This article investigates contemporary LGBTQ romance in which the central couple has a queered betrothal that results in nonmarriage. Drawing on examinations of romance plot tropes, including Regis’s eight essential elements and Roach’s claim that the ending to romance is key, as well as queer theory, I demonstrate how the nonproposal offers a queering of romance that differs from homonormative same-sex romance. In the case study of the feature film Bros, this is achieved by one character asking the other to date and reassess in a few months, an anti-proposal that follows the conventions of a traditional marriage proposal. In the novel Husband Material, the central couple runs away from their own wedding because it does not feel like the right expression of their love. Unlike traditional romance narrative patterns that reaffirm social conventions and normative values, these queered anti-betrothals allow for more individualistic expressions that still offer the reader or viewer an emotionally satisfying romance ending.
As is apparent from the above, this article analyses both films and romance novels. The romance analysed at most length is Husband Material by Alexis Hall.
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In LGBTQ romance prior to the 2010s, wedding endings were not common. Although romance offers a fantasy version of love, the complicated legal realities for same-sex couples no doubt influenced the resolution to these narratives in print and on screen.
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Wedding endings appear to be decreasing across romance in favor of HFN endings, perhaps in reflection of marital statistics in real life. The number of married adults in the U.S. has been steadily declining since 1990, while the number of unpartnered adults from ages eighteen to fifty-four increased nearly 10 percent in the same period of time (Fry and Parker). With marriage equality achieved in the 2010s in the U.S. and U.K., some American and British LGBTQ romances end with an engagement or wedding. Others conclude with a happy for now that is indistinguishable from the HFN that ends heterosexual romances.
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Most mass-market LGBTQ romance features two cis, gay (m/m) or sapphic (f/f) characters, thus framing cis homosexuality as more palatable than a nonbinarized spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Proposal and wedding scenes reinforce the value of monogamy and marriage.
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In the examples presented here, gay couples actively avoid society’s markers of commitment: engagement, weddings, marriages. These heteronormative trappings do not solidify the couples’ relationships but instead threaten them. This is a weird retelling of gay romance that is neither homonormative in its replication of heteronormative values nor wholly politically queer in its firm disavowal of those same things. Somewhere in between, the new queer romance promises commitment through freedom from commitment and finds its happy for now by eschewing expected forms of happily ever after.
Here's the abstract:
As is apparent from the above, this article analyses both films and romance novels. The romance analysed at most length is Husband Material by Alexis Hall.
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