Why I Write Gay Romance
Many readers discover my books by searching for gay romance novels, LGBTQ+ fiction, or stories about queer love that feel honest and deeply human. Before I became an author, I spent years wishing those kinds of stories existed. That wish is a big part of why I write the books I write today, including my newest novel, A Boy From Before.
If stories had the power to make someone gay, I should have grown up straight. Everything around me as a child told only one version of love. Every book featured a boy and a girl. Every movie paired a prince with a princess. Every hero had a heroine waiting. There were no stories that mirrored the feelings that were inside me.
Growing up, there were no gay romance books on the shelves of my small-town library. No TV shows with openly gay characters. No movies that allowed two men to fall in love without paying for it in the end. The only place I ever found the word homosexual was in medical books, and those pages described it as a medical illness. They called it a condition that set you apart from society and warned that people like me did not belong in the military, the government, or any form of public service.
I kept reading those books anyway. If I was mentioned in them, even in the harshest language, it meant I was not imaginary. It meant someone else had felt the same pull toward another boy. Someone else had questioned, yearned, and hoped. It meant I was not alone.
By the time I reached high school, I began to recognize other boys who felt different. Some were more feminine or more flamboyant, and they were often the ones dragged into bathrooms and beaten up. Watching that taught me how to hide myself. It also taught me a quieter truth. I was not the only one walking the halls with fear in his chest.
Today the world is different in ways I never believed I would see. Young readers grow up with stories that reflect them. They see queer characters who are not jokes or tragedies. They find books where gay love is tender, joyful, complicated, and worth rooting for. It is an entirely different landscape from the one I knew, and I am grateful for it every time I sit down to write.
My novels are a small part of that landscape. They are my expression of existence. They say I was here and I loved, just like anyone else.
When I began writing my own novels, I focused on the stories I never had growing up. Stories about connection, longing, and the quiet feeling that two people are meant for each other long before they understand why. That idea became the heart of my newest novel, A Boy From Before. What if the stranger you almost ran over on your bike today was the love you lost lifetimes ago? How would you know? In the book, two young men move through high school hallways and college campuses with the quiet sense that something is missing. When their paths finally collide, the pull between them is immediate, powerful, and impossible to explain. Love remembers even when they do not.
Unlike many men for men books, mine center on romance. They do not aim to be x rated or explicit. That is not what I want to write. My stories aim for the heart. If someone wants a book filled with sexual encounters, there are many places they can find it. My books choose something different. They choose laughter, tears, tenderness, and the quiet truth that love between two men is as worthy and as beautiful as any love ever written.
If that is the kind of story you seek, then I invite you to explore the worlds I create and the love stories that brought me here.
Mj