Today a reader gave me the heads up about an interesting article that just appeared in The New York Times magazine: A New Romance. The article discusses Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier, authors of the new novel Hot Sauce (a gay male romance novel).

After reading this article I couldn't help but think about gay fiction vs. genre fiction vs. gay genre fiction. I never really thought about gay genre fiction as a term before, but after reading this article I think an argument could be made that gay subgenres could grow out of all the major subgenres ( mystery, horror, science fiction, etc.). In the article the public relations manager of RWA said that she would consider Hot Sauce to be a nontraditional romance. As I told my RA class, if you can find enough titles to make a booklist called Gay Male Romance, you've got yourself a subgenre. Now I'm going to be keeping my eye out for other subgenre examples.

I checked around to see if any libraries in my area had added Hot Sauce to their collections, and was pleasantly surprised to see that several had. And before anyone emails me to ask this, the answer is yes, I have placed myself on hold for it. Although I have a feeling that I may be too impatient to wait and will end up going out and buying it instead (I'm very short on patience and understanding right now -- don't ask). Am I the target audience? Not really. Am I still going to give it a whirl? You bet. :-)

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