Romcom season is officially upon us, and while the genre has historically relied on heteronormative tropes, a new wave of queer romance films and books are challenging that standard. While reading them is a pleasure, writing and marketing those books comes with a unique challenge.

“There is a pressure in the industry to stay within certain genre lines” explains Rose Dommu, author of the debut novel Best Woman, which came out in September. The book immediately caught the attention of Casey McQuiston, who has written arguably the most successful queer romcom of all time: Red, White and Royal Blue. These two great minds got together and spoke about, genre conventions, happy endings, monogamy, why they let their characters be “nasty queer little sluts” and of course, Pride and Prejudice.

Autostraddle: Casey, what drew you to Rose’s book?

Casey McQuiston: I hope this doesn’t sound like the book was checking a box for me, but I have been bitching and moaning for years about the lack of transfemme representation in romance. And it’s such a delight when that thing that you’ve been waiting for exists and it is fun to read and good. I feel strongly that having queer and trans art simply exist is not good enough. I also want queer and trans art to be good and enjoyable to read. I hold queer and trans art to the same standards as any art. It had this really familiar sense to it. The book felt like life, like the people I know.

Rose Dommu: I feel the same way about your writing — it’s queer art that is not just existing so that it can say it exists. It actually is good and worthwhile storytelling. Something else I appreciated, especially, in The Pairing, was how real the characters were. Just like the queer people I know, your characters are flawed, messy, nasty queer little sluts which is awesome because so rarely do queer characters get to be those things.

There are some characters in both of your works that don’t always do the right thing. Characters that aren’t always on their best behavior. Are you ever afraid of writing that way, that maybe you are giving people ammo? 

RD: No. Because a lot of queer people aren’t nice and are messy. I think there might be some people who would read Best Woman and be like, “this is a bad look for us” or “this is bad representation” but some trans people suck, and I want that reflected in fiction.

I don’t like reading about characters whose actions I agree with one hundred percent of the time. That’s so boring. Also, in the literary canon, we have so many examples of flawed protagonists, people who make mistakes and are awful but nobody ever questions whether that is a good depiction of the human race.

CM: I totally agree. With The Pairing, I was very intentional about confronting the “bisexual slut stereotype.” When I was first being published, everyone was saying that we need to be really conscious of not portraying bisexual people in a way that reinforces stereotypes. But that can make things worse and land us in a weird puritanical loop. It enforces the idea that a “good bisexual” is monogamous and extremely reigned in. I kind of chafed against that because it wasn’t reflective of most queer people in my life. I am not saying there aren’t many happy monogamous, bisexual people in this world — they just aren’t at my club.

RD: It’s also so refreshing to read romantic stories that don’t see monogamy as the only happy ending, because that is not my experience and that is not the experience of most of the people I know. Most people I know have six partners, two boyfriends, a wife or whatever. In The Pairing, I loved how part of their love story was these two people being happy for each other when they had fulfilling sex without the end goal being a traditional relationship. Celebrating pleasure is important. Pleasure in and of itself is its own win.

CM: Hell yeah, I love that. I definitely tried to do that in The Pairing. If you’re being traditionally published in romance, there are certain genre conventions that are hard to get away from. You can push and see how much you can get away with, but romance is a genre that has been predominantly cis and straight for so long that a monogamous ending is still the de facto. Every book that doesn’t end with a joyous engagement is a little untraditional for romance. And I would love to see that change.

I think a lot about the ending of Fire Island, the movie where the happy ever after for this Lizzie and Darcy archetype pairing is them both being like “Hey, neither of us want monogamy so this could totally work and we could be together.” That’s romantic, too. And I would love to see more room for that in traditionally published romance. I think you have to push it a little bit each time.

Queerness, by definition, doesn’t fit into pre-existing structures. How does one write queer fiction in a genre that is seemingly bound by rigid rules?

RD: I don’t view those things as rules. I view them as conventions that I’m excited to subvert and play with. I grew up loving fan fiction so I’m like, these aren’t rules. These are just AO3 tags so that people know what’s going on in the book. With Best Woman, I wanted to take the shape and form of a traditional romantic comedy and find a way to do the opposite of each convention, to find the more interesting answer. I wanted to figure out how this person, who we don’t usually see in these kinds of stories, would interact with this type of narrative. For me, those rules are there to play with and make reference to. They are so ingrained, and we all have this shared cultural knowledge of them that we are able to to fuck with them as much as we want to.

CM: The most important rule of romance is a happy ending. In the biz, there is something called HEA or (Happily Ever After) and HFN (Happy For Now). Those two acronyms are a big deal and many people will say it is what separates a romance from other fiction — the guarantee of the happy ending. That is the one genre convention that I am actually happy to stick with. I understand the importance of it because when I’m reading a romance, I want the safety net under me of knowing it is going to work out in the end. I am always torn between being proud of being really sincere and corny while also trying not to be.

But I am a corny person. I am a sincere person, and I do think the happy ending is important to me. My characters are queer and are trans, and I know that a lot of people need that little dopamine rush of a really good happy ending. And that’s important to me. But it is also important that a happy ending can look like so many different things when it’s a queer story. And that’s really cool.

RD: When I started writing Best Woman, it was really important to me that there was not going to

be a happy ending. The first draft of it had a more wistful ending like My Best Friend’s Wedding, which the novel is an homage to in many ways. But while editing, I realized how the book could end up being

hopeful while not going too easy on any of the characters for the ways in which they screwed up. They’re not getting married, they’re not riding off into the sunset together, but in a way I think that the ending felt very true to the lives of queer people. It’s like no-one you date or fuck or have some kind of messy friendship with is ever really going to leave your life forever. They’re always going to come back into it, especially in a city like New York. It didn’t make sense that this girl would walk off into the distance and Julia never sees her again. It’s like, no, she would eventually run into her and they would have to reckon with what happened and decide, oh, we do still have all this chemistry and all this history. What are we going to do with it?

Are there any genre conventions that you more intentionally try to subvert? 

CM: There are so many genre conventions that can feel really steeped in heteronormative ideas of how a relationship should progress, and I like to mess with that stuff. First of all, I think queer art should always have some element of rule breaking in it. Secondly, queer relationships are very often nonlinear, messy and confusing. I think in order for a story to feel queer and also romance, there has to be a balance of it being a little bit formulaic and a little bit fuck you to the formula.

There is one trope in Straight Romance that I see all of the time that really grates on me where it is like “Oh, he’s so big! He’s seven feet tall! And his shoulders fill a doorway and she is so small and so skinny and malnourished and petite and two feet tall.” That really pisses me off. I don’t find the idea of a woman being much smaller an inherently romantic thing, the way that it’s often written to be. And so in The Pairing, one thing I really wanted to play with was having two characters who are basically the same size, height, build everything. And I thought it was fun to just imagine them being exactly the same size and shape and that being hot.

RD: I often find myself hating a miscommunication trope. And yet, I kind of wrote a book predicated on one. It is a miscommunication that is twisted into outright lying. I wanted to see if people could still root for someone who was being so wrong and deceitful because that felt very true to my life. I love to lie. I could be lying right now. You’d never know.

Is there anything else that either of you wanted to talk about today that we didn’t touch on?

RD: I’m having a good hair day, so I want the people who are reading this to know that.

Okay. I will make sure to reflect that in the article. 

CM: I am not having a good hair day, so I would like all the focus to be on Rose’s hair if that’s possible.

RD: I’d actually like you to paint a picture that Casey actually is having a good hair day.

I will tell everyone how great of a hair day you both had. What books should we be reading? What are you reading? Bonus points if they’re queer or romance and double bonus if they are both! 

RD: This year I have been in a very horror specific place because I find it comforting and less horrifying than what’s happening in real life. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s, who I think is the trans Stephen King, new novel Black Flame is one of my favorite books of the year.

CM: I love historical romance so I’d recommend Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall and A Gentleman’s Gentleman by TJ Alexander. Those are two wonderful trans historical romances.

RD: I need to write my trans Gilded Age novel.

CM: Please do! I’m rereading Pride and Prejudice right now and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Catherine de Bourgh is basically a drag mother. I’ve been thinking a lot about Charlotte Lucas being a trans guy, maybe Charlie Lucas!

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