The Purpose of This Hop

It has been brought to our attention that the purpose of this hop was never actually stated in the hop info on this site. We assumed that the purpose was a given (due to the name): To bring awareness to homophobia. However, since the creation of this hop, the purpose has become twofold: To bring awareness to homophobia and to stand together as an m/m writer community to fight of discrimination against the m/m genre. We have spread this purpose in interviews, personal email recruitment and in other announcements, but it was never stated on this blog site. We hope to rectify that with this post.

The blogs taking part in this will discuss homophobia in their hop entry. Originally we thought that we wouldn't get many sign-ups, so we added this text "as little as mention it - your choice" in the info post, because we wanted good exposure to the blogs that would talk about homophobia. In our informational email message going out this week, we will emphasize this part of the hop, as it has always been the purpose: to talk about homophobia. A lot of the participants have already stated in messages to us that they know what they're going to write about, so we're confident that most will want to spread a message (and everyone will, in the following hops, as that little text won't be included in the future). Some of it will be about the real problem, some will be about people's own experiences, and some will be about how homophobia has been successfully fought.

That said, we were outraged when a chapter in the Romance Writers of America excluded m/m romances from one of their contests because it felt "icky" to the judges. It was a big part in us wanting to make this hop large-scale and make a loud splash. We're not members of RWA, so this did not affect us directly, but we were still outraged. What the chapter of RWA did was discriminate against our genre and the subject it centers around: men loving men. The RWA chapter was being homophobic. They ended up cancelling the contest after an uproar, but it was clear by their excuse that there's a lot of work to be done for people to accept m/m fiction as something just acceptable as other fiction. This is why we added the second purpose: to stand together as m/m an m/m writing community and bring about awareness of our books and their subjects. 

Is it morally wrong to use the International Day Against Homophobia in relation to this hop? We believe not. Being excluded for the sole reason that our work contains love between two men is wrong and homophobic, and we have a right to fight to make sure it doesn't happen again. This may seem trivial to some people, in comparison to other homophobic issues, but to us this is very important (and no, not for sales - if money was all we were after, we'd be writing mainstream YA).

Is it wrong to use prizes to get people to our blogs? We think not. We think it's a great way to get people to stop by in hope that they'll take interest in the issue and become more aware. We could have made a hop where there were no prizes involved - just us spreading a message - but we believe that this way, we will get more people over. A lot of people - including m/m readers - don't even know that there's such a thing as an International Day Against Homophobia. A lot of people - including m/m readers - don't even know that there's such a thing as an International Day Against Homophobia.

People may not agree with this method, but it is within their rights to disagree. People's opinions will always differ. A couple of days ago, we learned that there are people who have posted a message saying how terribly wrong this hop is - and by reading the post these people made, they were right. It did look terribly wrong. Had we not been involved in this hop ourselves, we would have been outraged. The informational post on "What is a Blog Hop" was badly written: it started off explaining in general what a book blog hop is, but then, as the post wore on, it started to get into the details of this specific hop. That has been rectified now, and only speaks of what a book blog hop is, in general. The biggest mistake, however, was that our purpose was not clearly stated in the informational post. We know that no matter what we say, we won't change the minds of most of these people. All we can do is be open, honest, and sincere in what our purpose has been all along. We can pull up links, dated back in February, to show that we've been spreading this purpose over the internet. Erica can send these links through emails, if people contact her personally.

We acknowledge these mistakes. The main purpose of this hop has never been to sell our books. People can chose to believe that or not - again, nothing we can say will change the minds of those who do think we're just here to sell our books - so all we can do is write this post and hope that most people will see that we're not doing something wrong here.

So again, in short: This hop is about spreading awareness of homophobia and to stand together as an m/m writer community against discrimination of what we write about.


Erica, K-Lee and NJ.