Bienvenue!
This is In Love With A Queer Romance , a brand new site by me, Mel Clevenger. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!
In the meanwhile, I invite you to cozy up while I give y'all a brief introduction to myself and what I plan on doing with this space. Like most people, I'm an ordinary working stiff with a standard-issue corporate job. As anyone knows who has this kind of job, it's not exactly the most intellectually stimulating. Add that with the fact that I am one of nature's power readers coupled with the everything of the past five years...
Well, you've got a recipe for someone who's in desperate need for a little dopamine, and I'm about to make it all y'alls problem.
You see, not only am I one of nature's power readers, in recent years I have fallen down a deep romance novel rabbit hole. It's been lovely, truly it has. I've been wrapped up in tulle and lace and leather and expensive suits and bad decisions and cozy home towns where high school romances have been rekindled. Romance is fun and wonderful and joyous.
And all too often I've felt somewhat sidelined. You see, as a middle-aged queer (they/them pronouns thank you very much), I see a lot of joy in romance novels, but not as much of it looks like me. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of great LGBTQIA romance novels out there, but I don't think they get nearly as much love as they deserve, and I for one intend to glow up as many of these gems as I can because my community deserves nice things, and because fiction is a great empathy engine. Even straight readers can find beautiful things in our fiction, and right now we need as much empathy as we can get.
So the rough plan is to review two romance novels featuring queer protagonists, with a preference for novels written by people who identify as queer. We won't exclusively require that last bit, not the least because it's problematic to require outness in a country that recently reelected the depraved creature it reelected, but I do want to boost our community economically whenever I can.
With that out of the way, I'm going to pop off to watch a bit of PWHL and then maybe stick my nose into a queer romance.
