Romance is a genre with a long history of attracting opprobrium. Especially among certain sorts of sci-fi/fantasy fans: all those feelings getting in the way of science and politics. Add queerness, and the enthusiasm level seems to go right down....
Me, I suffer intermittently from depression and anxiety. When I’m in a slump—or when I’ve been freaking out, as postgraduate students do, and trying to do shitloads of work in not nearly enough time—I don’t want to be reading big crunchy juicy books full of bittersweet pain or complicated politics or ethically complex issues: I want to read books that ask little of my attention, and give a lot back in terms of comforting entertainment. Last year, not for the first time, when I went looking for the comfort food of SFF literature, I kept coming up against a brick wall, one ably described by Foz Meadows in her “The Unbearable Lightness of Default Settings” in December:
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