I spend a lot of time, like, pontificating here, so if you just want the answer: It’s the “Well, he must be gay” ~zinger~ re: the MMC, and the “We should give up on men and be lesbians together” re: the FMC and her just-so-devastatingly-sassy BFF, and the stuff, etc., ad nauseam, like that.
If you want the extrapolation, well, read on, friends.
Per the post title, I’m assuming heterosexuality, but don’t let me stop you from exploring your identity. This particular Thing just, ya know. Reeks of the kind of heteronormative “humor” I thought was exclusive to ’90s sitcoms and early aughts junior high insults, and yet… Well, let’s get into it—in a minute.
(Or, upon editing, a couple of minutes. Perchance a few. Several, depending on how you quantify time.)
(I don’t mean to clickbait, I just love to set a scene.)
Once upon a time in my twenty-somethings, I was really into erotic and high-heat/drama romance novels. That’s what I wanted to write, and it’s what I started out writing. Until this whole journey—tl;dr my demisexual ass realized I didn’t really Get It enough to write about it with any success, because there was no joy and therefore no authenticity. I had nothing left to say about it, so I moved on and figured out where my writing belonged.
Or, at least, where my writing makes me happy, because, sure, I write romance and comedy, but my stuff doesn’t really suit the conventions of the romantic comedy, so. Who knows what this is, but I like it.
Anyway, anyway…
Lately, aka this entire year, I’ve been overrun by day job projects and the overwhelming stress that is *gestures vaguely* the world around us. I’m worried about the general state of things, about my health insurance, my bank account (overrun by day job projects does not, after all, equate financial stability, HOLY CAPITALISM, BATMAN!—).
I’ve been preoccupied with self-esteem issues I thought I got over, and trying to get over them on this next go-around. I’m wondering where my writing’s going to take me, if I’ll get anywhere beyond where I am (and where I am is fine, but is there more?). I’m bone-tired of having to do things, of making every decision by myself, of that suffocating loneliness that really starts to get to you after ten years of single life when that’s not the life you want.
I’ve been feeling stuck, in limbo, waiting for something but I’m too busy burning the candle at ends I’d never heard of before to get up and go after that something. I don’t even know what it looks like.
Life in 2026 has become a series of to-do lists and end-of-the-day doomscrolling because I don’t have it in me for anything else.
And I. Do not like that.
So, in an impressive spectacular show-stopping moment of willpower, I abandoned my socials in favor of Libby.
Allow me to digress, again, to impress upon you how much you need to be using Libby, and libraries in general. You don’t have to buy every book you want to read, only to join the overabundance of TBR memes about how you just bought more books to add to the pile.
Fuckin’. Go to the library. Support a public service, see if you like a book before you buy it, and like, chill with the overconsumption.
(That’s what people mean when they talk about the overconsumption of books, btw. It’s not language to discourage you from reading; it’s to critique the contemporary book culture’s obsession with buying buying buying. Sometimes buying is the only option—particularly when it comes to indie authors—but, no, honestly I don’t think anybody Needs the special edition sprayed edges. What are you even gonna do with that? Stare at it? Riveting.)
Christ, if my brain’s the malfunctioning confetti cannon, this post is the mess it left behind. Where was I?
Okay, so, in my efforts to get the hell off any and all FYPs for a night, I turned to Libby for sustenance. I still wanted to shut down my brain, so I put aside my recent music (auto)biography binge for my old standby of erotic romance. It’s a genre you can just lose yourself in, something I enjoy the same way I’ll eat a Lifetime movie marathon alive, except I don’t have cable anymore so that’s harder to get. Dark, erotic, high drama, etc. romance ebooks and audiobooks, though, are easier than coming upon an Instagram reel that was worth the two-to-three hours of scrolling.
It’s been a couple of months since my first step back into these subgenres, and I pretty quickly remembered why I don’t Get It. I don’t need to Get It to have a perfectly nice time—nothing’s worse than a reader-centric approach to writing, imo—but some of you are really pissing me off.
Criticism of BookTok and all its constituents does not live and die by antifeminist sentiment. Sure, some of it’s that same ol’, same ol’ “Those aren’t REAL books, it’s just porn” discourse—which is fuckin’ rich coming from dudes whose greatest wet dream is to be Jon Snow, but—
There are a lot of issues with romance that didn’t phase out in a culturally timely manner, or at all. There continues to be an obsession, especially in these high-heat romances, with MAN BIG AND STRONG AND ALSO BIG and women who could otherwise be known as Thumbelina. If I read another specification of a grown woman’s “small hands” around the dude’s “massive length,” I’m gonna put myself in a medically-induced coma.
Why do her hands have to be so small. Why are you telling us this.
Coupled with the hero’s fascination with the heroine’s “innocence” and “how young she looks,” surely you see the problem. Surely. Please. I need you to see the problem.
This concentration on women’s youth and size and body type and body hair in comparison with men’s, this dichotomy of masculine and feminine… It’s regressive, woefully non-inclusive, and, if I may, just really fuckin’ weird, guys. Keep talking about how it’s all for the fantasy of it, I don’t know WHAT that has to do with “curves in all the right places” (is there somewhere they’re not supposed to be???? What does this MEAN).
But I’m not even here to talk about any of that!!!!!! Alas, I’ve gotten away from myself again. Such is the nature of my not-so-fun funhouse of a brain.
Truthfully, I think all of the above is going to be more of ~process~ for authors and readers to unlearn. What I want to talk about—what the point of this post was supposed to be—is something you can simply knock the hell off.
A hundred years ago, when you first started reading this, I revealed The Point because I’m just not one for antici…………………pation. If you can reach that far back into your memory, the line I need straight romance authors to cut from their sassy-joke Rolodex is the “He must be gay” bit.
I’ve read A Lot of romance novels. Not just in my latest foray—which has evolved from shutting-down-my-brain to necessary research for my own next book (a stoner comedy of sorts, I’ll talk more about that when I’ve completely nailed down the outline)—but since the tender age of twelve, when I could walk to the local K-Mart for a ten-dollar Nora Roberts paperback, so I could learn about yearning without actually subjecting myself to the experience.
In the ensuing twenty-four years, I’ve picked up on this “He must be gay” bit that, surprise surprise, feels more common lately than it did back in the day. I’m shit at percentages, but the vast majority of these M/F romances I’ve read were written in the 2010s-2020s and include this in some shape or form. (And a lot of the M/M ones really hit home the biphobia to compensate. The F/F ones, though, I haven’t run into too many issues there.)
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it goes something like this:
The MMC is to some degree aloof or mysterious or seemingly uninterested in the FMC or, sometimes, her “ballsy, badass bestie” who decides to hit on him first. Conclusion? “He must be gay, because no man can resist a hot girl who offers him a no-strings hookup” (GOD FORBID we think for the splittest of seconds that the FMC isn’t the hottest woman to ever live, and ditto for her BFF who’s probably starring in book two, and nobody wants to read about normies gettin’ railed so don’t you even consider the possibility).
Or! “No way he’s gay, no man who looks like that can be gay unless God has a really sick sense of humor.” OR! “Must be gay. What a waste.” OR!!! …Well, that’s all I’ve got. Dialogue to that effect.
This can be mirrored back at the FMC, too. If she doesn’t do relationships, if she and her best friend are really close, blah blah, there’s some ha-ha-ha reference to scissoring.
Whoever the subject, the potential for queerness is treated as such an LOL, absurd, outrageous, or a personal slight against the opposite-sex character who wants to fuck them. It’s played for laughs, no one’s slingin’ slurs, but I gotta tell ya, that doesn’t make it less homophobic. It’s just a real thin smokescreen for you to pretend you’re funny.
Even if these sooooooo charming chuckle moments didn’t treat gay people like Not People, like the mere notion that someone could be gay is UNHEARD OF, it’s not even clever. Every time, I’m rolling my eyes so hard that I’m gonna divvy up the invoice for my retinal detachment among all you fuckwits who’ve written some variation of this (medical care is out of control in the U.S., but so many of you assholes write this shit, it’s gonna run you like nine bucks, calm down).
Like!!!! Are straight people really so preoccupied with everyone else’s sexuality that they have nothing else to talk about???
(I mean… yeah, I guess y’all continue to confirm that. Queer people don’t even talk about it as much as you do.)
It’s never some character quirk, either, a Lesson they have to learn about not being a dick and minding their own business. It’s very clearly a reflection of, at best, the author’s sense of humor; at worst, the author’s ideologies. Occasionally, later in the book, the MCs will have some fuckass conversation about “Love is love” to position themselves as allies, lest the author get canceled for being Not An Ally. But it’s so shoehorned in that you might as well write them listening to Diana Ross and call it close enough, job well done.
(And that is NOT a dig at Diana Ross. Obviously I’ve got “I’m Coming Out” queued on my queer playlist, but you know what I mean. Whatever, I’ve been overexplaining myself this whole time, either you know or you don’t. I’m not your tour guide into Queerlandia, and if I am, it’s under duress. Or because someone pissed me off. Which, yeah, I guess that circles back to how this post started.)
(Oh, well. I played myself.)
There’s no way to slice it to make this “joke” acceptable, and certainly nothing makes it funny. The people you’re attracted to don’t owe you reciprocation, they don’t owe you their sexuality. It’s not a “waste” for a hot guy to be gay—that one continues to baffle me beyond repair—and someone not wanting to fuck you doesn’t say anything about their sexuality. Maybe you just suck.
Whenever I read any iteration of this line, I just. I Get It even less than the fascination with deeply defined abs (he’s DEHYDRATED, get that man some goddamn electrolytes). It’s like these authors have never met a queer person before, like they think being gay is such an absolute anomaly, of course that can’t be the case, and if it is, well, isn’t that just such a bummer for all the straights who want to ride that rollercoaster.
As if you people don’t already have your rights by default, my god, quit your weird bitching and develop some shit that’s actually funny. Or stop trying to be funny at all. None of these books are comedies!!!! It’s not even required!!!!
(Well. I’ve seen this in romcoms too, but I don’t read those as much because they’re not funny either—and they’re supposed to be—so my data in that subgenre is too lacking for me to include it.)
It’s totally bonkers to me that this gets written in the first place, and then edited, and then it goes to print, and so many of these books go viral and get optioned for screen and have 4-star+ ratings. I am so tired of having to ignore an author’s catty microaggressions for the sake of this ill-disguised “”banter”” (strike that word from the English language, we’ve done enough).
And, yes, I wish it wasn’t that deep, but saying “It’s not that deep” about everything that you enjoy just so you can continue to enjoy it guilt-free has contributed to the media literacy crisis like nothing else.
What you write tells me something about who you are. You can write mess and moral complexity and real people, you can write something heinous, something fucked up and back again, you can do your worst—and that content isn’t a reflection of you, but the devil’s in the details.
I am loathe to talk about Joanne, but for the sake of what I’m trying to say here, let’s look at Public Embarrassment Rowling: On the outset, Harry Potter is a series about the enduring power of love and friendship and what it takes to be a good person against every odd that tries to make you something else, something worse. But the details…
- Rowling’s fixation on motherhood as the defining feature of her female characters (Lily’s sacrifice as the catalyst for Harry’s journey; Molly’s entire role; McGonagall’s strict but maternal nature; Hermione’s position as Harry and Ron’s caretaker, from doing their homework to often doing the work that saves their lives).
- Other female characters are framed as giggling ditzes (Lavender and Parvati), or crazed villains (single and childless Bellatrix—because, yeah, we’re ignoring whatever the fuck Cursed Child is, I don’t have time for this), or hot and desirable tomboys (Ginny, and Cho until she cries a lot because her boyfriend was murdered, god, how dare she emote).
- Rowling’s treatment of her POC characters (an Asian girl named Cho Chang, a Black man named Kingsley Shacklebolt, the fact that there’s a sum total of, like, seven POC characters at all).
- Rita Skeeter in general (a woman with “mannish” features, who disguises herself to spy on children—the conservatives are eating this shit up).
- The reveal that Dumbledore is gay, and in fact his feelings for Grindelwald played a major part in his character design and development—but when Rowling had the chance to explore that in Fantastic Beasts, she chose not to; it was ignored, discarded, irrelevant.
Those aren’t all of the details that should have shown us who Joanne really is; but her prejudices have been on display, just hidden behind the overarching theme. A theme that doesn’t hold water once you clock those details, but it sure did the job for a while there.
The “Well, he must be gay” bit falls under this umbrella.
Maybe you’re an author who’s written it. Maybe you’re a reader who’s laughed at it, or thought it was clever or relatable. Maybe you’re even a queer person who doesn’t see the big deal. I’ve got nothing in the tank for the latter, but for the rest of you:
It’s not even a good joke. It’s tired, overplayed, it has no bearing on character or plot. Not everything has to, I love a useless detail, superfluous set dressing, that whole shebang. But making queer people the joke? Come on, guys. You wanna be a writer, you’ve gotta write better material than that.
It’s just a quip that’s not worth it. It’s a recycled bit from Friends that’s ignorant in context, and fuckin’ obtuse today. Wrap it up, pals. I’m a sucker for nostalgia, but we can leave the ’90s homophobia behind.
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