I was on the hunt for hot men of the fictional variety, something to whet my reading appetite. I searched on GoodReads through a few of their lists (Best Gay Couples, Best Gay Romance, Best Gay Paranormal) and was surprised to see that the majority of the titles in the top fifty were all about men in uniform, usually cops.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, gay men have a thing for men in uniforms (broad generalisation here). Is it the authority? Is the uniform? Is it the good odds that a cop or fireman is likely to be a gym junkie, needing to pump enough iron so they can beat the bad guys without too much bother, and therefore have a pretty ripped body? Or is it because of the subversiveness of it all? Someone could write a thesis on that. Or maybe they already have.
Cops, firemen, military…often come with the “straight” label and so to have “one of us” being “one of them” feels like “we” have cracked through and “infiltrated” the club. (I use a lot of quote marks because I don’t want to offend anyone.)
Apart from the breaking down of gender stereotypes, you could also do a whole lot with the idea of infiltration of the “straight” norm. There’s probably a whole heap of gay spy stories that deal with that: the gay Russian agent undercover in the CIA, that sort of thing. I’m not sure I really agree with that kind of positioning, whether it’s done consciously or not. But anyway, whatever rocks you boat.
But these kind of thoughts come from examining the characters as gay and all that goes with that culture. And I’d argue that not all m/m stories deal with “gay” characters. We know that m/m stories are mostly written by straight women for straight women, so what is the attraction? Once again, is it the uniform, the discipline or the subversion? Maybe it’s the raw maleness of it all. All that sweat. All those muscles. Hypermale. Ubermale. Male with male on the side. Hell, it’s a no-brainer really. I’d buy it.
And why do writers choose men in uniform so often? Is it just because it sells and therefore we see more of it? Is it because they had a friend/brother/father/cousin who was in service? Is it a good set of traits to pick because it offers up ready conflict?
Prejudice (real or stereotyped) is inherent in the forces (military, police, fire, etc) so that provides a nice layer of conflict about coming out to the straight work mates and then there’s the added conflict of whatever the assignment is. Whether it’s the psychic cop trying to catch a serial killer, the werewolf cops trying to catch a serial killer, the bisexual fireman trying to catch a serial killer…wait, that doesn’t sound right.
Either way, there’s plenty of conflict to choose from. Does that make it easier to choose the internal conflict? Coming out is a pretty huge internal conflict so maybe that’s the winning combination there. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s easier to write these type of characters because that’s just not true but it does offer up a good base for conflict.
So what do you think? As a reader, why do you like reading about men in uniform (or not, if that’s the case)?
As a writer, why do you choose them to populate your stories?
In case you’re interested, the books I choose to read after my hunt were Among the Living by Jordan Price (short, simple, easy to read) and Hot Head by Damon Suede. Everyone’s been going on about Hot Head lately so I bit the bullet and read it. Man, the sex in that book is steaming! And a day later I’m missing Dante and Griff. Kudos to Damon.
I would guess, for women, that the attraction with the M/M story is really just a cousin of the engagement we get from a F/M story. We don’t read them to see what a big, strong, authority figure *be* a big, strong, authority figure (well, not all them time). We read them to see the big, strong, authority figure break and find his way to also being a loving, squishy, gentle, authority figure.
The fantasy lies in the heroine (and thorugh her, the reader) being his achillies heel. The one (maybe the only one) to make him weak and human and vulnerable.
It’s the reverse equivalent of the ‘virgin in the kitchen, whore in the bedroom’ dichotomy. We want romance heroes to be strong and dominant on demand but also soft and squishy as required.
And so it’s the same in M/M but just buried a bit deeper. We identify with the protag hero and we want him to be the one to bring the antag hero to his knees. And so adding the uniform, or the corporate uniform, or the mantle of authority that comes with position just makes that ‘break’ moment all the better.
I imagine that if you wrote a story with two very unyielding, very dominant male characters it wouldn’t have the same appeal with women readers. The deliciousness is in the power-shift. And we want that shift to go our way, please 🙂