Cut & Run – Look How Far We’ve Come

Cut & Run is a cult classic amongst the Queer Thriller crowd. It’s coming up on being two-decades old and recently got reprinted, so I knew I was going to pick it up. It has a reputation for being on the ‘mindless fun’ side of books, and it fit that brief delightfully. I’d been feeling a bit of burnout on reading, and this required so little brainpower that it started to fill my cup again. However, I also think it’s a good benchmark of what ‘well written’ gay love used to look like. It feels dated and a prime example of what happens when queer men are written with a straight female audience in mind.

This review will (in part) explore how this book gets writing queer men wrong. Many of these elements are frustrating patterns that still pop up in new releases. However, I want to anchor all of this with the idea that Roux & Urban were writing queer men long before it was seen as profitable, though they definitely profited. I wish we’d moved past the types of writing I found here, and I’m also thankful that they paved the way for better representation to follow.

I bear no ill will towards these authors and books, but this read was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to continue following these characters.

Let’s get this out of the way, this book is not at all well written. Roux & Urban will tell you exactly what to feel about the characters, whack you on the head with plot points, and repeat the book’s title in the narrative enough times to make you want to scream. They don’t develop a cast of potential suspects, so I had the dramatic reveal figured out by the 1/3 mark. Hell, even the POV work is sketchy; the series is written in 3rd person limited, but with constant access to both character’s thoughts. This led to some rather confusing scenes where I tried to keep track of which character ‘he’ referred to. When I seperate out the fun factor, there’s just not a lot of substance to actually praise in this novel.

In some books this would annoy me greatly, but I delighted in it. Ty and Zane are shallow as a birdbath, and there’s not much effort to convince you otherwise. They are a pair of tall and hunky FBI agents who mock the newbies for making Spongebob references. All the while they are simultaneously taking potshots at each other. I needed a reading reset and breather, and this book was a phenomenal way for me to release some of the pressure I’d been putting on myself. The only real complaint on this front I have is that I wish it were a little shorter. I think 300 pages would have worked just great, and losing that other 100 pages wouldn’t have cost the story anything meaningful.

So, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: representation.

This book could be the poster child for queer love being twisted into something that panders entirely to the heterosexual female gaze and removing any sense of queerness. It starts with our two characters. Both are bisexual, but not in a way that actually reflects male bisexuality in any serious way. Instead, we get two very clear archetypes of female desire who happen to have the hots for each other. Ty is the bad boy, a constant flirt who has regular seduces women. They unanimously would like to continue seeing him, but he never does. He is, of course, ‘tamed’ by Zane. Meanwhile, Zane was married to a woman to 10 years, and is still grieving her death five years after a car wreck. He’s so devoted to her memory that he can’t possibly think of having sex with women anymore. In another inversion, our pure beacon of true love descends into more of a rugged persona as the book carries on. He’s not nearly as uptight as he seems at first.

Neither of these characters really engage with the complexities of queer love. It’s made narratively clear that, like in the actual year 2008, being out wasn’t doing you any professional favors. However, there’s no attempt to replicate the sense of tension of repressing part of your identity, especially when you’re falling hard for someone and can’t let the outside world see it. Since his wife’s death, Zane has only gotten off with male escorts; he says that ‘breaking the rules is addictive.’ Using sex workers as an outlet for subversive or rebellious sex is a very heterosexual conceit. Not so much for queer communities; if Zane is going to gay bars where he’s having sex, he sure as hell wouldn’t be paying for the pleasure. Queer spaces, especially pre-dating apps, had a plethora of options that cater specifically to indulging in illicit sexual desires where breaking the law was part of the fun. If Zane is comfortable in his bisexuality (and his only compunctions seem to be professional blowback) and is comfortable going to gay bars (which he is), the man would be in black rooms or cruising spaces. Male escorts almost never bother going to gay bars anyways, so Zane picking them up there doesn’t even make sense. There’s zero understanding of queer culture and spaces, and it feels like a cheap and quick way to explain why Zane is only fucking men right now.

Another example of how these characters are divorced from the lived experience of queerness is their dialogue. The two casually throw around homophobic terms, pansy being the main one. However, the way that they use them doesn’t shift at all when they’re pretending to be straight vs when they’re out to each other. They truly feel like straight men who happen to just have the hots for each other, and there’s no relationship between their sexual identity and the world around them. This has nothing to do with whether or not the characters have connections with queer community (though Zane at least has some), but rather how the way you use language shifts with people who are in-the-know vs not. When I’m using homophobic language with my friends, there’s a sense of irony to it usually, of defiance. When closeted, it was a desperate desire to pass and said with false earnestness. That difference doesn’t’ exist here. There’s no change in language and behavior after they share their bisexuality with each other, aside from the fucking. There was no sense of the interior conflicts of staying closeted and coming out.

Roux and Urban are so close to the sex being right. They acknowledge the importance of lube and preparation more than some modern writers do. However, the heterosexual lens pops up again here. Here’s a good example:

Ty had let Zane fuck him. He’d given up every ounce of control to a man he barely liked.

This is just not how queer men think about topping and bottoming. Your sexual position isn’t related to how much you want to be in control, especially for couples that switch. They’re very different kinds of pleasure and release, like whether or not you want pizza or pho. Some people have strong feelings, some don’t care, and others might only be in the mood for pho today and pizza other days. This conception pervades m/m written with women in mind: that topping means you are in control of the situation and bottoming is inherently submissive. This is true in some individual relationship dynamics of course. However, its generally much more common for the bottom to be in control, especially during early encounters. Perhaps this is me being pedantic. It’s a scene meant to showcase sexy vulnerability from the ruggedly aggressive Ty, but instead was another gnat in my ear that this book doesn’t understand queer men at all.

This book is not the worst offender of poorly-written gay love I’ve read. However, when concerns like this are voiced by queer men in m/m Romance spaces, we’re often dismissed or attacked. To be fair, there are people who think that women should never write gay romance, and that it is inherently fetishizing. I think that idea is stupid, silly, and unproductive. I think it comes as a reflection of the anger that gay men feel at the contradiction between consuming m/m content and refusing to be supportive of actual queer individual. I have complicated relationships with Romance bookstores, for example. The staff are almost universally wonderful, but I feel very out of place at events or book clubs that focus on m/m romance. Going to a Heated Rivalry trivia night felt like walking into a gay club with almost no gay men present. Many of the sex jokes cracked by the emcee referenced heterosexual nomenclature that queer men don’t usually to describe our sex. It’s just a constant little burr, because I wish the spaces featuring us were curated with us in mind more? At this point I’m straying beyond the topic of the book, but it’s hard to disentangle them fully.

Anyways, thanks for sticking it through this extended Ted Talk. To reiterate, I’m thankful that flawed representation helped prove gay characters could be financially marketable. I just wish I weren’t seeing these same problems pop up constantly two decades later.