I think this will be a great thing to talk about in the comments too, so we can get some more there.

Come with your recs. If all else fails, there is the Basilisk Shifter romance. I believe it's called Split or Swallow.

So good. Our next question about finding stuff to read comes from Kat. I'm

an AFAB and be heavily into MMXM romance because it means no dysphoria for me. However, I'm curious, how are the queer guys finding own voices books among the absolute torrent of MM books written by ladies? Like, as a genderqueer person, the trans bestseller lists are a horror show of fetishization, and it's hard to find romance rep that resonates. And I think it may actually be worse for queer guys than it is for me. I want to be prioritizing own voices MM, but my Google foo hasn't

been up to the task. All right. Can you help Kat here?

Oh, I will give a shout out to one of my favorite websites on the entire internet, which is dalia adler's lgbtqreads.com uh which is an extensive searchable database of queer literature by trope by pairing uh by microtrope by age category by genre by just about anything you could want and dalia is one of the most well-read um i wouldn't call her a librarian but she has a librarian brain that like she just can recommend you things um so i think that's a great way to find it as far as kind of the deeper question about like how it feels to read books that feel like it gets um like the sex wrong yeah uh which i feel like is maybe the the

sub question there the sub question

i often i don't know if anyone on the podcast has ever seen arrested development which i guess i think about a lot um but every member of the bluth family has like a chicken dance they do and none of them yeah sound anything like a chicken and that's sometimes how it feels like reading mm sex is is uh there's a line where michael booth where everyone in his family is doing the chicken dance and michael booth says has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken and sometimes i just feel like i feel like him but it's like has anyone in this family ever seen a butthole like right like every time i see spit used as lube i'm like no that is not healthy or safe uh or loving for a partner. I don't know. There's the reality of sex and there's a fantasy of sex. And I think every author and every reader has to decide where they want to fall on that line. And I think even book by book you can decide. I mean, there's some very unrealistic sex that I still was like, oh, this is fun. Let's read more of this. So I don't want to ever tell anyone go read something that might trigger your dysphoria. I don't know. You have to kind of carefully find authors who you resonate with and find friends who you like have the same taste as you. So you can swap recommendations. Yeah. I mean, that's really a lot of what I do is like I find I know who reads the kind of books that I want to read and they read things in a different order and so they can recommend things to me and having like a good network for word of mouth is actually one of the best ways to find new books yeah

do you find that like searching by trope that it's satisfying do you find that you set yourself up for a certain sort of expectation for how the trope is going to play out and then it doesn't necessarily meet that expectation?