I’m heading to EuroPrideCon (a meet-up for LGBTQ romance readers and writers), in a couple of weeks – this year it’s in Amsterdam. I’m really looking forward to seeing a city I’ve only visited once, when I was 2 years old – (vague memories of a pier with a vending machine where, for a coin, a mechanical chicken laid a plastic egg with a toy in it… probably not how Amsterdam should be represented.) Then I’m off to Finland, before heading home.
The attendee list includes so many authors I have loved reading and can’t wait to meet. And readers whom I know online, and look forward to seeing in person. And old friends I’ll get to see again, including the wonderful organizers.  I’m excited, although a bit nervous despite years of going to GRL, because social spaces are never my comfort zone. But mostly excited. (BTW, if you are going to EPC and want to order paper books of mine for me to bring, today is the last day to order. There’s a link to my order from on the EPC Facebook page, or contact me for it.)

One of the great things about this trip will be meeting more authors and readers from different places. So much of English language M/M is focused on American settings, with a small nod to the UK, Canada, and Australia. I look forward to talking with people in the genre with a different world experience. Fiction makes our world view wider.

I’ve had chats with readers from other countries who didn’t believe the homophobia openly expressed in an American story, because that would be unheard-of in their experience. (Not that they don’t have homophobia, but that culturally it would not be shown openly in, say, a work setting.) Or they wonder at the impact of lack of health care for our protagonists, which adds motivations they have to struggle to understand. While others marvel at the relative ease with which a transgender character is able to change their legal identity, compared to say, Finland where they have to get surgical sterilization first.

In turn, I’ve learned about sectarian divisions in Glasgow from Playing for Keeps by Avery Cockburn, and about UK slang from J. L. Merrow’s wonderful books with blue collar heroes. I found out about a war I hadn’t even known happened when The Open Arms of the Sea by Jasper Drogan showed me a British soldier in Yemen, falling in love with a man in the 1960’s. (BTW, great book but an open ending, not a HEA.) N.R. Walker’s Red Dirt Heart gave me a feel for the open spaces of the Australian outback.

Sure, M/M is only fiction, but part of the reason I read and write it is because fiction has the power to let us walk in unfamiliar shoes. I”m hoping to find more M/M books set in other places. Especially books by and about residents of other nations, and not just American or British tourists or military abroad. If you have recommendations (in English, because I don’t read for pleasure in a second language, unlike so many amazing people I will be seeing at EPC), I’d love to hear them. And if you are going to Amsterdam and EPC, I look forward to seeing you there.

-Kaje Harper

June 2018