It always astonishes me when I read in an Amazon review that a reader disliked, or abandoned reading, or didn’t bother picking up a book because of its gay characters. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book dismissed so conclusively on the sole basis that it has heterosexual characters. If I were to dismiss all books where the characters didn’t subscribe to my particular sexual preferences, there would be very many hundreds of dearly loved novels, from the classics to casual light reading and of every genre, that I would be the poorer for never having read.

It’s never been implied or assumed that only straight readers can, or should, enjoy a novel that contains straight characters – and quite rightly - so why it assumed that only gays should read books with gay characters? If I can cope with your straight sex scenes – with all the graphic detail that seems both alien and rather icky to me – without declaring it makes me want to vomit or throw the book aside in disgust as if it were a used sanitary rag, why do you have to be so squeamish about what floats other boats?

Gay romantic fiction written predominantly by and for straight women is of course a particular case all of its own and none of the usual rules apply to it. It’s particularly significant, and not at all surprising, that the vast majority of the Amazon reviewers who were icked out by gay characters were male.