erastes

How the hell that GLBT got lumped in with “Het Erotica” in The Romance Room Awards? This really really pushes at my Grrrrrrrrr button. And yes I have one.

I used to see this a lot, that gay romance was considered to be TOO SAUCY to be considered on its own merits and it often got shoved into the Erotica category, but this is… appalling! I thought we had come past this particular obstacle. Obviously not.

The only thing I can think of is that they reviewed so few GLBT books that they didn’t know what else to do with them, but – er… at the risk of sounding the Bleeding Obvious perhaps just putting them in the normal categories would have been better? I’m sure Bonnie Dee and Summer Devon would much prefer to compete against other historicals rather than erotica. And for Gawd’s sake, House of Mirrors ISN’T erotica. Not at all.

It infuriates me in this day and age that gay romance/sex is automatically considered erotica (and many book shops are guilty of this still, we can’t have our books in the Romance section, despite many many of the het books already there are more explicit and with far more explicit covers. We are therefore lumped into Erotica OR “Gay studies”!!!). I mean – WHY? If Charlie Cochrane had been nominated in these awards, her very sweet and inexplicit sex scenes where innuendo leads more to the fore than graphic description—would be labelled erotica.

one step forward two steps back.