Rosy
asked
Kaje Harper:
What initially inspired you to write M/M books? After you began what were some challenges you encountered that you did not expect? As you've stated in a previous question you are writing from a culture that is not entirely your own and I was curious on the steps you take to being comfortable writing from a male perspective. I absolutely love your writing and applaud you for being such a contender in the M/M genre.
Kaje Harper
I grew up in a household very focused, in a quiet way, on equality and justice. Not specifically LGBT, but my mother earned a science PhD in 1952, and was a university professor and internationally-known researcher, when women were still mostly supposed to be housewives. My dad was a Christian in the real, humanist sense of the word, and also a scientist who believed in the wonders of diversity. He genuinely didn't see race, gender or creed, except when others used them to discriminate. So when I hit my teens and began to look around, it was with a heightened sensitivity for justice and fairness.
I'd written stories since I was five or six, mostly about girls, horses, dogs, and fantasy. Then when I was 14 (back in 1974 :) I read "The Persian Boy" by Mary Renault, and was caught up in injustice of slavery, but also by the beauty of the characters and the sadness of the ending. Looking at some commentary about the book in a magazine, I was devastated by the echoes of disdain for a love as true and pure as that. How could people not see the truth? I secretly rewrote the ending to give Bagoas and Alexander many years together, in deepening appreciation (but with no on-page sex, being a sheltered 14-year-old in those pre-Internet days.)
Then I sat down and wrote my first M/M with original characters - two teen boys from different backgrounds, if I remember right. And then some Starsky and Hutch slash. Not long afterward I got a copy of "The Front Runner" by Patricia Nell Warren from the library and that raw, sweet, realistic and tragic story sealed my interest. I rewrote the end of that one too.
For years (35 or so) I wrote stories of all kinds for fun - many different genres with gay MCs, some slash, and some true gay romance. I didn't know others were out there doing the same, although I read gay lit like Armistead Maupin. I had no out gay friends, and my LGBT family members of whom there were a couple were distant in time and age, so I researched and read and wrote, and never showed anyone. A dozen or more novels, hundreds of first and second chapters of abandoned novels, many short stories. Finally in 2010 my husband convinced me to submit one for publication (although I didn't tell him I'd done it) - and Life Lessons was accepted. The nice comments from the editor gave me the confidence to polish up a couple other books and submit them too - M/M werewolves and mystery and contemporary.
I never felt there was a problem writing from a male perspective - even the M/F stories I wrote often had both male and female POVs. One thing my parents taught me is that we are all humans and there is no qualitative dividing line between the sexes. My father was the softer more emotional of my parents, and saw nothing of female work, life or attitudes as being unfit for a man. So I just wrote people, be they male, female, bigender, elves or aliens.
I did have a fair bit of anxiety about releasing stories about my gay MCs though, where gay men would read them. When a group is embattled and discriminated against, they have every right to be sensitive about how they are portrayed, and to protect both their image and their personal sense of culture. One of my first blog posts was about the cultural usurpation of being a cis-gender heterosexual woman writing M/M. The first few times some gay male reader chastised something in my books as being ignorant of gay realities, I cried and thought about quitting publishing each time. (Not quiting writing - that's life blood, but I got along for 35 years trunking my stories, It wouldn't kill me to go back to that.)
I always felt, though, that more available stories about gay men living real lives had to be a good thing, even with inevitable errors. I read books by male authors that weren't perfect either, or were criticized by other men for being poorly representative. Then I had two gay men send me emails in the same week about something they didn't like in my books... and it was exactly the opposite thing. One told me that I had my guys being switches too often, and that almost all gay men were either tops or bottoms. The other told me that my guys were too fixated on mostly topping or bottoming - that this was a female sex-role perspective, and I needed to understand that most gay men were happy to switch.
A kind of light came on, and I realized that although some of the past criticisms were justified - because yes, I can screw up my research or fail in my empathy - nonetheless, gay men are as varied as any of us, and no one gay man is a perfect arbiter of gay culture or representation either. What I had written was sometimes just variations, not mistakes. I looked back at all the positive reviews I'd garnered from readers, including male readers. I also looked at those precious ones - the reviews that said, "I hadn't thought about gay marriage before I read this book, but now I think they should have the same rights we do." "This book made me proud of who I am." "I had never seen a book with such a positive ending for two men, and now this is what I hope for myself." "This was the first M/M romance I read, but I loved it and now I'm an ally... and looking for more books."
I've always tried to keep it real, to do good research, and to be respectful. But that was a kind of watershed time when I decided to give myself a little bit of a break from the pressure to get it exactly right. And I got the courage to write more different characters - I started, in my YA short stories for my group, to write more F/F, and transgender and asexual and bigender and genderfluid main characters. I decided representing the wonderful rainbow of human diversity in fiction was a worthwhile goal and perfection was unattainable anyway.
Which gave me the nerve to also take the transgender prompt in this summer's M/M Don't Read in the Closet event, and write Carlos who is an Hispanic, transgender, indie-metal musician. All of those aspects have their own community, which is vulnerable to misunderstanding and mis-representation. But I got as many beta readers as I could and dove in. :) And I'm proud of Carlos, whatever unintentional as well as intentional flaws he may have.
Long winded answer, to say yes, writing about other cultures feels like hubris and a risk to a people-focused perfectionist. But if I only wrote what I know, it would be one short and not very exciting book. When it gets to be too much anxiety, I write fantasy or paranormal where I can invent the culture :)
I'd written stories since I was five or six, mostly about girls, horses, dogs, and fantasy. Then when I was 14 (back in 1974 :) I read "The Persian Boy" by Mary Renault, and was caught up in injustice of slavery, but also by the beauty of the characters and the sadness of the ending. Looking at some commentary about the book in a magazine, I was devastated by the echoes of disdain for a love as true and pure as that. How could people not see the truth? I secretly rewrote the ending to give Bagoas and Alexander many years together, in deepening appreciation (but with no on-page sex, being a sheltered 14-year-old in those pre-Internet days.)
Then I sat down and wrote my first M/M with original characters - two teen boys from different backgrounds, if I remember right. And then some Starsky and Hutch slash. Not long afterward I got a copy of "The Front Runner" by Patricia Nell Warren from the library and that raw, sweet, realistic and tragic story sealed my interest. I rewrote the end of that one too.
For years (35 or so) I wrote stories of all kinds for fun - many different genres with gay MCs, some slash, and some true gay romance. I didn't know others were out there doing the same, although I read gay lit like Armistead Maupin. I had no out gay friends, and my LGBT family members of whom there were a couple were distant in time and age, so I researched and read and wrote, and never showed anyone. A dozen or more novels, hundreds of first and second chapters of abandoned novels, many short stories. Finally in 2010 my husband convinced me to submit one for publication (although I didn't tell him I'd done it) - and Life Lessons was accepted. The nice comments from the editor gave me the confidence to polish up a couple other books and submit them too - M/M werewolves and mystery and contemporary.
I never felt there was a problem writing from a male perspective - even the M/F stories I wrote often had both male and female POVs. One thing my parents taught me is that we are all humans and there is no qualitative dividing line between the sexes. My father was the softer more emotional of my parents, and saw nothing of female work, life or attitudes as being unfit for a man. So I just wrote people, be they male, female, bigender, elves or aliens.
I did have a fair bit of anxiety about releasing stories about my gay MCs though, where gay men would read them. When a group is embattled and discriminated against, they have every right to be sensitive about how they are portrayed, and to protect both their image and their personal sense of culture. One of my first blog posts was about the cultural usurpation of being a cis-gender heterosexual woman writing M/M. The first few times some gay male reader chastised something in my books as being ignorant of gay realities, I cried and thought about quitting publishing each time. (Not quiting writing - that's life blood, but I got along for 35 years trunking my stories, It wouldn't kill me to go back to that.)
I always felt, though, that more available stories about gay men living real lives had to be a good thing, even with inevitable errors. I read books by male authors that weren't perfect either, or were criticized by other men for being poorly representative. Then I had two gay men send me emails in the same week about something they didn't like in my books... and it was exactly the opposite thing. One told me that I had my guys being switches too often, and that almost all gay men were either tops or bottoms. The other told me that my guys were too fixated on mostly topping or bottoming - that this was a female sex-role perspective, and I needed to understand that most gay men were happy to switch.
A kind of light came on, and I realized that although some of the past criticisms were justified - because yes, I can screw up my research or fail in my empathy - nonetheless, gay men are as varied as any of us, and no one gay man is a perfect arbiter of gay culture or representation either. What I had written was sometimes just variations, not mistakes. I looked back at all the positive reviews I'd garnered from readers, including male readers. I also looked at those precious ones - the reviews that said, "I hadn't thought about gay marriage before I read this book, but now I think they should have the same rights we do." "This book made me proud of who I am." "I had never seen a book with such a positive ending for two men, and now this is what I hope for myself." "This was the first M/M romance I read, but I loved it and now I'm an ally... and looking for more books."
I've always tried to keep it real, to do good research, and to be respectful. But that was a kind of watershed time when I decided to give myself a little bit of a break from the pressure to get it exactly right. And I got the courage to write more different characters - I started, in my YA short stories for my group, to write more F/F, and transgender and asexual and bigender and genderfluid main characters. I decided representing the wonderful rainbow of human diversity in fiction was a worthwhile goal and perfection was unattainable anyway.
Which gave me the nerve to also take the transgender prompt in this summer's M/M Don't Read in the Closet event, and write Carlos who is an Hispanic, transgender, indie-metal musician. All of those aspects have their own community, which is vulnerable to misunderstanding and mis-representation. But I got as many beta readers as I could and dove in. :) And I'm proud of Carlos, whatever unintentional as well as intentional flaws he may have.
Long winded answer, to say yes, writing about other cultures feels like hubris and a risk to a people-focused perfectionist. But if I only wrote what I know, it would be one short and not very exciting book. When it gets to be too much anxiety, I write fantasy or paranormal where I can invent the culture :)
More Answered Questions
E
asked
Kaje Harper:
Hi, I just read one of your books and really loved it (Avocado Protection), and was just wondering: Have you written any original gay fairy tales or classic fairy tale retellings? If you have, please point me in that direction! I generally like any genre or theme as long as it’s MM romance, but the fairy tales are a guilty pleasure, but have discovered that there are much too few of those written to my liking. Thanks!
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Apr 18, 2020 03:34PM · flag
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