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Month: January 2011

Call for M/M Romance and Yaoi Bloggers

Picture from www.homotography.com

As most of you may have heard, I put out a call last week for authors and readers of M/M Romance and Yaoi to be guest bloggers right here. There was a really great response and I’m pleased to say that for the next few months, there should be some fun discussion from avid readers and authors alike about the subject. I’ve asked the bloggers to talk about things like:

  • Why they write M/M Romance or Yaoi
  • What funny or interesting things they have come across in the M/M Romance and Yaoi genres
  • Purple Prose (you know, those wacky ways us authors like to describe sex)
  • Why do they think women like M/M Romance and Yaoi
  • Any funny quirks of the genre and so on.

Some of the authors I’ve already booked are (in order of appearance):

  • ZA Maxfield
  • Amber Kell
  • Belinda McBride
  • Louisa Brown
  • Julie Hayes
  • Laura Tolemei

Plus I’ve got a few readers to blog as well. If anyone reading this wants to join in and guest blog, please contact me at: Contact

All in all, it should be a fun couple of months here, so please check by often to see what’s up. Of course, I’ll be announcing the guest bloggers at all my usual places, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace (Links and follow info to the right there).

And that picture at the top, holy cow – I swear that is exactly what I picture Logan to look like in my next full-length novel, “Secrets“.

Lolita in JRock: What’s Up with That?

If we’re going to have a quick discussion on Lolita and how it pertains to JRock, I suppose we have to talk about what it is first. Historically, the term Lolita can be referenced back to a book. Wikipedia says,  “Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, who becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze.”

Okay, so the first “Lolita” was a fictitious, 12-year-old, sexually active girl who had a thing for much older men. Got it.

Anyone who knows anything about JRock and anime culture knows that “Lolita” is a term for a certain type of fashion – frilly, lacey dresses that are similar to something you’d see in “Gone with the Wind”, but have a decided sexually provocative and sometimes Gothic flare to them and we’ve seen some of our favorite JRockers sporting these dresses on stage. It sprung up amongst the Visual Kei (Visual Style, translated) thing back in the late 1980s, when all rock stars at least wore make-up. Except, the Japanese took this to an extreme.

I’ve personally seen many a woman wearing a Lolita outfit at an anime/yaoi con and I must say I’ve investigated getting one for myself to wear on Halloween, my favorite holiday. A forty-something mother of two wearing a Gothic Lolita outfit for anything but Halloween seems a bit strange, dont’ you think? Not that I’m above that, LOL. There are also many an anime in which boys are forced to wear princess outfits that look suspiciously similar to Lolita outfits. Hmmm…

So how did this 12-year-old-girl named Dolores inspire a fashion culture in Japan that culimnated in cross-dressing Japanese rock musicians? I have no idea. But I do know one thing, it’s both intriguing and just plain silly, at least in my opinion. I have to say, I find these Japanese cross-dressing rock stars courageous. There is no way any respectable American rock musician would have the balls to prance around onstage with his guitar in a Lolita dress. Okay, maybe Marilyn Manson… but do you really want to see that? I think the closest we did get to seeing something like that was Boy George in the 80s, LOL.

My main question here becomes: what’s up with Lolita fashion and male JRockers? Are the Japanese really insane? Are they just doing these things to make us say, “What the fuck?” I’m laughing to myself on that one. I’d love to hear your comments and views on the subject. Do you like it, hate it, want to be it?