Movies

Radclyffe on lesbian romance novels and “Love Between the Covers”

When you think “romance writer,” names like Nora Roberts immediately come to mind. Fair enough, because she is featured somewhat at length in a new documentary about the genre, Love Between the Covers. But so is lesbian author Len Barot, aka Radclyffe, aka L.L. Raand. As both a writer and a publisher, Len can’t get books out to queer readers fast enough.

The romance fiction industry takes in more than a billion dollars annually. In the past year, 75 million Americans admitted to reading at least one romance novel. Of course, big fans read a lot more. They’re also lining up at conventions and creating community wherever they can.

We spoke with Len about her start in the genre, creating her own queer publishing company, the importance of romance fiction to queer women and more.

AfterEllen.com: You know, sometimes you don’t consider yourself a romance reader when you’re reading online and you’re all, “Well it’s original fiction.” And I come from the fan fiction community, so it’s such an easy crossover that it’s possible to not realize you’re actually a big romance fan until it’s spelled out for you like it was in this film.

Len Barot: I’m at a lesbian literary conference right now, the Golden Crown Literary Society Conference, and they screened the film last night and one of the readers today told me, “Until I saw that film, I didn’t really realize that I was reading romances and that I’m a romance reader.” So that’s not an unusual response, which I think is fascinating and wonderful.

AE: So the movie goes into your professional background a bit. We learned you were a surgeon. Have you now retired from that?

LB: Yes, I retired in 2005, just a few months after I started Bold Strokes Books. I had been publishing romances for about four years before that while I was still practicing surgery. But once I decided to start the publishing company, I felt that, in order for me to do that full-time, the way it really required it and to continue writing, I would need to retire.

AE: Being a surgeon and a writer seem like such different professional passions. What motivated you to be more than just a reader despite the lack of time on your hands?

LB: As almost every single solitary writer will ever say, they’ve always been writing. I have always been writing. I was writing stories that entertained me, but also allowed me to see myself in ways that I couldn’t when I looked around in the world. So I had always written as a very personal form of sort of self-fulfillment. And when I was in my surgical residency, it was pretty stressful. We were on call every third night, working 100 hours a week, and I was one of the few women in the surgical training program, so it was pretty rough. I can’t remember the exact moment that I decided I was going to start writing again, but I started writing Innocent Hearts, which is one of my very, very first books, and it was a wonderful—I won’t say escape because it wasn’t that, but it allowed me to express another part of my personality. And it was very rewarding in a very private kind of way.

I started writing just for my own sense of completeness. To express parts of myself that I wasn’t able to express in the other very high-pressure part of my life. And I never thought about being published. It never occurred to me that I would be a writer. It wasn’t until I discovered the Internet that it even occurred to me to let other people read what I had written, or that anyone would actually want to read what I had written. So I had eight full-length novels written by the late 1990s when I became part of the internet community and people began reading what I had written.

AE: But with so many genres out there, why did it come down to romance for you?

LB: It’s always been romance for me. I’ve always been a romance reader. I love science fiction writing, I love fantasy, but in those books, I was always looking at the character interactions. I always wanted to know what were the connections between the people. And the heart of a romance is the relationship. For me, that’s the most interesting thing about people, is the intimate connections that we make with one another. So writing those relationships, it never occurred to me to write anything else. Even if I’m writing an intrigue or I’m writing a paranormal, what I care about is the connections between the characters within the context of that setting. And I like a happy ending. I want to feel good when I get to the end of the book. I want to solve the problems in fiction at least that we can’t always solve in the world.

AE: What did your friends and family think of your decision to become a romance writer?

LB: Well no one said, “You’re nuts,” but I did get a sense that they thought I was kind of a little crazy. I don’t think they got what I really did until they saw Love Between the Covers. They finally got the scope of what this work is really about.

AE: Why the decision to write under pseudonyms?

LB: The decision to publish under my pseudonym Radclyffe was purely a marketing decision because when I got ready to publish I had already been writing and posting a lot of free fiction on the Internet. I started writing fan fiction as Radclyffe. The reason that I took that pseudonym when I started writing fan fiction is that it was an entirely new world for me. I had never shared my writing with anyone, except maybe my girlfriend at the time. It was incredibly private and personal. And when I started posting my fiction online and sharing it—with I don’t know how many strangers were out there reading it—it felt like a new piece of my life, a new segment of my life, was beginning. And I wanted a pseudonym that was special to that area, to that form of expression, for me.

I chose Radclyffe based on Radclyffe Hall. Because of the lesbian connotation. At the time, a lot of the fan fiction around The X-Files was being written by men. I had no problem with that, but I thought, “Gee, here I am. I should be writing this. I’m a lesbian.” And I wanted to kind of make that subtly clear. And I love the name. I related to it instantly. I am Radclyffe. When I write, when I talk about it, in this world that’s who I am. So when I got ready to publish traditionally, formally, I had a lot of readers and I didn’t want to lose them. I didn’t want to use a different name that they wouldn’t recognize. So I kept the Radclyffe pseudonym when I began traditionally publishing.

When I got to about book 35, I think, I decided I wanted to try writing a paranormal series and that’s a big departure from what I had written previously. A lot of romance readers don’t make the leap from romance to paranormal romance because the paranormal element isn’t something they’re interested in. So I was trying to send a signal when I took the pseudonym L.L. Raand. I was trying to send the signal to my romance readers—and I told them what it was. It wasn’t a secret. Some of my readers said, “Oh, I don’t want to read that. That’s not why I read your books.” So it was to give them the option to know there was something different coming down the line. And I also hoped that if I used a different pseudonym for the paranormals I might get a crossover audience, that I might get new readers who weren’t romance readers. So it was a little bit marketing and a lot of communication.

Len with partner Lee

AE: Do you think queer women have a different relationship with romance novels than straight women do? If so, in what ways?

LB: I absolutely do. I certainly know from my personal experience how important it was to find any form of popular media that presented queers—and, for me, lesbians in particular—in romantic and sexually positive relationships. I think it’s absolutely true to this day that we don’t have that many positive, affirming images of queers in popular media. Many readers are voracious. They can’t get enough of this thing that they enjoy so much.

And there’s been very little in the way of popular queer fiction in the last 50 years in terms of volume. Those of us who were reading it could never get enough. And when you don’t see yourself represented in the popular media, it’s hard to feel like you’re part of the larger world. I think that for lesbians reading romance fiction with lesbian characters, they see themselves in positive portrayals of being partners, being employees, being women who make decisions, being leaders, being in love, having children, having good sex—all of those things that we may not be getting those messages anywhere else. I’m not saying that straight women don’t need that or want that or enjoy that, but they have lots of other avenues from the time they are born, practically, supporting them and affirming their lives. Only in our fiction can we see the full complete spectrum of sexual and physical and emotional fulfillment.

AE: The stigma that surrounds romance in terms of it being lowbrow literature—do you think that’s prevalent in the lesbian community as well? Or has a lack of lesbian representation in literature in general tended to make our community less snobbish about this genre?

LB: I think not. I think that the greater community at large probably shares the same stigma as the heterosexual world or the reading world in general. I think the people who read it absolutely love it with an incredible passion and devotion and are incredibly supportive of us as authors and publishers. But I think that there are lots of lesbians who have never read a lesbian romance because they think they won’t enjoy it, that it won’t be substantive enough. I think until they do, they don’t really appreciate what it’s all about. I mean, I’m at a literary conference right now where some of the partners of the women who are here are not quote, unquote “romance readers”. And yet several of them have stopped me and said, “The film was so eye-opening that I decided I really should try to read a romance because there’s so much more to it than I realized.” I think that’s common in our community.

AE: Perhaps some of the more hesitant ones need to come across it accidentally like I did.

LB: And not realize that’s what you’re reading. Because there are so many subgenres of romance. It’s not always girl meets girl and girl falls in love and they break up and they get back together. You’ve got romantic intrigue and paranormal and high fantasy and thrillers. And all of those things fall under the romance category. So there’s incredible diversity in what we write.

AE: What are fan conventions like for you? Both today and in the past.

LB: It depends on whether it’s a queer convention or it’s not. When I am at a heterosexual conference like the RWA [Romance Writers of America], where I’ll be next week, I am still very, very, very much in the minority because I’m not part of their writing world. They recognize me now, but they haven’t read my work.

So I’m not totally integrated, but I feel like I’m far more welcome than I was when I first started going, which was 10 years ago. I was never made to feel unwelcome, but I was always on the outside. Now I feel I am much more a part of what’s happening in that greater romance publishing world. They actually contacted me last month and asked me to be on a romantic intrigue panel at the RWA this year. I’ve been on panels there before, but never one that wasn’t queer. So I think that that’s a tremendous sign of progress.

AE: Let’s talk about publishing now. When and why did you decide to start your own publishing company?

LB: I started Bold Strokes Books in 2004. I had been publishing with some small independent lesbian presses from 1999. They were very good, but they were small. They were a little bit restricted in terms of the reach of the books. I felt that I wasn’t being able to get my books into as many avenues of the market as they should be, as the mainstream romances. And I really wanted to change that. I wanted to be able to get my books and other books, other queer books, into mainstream marketplaces using traditional mainstream channels just like all the other publishers.

So I started Bold Strokes Books with the aim to produce really good queer books and also to foster author craft and get our titles out in front of as many people everywhere as I could. The first thing I did was get a really good line of distribution so that our titles were being distributed right alongside all the other straight books. That has made the difference, I think, over the last 10 years in terms of the growth of our company and the visibility of our authors.

AE: Being your own publisher, do you still feel the need to produce more than a book a year just to stay relevant? How many books a year do you write right now?

LB: I write three full-length novels a year. I have one full-time employee; we have probably 20 contract workers who do all kinds of things. All those people are part of our structure so that I’m not hands-on in terms of the production of our work. But I review all the submissions myself and I make the final decision on what we acquire. I really like writing and I like interacting as an author with readers, so at this point, I don’t have any plans to cut back. Although I probably will, maybe, in a couple of years. Right now I publish one every four months. I might cut back a little bit in a year or so and maybe go to every five months. But it’s a form of personal expression for me that I would really feel its absence if I stopped writing.

AE: You being your own publisher though means you don’t have someone coming down on you cracking the whip. But there is still the matter of wanting to stay relevant. Things are changing at a rapid pace. When you say you write three books a year, is that a comfortable three books a year, or maybe it would be two but three keeps you on the map in a safe way?

LB: Three books a year is a lot of work. I need to write 7,500 words a week, which takes me about 30 hours, maybe a little bit more. When it’s done and then it’s edited and gets ready to go to press, it gives me about three to four weeks when I’m not writing in between books. So it’s a very constant, pretty steady pace of writing. I do it mostly because my books are in demand. I can’t write fast enough to satisfy my reading audience. And I guess there’s a little ego involved. I’m an author and I like to see my new titles come out and I like to see them sell. That’s a part of my, I guess, my personal need.

AE: You also host author retreats on your farm. Has this strengthened your sense of community within the romance writer world? Had you had that before?

LB: There are a couple of queer-focused literary events. Saints and Sinners is one in New Orleans, which is gay and lesbian and queer. And then this, the Golden Crown Literary Society, which is lesbian-focused. In terms of me as a writing professional and as an author, those are where I feel the greatest surge of community feeling that I’m part of a queer writing world. On the other hand, we have a big author pool. Generally, about 50 of them will come to our retreat. To be with them face-to-face is really important and really bonding, because otherwise, we’re just communicating on the internet. The retreats are designed not primarily for education. We do seminars and things like that, but it’s mostly for people to come and have a good time. So it is a very deep bonding experience within the Bold Strokes Books community. And then for the greater community at large, things like what I’m doing right now, where it’s probably 50/50 authors and readers, really reinforces the connection between those who write and publish the fiction and the people who read it.

AE: How have you seen the business change? In your opinion, what’s the future looking like for lesbian romance fiction?

LB: I don’t see any indication that the demand or the accessibility of lesbian romance will decline. It is the most popular subgenre of what we publish, which is true for the mainstream too. I mean, romance rules. That’s what people want to read. I think that what has changed since we first began publishing romances in the very early 1970s, lesbian romances that were actually identifiable as such, is the diversity of the works. Whereas most were character-driven romances, many of them were coming out stories, which of course made sense in the 1970s and early 1980s, now we are publishing lesbian romantic intrigue and erotic romances, high fantasy, science fiction, time travel, historical romances. As our social and cultural world changes, as we become less binary, as our gender identification diversifies, those things we’ll begin to see in lesbian romance. I think that we will always have the core of relationships as we know them now, but I think that we’ll start to see a lot more diversity within the romance genre itself.

Love Between the Covers is available on demand and digital HD beginning July 12. Visit the movie’s website for more information.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button