Man on Man: The New Gay Romance ...

Vaughan once wrote four pages at the company where she is a health-care administrator. When she got home, a page was missing. She imagined the horror of asking her co-workers, “Excuse me, do you have my smut?”

Yes, there’s a sense of horror when she tells the story, sure, but there’s also pleasure lurking beneath the surface, a thrill at almost being caught. A sense of the illicit. It’s hard to say whether these novels would be as compelling if mainstream culture accepted being gay.

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• James Buchanan
• Stephanie Vaughan
• Michael Bailey
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Sometimes Vaughan’s stories are based on her office mates, a man she works with maybe, who doesn’t know he’s gay. Or, at least, doesn’t know that Vaughan wants him to be gay. It starts with a look, a charged moment. “I think, ‘What would give them the most difficulty,’ ” she says. “What would torture them the most?”

This sort of “what if?” fantasizing is in one sense what really fueled the gay-romance revolution. The bulk of today’s writers in the genre started writing “slash” fiction, where you take two preexisting characters who are normally straight and make them gay. Such combinations are indicated as M/M (two men) or F/F (two women), or M/M/F/Werewolf (two men, a woman and a werewolf).

Women would write stories as part of what Prof. Penley calls a “gift economy.” In slash fandom, where almost everyone is a writer, you create something, hoping it will inspire someone else to write another story. It’s a sexed-up game of Exquisite Corpse. “In other words, I will write this really hot story, and maybe in turn you will write one for me. They’re doing it for their own pleasure,” she says.

Slash found its best, most perfect medium online, but it’s been around for decades. Penley first came across it in 1986, when slash stories were being distributed as photocopied zines, like comic books. She was blown away by them, at the writers’ transgressions; by the way the women rewrote popular culture to meet their own social and sexual desires.

In the process, their act of consumption had turned into an act of production. These writers picked up on the homoeroticism of every male pair on television and gleefully ran with it. They slashed Kirk and Spock. Or Starsky and Hutch. “They were just doing what the producers didn’t have the nerve to do,” Penley says. It was, she adds, the first time she’d ever really responded to porn.

Author A.M. Riley, by day a film editor for PG animation, describes her descent into slash fiction as an act of rebellion: “One day I was working on a Winnie the Pooh straight-to-video and it was so, so bad. I went home and took Winnie the Pooh and slashed him. Winnie, Tigger and Piglet have sex.”

On a recent afternoon, Riley putters around the small Toluca Lake apartment she shares with her daughter. Riley is slim, with shaggy, cropped dark hair and expressive eyes. She snuggles deeper into the hood of her sweatshirt. “I sit there on planes when I’m traveling and wonder, ‘God, if everyone knew what I was thinking,’ ” she says. “But everybody on the plane is probably thinking it!”

Like Buchanan, Riley writes about gay cops. Evening is falling, and in the half-light, the G.I. Joes on her office shelves seem like they might spring to life at any moment and start fighting — or kissing. Writing fiction, Riley believes, is a lot like playing with dolls.

Her new book, Immortality Is the Suck, is currently in edits. “The vampire character used to be a vice cop,” she says. “Remember a few months ago, when they did the bust of the Mongol Motorcycle Club? ATF and LAPD got a couple people in there as undercover cops,” she says. “I wrote about the guy who busted them. He rides a Harley. Then they turn him into a vampire.”

Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 film that catapulted gay love stories into the mainstream, is often mistaken to be the work that started the gay-romance genre. But Brokeback did not go over well in the M/M community. It was slashed beyond recognition, online and off — much to the chagrin of author Annie Proulx, who was moved to complain to The Wall Street Journal about the endless “ghastly” and “pornish” manuscripts she receives.

Gay-romancers believe Proulx — and her readers — need their help. “Proulx writes these stories about people who create their own hell and then die in it,” Riley says, her voice dripping with scorn. “The guy in that story ruins everybody’s life because he can’t accept who he is. It’s just all so horribly painful. If these people only had the balls to be happy.”