LGBTQ+ romance is slowly gaining greater popularity as well as cross-over readership in mainstream (read heterosexual) romance markets—in particular, the subcategory of male/male (M/M) “gay” romance, which still flies largely under the radar and tends to have the freedom to venture where mainstream publishers dare not tread. At the heart of it all, particularly within the science fiction subgenre, is a longing for a queerness that is not yet here but tantalizingly out of reach on the horizon, a destination we are ever trying to move toward. This chapter analyzes how M/M science fiction romance utilizes the male pregnancy (mpreg) trope to imagine a variety of queer reproductive intimacies. These narratives transgress biological and gender binaries to conceive queer futurities via romantic fantasy and alien worlds. As I explore in readings of two novels, Lyn Gala’s Earth Fathers are Weird and Lexi Ander’s Alpha Trine, such textual explorations not only open up unique ways to interrogate and reimagine different masculinities, but also create opportune spaces for transgender and genderqueer identifications around modes of interspecies reproduction that challenge heteronormative biological and gender essentialisms.
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SF’s future-facing gaze and world-making tendencies have long made it a genre with radical and even queer political possibilities. I am interested here in the “active queer world-making” powers of SF as they combine with the affective and erotic intimacies of M/M romance to begin breaking out of restrictive binaries and biological essentialisms that still persist in our understandings of gender, sexuality and reproduction. (195)
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