After a tiring day as a school maintenance worker, 28-year-old Paul loves nothing more than unwinding with a good romance novel – ideally one with a fantasy or horror element to it. He reads five or six a month – most recently Love Bytes, about an 8ft-tall werewolf woman who runs an extremely successful AI company and falls in love with a handsome ballroom instructor. Paul got into romance fiction via what he calls its “more traditional” side – such as the Regency romance series Bridgerton.
He is partially sighted, so he mostly reads on his Kindle, where he can adjust the font size. In the first Bridgerton novel, “Simon, the main character, has a speech impediment that he has to work through,” says Paul. Typically, I don’t come across disabled protagonists that much.” He doesn’t talk to anyone about his love of romance novels, communicating only with other users of a Discord channel called Romance for Men.
Women are the genre’s main audience, followed by queer romance, which is a well documented success. The fifth volume of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper – about the friendship between two teenage boys blossoming into love – is the UK’s fastest-selling graphic novel and a hit Netflix show, while novelists such as Alexis Hall are widely read and critically acclaimed. But in this corner of publishing, straight men are rarely seen and usually stigmatised.
At Mills & Boon, the best known publisher of romantic fiction, men account for only 4% of sales, according to an editorial director, while less than 2% of the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association is male. Almost nothing is known about how many men read romantic fiction, and why. For those I spoke to, however, reading romance is more than just entertainment.
It offers a kind of liberation, allowing them to feel deeply, imagine being desired, and accept parts of themselves that conventional masculinity has little room for. Many would only speak anonymously, worried about being misunderstood or mocked. Before books, Paul’s path into romance began with role-playing video games in his teens: “You have some non-playable characters who are your companions, and you can build romantic relationships with them as you go along.” He gravitated towards playing aggressive male characters rallying different factions to war, realising later that the diplomatic approach worked better.
The appeal of these characters was that they were so different from him. In 2015, Paul learned that Stephenie Meyer, author of the vampire romance Twilight, had released a gender-flipped version of the book. But I read it anyway, and there’s a moment where Edythe, the vampire, tells the male protagonist that she is tired of trying to stay away from him.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
