Excused from comparing themselves with the characters and feeling hopelessly inferior, they can sit back and surrender completely to the fantasy. People don't just want to read about themselves. 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.