This is a topic near and dear to my own heart. I started writing more than forty years ago when I was a little kid – I always felt the need to write.
And as I grew older and realized I was gay, I wanted to include LGBT characters in my work. At first, I was really tentative about it – back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, there were very few LGBt characters in sci fi and fantasy, and I could count on one hand the books that had major protagonists who were gay.
Fast forward to now, and MM Romance has invigorated the LGBT fiction community, bringing many new voices into it, and a number of those voices have branched out into genre fiction, but more often than not with an MM romance heart.
I love a good MM romance, but I’d like to see more of us take the next step, and find a way to start telling LGBT stories that are more centered on the sci fi, fantasy and paranormal aspects than the romance.
What do y’all think? Who is doing this now? And how can we move more toward such a paradigm?