So a book is a constant companion like no other on a train. A good book helps you cut out the whirl and noise, or downright tedium, of travelling. Books transport you to another place, occasionally another time, and definitely to other people who aren't fellow travellers eating strange smelling food or having obnoxiously loud phone conversations that always include "Yeah, I'm on the train …. Shit, you there? … You got cut off."

The best bit though? I discovered gay romance. Or Queer Romance, also M/M romance.

At first I read some of the more mainstream gay novels that I'd been meaning to read for a while. But they left me a bit unsatisfied, even after I'd read the books that some of the movies were based on. After the music and the movies that really touched the heart of gay relationships these books seemed to be missing something. They were about the modern gay experience, sure. They were about things that we all have to deal with  - you know the stuff, work, family, finding a partner, losing a partner, moving on, more work, more family, that sort of stuff. But still something was missing.

The mainstream gay books, the stuff you'd find in Waterstones if you asked quietly, in a corner so as not to cause a fuss or upset someone eavesdropping, they all miss out a key part of life. They missed out on the real intimacy of gay life. Which is kind of bizarre when you think about it. The whole, wide, straight world generally defines us gay folk by who we have sex with.  Not who we love, not who is significant and important to us. And we as gay men are fixated on all the phone apps that'll help us hook up, find a date, maybe bump into that someone special. Maybe one day find love. Yet it's never in any of the books. How did that happen? Where'd the sex go? The intimacy that rocks your world so much that you spend your walk of shame grinning from ear to ear.  The crazy thought that runs through your mind after a hook up that he might want to do it again, only this time without the haze of booze, or with the lights on so you can find the way to pull off his pants without nearly circumcising him. All that stuff. The sexy stuff, that's connected to the romantic stuff, that's part of what our hearts desire.

It was out there. Oh yes. Only it wasn't where I expected it to be. It's there mostly in e-book format. It's there on romantic-fiction sites. We're not talking Mills & Boon here. We're talking romantic-fiction for sure, but generally with the heat turned up, sometimes to pornographic levels, usually to erotic, and sometimes not at all. But all are good in their own way. And like the films and the music you can have any kind of romance you like. You can have Sci-Fi, Westerns, Detective stories in all flavours (noir, contemporary, historical, etc) all the way through the genres to general contemporary. There really is something for everyone.

These books contained the things that my heart really did yearn for. Not just the sex, but the intimacy, the forming of a relationship, the trials of working through whether this person you've met is the person for you. It's not always a 'happy ever after', sometimes it's good enough to find a 'happy for now', you know just like real life. And in amongst all of those romantic things are well crafted stories, with characters you can love (or loathe, or fear, or laugh with) and places that are so well written that you want to visit them. Even the places that aren't real, but hey, life's always a little disappointing.

This five year journey has changed me. Quite significantly too. By experiencing the lives of so many other gay men, through film, music and in books, I've discovered quite a few things about myself. Most of them I wont reveal here (there is such a thing as over-sharing). But I'm glad for all the influences that these things have given me. I welcome them with open arms and continue to seek out new film-makers, musicians and writers who take the time to create things that reflect aspects of my life. Because mainstream media isn't doing it, not in the ways, or the depth, that I'm looking for.

Alongside the books themselves you can also find a small but thriving online community of writers, readers, cover artists and publishers (and a massive thank you to @catherinedair the cover artist for creating the Queer Romance Month logo at the top of this post). Interacting with all these people stoked in me a lurking desire to write. I've been experimenting on and off for over twenty years. Never with a view to publishing, never with the idea that anyone else would ever read anything written by me. Just, you know, doing it for the hell of it. But all those people have encouraged me, supported me and nudged me in the right direction. They continue to do that, day by day.

I know quite clearly that I'm a novice at this. That despite having a couple of short stories published that it'll take me some time before I get to the point of being good enough to have a novel published. That it'll take a lot of work, and re-writes, and all sorts of other efforts. But because of these people I'll get there. I'll be a writer. Something I've wanted to be for almost thirty years. Something that my transformative experience made me decide I should do before it got too late.

So from that one evening a few years back I have discovered a whole new set of film makers, actors, musicians, writers, characters, and worlds that I never knew existed. And I love them.

I totally love to love you all, baby.

Go show them some love over at http://www.queerromancemonth.comand @queerromance

*A word of warning though, there's also a fair bit of dross out there too.  You can find a good selection of movie recommendations at http://www.pinterest.com/suebrownstories/my-queer-cinema/and http://gay-themed-films.com . You could even have a look on Netflix, they have a fairly decent selection.

** If you want to discover music made about LGBT people by LGBT people then I can recommend you listen to this monthly online radio programme (and have a listen through the archive) Like the movies, you won't like everything but you should find a few artists that you'll like. http://queermusicheritage.com/out2014.html