Str8te Boys

Str8te Boys is one of Evangeline Anderson’s queer romance novels, working in the contemporary and paranormal queer romance corner she has built her career around. Anderson is one of the more prolific writers in the wider contemporary and paranormal romance independent market, with a catalogue spanning multiple subgenres and multiple connected series. Her readers know her for the high heat content, the careful relationship building, and the kind of distinctive character work that her novels reliably deliver.

The Str8te Boys premise hints at the kind of bisexual awakening or gay for you romance subgenre that contemporary queer romance has used in various forms. The setup involves a male lead who has previously identified as straight encountering circumstances that lead him to recognize his attraction to another man, with the slow recognition and the wider emotional and identity work that the situation requires driving the central romance forward. Anderson handles this kind of setup with the practiced confidence of a writer who has been working in queer romance for many years.

Anderson writes the kind of queer romance that combines high heat content with real emotional substance. Her characters tend to have specific lives and specific reasons for the situations they are in, and the relationships develop through actual conversation alongside the physical chemistry. The bisexual awakening subgenre has its own particular conventions and its own dedicated reader community, with writers in this corner of the market developing the kind of careful treatment of the identity and emotional questions that the subgenre raises while also delivering the romance and the heat that the wider genre rewards.

What distinguishes Anderson from a lot of her peers in the independent queer romance corner is the willingness to write across multiple subgenres and to develop connected series that her readers can follow across multiple books. Her catalogue includes contemporary queer romance, paranormal queer romance, and various other connected projects that give her readers the kind of recurring world that the wider series can build out across many connected entries.

For readers who enjoy queer romance from authors writing in the wider contemporary and paranormal corners of the independent market, Evangeline Anderson is operating in adjacent territory. Her catalogue is large enough that picking a starting point can feel daunting, but most of her standalones can be read in any order, and the connected series allow new readers to start anywhere without losing too much context. Str8te Boys is a comfortable entry into her catalogue and a fair sample of what she does. For new readers curious about the bisexual awakening subgenre or about contemporary queer romance more generally, this kind of book is an accessible starting point.