Reading Gay Romance as Truth Serum
I wonder if I’m alone in having the experience of reading gay romance and, in the process, rethinking my marriage. Before I started reading gay romance, I read het romance for long time and didn’t rethink my marriage. Why was reading gay romance so different? Following that question’s trail of clues continues to take me to places where I feel more at home.
My first novel, Everyday History, was conceived during a time when I was trying to come to grips with my reactions to gay love stories. I had occasionally read and enjoyed novels or seen movies that included a gay storyline, but suddenly I couldn’t get enough of those stories. Big parts of my life felt scary, and I relished the distraction of stories that seemed to be giving me something I needed. I just wasn’t sure what that something was.
While I was trying to figure that out, I watched a ridiculous number of German soap opera snippets online, following the gay storylines. I bought a bunch of gay romance novels and stayed up until dawn reading them. Why did I care about the characters so much? And why had I started writing a romance novel about two men, Henry and Ruben, during a time when I didn’t have enough income to support myself and felt like I should be focusing all my attention on that? I enjoyed those gay romance watching and reading and writing activities to the point that it freaked me out. I belatedly decided to do a Google search to see how weird I might be.
In the Google search field I entered something like straight woman who likes gay romance, and up popped pages and pages of results. I gawked at the screen, burst into tears, followed links, and spent the next two days opening up to what might be true for me. Connecting with all of that information helped me not feel so alone (Google for the win, yet again). What I soon clarified was that I was drawn to stories of courage about being truthful. There’s usually plenty of truth-telling in het romances, but gay love stories affected me more on that score than het stories. (Years later, I would also clarify other facets involved, which I wrote about here and here.)
Once courage and truth came onstage in my conscious awareness, they demanded a lot more attention. I looked around at my life and admitted it wasn’t going well. My husband and I had been in Germany for two years by then (and I’d lived with him in Canada for a decade before that). I adored Germany and the town where we lived, but my life had been falling apart for a while. I couldn’t find enough work to support myself anymore, my savings were tapped out, and my marriage, when I dared myself to take an honest look at it, was really not working for me.
I dried my tears, made three signs on big index cards, stuck them above my desk at eye level, and stared at them for hours: Truth. Courage. Boldness. I put them in that order, because I knew truth came first. One day, I wrote in my journal, You can't shove aside the truth and have any chance of being actually happy. I began trying to tell myself the truth, as a place to start, and slowly things started to shift.
That autumn, I spent my mornings doing everything I could think of to bring in more money. I tried hundreds of things (I know because I made a spreadsheet). I’d been successfully self-employed for years before moving to Germany—working online and by phone, but my business tanked for some reason when I tried to do it from Germany. By lunchtime every day I was exhausted and depleted. I spent my afternoons relieving the pressure of my lack of income and my doomed marriage by taking long walks and by experimenting with writing a novel to tell myself the story of Henry and Ruben. I told the story I most needed to read and clutched it like a life preserver.
I’d written stories before, had even finished a messy first draft of a het romance, but I’d always been daunted by the task of organizing an entire novel. Writing Everyday History was different. Because I needed that story so much, to give myself the courage to do what needed to be done in my real life, the words flew onto the page. An organic order and story format made itself known to me—that was how the writing process felt. I opened, and something more beautiful than my own life at the time moved through me. When I was writing about Henry and Ruben I could breathe.
The scariest thing, now that I'm looking and seeing, I wrote in my journal at the time, is the extreme gap between what I have and what I want. I can’t un-know this. I'm going to have to do something about it.
Less than a year later, I left my husband (in the gentlest, most caring way I could think of), bid Germany a bittersweet farewell, and moved back to the US, where I hadn’t lived in thirteen years. My income picked up again. I finished Everyday History, found a publisher, and started writing another novel. A little truth became a life.
The smallest step can end up leading the way to a metamorphosis. And the boldest writing and reading drenches life in truth serum. Go where you need to go, look where you need to look, even if you’re scared. Everything is there.
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Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more. She also writes nonfiction for quiet people as author Grace Kerina.
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