And, as usual, gays were equated with NAMBLA, but they stopped short of suggesting it would lead to man on dog sex. Minor league crap, I know, but it gives us insight into how these people work, and how much they want to force their views on the rest of us.
Here's a link to the letter that started the pie fight.
http://katerothwell.blogspot.com/...
For those of you who don't want to read the whole discussion, I will merely give you the highlights. Jan W. Butler writes Inspirational romances--romances in which both parties are Christians ( or become one by the Happily Ever After Ending in which they march down the aisle of the right kind of church), indulge in nothing wilder than a chaste kiss or two, and pray a lot (yes, I have actually read them; it was part of my job as a librarian). Heroines are virginal--or, if they were ill-advised enough to lose it before Getting Saved, they are born-again virgins. Sex before marriage is Sin. It is also Sinful to be Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian or TG unless you are celibate--in fact Those People are so sick, they are never mentioned in this happy little born-again world, which, strangely, resembles Buford GA, where I reside under protest (he gets his degree, and we leave and never look back).
Here's the gist of her letter:
. . romance isn't about just any "two people" celebrating "love in its many forms." Organizations such as the Man-Boy Love Association would certainly refer to themselves as celebrating love "two people" (or more) finding love in one of its many forms" . . . while they actively promote pedophilia.
Think RWA can't go down that slipper slope? Think again. Under our present definition, we cannot exclude such "love stories" under the category of "romance". We, as a culture, seem to have forgotten how to say "enough is enough," but RWA can--indeed, must--do better than that. . . .
And, please, spare us the arguments about "censorship" and "inclusiveness." Preference for "one man, one woman" stories represents what RWA has always claimed is romance's target demographic: college-educated, married, middle-class, monogamous, and moral. . . .Only in recent years has a vocal (translate: shrill) minority tried to drive RWA's focus off that path, under the guise of "broadening its horizons." But refusing to define romance according to the parameters it has held for centuries doesn't "broaden" anything . . . it only starts us down the aforementioned slope, and once we're in that slide, heaven help us.
Jan W. Butler
I learned of this from a romance writer's email list--the author who runs the list happens to write kinky erotica as well m/m erotic romance. She sent me to the blog where I got to read this masterpiece--I don't belong to RWA because it isn't worth my money to join at this point in my career, so I didn't get to read the whole letter in the newsletter. Needless to say, it provoked a lot of negative responses. No one, however, called for Inspirational writers to be banned from RWA because they are offended by Biblethumper Love Stories--and they rightly called this broad what she is: a bigot.
One post on this blog summed it up beautifully:
Romance is not about the combination of parts. Romance is about connection. It doesn't matter if the owner of the heart is male or female.
I am tired of the constant casitgation of gays as pedophiles when ALL of the statistics show that well over 90% of pedophiles are heterosexual. NAMBLA is no more representative of gays as a whole than that creepy guy who dressed like santa so he could molest the children in the neighborbood is representative of heterosexuals.
Jan most certainly has a right to not like gay romance. To say she doesn't. To even use the kind of hateful and innacurate rhetoric that ends in violence every day for gays and lesbians across this nation. But I have a right to stand up as a romance author and call it what it is - hateful bullshit.
Jan replied with the usual Religious Right Rrhetoric: disagree with me, and you hate Christians and free speech, and, besides WE are themoral Majority and have God on our side and we'll beat you horrible heathens in the long run.
Ahhh....hit a nerve, did I? LOL!
Never mind. If you can't effectively attack the truth of an assertion--which is, in fact, that legally we cannot bar anyone from writing virtually anything, calling it "romance," and wanting to be represented by RWA, as long as we preserve the current "two people" definition--then attack the writer's intelligence, her publisher, her website, her links, her blog, and anything else you can find.
Fact is, ladies and gentlemen, RWA used to stand for something. Now, it falls for anything, out of fear of being labeled "bigoted." Most of you won't remember a time when you could buy a romance and it'd be about emotion, not about body parts. Unfortunately, in most cases in the ABA market, that simply isn't the case. We are surrounded by plotless wonders in which people know where to find the "provocative" scenes...because the publishers put the ad cards in those pages. And then we wonder why so much of the fiction world makes fun of us?
It really doesn't matter what you say about me, in the long run. It really doesn't matter what you think about what I said. It really doesn't matter how mad you get. Just don't blame those of us out here attempting to "cry out in the wilderness" when you can't find a book that expresses your idea of romance anymore...because the inmates have taken over the asylum.
Actually the reason romance has such a bad rep is because of people like her--for many people, romance novels are equated with the old-style Harlequins (their Blaze line ain't nothin' like the originals and it's hot enough to requrie a fire extingusiher when reading them) where the heroine was a lobotomized teenage virgin riased in a convent school in the Alps, the hero a Jaded Rake/Arab sheik/Millionaire Playboy who falls madly for the moronic heroine, tries to seduce her but fails, and, won over buy her purity and innocnence, marries her and becomes a Good Man, saved by her sweetness and goodness.
In other words, EXACTLY the sort of book Jan writes. To learn what goes into writing an Inspirational--go here:
http://www.booksbylyncote.com/...
While Inspirational sales have increased 26% recently, they are still only a tiny part of the romance market, something like 3-4%. I know of two large publishers with an inspirational line (one of them is Mills and Boone, which gave us Harlequin, and this isn't anything new for them). The majority of the publishers who handle these books are small press Christian publishers. Their readers are conservative Christians and many buy them in Christian bookstores (my Borders carries Steeple Hill, the Harlequin line, but no other Christian romance line, at least not in the romance section). On the other hand, erotic romance (very explicit sex scenes, including the language real people use when fucking, not pourple prose euphemisms, and often permitting kinky sex and even threesomes) and flat-out women-oriented erotica is growing like crazy, considerably faster than Inspirationals. One of the hottest categories in the erotic romance and erotica categories (which began in e-books and has now expanded to print; I know of two lines from a major publisher that are red hot right now) is the male/male love story. I suspect that their popualrity grew out of what is known as slash fan fiction (slash is takign two male characters from a show or movie, and putting them in bed together even if theya re rather decidedly het in the original). And these books are marketed to straight women, the same ones who read slash fan fic, who were going nuts over them at the last RWA conference a couple of weeks ago. Jan is horrified that Those Smutty Books About Perverts are considered romances, and wants to keep their authors out of RWA.
Jan also blogged about how us Evil Libruls tried to censor her views--by responding negatively to them. We infringed upon her freedom of speechby not agreeing with her. Umm, her letter was published. She was permitted to respond to the discussion on the blog where I read it, without the blog owner editing it in any way. Last time I looked, the first amendment only guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from being offended--in fact, it pretty much guarantees you will be offended. Nor does it require that everyoen agree with you. NO ONE attacked her for being a Christian or for having different views, but they DID jump all over her attempt to weed out ideas which offend her and for her opious comparison of gays to pedophiles. I almost wondered if Jan Butler was a pseudonym for Rick Santorum!
But on her blog, where Jan laments censorship by us nasty dirty-minded people, SHE has chosen to moderate -i.e., self-select--which comments get onto the site. And since MANY people wrote comments, but only one was permitted to stand for public consumption, methinsk SHE is the censor--just as she is when she demands that books she doesn't like not be counted as romance.
But I find it both funny and very UNfunny that many of the people who are slinging the most vituperous arrows at ME are the same people who claim to stand for Free Speech in this Country, By Golly. You can't censor us! How dare you! The culture demands diversity!
Oh, yeah?
You know, free speech? First Amendment? The one that enables them to make a book or a website or a movie or a joke as smutty as they like, and I don't dare tell them they can't?
Yeah, THAT First Amendment. But what has happened to MY First Amendment protection?
http://www.msmentor.blogspot.com/
I publish this link to her website in the hope that every person here who thinks gays are humanbeings, and that love stories with two men are just as much a romance as those with a male and female pairing--or who just plain are tired of the Religiosu Reich telling the rest of us what to, think, or read--go to her site, and comment. I know she won't allow any of the commetns to be shown, but I figure we might give her a headache from the negative energy, which she deserves after making me throw up from reading her bigopted, hate-filled prose.
Yes, it is a small and minor fight, and Jan is WAY outnumbered at RWA. But I beelive in fighting even petty evil and minor league censorship. Please comment--but no death threats, hate speech, or attacks on Catholicism, please. Just stick to reality: gays fall in love too, and trying to keep authors of gay love stories out of RWA (because SHE doesn't like their books and considers them SINFUL) is censorship.
I amnow returnign to work on my own romance, in which the heroine is a kinky feminsit submissive divorce lawyer with a fondness for Victorian role-playing, spanking and corsets. In other words, she's precisely the sort of chracter who will give Ms. Bnutler a fatal coronary should she somehow get hold of the book. For good measure, the Bad Guy (a minor character) is a conservative Christian Republican federal judge whsoe wife has finally left him after years of beatings (I based him on a member of a Republican administration whose divorce was verymessy during the late 80s). Just for the hell of it, I may add a gay couple to the cast. Gotta do my part to keep the Religious Reich on their toes.
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