Why I Write M/M:

Self-Censorship, Truth, And the Nature of Gender

I have always written male on male romances, even back when I was a teenage girl in the 1990s – in those dark days before the Internet. Certainly I had little access to any realistic or reliable information about gay men, so I wasn't exactly writing what I knew.

I am still surprised by why this type of story appealed to me so deeply and consistently, across the decades. It was my first adolescent story in my head and the first novel I wrote. Soon I had created a whole world just to place these stories in.

I have at times badly wanted to write something else – something 'normal' . . . oh, something literary and true and worthwhile. And instead, I am always thinking of my characters in this male on male realm and finding new conversations for them to have.

Part of the reason is undoubtedly due to sexual taste. I think I came into the world with a weakness for sexual submission, something that began to surface for the first time in my early teens. Not coincidentally this is when I created my first male on male stories. I think I never placed myself as the protagonist because I was uncomfortable with the idea of behaving submissively myself, for a host of reasons including not wanting to be vulnerable.

And of course, these stories, even then, were more than just fantasies - they were also a working out of the implications of sexuality (and size and weakness) in an emotionally safe place. In the world I grew up in differences between men and women, in even unambigious things like size and physical strength, were never spoken of. And while these things might not matter to a athletic, strapping woman who stood at 5'10" to me as a slight and small teenage girl they were more pertinent.

And then, there were so many complications in what I wanted for my future. I didn't like the women who were held up to me by my parents and teachers as good examples. I didn't think I would enjoy living their lives. They were almost Puritan examples of hard work and strength, spending long hours at the office and making darkly humorous, bitter remarks.

In contrast to what I was philosophically coming across on my mother's bookshelf and in her world – books on sexism and hostile comments on men – I found my nascent femininity wonderful. I had been a bad student – even failing a grade in primary school – and I was given to persistent ill health. I was neither extraverted nor good at sports. But then I became, in a very ordinary way, beautiful. I had finally been given something that mattered, that could give me a boost in life.

I don't mean to imply I was beautiful like the models on the pages of the glossy magazines, or even traditionally beautiful. But I was pretty enough to turn heads on the subway, to have my pick of the young men in my social circle; pretty enough to be well liked without needing to speak; pretty enough to get every job I ever interviewed for. And I was pleased with my newfound power and status.

Yet I lived in a world where beauty was only ever spoken of as unfair, or else was unacknowledged. There were no acceptable outlets in my life for romance or sensuality. Likewise, there was certainly no place in my world for even accessing portrayals of submission, or even coy flirtation. There were frank conversations between equals; there was an expectation of a certain linear nature to my life. Not coincidentally I was constantly being told to stop talking in my high, girlish voice.

I did not quite feel the future that was being laid out for me fit. Like 'Nigel in the British Steel' my parents knew what was best, but I was in a rather adolescent and moody search for things that spoke beyond their bourgeois sureties. But in the world that I existed in (partially formed from my own reading of The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique – I was nothing if not curious) I was to have the linear career that any young man might have.

And love was friendship set on fire, like a delicious meal that two people ate together. None of it was about one person getting to a place of safety by submitting to another. None of it accounted for what I physically wanted.

Perhaps it was unsurprising that the conflicts - the unsureness - of sensitive young men who struggled to fit in, as portrayed in books like Parade's End and Testament to Youth, appealed to me. These young men, in their isolation and conflict with their parents, reflected my own interior state better than the contemporary novels I read about young women. But then these books were classics, of course.

My friends were blithely confident, in contrast to my own quiet agitation. They were marching towards eventual admission into commerce and medical programs. Of course it's obvious writing that last sentence that we were privileged youths. One mentor threw in my face that I had an obligation to make use of my opportunities.

And yet . . . Maybe I was less a rebel than that I had chronic doubts. I had failed at school (for years) when the other girls around me had succeeded seemingly effortlessly. And then, I had been sick enough to be in chronic pain at times, a circumstance that could conceivably contribute to masochism, or at least a desire to seek out both strong sensation and the comfort of absolute safety.

I became rather attached to ideas from the past, places where less emphasis was placed on ambition and achievement and meritocratic success. I liked Jane Austen, Gone with the Wind, Edith Wharton – and all the issues and complications they raised.

But I had found my own cookie in the cookie jar. When I was fourteen or fifteen I came across a story that mentioned in passing (for no more than three paragraphs perhaps) a young man in prison and his relationship with his older cellmate. In retrospect, it's clear that I liked the uneven power dynamic, as I think many women do (and quite a few men, too).

This fantasy of prison sex was outside the shame and guilt of the strictures of my mother's feminism. I wasn't thinking of anything to do with men and women; I wasn't even involved. It was far enough away from me to be safe yet it included everything I wanted and didn't understand.

I thought about it so much. As I mentioned I had been a sickly child – with lots of time in bed with nothing to do. I was used to a vivid fantasy life. I plugged this new, far more sensual fantasy into the template left from my innocent childhood imagining of brooding protagonists on the moors of England.

I made certain discoveries; I found there was a moment of blackness. When I learned that the French call orgasm 'la petite mort' (the little death), I thought, how perfect.

I experienced desire before any exposure to pornography and based on very little outside influence. Nevertheless, I discovered exactly what I liked.

Later, at about twenty, I came across explicit romance novels – helpfully given to me by a religious friend. I was extremely surprised. Here was what I fantasized about, except between a man and a woman. But I never transitioned to thinking about men and women. Every relational fantasy I have ever had involves that original prison dynamic.

As I got older, with the rise of both the Internet and satellite TV, I discovered that representations of prison sex, as they are marketed to a broader audience at least, were not what I was looking for. Half a poorly chosen episode of "Oz" and my prison world was shot to hell.

With no direction from my conscious mind, I slowly moved my whole fantasy world into science fiction. By adding some handsome and somewhat upstanding aliens, I could create a gendered dynamic in a world safe from both the worst extremes of prison culture and everything about men and women that I did not feel comfortable with.

Soon enough, too, I found I could use my aliens to conveniently represent different and unfashionable perspectives in fiction – and take them seriously – which I could not find a way to portray otherwise (religious perspectives - or sexist perspectives, for instance). I could simply play with more things.

I have, though, occasionally written about men and women in closer to real life situations, but still with a gendered submissive and dominant approach. For me, for better or for worse, a gendered dynamic more accurately reflects reality than the more equal narratives I so often read today.

[All the very best writing that I fall in love with is willing to wrestle with gender differences and not smooth them over for the sake of convenience or ideology. Lionel Shriver, Raymond Chandler, Hemingway – all deal in truth. After all, a woman who acts like a man in a story or a movie is not a step forward for women's representation; it's an erasure.]

The last time I publically wrote about men and women though was much less fun than writing about two men together. I ended up leaving my writing club. People – well, urban professional women at least – do not want to see submissive protagonists, especially when they're women.

Aside from this experience, I find it harder to write female characters than male anyway. I involuntarily engage in self-censorship. I feel there is so much that I cannot admit. And then, too, I find I can't cope with anything bad happening to a female character, which rather limits my female characters, doesn't it?

In fact, my best success with female characters is when I'm not paying attention. Only by looking from my peripheral vision, and almost not being aware of what I'm doing, can I come close to any sort of true representation.

You might think that not being able to fantasize about heterosexual sex would be limiting for a heterosexual woman. You might think my writing suggests a permanent wrinkle in my life plans: problems of confidence, of sexuality. Nevertheless, all these problems not withstanding, I fell in love with my future husband when we were both teenagers and we have been together ever since. We went through some early and defining experiences: my husband was kicked out of his parental home at eighteen and then failed to get into university – upsetting the middle-class script that we had both been expecting. Yet amidst everything that happened to us he was always there for me and, while far more imperfectly, I was there for him.

Despite what I had been taught about men, I was able to trust him. And at some point in our early relationship I told him I had something to tell him. I was very nervous. I said I had a fantasy about two men in prison; I told him I wrote stories about that.

One of the best things about young people is how open-minded they are. "Oh, you mean like how girls like vampires? That kind of thing?"

"Yeah, sort of."

For years, my husband has indulged my bouncing plot lines off him. Later we would trade conversational time: 'If I listen to your stories about men together, you have to let me talk about cars,' he would say.

Recently I said to my husband "Do you think if we had met in our thirties, and you'd gone out with ten other women, that you would have been okay with my being so into boy-on-boy plotlines?"

My husband hesitated. "Probably not. You know, you basically have a kind of fetish thing. I just got acclimatised."

There are many things I don't understand in this life. Such as why I could not, even when I tried, transition to thinking about and writing male/female romances. But one thing I know is that love is real and beautiful and freeing, in whatever form it takes, no matter how problematic sexuality may make it – even with sexuality's dark, nearly unacknowledgeable lusts that torment us.

Drop me a line if you have time. I'm very interested in why male on male plotlines and writing appeals to other people. Let me know!