Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullanin

Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullinan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Snagged because it won a whole bunch of awards last year, and I'm in that mood. Having read it, I'm kind of going "…oh," because apparently a lot of people loved this, I didn't, and that's always a frustrating datapoint when you're dipping a toe into a genre.

I don't actually want to talk about this book qua book much, except to say that a lot of you probably will really like it (ranching, horses, families-of-choice, kinky sex including ponyplay), and also for the subset of you who want to know these things, the narrator has a learning disability and separately is somewhere on the autistic spectrum (or has sensory integration issues at the very least, but whatever, armchair fictional diagnosing) and it is handled unusually deftly.

What I do want to talk about is how it drives me bugfuck when gay romance has a Very Special Episode about homophobia. Homophobia is bad guys, did you know that? Homophobia in these books being almost entirely of the gaybashing, family-destroying, cartoonishly evil sort, and not the creeping, stereotyping, othering, unconscious sort that has a lot more to do with the real lived experiences of most queer people right now. Not like violence isn't a big concern, just. That is a very narrow idea of what homophobia actually is.

And these books. So many of them have to have a big dramatic scene where someone gives a homophobic person the big crushing speech of righteousness. (Very often, this is delivered by a straight person, by the way, as it is in this book). And it pisses me off.

These books are by and large written by straight women who have varying experiences or connection to queer people or any queer community. And there is something so pointless and cheap and manipulative about these ra-ra feel-good anti-homophobia moments. Like 'we're cool! We know homophobia is bad!' While these books so often participate in the more subtle forms of homophobia by writing about queer people as fundamentally different from straight people, or by importing creeping sexist ideas about what it means when someone gets penetrated, or by treating women in general really horribly, or by -- I could go on. At great length.

It's the ripped-from-the-headlines idea of what homophobia is, without any grasp of the whole iceberg under the water. The reason I'm not out at work has nothing to do with being afraid I'll be gaybashed, or even that I won't be promoted, let me just put that out there. It's that I'd rather not be the queer person first and the human being second, thanks not so fucking much. And watching mostly straight people appropriate the awful things that can be done to queer people in order to say "that's bad, everybody!" and feel smug is not my idea of a good time.

Whatever. This book didn't even do most of that (though some of it, it totally did) and if these books never addressed homophobia at all, I'd also be pissed off about that. Just. Arrrrrrgh, in general and specific.



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