Bookmarked by Piper Vaughn

[Ulysses]

Bookmarked
By Piper Vaughn
Three stars

As always, when I give three stars, I remind people that this is a good grade for me. Piper Vaughn is a fine writer, and in this first of her Heartsville novellas, adorably set in a small Midwestern town with an open mind, is a fully realized romantic story. In the world of contemporary m/m fiction, “Bookmarked” is a model.

The central character is Markell Werner, handsome young gay man who is struggling to maintain an independent bookstore on Heartsville’s main street. Now, the idea of a twenty-seven year old having achieved even a struggling bookstore on his own, even with the loving support of his single-dad father, Bruno, is a little implausible. This seems to be a nod to the m/m imperative that all of the protagonists have to be twinks or near twinks.

In order to save his bookstore, he calls on a best-selling author of adventure novels, Shepherd Knight. Having already had an embarrassingly negative interaction with the celebrated writer, Mark still reaches out to him, desperate to find the silver bullet that will bring in more customers and secure the future of his little business venture.

Shepherd Knight is a difficult sort of character, and in the short space of this novella the author can’t quite fully realize him. But Vaughn quite intentionally does something else with Knight that pushed one of my seriously unhappy buttons. She has Mark go on rapturously about the hit series of books that have made Knight successful: “The Drake Chronicles.” Indeed, it is the mainstream success of those books that make Knight the, um, White Knight, whose presence will rescue Bookmarked from a slow death.

Jack Drake is the hero of this best-selling series of novels – books, we are told, that have been given rave reviews in the New York Times! But here’s the catch: Jack Drake is straight, and carries on a torrid romance throughout the series with a character named Alicia. What makes Knight a hero to Mark is that there is “a gay secondary character who played a pivotal role in the plot,” named Thaine. Much is made of Thaine’s appeal as a character, and the fact that he is allowed to have a boyfriend in the series, “even if their nookie never got any page time.” The author goes to far as to have Mark and Shepherd, in the midst of a sexual moment together, reminisce about a really hot sex scene between Jack and Alicia, because there are no sex scenes with the gay character in these gay man’s books.

This is one of those moments when, as a gay man and an author of gay romance, I see the divide between the traditional audience and authors of m/m fiction and the emerging audience of gay male readers and writers in this genre. As soon as I learned that Shepherd Knight tailored his novels to the mainstream audience by suppressing the centrality of his gay characters, he ceased to be a character with whom I could identify. It is one of my personal quirks that I won’t read books by gay men that eschew central gay characters. It may be the case that this is still the only way to make it in mainstream publishing – to suppress your own identity in order to appeal to a straight audience. But if so, then let the straight world support your work. To me, Knight’s books are an expression of his internalized homophobia, and his drive to succeed financially trumping any sort of pride in his self-identity. Problem is, over the past four decades I’ve seen more than enough gay men devote their careers to writing books about gay men. I know it can be done. Those are the guys I admire.

What Vaughn inadvertently does by making Shepherd Knight a hero, is to tacitly agree with the status quo that keeps gay authors in a literary closet. And that kind of ruined my pleasure in this well-written straightforward romance for me.