They read to escape, have exotic journeys and gain access to new, forbidden or unattainable worlds. Basically, there are two kinds of people, men and women, and men and women are very sexy. Which is why niche marketing, he added, is so suspect. Women really do read the books for the stories and emotional content. They say they relate to the characters and the situations, and the fact that the romances are between two men often just dissolves into an unnoticeable background hum as they're reading.
Homosexual sex is basically the same as heterosexual sex.
They go through the same problems that heterosexuals go through as far as love. Love is love, say the women readers of these books, a mantra they repeat with an offhandedness that would alarm many a minister of family values. These are not the sentiments of sex radicals. These women do not read to prove a point, and their tone is amazingly free of righteousness or moral superiority. In a culture where we are increasingly defined by the various identities we inhabit, it's funny to find this insouciance here, amid the grunts and moans of naked, writhing bodies.