Are Gay Male Authors Afraid to Comment Review Books by Women Writing Gay Fiction: Exploring the Gend

The eponymous protagonist starts as a rakish young nobleman in Elizabethan England, finding favor with the queen, then falling out with her and indulging liberally in sex with a variety of women but having an intense friendship with a male poet. Later Orlando is sent on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, where he finds he's become a woman, and the gender switch offers an opportunity for commentary on the limitations society places on women.

Any female author of M/M who avoids writing M/F because they believe female characters are automatically bitches, is saying a fuckload more about their own writing abilities than they are about whether or not women are more bitchy in this genre or that.

Are Gay Male Authors Afraid to Comment Review Books by Women Writing Gay Fiction

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On the other hand, readers of those authors are all shocked by this accusations because longtime following of them had shown them to be all very loving, caring and great women, who write great books with wonderful characters, male and female.

Well, I absolutely think that we live in a sexist society still. But if the option is to abstain from portraying women at all, that is extremely troubling. There are many authors doing the hard work of portraying complex female characters and getting plenty of praise and readership from the process. The answer to sexism cannot be to throw our hands up and give up, can it? There have to be better responses to the issues than that, surely.

Reblogged this on Romance, Sex, and Other Queer Comfort Lit and commented:An interesting post from a gay male author of MM romance reagarding the occasional (but seemingly recurrent) concerns regarding women authors (and readers) dominating the genre. While I am sympathetic with some of the points raised by critics, I overall greatly appreciate the community and the efforts of all authors to present romantic (and often heated) stories that I can identify with and greatly enjoy. This blog post reflects much of my own response to the issue (as a male reader of MM romance).

I hear you, and agree with so many aspects of your comment. I shudder when I read some of the reviews of books written by gay men. I would like to see m/m romance evolve into something with less stringent rules. Too often judgement is cast using heteronormative standards. There is little or no attempt to learn more about the LGBT world. Sure some gay relationships are happy following the heteronormative model, but to insist all m/m romance does is worrying. Especially when books not classified or written as m/m get bad ratings for not complying with expectations. Not all readers or reviewers have this attitude, but those that do seem unwilling to evolve.

Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Woolf had romantic relationships with women, including Vita Sackville-West, who also published her books through Hogarth Press. Both women's literature became inspired by their relationship, which lasted until Woolf's death.[3]

Virginia showed an early affinity for writing. Although both parents disapproved of formal education for females, writing was considered a respectable profession for women, and her father encouraged her in this respect. Later, she would describe this as "ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown-ups dined". By the age of five, she was writing letters and could tell her father a story every night. Later, she, Vanessa, and Adrian would develop the tradition of inventing a serial about their next-door neighbours, every night in the nursery, or in the case of St. Ives, of spirits that resided in the garden. It was her fascination with books that formed the strongest bond between her and her father.[4] For her tenth birthday, she received an ink-stand, a blotter, drawing book, and a box of writing implements.[45]

Although Virginia expressed the opinion that her father was her favourite parent, and although she had only turned thirteen when her mother died, she was profoundly influenced by her mother throughout her life. It was Virginia who famously stated that "for we think back through our mothers if we are women",[115] and invoked the image of her mother repeatedly throughout her life in her diaries,[116] her letters[117] and a number of her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908),[34] 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921)[35] and A Sketch of the Past (1940),[36] frequently evoking her memories with the words "I see her ...".[118] She also alludes to her childhood in her fictional writing. In To the Lighthouse (1927),[39] the artist, Lily Briscoe, attempts to paint Mrs. Ramsay, a complex character based on Julia Stephen, and repeatedly comments on the fact that she was "astonishingly beautiful".[119] Her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is an only thinly disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there.[40][27][41] However, Woolf's understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure becomes more nuanced and complete.[42]

The press subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.[209] The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell. Woolf believed that to break free of a patriarchal society women writers needed a "room of their own" to develop and often fantasised about an "Outsider's Society" where women writers would create a virtual private space for themselves via their writings to develop a feminist critique of society.[210] Though Woolf never created the "Outsider's society", the Hogarth Press was the closest approximation as the Woolfs chose to publish books by writers that took unconventional points of view to form a reading community.[210] Initially the press concentrated on small experimental publications, of little interest to large commercial publishers. Until 1930, Woolf often helped her husband print the Hogarth books as the money for employees was not there.[210] Virginia relinquished her interest in 1938, following a third attempted suicide. After it was bombed in September 1940, the press was moved to Letchworth for the remainder of the war.[211] Both the Woolfs were internationalists and pacifists who believed that promoting understanding between peoples was the best way to avoid another world war and chose quite consciously to publish works by foreign authors of whom the British reading public were unaware.[210] The first non-British author to be published was the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, the book Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaiovich Tolstoy in 1920, dealing with his friendship with Count Leo Tolstoy.[204]

Virginia submitted her first article in 1890, to a competition in Tit-Bits. Although it was rejected, this shipboard romance by the 8-year-old would presage her first novel 25 years later, as would contributions to the Hyde Park News, such as the model letter "to show young people the right way to express what is in their hearts", a subtle commentary on her mother's legendary matchmaking.[304][305] She transitioned from juvenilia to professional journalism in 1904 at the age of 22. Violet Dickinson introduced her to Mrs. Lyttelton, the editor of the Women's Supplement of The Guardian, a Church of England newspaper. Invited to submit a 1,500-word article, Virginia sent Lyttelton a review of W.D. Howells' The Son of Royal Langbirth and an essay about her visit to Haworth that year, Haworth, November 1904.[306][4] The review was published anonymously on 4 December, and the essay on the 21st.[307][308] In 1905, Woolf began writing for The Times Literary Supplement.[309]

Among Woolf's non-fiction works, one of the best known is A Room of One's Own (1929),[198] a book-length essay. Considered a key work of feminist literary criticism, it was written following two lectures she delivered on "Women and Fiction" at Cambridge University the previous year. In it, she examines the historical disempowerment women have faced in many spheres, including social, educational and financial. One of her more famous dicta is contained within the book "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Much of her argument ("to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money") is developed through the "unsolved problems" of women and fiction writing to arrive at her conclusion, although she claimed that was only "an opinion upon one minor point".[343] In doing so, she states a good deal about the nature of women and fiction, employing a quasi-fictional style as she examines where women writers failed because of lack of resources and opportunities, examining along the way the experiences of the Brontës, George Eliot and George Sand, as well as the fictional character of Shakespeare's sister, equipped with the same genius but not position. She contrasted these women who accepted a deferential status with Jane Austen, who wrote entirely as a woman.[344]

Did I get critical feedback from readers about his biological family never coming around? Yes. But from queer reader reviews, it was often noted as a strength of the story. And I treasure those reviews all the more because I know, just by virtue of numbers, my queer readers are outnumbered by non-queer readers, just like queer authors writing m/m are outnumbered by non-queer authors writing m/m.

This disservice rises, in part, out of a culture that assumes women writers are less relevant than their male counterparts, that women in general are simply not as important, that their writing is not as critical to arts and letters. This disservice rises out of a culture where Jonathan Franzen lost the Pulitzer rather than Jennifer Egan winning the award. 2ff7e9595c