Homophobes in My M/M Romance? It’s More Likely Than You Think

Some recent discussions got me thinking about something I’ve known to be true for quite some time. A lot of the m/m romance readers out there are … pretty problematic people, when it comes down to it.

That got me to thinking: how is it that there is so much cognizant dissonance when it comes to reading what are effectually queer books?

A Brief History of Bigotry in the M/M Romance Space

I’ve been kicking around the internet for a long time. I got my start over in anime fandoms, writing and posting fanfic when I still had my youth. Later, I started writing and publishing original fiction instead, so I could, uh, maybe make some money. (That last bit is still questionable.)

Suffice to say I have been around a long time, and I have seen a lot of shit. I generally don’t wade in. I’m someone who much prefers to judge from the sidelines. I tend not to trust people—especially people who tend to have big followings. That might be because I’ve watched the mean girls shtick unfold too many times. I just … don’t like the “junior high” vibes a lot of groups tend to have.

But this isn’t about me—it’s about observations I’ve made, which is sort of what inspired me to write this post.

One came from a fellow author, who expressed surprise about how misogynistic women in m/m spaces often are. And this has been a truth stretching back years—it goes back way before the internet and before my time. Essentially, m/m fiction exists the way it does is because our society is so goddamn misogynistic.

Misogyny Makes It Hard for Women to Enjoy M/F Romance

Women are taught to hate other women. Reading M/F can thus be uncomfortable for some readers. Rather than seeing the heroine as a proxy for themselves, they see her as competition. Further to that, they are profoundly uncomfortable with female sexual desire and pleasure. That’s why it’s easier to map sexual pleasure and passion onto a male body.

A note here: I’m painting with broad brushstrokes. This is a general trend among the m/m girlies. Other readers have other reasons for reading, some of which are not rooted in misogyny. But for many, many readers, unresolved misogyny is why they resonate with m/m couples.

One way to discern this is to look for female characters in the media and how they’re treated. I can point to half a dozen examples here. I remember virulent anti-Relena fiction in the Gundam Wing fandom. Over in the Naruto fandom, Sakura-bashing was a popular pastime, especially among Naruto/Sasuke shippers. FF7 fans tended to view both Tifa and Aerith as “getting in the way” of their OTP, Cloud and Sephiroth, and Kingdom Hearts’ Kairi didn’t fare much better.

In a lot of original m/m fiction, women simply don’t exist. Leta Blake’s Heat of Love universe might be taken as an extreme here: literally all the women are dead. (Blake uses this to explain the existence of omega men, who are similarly oppressed.) In a contemporary I read recently, there were three female characters, all of whom played support roles—and all of whom showed up relatively late in the narrative. While it’s encouraging that these characters appear, they weren’t fully formed characters, their roles not truly fleshed out.

The Men of M/M Romance Ain’t Queer

Another phenomenon, one that’s intimately tied to the rampant misogyny, is that the men in these stories aren’t queer.

They do queer things, absolutely. But they are not truly gay men. We might class them as bisexual or pansexual, but they’re not even that. And we’d best not even suggest any of these characters are trans—the specter of transgender characters in m/m makes a lot of readers squeamish. Transphobia and transmisogyny is part and parcel of the genre in a lot of cases. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen review sites bar m/m and mpreg romances that include trans men—which is baffling, given that we’re dealing with stories that involve men getting pregnant and giving birth. I’ve seen “no pink!” too many times in my life.

That’s not even delving into the homophobia that exists in M/F “reverse harem” or “why-choose” romances that feature more than one man. Another phrase I never want to encounter ever again is “no swords crossing.”

All the Queer Action without Actual Queerness

What this all adds up to is that m/m girlies want multiple guys or potentially guy-on-guy action, without those guys actually being gay. It’s why our “male” omegas or the pregnant cisgender dudes in mpreg never seem to have an identity crisis and ask, “Hey, am I a woman?”

Because the m/m girlies don’t actually want queer people in their fiction. What they want is hot guys banging with nary a vagina in sight, because vaginas are icky.

That’s honestly what it is. Seriously. It’s been theorized that the popularity of BL in Japan is rooted in the fact that misogyny is so strong there. Women are uncomfortable with the idea of female sexuality and uncomfortable with portrayals of feminine pleasure and passion. Women want porn, but they don’t want other women in it. The solution is thus to make the porn about two dudes, rather than a guy and a girl.

Why M/M Romance Reads Like Heterosexuality

That also goes a long way to explaining why a lot of m/m romance reads like a heterosexual relationship. I’ll point again to Japanese BL works: the stereotypes of “seme” and “uke” (top and bottom, respectively) adhere to heterosexual stereotypes. The top would be big, manly, and often stoic, while the bottom was overly emotional, super cute, and might have engaged in “girly” pastimes like cooking or keeping house. Crossdressing was not off the table, so long as it was the bottom donning a frilly maid costume.

In a sense, then, the bottom becomes hyperfeminized, which gives the relationship all the trappings of a heterosexual pairing.

Most queer relationships don’t work like that. Yes, you have people who don roles like butch and femme, but most queer relationships don’t have one partner play “the man” and the other take the role of “the woman.” Queer relationships become more complex, because they are queer to hetereosexuality.

Mapping Heterosexuality onto Queer Relationships

When women readers and writers depart from the safe stables of m/f and adopt m/m romance, though, they often bring those heterosexual stereotypes with them. They want guy-on-guy, to get them around their hatred of other women. Yet they can’t imagine anything but the stereotypical heterosexual relationship.

So they just keep writing that and reading that, over and over.

I know this to be true. It’s exactly what I did when I first started writing m/m romance. I engaged in bashing female characters who “blocked” my preferred ship. I wrote the characters I was slashing as very stereotypical “seme/uke” relationships, to the point of bending established characters’ personalities to make them “fit” the assigned role.

Thankfully, I encountered a lot of people who were writing more queer stories. They were either queer themselves or had been exposed to queer theory. They were doing a lot of work to break down harmful stereotypes. As I read more of this type of work and listened to more theorists, my work took on new dimensions. I left behind the idea that all relationships look like lazy-dolt-husband/nagging-angry-wife. Vers and switches? Yes, please. Men who act like men constantly? Sure. And hyperfemme men and trans men and everything in between? Don’t mind if we do!

But not every m/m reader or writer has had that wake up call. More than that, a lot of them don’t want that wake up call, because it would force them to engage with some unpleasant truths.

Circumventing Queerphobia and Bigotry

A lot of those women don’t want to be called out on their misogyny and their queerphobia. In being able to deny that the characters they’re reading about are truly queer, they can get around a lot of nastiness—like the fact the world is homophobic and gay people face challenges, harassment, and hatred, even in supposedly “advanced” countries like the US and Canada. If we don’t call the boys gay, then we don’t ever need to grapple with what it means to be gay. We can simply sweep that under the rug and enjoy our exploitative guy-on-guy porn, right?

That, in and of itself, could be considered another form of homophobia—the willingness to read about dudes doing gay stuff, yet refusing to label them as gay or queer. It also explains the popularity of the “gay-for-you” trope. This trope specifically allows the characters to deny that they are queer, even while they engage in queer sexual and romantic relationships.

I would bet at least some of the m/m girlies have had similar experiences themselves, where they engaged in queer behavior with another woman—but it’s okay, because it was “just a phase” or “an experiment.”

If these women were forced to confront the idea that their fav male leads are actually queer dudes, they might be forced to contend with the idea that they themselves are also some flavor of queer. And that might make them uncomfortable. And we can’t have that, now can we?

A Ray of Hope for M/M Romance

I will say that, at least in the circles I move in, I am seeing less of this kind of writing and more of the diverse queer world on the page. Just this morning, I finished an mpreg book in which the characters opted to use the third person neutral from their newborn child—something I’ve also done in the Omega on Top series.

Now, maybe I’m seeing more of this because I specifically move in queer circles. Yet it does seem like there are more and more authors in that space, if nothing else. And that suggests that there is a growing desire and acceptance of these stories—and more writers who are getting them to the page for more readers who want to read them.

And that, I think, is a good thing as we move into the future. The way m/m romance has been constructed and operated for the last however many decades is definitely something we should leave in the past.