Thank you Trix for asking us another question in this celebration month 🙂
Trix: What was your gateway book to m/m (either the first one you read, or the first that made you fall in love with the genre)?
Kimberley:
The first book I read in this genre was Razor Burn by Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier in 2006, I think it was. They were known then as Scott &a Scott. They were a couple who wrote romance geared towards gay men, I think. A decade later, I still have ALL of their paperback books.
Dan:
As a gay man over fifty, my first reads in this genre were before the genre existed and we still called it gay fiction. I remember reading Gordon Merrick’s ‘The Lord Won’t Mind’ and Mary Renault’s ‘The Persian Boy’ years before the genre was ‘invented’. Were they polished like today’s m/m genre? Not so much, but they were written for a different audience. Then there was Mercedes Lackey’s ‘The Last Herald Mage’ series. Loved that one. And I have to mention C.S. Pacat’s ‘Captive Prince Series’. I tend to read stuff that a lot of the other reviewers at Love Bytes don’t like, and vice versa
Roberta:
Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series has a gay character…Jules Cassidy and I fell for him the moment he hit the screen. Suzanne started putting him in more stories and I just kept falling for him. Hot Target was the one for me to really start to see Jules in a romantic lead way and Jules and Robin have such great chemistry…well…I was excited whenever I knew that they would be on screen together. Their Holiday book: All Thru The Night: A Troubleshooter’s Christmas…that changed my life. She was more the fade to black-that’s perfectly fine..but it totally made me go and look on Amazon for more…And Boy Did I Find It!!
Tammy:
My first foray into the m/m genre was via Carol Lynne’s, Branded by Gold, then I read every book she wrote! I couldn’t/can’t get enough of Carol Lynne’s books.
Marieke:
Mine was: Leonardo Da Vinci is a vampier. It wasn’t particularly great, and it was not my intention to read m/m. I didn’t even realize it was m/m until the two best friends fell in love that it wasn’t m/f, but I was so pleasantly surprised I started to google more books and stumbled on a whole new community.
Donna:
I discovered m/m when I was going through a major reading slump. I went through a historical phase, a BDSM phase, contemporary, paranormal, you get the idea – but all strictly m/f. I was having trouble finding something to read when Love The Sinner by Avril Ashton popped up as a recommendation on Amazon. I’d previously read m/f by this author and barely glanced at the blurb before buying it. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that Angel was not a girl, but a violent, tatted, muscly gang leader who was suddenly having panty-melting sex with Gabe-the-cop.
I was instantly hooked and there was no going back. And what a book to pop my cherry with!! Go hard or go home I guess 😉
Sarina:
Oh, that’s an easy one! :D. For me it was Change of Heart by Mary Calmes. It remains one of my favorites to this day.
Vicki:
Oh I love this question! My first introduction to a gay character in a book was Mercedes Lackey’s Vanyel, a looooong time ago. My next gay character was Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John. And one of those books had sex in it! That was quite interesting. Then I moved from fantasy and historical romance to paranormal romance books, and devoured JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood. In one of her chat rooms I saw a listing for something called m/m romance. What was this? I was curious! Since I was so in to vampires at the time, I saw a series mentioned about vampires and wizards in Paris, written by Ariel Tachna. I bought the first one and….. almost eight years later 95% of what I read is gay romance! I totally blame it on Ariel.
Pizzygirl:
My first gay romance was a Sherrilyn Kenyon book. It was good but not great and the reviews reflected that. So I decided to investigate further and started reading within the genre and got hooked. Of course I still read all forms of romance no matter the pairing as well.
Dani(elle):
It is a close call between two in my memory between Change of Heart by Mary Calmes up till now my favorite book ever and my second favorite Love Means … series by Andrew Grey.
Chris:
That would be Without Reservations by J.L. Langley. I still adore this book to this day, though I think the genre has moved on a bit since I first started reading m/m…but man I love going back to reread it. I actually got this for free, and I don’t know if, or when, I would have come to this genre without it coming at a point in my life where poor ol’ college me saw FREE and thought “I’m having that!” It was totally my gateway drug, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful.
Jen B:
My gateway to MM was through three paranormal series I discovered early on – Knights of the Darkness Chronicles by D.N. Simmons, Soul Mates by Jourdan Lane and Master Chronicles by Jamie Craig. I was addicted! My first MM/Romance book was Crossing Borders by Z.A. Maxfield.
What was your introduction to the wonders of reading m/m ?
let us know and have a chance to win a $5 store credit for Pride Publishing
I read “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Shopping and Fucking” during my studies at university (early 2000s). Don’t know, if those kinds of screen plays count, since everyone in my class had to read them. At that time I’ve also been quite an avid manga reader and I think the first BL manga series I read was “Kizuna” by Kazuma Kodaka.
After checking my goodreads book shelf I’d say the first m/m book I read was “Dragon Fire” by Wolf Specter (some time spring 2016). Seems I was searching for mpreg books at that time. I soon discovered that there are a lot of cool books and publishers out there and I guess I’m still a bit overwhelmed with the mass of interesting books and m/m-related subgenres *has a huge tbr list*.
In college, I read two gay-themed books that had elements of the m/m genre to come: David Leddick’s MY WORST DATE and an erotica book called TRICKS by an author I can’t remember. Then I read a lot of music and hockey fanfic before I got my first official m/m book, Marie Sexton’s BETWEEN SINNERS AND SAINTS.
I think there were several science fiction/fantasy series that I was fond of that happened to have gay characters…Mercedes Lackey, Lynn Flewelling, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey and maybe Elizabeth Lynn? I didn’t particularly see them as different…they just had same sex couples. I enjoyed the stories…then and now (0′
Uhm, I think my first LGBT content is gay fiction book, including Brokeback Mountain (the novella). But my first MM is The Tin Star by JL Langley.
That was a fun question. I started reading my first MM book in 2012. I don’t know which book was the first, but the ones I remember are: Heatstroke by Taylor V. Donavan and Just Ask by Mia Downing. I was hooked and never looked back.
Although I’d read gay and lesbian fiction before, as for m/m, I know I read a few freebies on b&n before going to my library’s catalog to see if they had anything. The first one that stands out is Damon Suede’s Hot Head, and then I just kept devouring every other book they had. Then, of course, I had to start buying!
I can’t remember the exact start, but i found some mm books in the free reads section of Books on Board in early 2012. The first I can recall are Jo Myles’ Pole Star, Boats in the night; The Telling by Eden Winters; Like the Taste of Summer by Kaje Harper
I read a book where the MC’s brother had a partner and it was a man I love that part of the book more than the main story and started to look around for M/M books, now this was in over ten years ago and I eventually found Torquere and brought “Forty Two Days” by Willa Okati and I was hooked.
My first one was Cut & Run, by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux, which intrigued me but it was with my second series, The Adrien English series by Josh Lanyon, when I fell for this genre for good.
Love the Q&As, and got some good leads. I’m much like Dan, an older gay and read those he named, but I don’t know what was first. B/c when I came out a bit later in life I was like a kid in a candy store to find authors writing about me, gays in … life (Maupin, Andrew Holleran), scifi (Mel Keegan), fantasy (Flewelling, Kushner), mystery (Joseph Hansen, John Morgan WIlson, Richard Stevenson), historicals (James Baldwin, Vincent Virga), westerns (Cap Iverson, Richard Amory).
In the eighties i read Maurice by EM Forster, The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt and The Boys on the Rock by John Fox (i still have them all in paperback, no ereaders back then). When i got my ereader the first books on them were The Christmas Throwaway and The Heart of Texas by RJ Scott
First intro into m/m was reading fanfiction when I was thirteen which is about the same time I discovered yaoi and a book called Counterfeit Son by Elaine Marie Alphin. While the book isn’t m/m or LGBT it kind of introduced me to men preying on people/persons of the same sex. It actually was scary and I think it made me paranoid about the dangers posed to young children.
I don’t remember exactly! It was either a marie section or an Andrew Grey book I think. I discovered the genre and read a bunch all at once.
I’m probably typical of many readers… m/f, then m/f/m, then m/m/f then m/m. The first book I read (and I checked by date on my Kindle) was ‘Coming Home’ by Jay Northcote. I fell in love and never looked back. I read all genres except Horror and hardcore BDSM. I find the depth of characters and well written plots the most important for me when choosing books and authors. I have too many favorites to list. Thanks to Prism, Goodreads, Love Bytes and Amazon for turning me on to new authors and series. If it weren’t for Dreamspinners and Riptide I’d have missed out on a lot!