F
Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, New Adult, Romance
Theme: One Night Stand, Second Chance, Sports
Archetype: Athlete
This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Giraffe. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Mid-Length Contemporary category.
The summary:
They don’t play for the same team. Or do they?
Jamie Canning has never been able to figure out how he lost his closest friend. Four years ago, his tattooed, wise-cracking, rule-breaking roommate cut him off without an explanation. So what if things got a little weird on the last night of hockey camp the summer they were eighteen? It was just a little drunken foolishness. Nobody died.
Ryan Wesley’s biggest regret is coaxing his very straight friend into a bet that pushed the boundaries of their relationship. Now, with their college teams set to face off at the national championship, he’ll finally get a chance to apologize. But all it takes is one look at his longtime crush, and the ache is stronger than ever.
Jamie has waited a long time for answers, but walks away with only more questions—can one night of sex ruin a friendship? If not, how about six more weeks of it? When Wesley turns up to coach alongside Jamie for one more hot summer at camp, Jamie has a few things to discover about his old friend…and a big one to learn about himself.
Here is Giraffe's review:
TL;DR: If you want to pretend that you’re getting fuzzy warm equality feels, but actually like stereotyping gay men, this is an A+ gold star book. The story is competent. There are cute moments. It’s hot. I get why this is a RITA finalist and why there are a bunch of squeeing reviews on Amazon.
If you’re at all remotely anywhere on the queer spectrum, or, you know, if you’re an actual ally? You might feel differently.
There’s no way for me to dissect how horrifically bad this book is without giving away plot points, so put on your spoiler ponchos.
The premise of this book is that Ryan, who is gay, and openly so (to himself, to a Grindr-alike app, and to some close friends, but not the rest of the world), is a hockey player. His best friend in high school, Jamie, is straight. Ryan and Jamie make a bet that whoever wins a little shoot-out gets a blow job from the other person. Jamie wins; Ryan gives him a blowjob, loves it, and cuts his friend off for four years because he’s wracked with guilt that he seduced his straight friend.
One of the reasons that gay men get beaten up when they come out is because there’s a persistent myth/stereotype of the gay man as a predator who just wants to plug straight ass. You have to watch out, my dear little boys, because he’s coming for you.
Gay panic kills people. It also isolates gay kids who come out only to have friends turn on them, which directly contributes to increased rates of depression and suicide. To have the set-up of your book be that one of your main characters has internalized homophobia to the extent that he is the one preemptively deploying gay panic on himself? That would require a really deft understanding and then later dismantling of the stereotype for me to take it.
I will give Him a slight advantage for recognizing that Jamie is bisexual. But, Ryan, the gay partner, constantly beats himself up because he is making Jamie give up all the world’s population as potential sexual partners. Jamie could be with a woman. Maybe someday he will decide he wants a woman instead. Et cetera et cetera et cetera.
I’d be fine with this discussion if there were any understanding in the narrative that this was biphobic crap.
If you choose monogamy (and not knocking anyone who doesn’t, but for those who do), you give up having sex with the rest of the world. There are 7+ billion people in it. Nobody can have sex with all possible partners even if they wanted to. Adding an entire extra gender is irrelevant, because nobody can have sex with everyone, and lemme point out, even nonmonogamous people do not want to. It doesn’t matter if you are gay or straight or bi. Treating bisexual people as peculiarly different in this regard is biphobic.
But instead of treating this carefully, it’s dealt with by…dissing women, of course. Here’s the pitch for choosing men over women (and it’s men over women, not Ryan over the rest of the world):
“You wake up on a weekend beside your really hot boyfriend, and fuck like horny hedgehogs for a couple of hours. Then you spend the rest of the day watching sports on television, and nobody ever says”—he pitches his voice high—“honey, you said we could go to the mall!”
Bitches, amirite?
It gets worse. Near the end of the book, Ryan gets picked up by a professional hockey team, but he’s worried about his status as a gay man, particularly since he now has a boyfriend and could be outed. He decides come out to the coaches of the team.
I do not have enough rage for what that conversation reveals.
I’m…dumbfounded. “My coach told you?”
He shrugs like this is nothing surprising. “The coach didn’t want you to hitch your wagon to a team that wouldn’t treat you right. He did you a favor.”
I’m going to let that sink in.
He did you a favor.
Yes, this book has a straight person outing a mostly closeted gay man, and telling him that he was done a favor. I’d be able to swallow this if there were any sense that this was a bad thing. But at the end of the chapter, Ryan is relieved. He agrees that his college coach, who he trusted, was right to out him to a prospective employer without any discussion, let alone consent, and never mind informing him about the fact.
There is no discussion anywhere in the narrative that Ryan should have had any choice in coming out to his team. There’s no thought that Ryan is a gay man in a rough sport dominated by machismo and fights. There’s no thought that not only was he outed, nobody TOLD HIM he was outed. What if his new team had jumped him on the ice to get him out of their locker room? Coaches can’t stop that. And what other teams did his college coach tell? Who might know now? Is Ryan in danger?
How is it that Ryan, a gay man who has been careful about shielding his orientation from the public eye, doesn’t immediately jump to the question of his safety? How is he relieved and pleased instead of worried and mad and scared?
I get that the plethora of positive coming out stories conveys the impression that coming out is always a good thing. That doesn’t mean you force it on other people, or that people are wrong if they are not out. Sometimes it is not safe to come out. Some people who are out in some circumstances are not in others, because there are still places it is not safe to be gay. And some people do not have supportive workplaces, or parents, and “not supportive” sometimes means that someone could die, because you thought you knew better than the person who was literally living that life.
Never, EVER out anyone, not for their own good, not to do them a favor, not to a prospective employer. And the fact that this happens to Ryan and he’s relieved? No. N. O.
Then we have the end, where Ryan presents Jamie with a medical test stating that he is STD-negative. No, Jamie does not provide the same. The only one who has to prove his worthiness with an STD-check is the guy who had previously engaged in gay sex.
I’m not dissing STD checks or safety. Yay, safety. I am dissing the homophobia in having only one character provide them.
Especially since the narrative is pretty clear that Ryan has done his best to be careful, and hasn’t engaged in much risky activity. The narrative spelled out that until Jamie, Ryan only had receptive anal sex once. And Ryan’s understanding of anal sex is so weird (he honestly believes that it takes thirty minutes to get a dick in an anus unless you wear a butt plug for hours beforehand?) that I can’t imagine that he’s a pro at anal.
It’s also pretty clear that Jamie was sexually active and made a point of having fuck buddies over real relationships. As far as risk factors go, the two are actually fairly equal.
This scene serves no purpose except to reassure the reader that the gay guy was “clean” (I hate that word) while giving the straight dude a pass. Because hey, we’ve hit all the stereotypes so far. Why not also reinforce that gay men are potentially disease-riddled?
Lots of people like this book, and fine, I get that.
Me personally, I give this book an F for “fuck this homophobic piece of shit.”
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The complete ignoring of bisexuality also turns up in Bowen’s The Understatement of the Year. Graham can’t be bi, oh no, he has to be the kind of self-hating gay guy who sleeps with a woman and leads her on to avoid admitting he’s not into her, and uses her as his beard.
That’s too bad. Normally I really like Elle Kennedy, but the things you point out are egregious. I’m going to blame them all on the co-author.
I am SO glad for this review. Thanks for writing it.
I am confused on a minor point, though. One review says the guy’s name is Wes, the other says it’s Ryan. Which is it?
@Lara – the character’s name is “Ryan Wesley.”
When I saw on the spreadsheet that one of the reviewers gave this an F I was really curious to see why. Thanks for the review — this book would have filled me with the burning rage of white hot suns.
Thank you for this review. I avoid M/M written by women, but was tempted to cave on this one based on the overwhelming amount of acclaim it’s received. This review–and the fact that the book is so well-loved and its fans either oblivious to or unconcerned with these issues–just reinforces what I already knew. Most M/M written by women isn’t really about gay men and doesn’t care about their lives and them as human beings. It’s just about fetishizing and objectifying them for (primarily, but not entirely, straight) women. It’s something that M/F does too of course, since most men in romance novels aren’t actual men, but idealized versions and fantasy figures. But fetishizing a minority group and getting off on them is hell of a lot more problematic.
Thinking that it is any way acceptable to out someone? That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to ask the authors, “What the hell is wrong with you? No, really. What. The. Hell?”
Great review! Thank you, Giraffe. I have only just discovered M/M romance, and find it an intriguing phenomenon. NT, I assume your take is correct; it’s about objectification and fetishisation. I would love to read a M?M romance written by a gay man. Any recommendations?
Santino Hassell identifies as bi, and his take on gay men is much more authentic than most in M/M. The second half of Sutphin Boulevard fell apart for me, so I didn’t love it, but Sunset Park and First and First are both very good.
Alexis Hall is also good, and For Real is a RITA finalist this year as well.
Thank you for this, Giraffe.
Neil Plakcey is a gay man who writes what I guess would be considered romantic suspense with gay men. I started one book and found it a little gritty for my taste, but that’s personal. The writing seemed quite good.
Excellent review, Giraffe.
I’d seen this book recced all over the place but, given that I’m lukewarm-to-DNW when it comes to sports romances, it took me a while to read it.
Like you, I was v. rage-y by the biphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. The way I see it, once you become aware of those things (because they tend to pop up again and again in ALL kinds of romances), it’s pretty much impossible to ignore. I ended up giving it one star on GR.
TL;DR: I get the fantasy aspect that fans of this book eat up like whoa. However, the negatives totes outweighed the things that would’ve made me enjoy this book.
Thanks for the recommendations. I enjoyed Alexis Hall’s Glitterland- very nice use of language. Interestingly, I didn’t identify it as ‘genre’, just as a good book. And, I didn’t identify the author by gender. 🙂 Will look for the others.
Ahh thanks for this review.
In general, I came up reading slash fanfiction as a girl so now I get super nervous when I see M/M fiction written by straight women. 😐 Seems like this one too has all the hallmarks of internalized misogyny and objectification too.
I liked this more than you did, but parts of it made me really uncomfortable (as a queer / bi woman). The excessive flashbacks to the blowjob scene seemed incredibly fetishizing to me. I didn’t find the whole blowjob scenario as homophobic as you did – but it was incredibly fetishizing and it definitely read like straight ideas / fantasies about how queer people act rather than how actual queer people act (not that there’s a queer code of conduct or anything). Hmm, maybe that is homophobic.
Interestingly, I wasn’t as bothered by Wes’s college coach outing him to Toronto (although I agree with your points – especially the WTF not TELL him, instead of letting him freak out about it. And has no one heard of Out Sports? There are resources for this). But I was ragey about the summer camp coach casually asking Jamie if he was ok with Wes’s sexuality. What if Wes hadn’t told Jamie yet?! OMFG. You don’t out people like that.
As a bi woman I actually really liked the portrayal of Jamie’s sexuality. I liked his friendship with his female fwb and that he eventually came out to her. I liked that he slowly realized that he’d been attracted to Wes for a long time and just didn’t think of it like that. It all resonated with me. I think that’s why I’ve re-read (parts of) this book so many times.
As a queer female fan of m/m I want to add a few more things to the general conversation.
I completely understand people not wanting to read m/m by women authors. Personally I’ve found that the gender of the author matters less to me than the content of the story. Because I’m queer, I tend to just go by my internal ick meter, although I also pay attention to what other queer readers say, especially queer men – if it feels fetishizing to me, I don’t read it and/or I don’t recommend it.
One more personal note. I’m glad for this review because it’s the first negative review I’ve read of Him and it confirmed things I’d felt but hadn’t said before. I’ve been strangely reluctant to criticize this book in the face of so much love – even my comment on the other RITA challenge review of Him was pretty measured. I mentioned not liking the flashbacks but I skipped that I felt they were fetishizing. And SBTB is a place I feel pretty safe.
Good review. I don’t particularly read M/M myself, but I just read and angrily stopped reading a well-reviewed straight historical where a side character has been the subject of a sodomy trial (homosexuality being illegal in the time and culture) but the two main characters have extremely modern, groovy, accepting attitudes about homosexuality that the book is a little smug about. I find it unsettling when modern writers do this, when they prioritize making a statement of their own beliefs and telling us how great/loving/progressive their characters are – not like all the other Victorian jerks around them! – over being honest about the terrible costs and dangers that have existed for non-straight humans in Western culture for so long! It just feels so… stupid. I feel that it really trivializes the long struggle for equality.
(I also feel this way when someone in a historical has an anachronistic attitude about slavery, race, women’s rights, etc. No trivializing! Either take those issues seriously or write about something else, people did not suffer for generations to be a cute element in your romance novel.)
It sounds like something similar is going on in this book. I don’t actually think it would be fundamentally wrong for an author to write about a man being outed against his will – IF the author is willing to take that seriously and explore what that means emotionally and practically and ethically, rather than resolve it in a single chapter, and so on. I really …cannot bring myself to read romances where authors try to grapple with serious topics. I find that many of them just don’t have the chops – maybe the inclination, maybe the insight, not sure – to really give those topics the depth they’d need to be given to not be glib. Your review mentions how annoying it is that the book is panicky about one character’s bisexuality – I’ve read books where the book has the opposite but equally dumb problem where someone’s Big Issue, like bisexuality, is introduced and then the character, as a mouthpiece of the author, lectures fiercely for several paragraphs about how wrong it is to be worried about the Big Issue and then everyone grovels and is over it. Oh? Is it that easy? Amazing that our culture has been wrestling with this issue for so long, hmmmmmmm.
It just feels like if you want to talk about serious issues, I want them to play out as they do in real life. Humans are complicated, dumb, messy, inconsistent, and stubborn. We’re also loving, trying our best, and, ALL OF US, often blind to our own blind spots. I want a more humanistic approach to Big Issue stories or I don’t want to read them at all.
@cleo:
I wanted to say that I am very, very glad you feel safe at SBTB, as that’s very important to me. Discussing romance can very easily become fraught and difficult because of how much goes on in the genre (I mean, they really are all the same, right? No massive collections of intersectionality, no, not at all) and speaking up when you feel like you’re facing a lot of opposition for your opinion is difficult. Thank you for doing so.
@SB Sarah – thank you. I did just bravely comment on the other review of Him. We’ll see how it goes.
I do think SBTB is a generally safe place to dissent (certainly safer than much of the Internet), but it can still be incredibly hard to speak up sometimes. Some of it is internal, some of it is external and some of it is IDK.
I’ve seen this book around so thanks for the review cuz I’d throw my kindle at the wall. Bi phobia drives me nuts. I read a fantastic book – can’t remember the name – where one MC is gay and the other is bi. The bi guy likes girls and sex with girls and likes guys and sex with guys. He also got along with his ex wife.
For M\M romance by a man – try The Lightning Struck Heart by TJ Klune. This book is funny, funny, and more funny and the the UST is off the hook. It’s a fantasy the way Moulin Rouge is a period movie. And the audio version is amazing. The narrator’s comedic timing dials it up to eleven and I’d listen to him read the phone book.
I just. No. What utter crap. What utter dangerous, biphobic, homophobic, misogynist crap. Thanks for taking one for the team and reviewing. So disappointed that this was so recently published.
This was a very interesting review and discussion. At first I thought “oh goody” because an F usually means a funny review is comin’ right up. But I appreciate the thoughtful treatment of the various subtexts.
I have not always been alert to subtexts of this nature, and the new world of romance – including legit m/m romance, or any queer romance for that matter, because it was Just Not Done in the mainstream until really very recently – is educating me rapidly.
fwiw, I think that not knowing whether a treatment is legit is not a sign of homophobia. Feeling like the depiction of a given act is fetishizing probably has more to do with the writer’s presentation than with the act. Some writers fetishize fashion or violence, some may fetishize fellatio. If it feels like the act was fetishized, it probably was.
As a straight woman, when I write about gay characters, I do so knowing that I can’t truly understand their struggles or issues or hangups or whatever that are *specific to their being gay*; as a white woman, when I write about characters of color, it’s the same. I can only write about them AS PEOPLE who happen to be falling in love. I have friends, relatives, and co-workers of all colors and all genders, they are all just people, and honestly outside the bedroom I don’t see a whole lot of relevance. Gender =/= a definitive guide to behavior, any more than skin color is.
Because of the way I am writing my contemporary stories, there is not much internal monologue, and there is very little narrative at all. I am trying to truly let my characters speak for themselves, partly because I don’t want to fall into the trap of letting my personal philosophies dictate what fictional characters will do. Those little bastards generally go where they want and if I refuse to follow, the story just goes flat. A love story is no place for a dissertation.
Maybe this is a weird place to mention, but I wanted to recommend a book that touched on homosexuality in a historical context and was, I thought, very humanistic, real, frank, and not at all “A Very Special Episode” about it. Also great writing. Not really a romance (although there are some elements) but still, highly recommended if you like historical mysteries and LGBT elements. I felt 400% more educated about homosexuality in Regency England after reading it!
https://www.amazon.com/Cunning-House-Richard-Marggraf-Turley-ebook/dp/B00RKPCGTG?ie=UTF8&btkr=1&ref_=dp-kindle-redirect
It’s hard for me too sometimes. I totally understand the feeling.
Other m/m authors who identify as male include J.F. Smith, Damon Suede, Aleksandr Voinov. Although T.J. Klune has loads of fans, Bear Otter & The Kid (one of his best known books) appears to dance on the edge of copyright violation and that’s a massive no for me so I avoid him.
P.s. Thank you for this review! Dissenting opinions rock, especially when explained really understandably.
Here’s what I don’t understand about this review. Just because that character tells Ryan that his coach did him “a favor,” why do you assume the AUTHOR agrees with this sentiment? Outing someone is a pretty awful thing to do. Just because a gay character in the book decides that he can live with that outcome doesn’t mean the authors are homophobes who think it’s fine to out someone.
Fiction can be complicated. Not every character can fall into “all good” or “all bad,” or the story would suck. If a gay man wrote this book would you be so pissy about that plot point? Think about it.
@sarah I admit I find it facile when people ascribe the problems of a book solely to the gender or orientation of the author, although it’s an understandable frustration in cases like this, of course. I don’t think this review does that.
The authors might personally absolutely think the coach did a terrible, ignorant, life-threatening thing, but they presented it as nbd, and with the hero accepting and endorsing it as he did, it seems perfectly fair for a reviewer to be angry and call it out. Assuming a gay man were to write something so tone deaf, it would be just as much a problem.
@cleo fwiw, I always look for and enjoy your comments.
@kkw – thank you! I do the same with you 🙂
And because I keep thinking about this thread, here are some non-male identified (mostly female but at least one genderqueer) queer (mostly bi and one ace) m/m authors whose work I’ve really enjoyed (ymmv of course)
Heidi Cullinan
James Buchanan
Alex Beecroft
Josephine Myles
Heidi Belleau
K. A. Mitchell
L. A. Witt
And one bonus straight, cis woman – K J Charles. I really enjoy her m/m stories and I feel like she writes queer characters well.
@Sarah,
I thought about it for all of two seconds, which was two more than was necessary. Being a member of a group doesn’t mean someone won’t say or do stupid, offensive things, or preclude them from being called out when they do. If this book, and that plot point, were written by a gay man, I would be just as “pissy,” as you put it, and have no doubt many other people would be too. Outing is a loaded enough topic, like some saying anti-gay politicians and those pushing homophobic agendas while engaging in gay relations themselves deserve to be outed, and others saying outing is wrong under all circumstances, that it would certainly be an issue. And I can’t see anyone on any side of the issue thinking a benevolent outing for one’s own good is anything but complete and utter bullsh-t, no matter who wrote it. That is so incredibly dangerous, and the idea that so many people are gobbling it up unquestioningly is terrifying to me.
Being gay hasn’t stopped people who support anti-gay politicians because they care more about money than equality from being called out. Catelyn Jenner being transgender didn’t stop her from being called out on some of her more dubious comments and conservative politics (initially saying she didn’t believe in same-sex marriage, lack of concern about equality protections that may not be necessary for her as a rich, famous, entitled person but certainly are for other transgender people).
Dangerous, hurtful and offensive ideas need to be called out, no matter who is saying them.
Dangerous, hurtful and offensive ideas need to be called out, no matter who is saying them.
Didn’t we just have this discussion last week? Writers can write what they want, but they should have no expectation of not being called out for what they put out in the world. Preach on @RT, and thanks for the intelligent and thought provoking review Giraffe. I had no plans to read this, based on previous experiences with Elle Kennedy. While they all ended up DNFs, this would have been Kindle endangering.
This is an excellent review, and I’m definitely going to avoid this book, thank you.
I don’t base my reading material on the author’s gender, but here are a few of my favorite M/M writers (some of whom have been listed, but bear repeating):
KJ Charles
Heidi Belleau
TJ Klune (I’ve only read his book “How to Be a Normal Person” but I seriously loved it, as an asexual myself)
Patrick Ness (not finished with the one of his that I have – “More Than This” – but it’s excellent so far)
C.S. Pacat – I don’t even know this author’s gender. All I know is that the Captive Prince trilogy is one of my favorite queer stories EVER. Bisexual POC main character and gay love interest, hate to love, absolutely beautifully written, just a really lovely series.
I guess my point is, limiting yourself to books written only by a certain gender will really deprive you of some incredible reading material. Bad apples exist, of course, but I like to think those of us who work to properly represent the queer community that we are part of or allied with outshine them.
Thanks for all the recommendations. Seems like I’m going to be reading lots of M/M.
I went back and re-read Understatement of the Year in response to the first comment (been very sick and had too much time on my hands). While Bowen could have written Graham as bi, it would have been a different story. Graham was never attracted to women. He was beginning, at 16, to develop a persona as gay. Then a very traumatic incident caused him to internalize “gay” as sick and dangerous. He also had what seemed like pretty significant PTSD. I do have some issues with the story but I think that portraying Graham as gay but deep in the closet is a choice that makes sense within the context of the story.
Thank you for such an insightful review. You gave me a lot of food for thought and I will definitely be a better reader because of it.
I’m 25% in and started getting bad vibes from it and looked for reviews. I’m glad I did because I’m not wasting my time. In the 70-some pages read… I already saw quite a few problematic moments. Thanks for your honest review!