The Sublime and Spirited Voyage of Original Sin by Colette Moody

Rameau: I asked, “Why don’t you set up a blog yourself?” The next thing I knew I was part of an email chain trying to decide the domain name.īeks: As an author of multicultural queer titles I found it very difficult to get my stories reviewed. Ridley: I wanted to get a group blog together with other people who are marginalized in some way and have the uncomfortable conversations about romance that we need to have.

JESSICA LUTHER: Why did you all start Love In The Margins last year? I talked with the Love in the Margins crew about diversity in the romance genre and their favorite reads. And Beks is a queer woman of color who has only been reading romance for the last six years and writing romance for three years under her full name Rebekah Weatherspoon.Now she reads in two-in a pinch in three-languages and flits from one genre to another. Rameau is the European who has read romance ever since she stole her first Harlequin from her mother’s stash.She hopes to never be any kind of famous, so her screen name is always subject to change. Meoskop has been reading and reviewing romance for several decades.Ridley is a funemployed wheelchair user in the Boston area who blogs about romance when she’s not watching hockey.There are four people who blog at the site: One of the best blogs out there interested in “how the romance genre tells (and avoids telling) the stories of those whose lives don’t fit into the neat and tidy box labeled “glamorous” is Love In The Margins. To go along with it, there are now blogs and sites dedicated to drawing attention to these more marginalized aspects of the romance genre. And the vast majority of these novels feature white, heterosexual, typically thin, not poor, educated, able-bodied protagonists.īut there is an exciting thing happening in romance these days: if you know where to look, you can find are a wide variety of novels that feature people of color, queer relationships, fat characters, and/or protagonists with blue-collar jobs. Romance novels are the largest share of the fiction market. Millions of people-mainly women-read them each year, generating billions of dollars in sales annually. For the week around Valentine’s Day, writer Jessica Luther is writing a series of three articles about gender, race, and sexuality in romance novels.

The Sublime and Spirited Voyage of Original Sin by Colette Moody