ewee (20/26): I Say a Little Prayer by E. Lynn Harris

Now for an embarrassingly low-brow read. BUT! Also part of the stack of books I'm going through, some of which are respectable and filled with big words. And mainly thanks to the local public library system.

But yes, it's true. This is embarrassingly fluffy harlequin-y stuff. I'll quote Salon's article on E. Lynn Harris (and James Earl Hardy), and leave it at that:

Women's smutty little reading secret is sending black homoerotic literature to the top of the charts.

The same is true of E. Lynn Harris' buttery romances about bisexual black men. The departure from traditional romance has not deterred thousands of women who eagerly await Harris' new novels, and have helped to make three of his books national bestsellers. Women, it appears, have a smutty little reading penchant -- they've been happily slurping down gay male romances and heaving at all the good parts.

In Harris' soap-operatic novels, the plot sweeps back and forth between love and lies and marriage and addiction. His characters tend to be more confused (gay? straight? bi?) than Hardy's proud men-loving men. And some of them date women but sleep with men on the down-low, which is, naturally, cause for more hairpin plot twists.

Men and women of all races went around their dorms reading the good parts aloud with the relish of flat-chested, teenage girls hunched over Judy Blume at summer camp.

"Homosexual sex is basically the same as heterosexual sex. It's not as totally different as society makes it seem," said Lillian Lewis, 24, a Harris devotee who is black. "They go through the same problems that heterosexuals go through as far as love. I was like, 'OK. This is the same shit I go through with my husband.'"

Love is love, say the women readers of these books, a mantra they repeat with an offhandedness that would alarm many a minister of family values. These are not the sentiments of sex radicals. These women do not read to prove a point, and their tone is amazingly free of righteousness or moral superiority. They are just women who like romances and want to read a good story: women on the subway, women in bookstores, cashiers and maintenance workers. The books appeal to them for the same fundamental reason that literature can be so satisfying -- because in some way it sheds light on the reader's life.