James Brown Wants You to R-R-R-R-R-R-ead to Yo' Money-Maker until You Cold Sweat Out Your Perm. Gut Gawd!

With hairless pecs bulging from almost every cover, misty castles in the background, and unsheathed swords grasped by virile hands, there is a lingering musk of Fabio that causes snickers among the uninitiated, the cynics who pass the racks by in search of paper towels and TV dinners. Before heading home alone to watch Desperate Housewives or The Hills, these shoppers may smirk, wondering to themselves, “Why would anyone want to read these books?”

Study these in-store displays and you'll discern highly specific genres within romance: fantasy, paranormal, sci-fi, and especially historical—where swords, stallions, castles, hoopskirts, plantations, and domestic servants have strangely endured.

And among these coded book covers, where yearning maidens cling to strapping lads with gilded locks, it's nearly impossible to find an African-American face. Nor any Latina features, nor any Asian figures, nor any sign that love exists for nonwhite women.


Well, if you're trying to get the boys in the 'hood excited—that's neighbor-, not clitoral—you're going to have to drop the fantasies about hoopskirts and plantations. I know the antebellum South gets some people as hot and moist as a North Carolina summer, but not us. We find that period about as exciting as the federal tax code, and we find hoopskirts and plantations, together, about as erectile dysfunctional as discovering we've just licked a chancre. If you must write this stuff—mind you, I said, “if”—write about something else in some other era.

Besides, anything you write is going to be compared inevitably to this? and you don't ever want to be compared to that, because, really,…eew.

While we're on the subject of “Eew,” “the lingering musk of Fabio?” Oh, sweet jebus.