Quote:
Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom
I have nothing against that, but if I can't rely on the Chicago Public Library, I am going to ask them to justify the demographics of what they are buying. Chicago only buys a handful of books in Spanish, and I suspect Spanish-speaking people make up a larger portion of Chicago than gay/transgender makes up of the suburbs.
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I sympathize with your desire to see more books in-stock which reflect your reading tastes. My own e-library tends to get in mostly romances and self-help, neither of which I am particularly interested in (or really, interested in at all). They've gotten better about acquiring interesting-looking pop-science/history books and literary fiction, but there's a severe dearth of sf/fantasy and the listings are still dominated by R & S-H due to the huge amount of prior acquisitions in those categories.
However, it's entirely possible that those gay romances aren't really intended for the gay/transgender segment of the local population.
One of the biggest markets for m/m romances is actually straight women (viz. the immense popularity of "slash" fiction among fandom, the writing and reading of which is dominated by women). The semi-"major" romance imprints like Ellora, Samhain, and Carina which offer m/m romances among their listings have over half of them written by openly female authors, and even specialty m/m-only romance imprints like Dreamspinner and ManLoveRomance were started by women, as well, and again number women as at least half their authorship.
I've heard anecdotally that there's a fair-sized subdemographic of gay men who don't care for the type of m/m romances which are marketed primarily to women, on the grounds that they're all-too-often unrealistically objectifying projection fantasies* which ignore the reality of actual gay life experience in order to just fetishize pretty boys kissing.
* I do not disagree with that assessment in some cases, because with a number of the ones I've curiosity-sampled, I've ended up wondering if the author has ever met and/or observed actual gay people in actual non-dysfunctional romantic relationships or if they're just making up whatever they think goes on in such in their own minds out of the whole cloth, before they set it down on paper.
Mind you, this is something I've also wondered about some of the heterosexual romances I've curiosity-sampled, so I suppose bad romance writing is bad romance writing regardless of sexually-oriented subgenre.