BRAD AND TROY seem to have the perfect relationship. They’re gorgeous. Brad’s a celebrity chef, Troy’s a “hip fashion designer”. But the bitchy Aria (a man) is out to destroy their happiness. Aria tells Troy, his ex, that Brad’s been “slutting around”. Can our two heroes weather Aria’s scheming to stay together?

In the canon of gay literature, Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier’s novel Hot Sauce (Warner Books) doesn’t share obvious shelf space with Alan Hollinghurst, though there is a grander plan behind this frothy love story. The couple have created a genre of literature, Romentics, “for all gay men who believe in happily ever after” — a million miles away from the worthy gay literature of old in which coming out, Aids and homophobia were staple themes. As the playwright Paul Rudnick puts it: “True equality demands equal trash.”

At Scott and Scott’s website, www.romentics.com, their love is plain to see: both handsome and toned, one shaven-headed and a bit rough-looking, the other more boyish, they are photographed cuddling and sleeping next to one another. They met in a club, surprised to discover both were called Scott and shared a liking for vodka tonics, and subsequently discovered they had “even more in common: fireplaces and red wine. Mountains and lakes and sunrises over the ocean.”

Hot Sauce is one of a number of recent gay romance titles: Jon Jeffrey’s Boyfriend Material (a gay Sex and the City — if you thought Sex and the City wasn’t gay enough); Dave Benbow’s Daytime Drama (will love make handsome soap actor Clay declare his sexuality to the world?); and the Alyson anthology Best Gay Love Stories 2005. The cover shows two tousle-haired hunks in woolly jumpers reading a book together.

Pomfret claims Romentics has tapped into “the institutionalisation of gay romance” — gay marriage is now on the political agenda in many countries and legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Canada. The characters in Romentics novels are monogamous, as are Pomfret and Whittier. “They’re supposed to be aspirational. We’re not being preachy. It’s just that no matter how sexually liberated gay men like to believe themselves to be, we like to think of monogamy as an ideal.”

None of this should be radical but it is. What distinguishes gay novels is their unflinching depiction of sex and desire (Edmund White, Dennis Cooper). Hot Sauce is a radical departure: homos have invaded chicklit. It’s hardly literary but what’s wrong with a little escapism? If gay romances succeed, it means that the gay book-buying market is as diverse as the straight one.

Highbrow types may glower — but who would begrudge a happy ending where the man always gets his man?

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