From The Guardian (via Jodi McAlister):
Over the last four years, many in the romance community, sometimes known as romancelandia, have thrown themselves into activism. Fated Mates, the podcast that compelled Lee to run for office, operates a phone-banking campaign called Fated States, which has logged more than 900,000 calls in support of Democratic candidates and causes since 2020. Separately, a group of authors who write under the names Alyssa Cole, Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan started an organization called Romancing the Vote, which has since 2020 raised more than $1m for voting rights groups.[...]
many popular romance writers today – such as Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall and Helen Hoang, to name just a few – take a more progressive view of gender roles, portraying marriage and babies as options rather than necessities. Between 2022 and 2023, booksellers also sold more than 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels – a 40% spike over the previous year, according to Circana. [...]
Novels by Sarah J Maas, who writes bestselling “romantasy” novels, are among the most-banned books in the US. Schools have also banned books by McQuiston and Hall, as well as those by popular romance writers like Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and Colleen Hoover.
