Mainstream...
Mom in her Southern polished tact asked me over dinner, "Why don't you try writing something more...mainstream?" I nearly said, "You mean without two guys fucking?" But I decided she was paying for dinner and I better not put it that way. I DID say, "When I get a plotbunny that's mainstream, I will write it." "Why don't you modify one of your ideas?" "Because there are story elements that hinge on what goes on with the couple." Anyone else get this? Maybe I need to grow some balls and say, "Because I like writing about two guys fucking." Can't I write yaoi/homoerotica/enter label of the week here because I WANT to and LIKE doing it? Ya just can't get a priest and a deacon getting creative with fruit, rubberbands and Texas Pete any other way, ya know? And what's so not mainstream about this anyways? Romance is romance, right? There are plenty of stories that contain sex and romance and they're "mainstream"...oh yeah...I'm writing about men who love other men. Yeah, that's like so...out there...ya know... I mean...who could possibly thing that two men might share ROMANCE or something solid and meaningful. Sigh... Ok, I feel better now that I've gotten this snarky and sarcastic stuff off my chest. BTW, when is snarky going to show up in the dictionary? It's an awesome word.

Glad you feel better now, Cup. As for SNARKY, it's already in the Merriam-Webster dictionary http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/snarky plus the American Heritage, and the Urban Dictionary. Pedantically yours, Bayou Bill 8)

My mother asked me why I write the stuff I write (basically: why write about men doing men). Maybe it's because we're Canadian and very liberal, or maybe it's because we're not all that religious (and I don't mean that we lack spiritual beliefs), but I did what you would have liked to do, Cup, although I didn't use the word fuck. I said I like men, and more than one is better. :-)

Oh, and I think if we keeping writing slash, it's going to go mainstream eventually, and not as "all mm love relationship must have one lover die" or more commonly understood as "Brokeback Mountain Syndrome". I still haven't watched that movie.

It took me a long time to watch that movie as well, namely because I knew that someone was going to bite it. The first MM movie I ever saw was Maurice and I really didn't want to deal with the tragedy.

Not sure what happened in the movie version of Maurice, but the book version had a decent ending, considering the time in which it was written. Or at least, I remember a decent ending. No one died. And Forster actually considered having a scene some years into the future, of a walker coming across two other walkers in the woods, a pair of gentelmen friends. ;-)

I think this is a separate thing from the HEA in romance thread. I think this is what happens when you present gay love stories to people with money to publish to a mainstream market or produce as a movie for mainstream viewers. These unfortunate, misguided, irritating people equate "gay" with "wrong" with "only way to make it right is kill someone so it can't happen".

There is a long history of movies and book where a transgressive character is fine and good and titilating so long as they are cure or die at the end. That includes independent women too. In comics this is call the 'women in refrigerators' effect.

I got an image of dead, dead, dead, packed in ice, probably chopped to pieces, like her poor soul, by the end of whatever story she was in.

In comics it comes from a particular female Robin who was a rebel and did literally end up dead in a fridge... :(