I just received an e-mail from our own Poison Ivy about what she calls “another romance tempest in a teapot”. It’s seems people have been blogging their fingers to the bone ever since Fred Head, the Democrat candidate for state comptroller in Texas, labeled his opponent, Republican Susan Combs, a pornographer. Why? Because in the early 1990s, she wrote a romance novel entitled, A Perfect Match, (Kismet #23), which was published by the Meteor Publishing Company. Poison Ivy writes, “Meteor was fairly middle-of-the-road romance, edited by a respected editor, Kate Duffy. There was sex in the books but only at the Silhouette Desire level at most.”

Have we all forgotten that Lynne Cheney, wife of the U.S. Vice President, made romance writing respectable–even for Republicans–with her lesbian romance, Sisters, published by New American Library in November 1981.

Don’t let this headline fool you either, romance readers come in all ages. And as we all know, real men read romance fiction, too.