Queer Romance Month

Queer Romance Month is exactly what it sounds like, a month long celebration of all types of queer romance. In a perfect world any time romance as a genre was celebrated or talked about queer romance would be included in there. However we do not live in a perfect world and queer romance is often thought of as its own distinctive genre, separate from "mainstream" aka heterosexual romance.

Which means that when romance is highlighted or celebrated queer romance gets mentioned maybe once in passing if that.

Queer Romance Month comes out of this. It is an entire month just to talk about and celebrate queer romance of all sorts, note a token post, not a single blog hop, but an entire month long event.

This year Queer Romance Month is October and it starts today.

All sorts of authors and romance genre people are participating in this years event. The organizers of the event have encouraged all of us writing posts to be thoughtful, to think outside the box and not just write the same old posts about why we write/read m/m romance. Instead I suspect there will be a wide range of topics covers from the ultra serious to more fun and light hearted. The topics I've heard murmurs of people writing about on Twitter have sounded amazing and I am looking forward to reading articles that touch on things that are often not talked about during genre events.

The months looks to be packed, there are 3 plus articles going up on the Queer Romance Month website daily.

We've already kicked things off with KJ Charles' super insightful article on the problems with thinking of queer romance as its own genre. 

Tracy Timmons-Gray's very practical and helpful article on how to raise community awareness about queer romance. Seriously after reading this article I looked at my local library system and discovered that although they owned almost a thousand romance titles none of them were queer romance. I am going to be looking into changing that soon.

And a very cute and funny audio from some of the people involved behind the scenes talking about Queer Romance Month, queer romance recommendations and other queer romance stuff. 

There is also a Queer Romance Month launch party over at Joyfully Jay's blog going on today (October 1st) that includes massive give-aways, check it out!

My own post is tentatively scheduled to go up on Halloween. So if that doesn't change I will be chatting with folks and replying to comments while sitting on the couch eating candy and watching haunted house movies.

For Queer Romance Month I chose to write about the personal reasons I write trans romance and why I believe trans romance and the inclusion of trans characters into all branches of romance is important.

It is going to be a lot of more of me talking about my experiences and feelings than I usually do. So that's both terrifying but also I think necessary.

So check out Queer Romance Month, and keep checking out out all the way through October. It is going to be a good time.