Ok Iâm gonna sit down and talk about marketing here. First up, there are large amounts of readers who search for representation FIRST and genre SECOND. I have readers who follow me around contemp romance, horror, fantasy, sci-fi. LGBTQ readers consume a wide range of stories and many will read outside their preferred genre if it has LGBTQ representation in it. Also, LGBTQ readers are generally good at financially supporting creators through purchasing works. Thatâs just the market and how it is.
LGBTQ is inclusive of non-binary genders in a way that BL or GL isnât. But also, LGBTQ is often more about the themes that are being tackled. The history of âqueer fictionâ versus BL/GL is mostly down to who is creating it and the issues that are tackled. BL traditionally did not look at the real lived experiences of queer people (though thatâs changing!) and instead focused on romance between two characters without societal commentary. If you read Tapasâ email you can see them acknowledging the lenses are different. Itâs not a value judgement, itâs just an acknowledgment that there ARE nuances that need to be addressed.
Finally, there are a lot of people, especially us old folk, who remember the Bad Days of BL as a genre and want the option to not associate it with our work while also clearly having a searchable genre to place our works in for the marketing reasons above.
And really - thatâs it. Thatâs the tweet. You may be comfortable using BL/GL and thatâs fine. The LGBTQ is there for non-binary characters, asexual characters, and for works that are more focused on queer identities. Or at least thatâs how I read Tapasâ email.