Given no real choice, I took the book from her as my heart sank. I was also going to Angels and Demons. Is she a lesbian? I wondered, turning my attention from her to the book. It was an oversized trade paperback, with a publisher’s logo I didn’t recognize. I looked at the front cover. Two men—one with blond hair, the other with dark—were embracing, their lips pursed as they were clearly about to kiss. Their ruffled shirts were open, exposing broad, hairless, muscular chests with enormous nipples. They were wearing tight breeches and knee-high boots. In Gothic script across the top was the title: THE KING’S SWORD. At the bottom was a name in the same script: ANTINOUS RENAULT.
Antinous Renault? Seriously?
“The King’s Sword,” I replied slowly, trying to wrap my mind around it. “A gay historical?”
“Yes, indeed, how clever you are! It’s indeed a gay historical romance.” She bobbed her head up and down. “The market’s really, really untapped,” she said seriously. “Since Mary Renault died, there haven’t been many gay historicals, you know. And with m / m becoming such a huge genre—it really is the big new thing in publishing—I’m very proud to carry the banner for gay historicals.” She exhaled, giving me a strong whiff of sour breath not completely masked by the smell of pork rinds.
“Antinous,” I said, half to myself as I turned the book over. On the back, directly in the center of the plot’s description, was a thumbprint in crusted chocolate.
Well, I assumed it was chocolate.
“Antinous was the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s lover,” she went on breathlessly, an idyllic, almost orgasmic look on her face. “He was the most beautiful man in the world—”
I cut her off, annoyed. “I’m well aware of who Antinous was, thank you very much. I have a degree in classical history. My specialty was the Roman Empire.” Nothing irritates me more than someone assuming I’m stupid, which happens all the damned time.
It’s the blond hair, blue eyes, and what used to be called a peaches-and-cream complexion. If I had a dollar for every time someone assumed I was a dumb blonde I’d never have to work another day in my life.
Okay, my specialty had actually been the Plantagenets, but I’d studied the Roman Empire and knew who Antinous was.
I narrowed my eyes.
The woman was, however, completely oblivious to the fact she’d given offense. Her smile never wavered even for a moment. She tilted her head slightly to one side in a birdlike way and went on, “And of course I took Renault to honor Mary Renault, because she really was such a trailblazer and one of the biggest inspirations for my work.” She sighed blissfully. “Reading The Persian Boy literally changed my life. I’d never thought about writing about yummy gay men before that.”
Mary Renault is probably rolling in her grave, I thought, and she really did not just describe gay men as yummy, did she?
I hate when people use food terms to describe people. I bit my tongue to keep from asking how many gay men she had actually tasted.
“Have you read it? It’s so wonderful.”
“Yes.” I stopped myself from adding that I hardly considered The Persian Boy, which opened with a rather graphic castration scene, a “gay romance novel.” But as I looked at her, my irritation started to fade and I began to feel sorry for her. She really was rather unfortunate looking.
And clearly, the irony of her use of Antinous as a pseudonym was apparently lost on her. No one ever would use the words “the most beautiful creature on earth” to describe her, the poor dear.
I turned my attention back to the book in my hand and read the blurb on the back cover. It was set during the Scots uprising in favor of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the eighteenth century, when the overthrown Stuarts made their final attempt to regain the British throne and oust the German House of Hanover. I smiled to myself—there really was nothing quite so romantic as a lost cause. According to the text, the romantic conflict in the book came from the fact that one of the lovers was in the royal army while the other supported Bonnie Prince Charlie. A bit far-fetched, I thought, but then again, aren’t all romance novels kind of far-fetched?
God knows I’d written some pretty far-fetched lesbian romances.
Farther down on the back cover there was an author photo of an extraordinarily handsome young man next to the author bio. I looked up at her and pointedly back down to the author photo, then back again.
She chortled and rolled her eyes. “Yes, you’ve noticed the author photo. No, that’s not me, obviously.” She threw back her head and brayed loudly with laughter for a few moments. She wiped at her eyes and sighed. “When I was first getting started, you know, there was a mindset that gay men wouldn’t read books by straight women, which of course is completely absurd on its face—after all, they read Mary Renault and Patricia Nell Warren, don’t they?”
I refrained from pointing out Renault and Warren were both lesbians.
“But my publisher insisted on using a male model for my author photos and insisted on pretending I was a man.” She rolled her eyes theatrically. “Like gay men are sexist! It really is completely absurd.”
I’ve known any number of sexist gay men, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud. But there was some truth to that—men have traditionally always ignored books by women and denigrated women authors. It was an endless struggle for women authors, requiring eternal vigilance, and I felt myself warming to her a little more. She might be lacking in social graces, but like me, she was also a woman author struggling against sexism in the publishing world.
I started to pass the book back to her with a slight smile. “So, you write gay historical romances? That must be really difficult to research, given the way queers have been systematically erased from history.”
She chortled again, reaching into her bag and pulling out a bottle of Mountain Dew. She took a big swig, recapped it, and put it back in her bag. “Oh, it’s not that hard. I do it all online. Everything’s on the Internet, you know. I don’t know how people did research before! Imagine having to spend all that time in a library! Or sorting through books to find that one little nugget of information you need!”
Oh my God.
I bit my lower lip to stop from saying something I might regret. It’s been a problem ever since I was a child—I tend to blurt things out that are probably best left unsaid. But the very idea of writing historical novels while only doing research over the web was so patently wrong and absurd that I wanted to shake some sense into her.
The historian in me wanted to slap her stupid face.
Somehow I managed to instead nod politely. “Yes, libraries are horrible places, aren’t they? All that dust.”
I wasn’t surprised that my sarcasm was completely lost on her. “Yes, that’s it exactly! Oh, it’s so lovely to meet someone who understands!” She leaned in toward me, and I involuntarily moved away from her. “I mean, why waste the petrol and all that time when everything’s available online? You can find out everything you need in the comfort of your own home!”
Oh, I understand all right. You’re a hack. I kept my smile frozen in place as I replied, “Yes, I’m certain Mary Renault would conduct her research online if she were alive today.”
And again, she took my statement at face value. Her head bobbed up and down theatrically. She elbowed me, chortling a bit. “Yes, you’re absolutely right, of course! Imagine how much more work she could have done had she not been limited by the almost primitive technology she had to work with! Imagine if she could have researched at home, or written on a computer rather than a typewriter!” She took the book from me and pulled out a grimy-looking Sharpie from her bag. “I’ll let you keep this.” She beamed at me. “Just let me sign it for you.”
I’d rather have cholera, I thought, deciding that I’d be polite and take it—and throw it away at the first opportunity.
She scribbled away on the title page. “It’s my fifth novel, and critics have simply raved about my work—five stars on Amazon and Goodreads, and all the important gay romance blog
s.”
All the important gay romance blogs?
“I’m writing another now—it’s more of a romantic suspense novel, set in the nineteenth century, where a young man comes to a gloomy manor to tutor the master’s son…”
As she rambled on in quite exhaustive detail, I let my own mind wander a bit. I didn’t need to pay a lot of attention—the plot she was telling me sounded like a rip-off of both Victoria Holt’s The King of the Castle and Jane Eyre, with a bit of The Castle of Otranto added in for good measure. The primary difference from those classics, of course, was that this woman’s version had only gay male characters and, apparently, a lot of gay sex scenes.
Besides, it was patently obvious that all she needed from me was an occasional grunt or nod anyway.
And I was extremely tired. I’d had to get up at four in the morning and drive two hours south to Albany to catch my absurdly early flight to Atlanta, and my efforts to secure an upgrade to first class on that flight had proven to be in vain. I’d wound up stuck in the back of the plane, and I just can’t sleep in the coach cabin. I’d drunk enough coffee to float an ocean liner, but rather than waking me up it simply made me nauseous as well as tired and sleepy. All I wanted to do was curl up somewhere and go to sleep, and I stifled a yawn as she prattled on.
This was my last trip back to Louisiana before my gig as writer-in-residence at Wilbourne College in upstate New York finally wound down. It had been a great gig—the kind that were becoming fewer and farther between these days with cutbacks happening in education on every level. But Wilbourne College was an old private women’s college, founded in the mid-nineteenth century for proper young ladies from good families. The tuition was ridiculous, but the school’s reputation for providing an excellent education had only grown over time, and it had the kind of endowment the University of Louisiana at Rouen, where I was tenured, wouldn’t have the nerve to dream of having. I hadn’t even had to think twice when the chancellor of Wilbourne had called with the offer. The gig was too good to pass up—a ridiculous salary, I only had to teach one graduate-level writing class, and it came with a furnished one-bedroom cottage a short walk from the campus that was absolutely adorable—cozy, warm, and comfortable in the brutal winter. I flew back down to Louisiana every other weekend, to check on my house and pay my bills. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have time on this trip to get over to my house in Rouen, the small college town about an hour northwest of New Orleans where I lived, but it didn’t matter—I’d be coming home for good soon enough. All I had left to do at Wilbourne was return my students’ last short stories to them, file my final grades, pack up my office and the little house, and ship everything back down here. I already had my plane ticket home purchased. It would, I reflected, be nice to be back home. Even though I loved it at Wilbourne, Louisiana was home.
Honestly, the timing of this trip to New Orleans was bad for me. I’d been avoiding writers’ conferences, too, over the last few years. If you’ve done one, you’ve done them all, really.
But when my old friend Jerry asked me to teach a master class and do some panels at the annual Angels and Demons LGBT Literary Festival, being held in New Orleans for the first time in its twelve-year history, I couldn’t say no, even though I’d done a pretty good job of avoiding New Orleans as much as possible in the last ten years.
You’ll be there for four days, and she doesn’t know you as Winter Lovelace, I reminded myself. Nobody in New Orleans knows you as Winter Lovelace.
That was the beauty of using a pseudonym—all the publicity materials for the conference listed me as Winter Lovelace rather than my real name, Tracy Norris.
Tracy Norris was a professor of English at the University of Louisiana-Rouen who also wrote critically acclaimed, award-winning crime novels about a kick-ass Louisiana female private eye named Laura Lassiter. Winter Lovelace, on the other hand, wrote torrid lesbian romances with lots of graphic, hot sex scenes.
And only my agent, and a handful of others who’d put the clues together, knew the two writers were actually the same woman.
It wasn’t that I was ashamed of the romances. I had copies of them proudly on the bookshelf in my office on campus at Wilbourne just as I did in my office at ULR, and while I didn’t use the same author photo as Winter that I did as Tracy, anyone looking at the pictures side by side would think they were either of the same person or of two women who looked so much alike they could be twins. I also wasn’t ashamed of being a lesbian. I’ve been out since I was in high school—at Sacred Heart Academy for Girls on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, no less.
No, when I decided to try my hand at writing a lesbian romance, my agent, Mabel Clegg, told me she could sell it to a small lesbian press—but recommended I use a pseudonym to differentiate it from the crime novels.
“The lesbian romances won’t sell as well as the crime books, and you don’t want the low sales for one to affect the others,” Mabel had insisted. “Trust me, it happens. We need to protect the Tracy Norris brand—we’ve worked too hard building it up over the years to wreck it now.”
I hated being referred to as a brand—like I’m dishwashing liquid or laundry soap or something—but I always listened to Mabel, even if it bothered my lesbian sensibilities.
I didn’t like using the pseudonym, but I’d gotten used to it over the years. Mabel was a great agent—the editor of the Laura series once told me that Mabel would scare a shark—and she did know the business inside and out. She’d never once steered me wrong, and it is a foolish author who ignores their agent’s advice.
And one thing I am not is a fool.
I was just two months past my deadline for my next Laura Lassiter novel.
In fact, I reminded myself, you should be working on it here while you wait to get on the plane.
I realized with a start that Antinous Renault had apparently finished talking by asking me a question and was waiting for me to answer her.
“I’m sorry.” I gave her a guilty smile. “I completely forgot what you asked.”
She twittered and leaned toward me. “It’s all right, dearie, he is good-looking, isn’t he?” She smacked her lips like she was about to eat something delicious. “Gay men are so yummy, aren’t they?”
Startled and more than a little repulsed, I turned my head to see the young man she was looking at. I wasn’t sure he was gay—it’s getting harder and harder to tell anymore, what with young straight men embracing the use of hair and skin products and paying more attention to their clothes and spending hours in the gym—but he was good-looking, if you liked men.
Which…
I turned and looked at Antinous again. She was staring at the young man with her mouth and eyes wide open. She licked her lips and nudged me with her elbow again, chortling. “There’s nothing hotter than two men together, is there?” She was rubbing her knees with her hands as she said it. “I swear, I don’t know why anyone would write anything besides m / m.”
“What’s m / m?”
She patted my leg with one of her small hands, which were covered with red splotches and looked almost grotesque given how large her forearms were. Her nails were bitten to the quick, yet still managed to look dirty. “Male-male, of course. It’s the hottest new trend in publishing.”
“I’ve never heard of it.” I frowned. “Why isn’t it just called gay?”
She was nodding again. “It’s a very hot trend,” she went on. “You know, women writing male romances.”
I shook my head again. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
She patted my leg again in that patronizing way that made me want to slap her. “It started out as straight women writing for other straight women—Queer as Folk fanfic, mostly, but then it expanded to other fandoms. I myself came to it from Midnight fandom.” She smacked her lips in a rather revolting way. “I mostly wrote Ptolemy / Orion romance.”
What? I can’t have heard that right. If I remember what little of the book I read, Ptolemy was a centuries-old mage
. I gaped at her. “But…Orion was a kid.”
“Oh, you bloody Americans and your prudish age of consent! In the UK it’s sixteen, so of course I made Orion sixteen in my stories!” She slapped my leg and chortled again. “But when I found out there was this market out there for original gay romances, and given my interest in history, well, writing gay historical romances simply made the most sense.”
“So you’re straight?”
“My sexuality is fluid.” She snorted rather loftily, as though I were not sophisticated enough to understand. “I mean, I find women incredibly attractive but getting one into bed, well, they’re just so much work! I just don’t have the patience for that.” She shook her head, her jowls swinging, and snorted again. “I’m much too lazy to work that hard, you know? I thought I might be transgendered for a while, but no, I’m all woman and proud of it. I’m fairly certain I’m just bisexual.” She rummaged in her bag again and pulled out another bag of pork rinds. “Besides, I don’t really leave my house that much anymore. I just stay home and take care of my cats and write and communicate with my fans on social media.” She leaned in closer. “And I get literally thousands of emails from gay men who love and appreciate my work.”
Thousands?
“And all of us who write m / m, you know, we’re all terribly committed to the cause.”
I shook my head. “The cause?”
“Gay equality, of course.” She virtuously pressed a splotchy hand to her massive chest. “Why, just last year I co-edited an anthology to raise money for gay equality. We raised over a thousand dollars! The book was an enormous success!” She nudged me with her elbow again. “If only one of my books sold as well as the anthology!”
I was about to point out that if the anthology had only made a thousand dollars and sold better than her novels, then she couldn’t possibly have thousands of fans, when the gate agent called me up to the counter. I was delighted to be handed an upgrade to first class, and as they started boarding the first-class cabin at that moment, I didn’t speak to Antinous again.
Slash and Burn Page 2
