I studies Japanese Pop Culture, and I used Japanese yaoi (MM) genre for my thesis. in yaoi, almost all of the writers and readers are women. it can be seen that Japanese women uses this genre as a mirror for their own relationship, because there are not traditionally bound as the real relationship in real life. the characters are seen as the ideal image of a man, and this ideal man-figure make the story accepted and loved by many of the readers (women). even if they (the characters) are impossible to exist in the real world. (or, BECAUSE they are impossible to exist?) Also, these fictional romances also could be seen as 'the last type of forbidden love' -kind of story. Japanese love a forbidden love-story.

Sorry for bumping up an old topic guys. But I have read an excellent book called The Charioteer by a woman named Mary Renault. It's a classic and about romance between two men during the war. I believe auswombat mentioned her in a previous post and I just wanted to vouch for the author. Her book was very touching. I am a female and write MM fiction myself but nothing close to erotica. Instead, I use authors like Edmund White, Scott Heim, and Dennis Cooper as inspirations for writing gay fiction that may leave an impact on readers and have a deeper meaning.

Also, a recent bestseller involving queer literature is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Excellent but long read.

[auswombat]

Sorry for bumping up an old topic guys. But I have read an excellent book called The Charioteer by a woman named Mary Renault. It's a classic and about romance between two men during the war. I believe auswombat mentioned her in a previous post and I just wanted to vouch for the author. Her book was very touching. I am a female and write MM fiction myself but nothing close to erotica. Instead, I use authors like Edmund White, Scott Heim, and Dennis Cooper as inspirations for writing gay fiction that may leave an impact on readers and have a deeper meaning.

Also, a recent bestseller involving queer literature is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Excellent but long read.

amiieey,

Mary Renault was one of the greatest historical novelists of all time, and for years many people did not believe that a female could write so well, particularly about gay men. One day when I get the time, I will post the biography of Mary Renault (by David Sweetman), but it needs to be digitised first.

"Mary Renault was born in London, where her father was a doctor. She first went to Oxford with the idea of teaching, but decided that she wanted to be a writer instead, and that after taking her degree she should broaden her knowledge of human life. She then trained for three years as a nurse, and wrote her first published novel, Promise of Love. Her next three novels were written during off-duty time when serving in World War II. One of them, Return to Night, received the MGM award. After the war, she went to South Africa and settled at the Cape. She has traveled considerably in Africa and has gone up the east coast to Zanzibar and Mombasa. But it was her travels in Greece that resulted in her previous brilliant historical reconstructions of ancient Greece. The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo, Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and The Praise Singer. In addition to the novels, she has written a biography of Alexander the Great, The Nature of Alexander. "

You may be interested in my post of 9 Novels by Mary Renault at:

viewtopic.php?f=121&t=589935&start=0&hilit=mary+renault

Mary Renault's research into the life and times of Alexander The Great was most impressive, and if you can find her Non-Fiction work "The Nature of Alexander", it is well worth the read. It was on this research that she based her Alexander trilogy; "Fire From Heaven", "The Persian Boy" and "Funeral Games".
"The Charioteer" was ground-breaking for its time, and "The Last of the Wine" is the story of two male lovers who fight side by side in a battalion of like minded souls espousing the Socratic ideal.

I'm a gay male who found the genre through Mobilism... and a few days later was hugely discouraged and outraged to find that it's largely predominated by and for women. I searched for MM actually authored by, well, M, and just summarized a bit about why here.

I listen to audiobooks while I work, as I don't often have time to read visually anymore. Not only do we not appear to have a way to search for specifically 'MM by M', I went through auswombat's excellent list of recommended authors and was disappointingly unable to find any MM audiobooks by them here. Or any 'MM by M' audiobooks here, though I'm not sure how to differentiate automatically, rather than backchecking each author individually first.

Recommendations?

I omitted one excellent writer of quality MM fiction from my list of authors;

Andre Aciman, Jamie O'Neill, Joseph Hansen, Gore Vidal, Anthony McDonald, Matthew Stadler, Christopher Isherwood, Michael Lowenthal, Paul Monette, Christos Tsiolkas, Paul Russell, Christopher Rice, Keith Hale, Yukio Mishima, Thomas Mann, Alexander Chee, Mark Behr, James Purdy, Tom Spanbauer, Michael Cunningham, Felice Picano, Roger Peyrefitte, E. M. Forster, Jim Provenzano, Scott Heim, Angus Stewart, Dale Peck, Ben Monopoli, James Magruder, Shyam Selvadurai, John Fox, Alan Hollinghurst, David Levithan,

so I should add Benjamin Alire Saenz for his excellent "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe". I should also add Paul Russell.

It seems that you did!

To answer the original question I'm not going to not read a MM romance just because it was written by a woman. Many of them do, however, seem to have no idea of what sex between two men is really like. I'm annoyed that someone would have a character shove a wadded up T-shirt between his legs to catch leaks when there's no reason for anything to leak or comment that bareback sex is so much messier. They seem to write to their readers expectations rather than reality. While male writers will sometimes have monogamous relationship spring up between two former sluts or something equally implausible, they do get the mechanics of the physical relationship right. I kind of wonder if the women who read MM romance even understand that there are mistakes in the book. If they read Marshall Thronton do you think they'd complain that he got everything wrong because it's not what they're used to reading?