Nakul Krishna reviews Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones (Fitzcarraldo, £9.99)

The booksellers’ statistics tell us that much male-male romance fiction is marketed at straight women. Whence the appeal? The American classical scholar Martha Nussbaum once praised Plato’s account of male-male love for combining “aspiration, passion, friendly concern, and shared intellectual goals in a way that I had never seen in fictional accounts of male-female love, which usually contained either asymmetry of power or a lack of real erotic passion”.

The explanation may well generalise: contemporary gay romance promises something that – under what feminists would term “conditions of patriarchy” – can seem inaccessible to women, a relationship simultaneously brainy, matey and sexy. What straight women want that the fiction of gay male relationships provides is then, in a phrase, romance without objectification.

Fictions by gay men (think Forster or Isherwood) have sought their frisson in a different ideal. Forced into couplings that are egalitarian willy-nilly – because biology is not thought to dictate any hierarchy between male lovers, because culture has no trouble with brainy men – they have had to find sexiness in something else: in inequality, the celebration of the body. As one gay writer has put it, “with the history many of us had of being branded eggheads or aesthetes, the prospect of being apprehended as pure, dumb, meat has an irresistible allure. It’s as close as some of us can imagine to being loved ‘unconditionally’”.