Romance, why am I so attracted to it?

“Love, in a world where carpenters can be resurected, anything is possible”

  Eleanor of Aquitaine

 

Years ago I discovered Lesbian romance novels. I had never really enjoyed romance novels I didn’t find

them realistic. But, when I discovered the novels of Karin Kallmaker I didn’t really care how realistic they were, I was hooked.

You see,  I had read gay and lesbian theme books before, but, they always tended to end badly, to offer no hope.

It could also be that at the time I discovered Kallmaker I discovered the gay, lesbian and feminist bookstore

(the now dearly departed L’Androgyne.)

I wanted to read about women like me. Women  who were attracted to and loved other women. I was not suicidal

and I was not ashamed but, I was starving for representation. At the time, lesbians did not exist except in a pathetic

or derisive way in books or movies. Sometimes it feels like yesterday and sometimes like a century ago.

It is in fact fifteen, twenty years give or take a year. The world has changed a lot since then. We went from kd Lang

and Melissa Etheridge coming out to the big splash of Ellen. In Canada, where I live it is legal to marry—- that my friends is progress.

It used to be that we would get excited about a movie where the lesbian(actually bisexual) character

was a vampire because there on screen were two beautiful women (Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in The

Hunger) kissing and topless.

Kallmaker and others represented lesbians in happy mode. Wooing each other, breaking up, getting back together and having hot and heavy sex. The sex was hot but, it always involved love and that to me is irresistible.

I’m a hopeless romantic. I love a happy ending. I know, from personal experience, that life isn’t like that

 but, so what, a girl can dream can’t she?

I’m attracted to romance novels  because, I’m attracted to hope.