This is a guest entry on behalf of Ellid, which I volunteered last week to write. Our title tonight is a recent Kindle Book gay romance by Anne Brooke entitled "Where It Hurts the Most" - available from Riptide Publishing Company.
Books so bad they’re Good!
OK Homo Escort Service: “Where you Hurt the Most” by Anne Brooke
I write what might be described as gay romances: because the guy gets the guy, and there is one moderately hard (so to speak) and fast (so to speak) rule in romance: Happily Ever After, which can be stretched any which way to include, for those who prefer their romance with a heavy dose of angst, “Happy for Now” which means if there are dark clouds on the horizon, then at least Frankie and Manuel get the joy of one another’s company – for the duration of the story and possibly a little ways beyond. Most gay romances, unhappily for hard-core romance fans, are of this second category, because it is difficult in this day and age of rampant homophobia and gay bashing, to imagine a world were gays and lesbians are treated equally, and a same sex hug, kiss, or even affectionate hand-holding, is a safe act, although attitudes have changed radically in the past few years, right up to the Supreme Court rulings and resumption of gay marriages in California after the final overthrow of Proposition 8.
The bane of the gay romance genre, and some readers and critics chalk this up to hetero women writers, although some of the worst gay romances I have ever read have actually been penned by gay men, is a theme called “OK Homo” – which is a story where either everybody and their upstairs neighbor is gay, the postman is gay, the hairdresser – okay it’s a cliché – is gay, defying the actual incidence of homosexuality in the population at large (10-20% outside of Fire Island).
Another manifestation of “OK Homo” is where the characters are all out to one another, there is no homophobia anywhere to be seen, and it defies all reason or reality that in a world meant to appear for the most part realistic, it’s all okay. Writers defend “OK Homo” with the argument that “It’s all fiction, why not?” but the problem with OK Homo is that it denies the real struggle that real people face every day with homophobic families, neighbors, colleagues, and the very real discrimination that has led in so many lives to violence, bullying, suicide and other non-romantic outcomes. “OK Homo” is generally the mark of a bad book.
The book I selected for “So Bad It’s Good” is a book that not only suffers from “OK Homo” but also “OK Prostitution!” because after all, it’s all by consent, everyone is an adult, right? And besides, all the escorts use condoms! And it’s ‘high class’ so that’s fine too! I always give wide latitude to gay romance authors who write in a British idiom because they SOUND classier and usually have a good vocabulary, and at first glance, the vocabulary is fine, the sentences are smooth, but it’s - deceptively so.
Now on to the plot:
The blurb reads
“Adrian is more than happy as a high-class escort for a number of regular clients. When his boss and dear friend asks him to entertain his nephew, Adrian readily agrees, but meeting Dan challenges him in ways he’d never imagined.”
Our hero is the high-class, beautiful, and completely contented Adrian, who is more than gay for pay – he’s really gay! Who has a really lovely dear friend for a boss (in the OK Homo, Okay Prostitution! Universe of this book, there are no pimps, no beatings, and no rapes, because it’s all – you know, HIGH CLASS.) The story just reeks of class privilege, and if we are to believe our narrator, Adrian is just doing for money what he would be doing otherwise: having high class sex in expensive hotel rooms – but wait, it’s not SEX, it’s “Making love.” Now granted, I have never been an escort (FULL DISCLOSURE!) but I have met men and women who have turned tricks in their lives, not a single one of whom ever described their dayjob (ahem) as ‘Making love’ and a ‘job they really really enjoy.’ Not even the over-airbrushed “American Gigolo” screenplay from 1980 described male sex-for-hire as “making love.” This is fantasy of the worst kind: make-believe that you can’t even pretend to believe in because it’s somebody’s imagination of what a glorified career of a ‘high class escort’ might be, and performing oral sex on slightly odiferous elderly men who have the money to pay is not really all as bad as it seems: after all, look at Larry Craig! I digress.
The ‘great challenge’ our escorting hero faces is a young gay man, the nephew of his ‘boss’ Max, who can’t get laid anymore because he burned his face in an accident and is suffering from self loathing. The heavy-handed dialogue is thick with histrionics:
Max explains:
“Before the accident, Dan was like any young man, looking forward to life, with great plans to be a house and garden designer” (cliché alert!) – everyone knows house and garden designers are ALL gay! Almost as gay as hairdressers and gay escorts!) “Maybe even a relationship in the offing. I couldn’t quite tell. After he was hurt, the bloke in question didn’t stay around long. Not that Dan was pleasant to him. On the contrary, he seemed to want to drive him away, and it worked.”
Poor Uncle Max, this close to a joyous gay union for his nephew - and tragedy strikes! Because everybody’s gay Uncle Max is rooting for a gay June wedding. Wait – they’re not?
What few details the story offers about the nuts (so to speak) and bolts of gay sex-for-hire seem a little too silly to even mention:
“As usual, I bathed and shaved with care and tweezered a few stray hairs from my pubes. I wasn’t a particularly hairy man anyway and counted myself lucky in that respect.”
Clearly, in this universe, Bears Need Not Apply. Sorry Bears, you can’t go work for Uncle Max because everybody knows this business is not for the hairy. There’s also the fleeting mention of anal douches. Okay okay we get it! Verisimilitude!
But as sure as undercover cops follow Larry Craig into the men’s rest room at Minneapolis Airport, there’s got to be the “penetration by euphemism” because somehow this can never be said using the actual words. Even the word “penis” is considered rude, even though hundreds of millions of men own one, and appreciate owning them:
“I felt his cock at my entrance…” –
as homophobes everywhere will tell you, the male anus is an Exit, not an Entrance, and it is my greatest pet peeve in gay fiction to use the term “entrance.” He’s not walking into a hotel lobby! ARGHGHGHGH!
But don’t get me wrong: one of the things that makes this story ‘so bad it’s good’ is because there are no visible typos, the characters are pleasant, the prose makes no egregious sentence structure errors, and the narrative is very sincere; and most importantly, the goals of Gay Romance – happy forever, or is it happy for now? Max’s hideously deformed nephew gets laid, Adrian gets out of the business with Max’s blessing (like THAT would ever happen, get to work, butt boy!) and somehow Dan, who got the freebie worth THOUSANDS on the open sex-for-hire market, gets to live happily ever after with the greatest lover money can buy. That’s a wrap!