Queer as Category and Why it Makes me Squirm

So. There was this wee award I learned about last year when a book of mine was nominated, which was sort of cool, but the category was “Best Queer Romance” (which always makes me cringe). Now, I’ve done a more detailed blog post about this in the past, which is here. I promised myself I’d just link back to things like this when they come up, because Queer 101 is exhausting, but this turned out somewhat differently, so… Onward?

(Fun-fact: I even have a T-shirt I wear to romance conventions now that says “My Identity is not a Sub-Genre” because of how often this discussion comes up.)

Another favourite shirt for conventions.

The TL;DR version of that blog post, is this: I can only speak for me as one queer romance author, but when there are categories like “Best Holiday Romance” and “Best Romantic Thriller” and then also “Best Queer Romance” I don’t think it actually elevates queer romance. I think it shoves queer romance all aside. Because if you’ve got a Holiday Queer Romance (as I did), then where does the book go? In my experience, it tends to shunt everything with queer characters into the Queer Category, even if they belong to other categories, because Queer tends to trump anything else.

How do you pick a “best” when one is a Queer YA, one is a Queer Holiday Romance, and one is a Queer Romantic Thriller? What makes one of those the “best” Queer Romance of the bunch when the books only have queer in common? Or, say one is a Queer YA and another is a Queer Romantic Thriller, and they’re a better romantic YA and a better romantic thriller than the non-queer titles in the YA and romantic thriller categories? Doesn’t matter—if they’re slotted into the queer category, only one of the queer titles gets to win, competing against each other.

Now, I should note in this award’s defence and for transparency, last year they also had a paranormal category, and the book that won that award was an m/m romance, so there was at least one queer romance that escaped the generalized “Queer Romance” category.

But I believe it was the only one.

So. Last year, after the awards concluded, I reached out to the organizer and mentioned all this as feedback, and more-or-less put it from my mind. Like I said, this happens often enough I have a go-to blog about it at the ready. When the categories were announced and there was once again a “Best Queer Romance,” I gently—and this time publicly—pointed out how having a queer category ends up giving off the impression that queerness gets one category, and queer titles don’t likely belong in the others (or that it could be easily second-guessed and likely put into the queer category).

I mean, given the RWA, history, etc…, unless something is pretty darn explicit about including queerness across-the-board, seeing a single queer category can easily send a message. An unintentional one, I believe, but it’s still there.

The organizer reached out to me, and it was a bit awkward, but I did my best to explain my reasoning, and used the blog post, because again I can’t speak for all of queer kind here. I imagine plenty of queer people probably don’t care or even prefer there be an explicit queer award (even if it is as a “first step” or something). I remember that from a few queer authors back in 2017 during all this discussion then, and it’s not like things have gotten much better. And it’s fine if other queer folk disagree here, truly. I just thought the way it was set up wasn’t particularly clear, and could fail at what it was intended to do: instead of elevating across the categories, it was (unintentionally) giving off the appearance of tucking queer titles into one category. Maybe using some explicit wording to emphasize what the category was meant to be/do might help? Maybe making it super clear the other categories were absolutely going to welcome queer characters, and that this was in some way intended to be an “and the best of the best!” award from among those queer titles?

So, the end result of this discussion—and, I imagine, discussion I didn’t see behind the scenes—is the award put a vote up and the entire vote is just: “Please vote on whether or not you wish for the Queer Romance Award to continue.”

No context. No explanation. Just a yes/no, should they have a Queer Romance Award, and I just…

Fuck it. I give up. I probably should have just stopped the first time I got “since some people [may] not be interested in queer romance” as part of the reasoning behind why they’d done it in the first place. I mean, yes. People “not interested” in queer romance are never going to vote for queer romance to win in any category, are they? Judges “not interested” in queer romance will never judge queer romance on an even keel.

Having “Best Queer Romance” tucks queerness somewhere those “not interested” in queer romance don’t have to see it.

Great.