Some background: me=ubergeek who used to get in trouble as a child for reading after I was supposed to have gone to bed. Came out to myself without a particular woman in the picture. Started going down to feminist bookstore in D.C. It was way easier walking in there than into the GL bookstore. I just tried to find the name of it and it seems to have gone away like the one here in L.A. The one in D.C. was called Lammas and closed (as best I can tell) in 2000 and the L.A. store, called Sisterhood closed in 1999. Thanks Borders!
So anyway, I would go down to Lammas and buy novels. Naiad was the big lesbian publisher in those days. At the time Naiad published two books a month as did Seal Press. (Both Seal and Naiad have since gone out-of-business--I didn't mean for this to be a theme). They weren't good books. Really, I promise. While I am not the most thoughtful reader of fiction the world has ever produced, I can tell the difference between crap and not crap. These books were crap.
Here's how they'd go. Woman X is alone in (you choose) a cabin, a casino, a spaceship. She meets Woman Y and there's an energy that she can't explain. They argue, maybe someone is killed, maybe the hyperdrive for interplanetary exploration goes out. There's lots of tension. They then have sex. Woman X is blown away. She doesn't know what to do. She runs away from the situation. She has an epiphany. She finds woman Y. They reconcile and have sex again. The book ends and they live happily ever after.
See how appealing that is?
Well, it is to me. I go in and out of liking this stuff but I'm back in it now. (I was in a funk about the end of the Willow Tara thing on Buffy for a couple of years). I dragged my honey to see Imagine Me and You and then provoked a fight about it when she kept worrying about whether the flower shops Woman Y (see above) owned in the movie would close because they had sex on the roses or because she kept running out to find Woman X.
I didn't care. I like regular romance well enough, but I'll deal with just about any version of this story I can find.
What I don't like: anthologies, especially "real-life" anthologies, stories that end badly, "horror" versions of the above (though scifi and mystery versions are great).
What I do like: less build-up, more romance. And if it's a movie or a t.v. show, lots of good passionate romantic kissing and cuddling. If it's a book, I like a things a little (NOT a lot) more explicit.
I am currently reading (in between weekly New Yorkers, monthly Outsides, and the L.A. Times) a book called Colder Than Ice. One thing you should know about this kind of lesbian novel is that there is one thing you can count on besides the plot outlined above. It will have a REALLY bad cover. Not Harlequin cheesy, just badly and amateurly done. This one, published by an imprint I've never heard of called Quest Books, looks like this:
Nice huh? The plot is the basic one outlined above, with Allie, the archaeologist, as Woman X and Michaela, the psychologist, as Woman Y. The setting: an archaeological dig in ... Antarctica. Of course. I'm about halfway through. No sex yet, but I can feel it coming. They're stuck in a blizzard alone, all all alone, in a snow pod of some sort. They're in danger. And together at last.
These novels are oversized (inevitably)and run about $18 today. They were $12 in the heady D.C. days.
I could analyze why I like these things so much, but my therapist and I have more pressing matters to attend to and, in some sense, I don't care.
My honey brought me flowers and a balloon after I accused her of not being romantic after not liking Imagine Me and You. I may try to get her to watch Saving Face but I'm worried that it's not going to be romantic enough for me. I have a friend who loves romance of any type so much that her knees wiggle when she thinks about it. It's nice. She'll probably like that I like this stuff. I don't know if she knows.
Anybody want Colder Than Ice when I'm done?
4 comments:
Oh, I am so relieved to hear you have cheesy taste in something. I hold you up as something so much more, well, deep and intellectual than I. I have low self esteem dontcha know.
For a while I liked Harlequins -- if they had a cowboy in them all the better. I'm not sure why; I've never had a thing for cowboys in real life.
Right now I like mysteries in the "cozy" genre. I particularly like these ones that have cookie recipes in them.
But yeah, I'd like the antarctica book, but can I pretend she's a folklorist instead of an archeologist?
Sandra--What I want to know is if you told your colleagues at your fine IHE that you used the university library to order one of the cookie mysteries JUST to get the recipe.
OK, so Imagine Me and You had zero dramatic tension. Of course X and Y were going to get together. So the only thing left for me was to worry about Y's flower shop. The whole movie she kept running out of her shop, sometimes leaving it in the care of customers she didn't know, in order to chase down X. And when X would come in, she'd shoo customers out of the store by giving them whatever they had picked out for free, then she'd lock up the shop and take X into the storage room and roll around on long-stem roses (inventory) with her. Wouldn't y'all worry about her business?
Ah, the trashy lesbian novel -- judging from my bookcase, Naiad was the heavyweight -- Seal was pure crap, straight up (as it were), no chaser.
Before all the publishing houses swallowed each other up, you could get good fiction from faber & faber and Plume, among other imprints.
For the last 25 years or so, it seems every hetset trashy best-seller had one lesbian scene -- I think it was in the writer's contract -- those scenes made Naiad look like a scholarly press.
Post a Comment