The origins of U.S. mass-market category romance novels: Black editors and writers in the early 1980s

Abstract

Racism is still a mystery to me. It doesn’t make any sense… Romance is romance. [There isn’t] such a thing as white love, Black love. To me.

~ Vivian Stephens

Editor and Literary Agent

If you listen to available recordings of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) professional conferences from the 1980s/1990s or pick up a mass-market romance novel from those decades, you could be forgiven for thinking that Black people did not exist. While African American authors have been writing romance stories with Black protagonists in many formats for over a century, author Beverly Jenkins, among others, has testified about the industry's resistance to such inclusion (2022). It was not until recently, however, that outsiders learned of romance publishing's racism problem. On December 23, 2019, news spread that author Courtney Milan—a former law clerk, woman of color, and outspoken critic of discrimination within the romance novel industry—had been suspended from the RWA for an “ethics” violation. The RWA also passed a lifetime ban to exclude Milan from a future leadership position. The backlash was swift, with many authors canceling their memberships and readers lambasting the organization on social media for trying to silence her. The RWA board called an emergency meeting and withdrew the suspension, but within a few months, numerous outlets had covered the controversy and the history of racism and gatekeeping in the industry (including bias in the RITA awards) (Grady, 2020). The tale of romance racism and the fight against it, however, goes back at least to 1980 and the first wave of what the New York Times's Ray Walters labeled “ethnic” romance novels. While Walters named one editor responsible for this wave, it was two Black editors and their vision for Americanizing mass-market romance fiction over the 1980s that was to change the form, theretofore dominated by the British/Canadian Harlequin Mills & Boon novels and their American imitators. Their vision embraced what they considered a more accurate representation of a post-Civil Rights era United States that was also grappling with the feminist movement's demands and with the sexual revolution. So, while Kimberlé Crenshaw would articulate the necessity to understand the combined pressures of these historical demands and political terrains in her now-widely used theory of intersectionality at the end of the 1980s, Vivian Stephens (at Dell and then Harlequin) and Veronica Mixon (at Doubleday) were operating on that principle at the start of that decade in the most unexpected of places—the popular romance novel genre (Crenshaw, 1989). Thanks to their bold intervention, American romance began to include stories of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) protagonists written by BIPOC Americans.

There is a surprisingly small number of articles and studies that mention Stephens's work, but Mixon's intervention is even less documented; consequently, the impact that they and other Black contributors had on the genre remains to be highlighted (Dandridge, 2022; Moody-Freeman, 2021). This article fleshes out Stephens's and Mixon's role in altering American romance and surfaces how their editorial vision, visible in the novels they chose and developed for publication, drew on broader political currents in the U.S. in the 1980s. Along with overturning the whitewashing of romance fiction's lineage, it establishes how Black political thought via Black creators influenced the genre (and who gets a HEA or “happy ever after”) and how the current anti-racist movement in the industry is the latest step in a long tradition of diversifying American mass-market romance, one rooted in the 1980s (Bates, 2020; Grady, 2020).

It is no exaggeration to say that American romance fiction owes its distinctive perspective to these African American editors and writers. Their influence becomes evident when we understand the fluid atmosphere in which the genre blossomed from 1980 to 1985 as it was infused with the work of Black contributors. Black romance emerged in the 1980s on the heels of a “formal and contemporary organizing cycle” of the Black feminist movement that happened in the period between the Civil Rights movement and the rise of Reagan conservatism, i.e., from 1968 to the mid-1980s, and in the wake of discussions about the tensions between Black men and women in both popular and scholarly writing (Springer, 2005). After looking at how some early Black romance novels edited by Stephens and Mixon reflect those late 1970s and early 1980s socio-political conversations and policy, this essay finally speculates on why this diversification of the genre (in terms of characters' ethnicity as well as opportunities for BIPOC creators) lost momentum. My data set for outlining this history comprises personal interviews with both editors, the small body of scholarship on them, a wide-ranging archive of magazine articles, news stories, and podcast interviews, and select 1980s' Black contemporary category romance novels. Black romance, to be clear, is defined as a romance with Black main protagonists and “category” romances are 180–190 page, usually serially-numbered, novels that are set in an author's own time and associated with a brand like Harlequin or Dell Candlelight.

Prior to the 1980s, contemporary category romance novels fall into two phases: pre-WW-II, when British publishing in the U.K. established the sub-genre's plot structure and race discourse, and after the 1950s, when publishers/writers in British settler colonies such as Canada followed that template well into a new century—a template of whiteness. While occasionally set in the outer reaches of empire, these novels were written by white authors and foregrounded naïve white heroines and worldly white heroes (with Southern European heroes being the “exotic” ones, and Arab heroes being exotic, never Black, and sometimes of white and/or Christian heritage) (Burge, 2016; Dixon, 1999; Grescoe, 1996; Hendricks & Moody-Freeman, 2022; McAleer, 1999; Teo, 2012).

This genre default would meet a challenge as the axis of romance publishing tilted toward the U.S. and New York houses in the 1970s. Thanks to the 1972 release of Kathleen Woodiwiss's lengthy best-selling historical romance The Flame and the Flower (Woodiwiss, 1972) by Avon, hopeful American writers, mainly white women, had begun to ask for a place at the table. For much of the 1970s, however, they saw few opportunities, particularly in contemporary category novel publishing; it was dominated by Harlequin Mills & Boon, then owned by a Canadian corporation and steered by its British editorial office, which largely declined to publish American authors.

American publishers had started a small output of contemporary category romance, but the industry had few Black staffers, which allowed the stories to be monoethnic. As Rosemary Bray notes, publishing had been “the last of the genteel WASP professions; the long hours and low pay that are typical of entry-level jobs in the industry tended to attract upper middle-class white women who could afford such jobs, until they moved up the ladder” (Bray, 1982, 71). These editors and publishers gatekept Black writers out, telling them that there was no readership for their work and that Black people did not read (Dubey, 2003, 10; Moody-Freeman, 2021; Morrison, 1974, 87). If Black authors were offered contracts, they were often asked to conceal their racial and ethnic identity, both by omitting references to it in their biographies and by changing the identities of their romantic protagonists to white (Bradley, 1994, 1C; Hendricks & Moody-Freeman, 2022; Moody-Freeman, 2022a). When the industry could no longer hold back the tide of Black people wanting to work in publishing in the late 1970s, Bray observes that they were steered into less prestigious and often neglected arenas, including romance fiction (Bray, 1982, 71). This was where people like Stephens and Mixon made their mark and indelibly changed the genre's exclusionary defaults. Thanks to them, starting in about 1978, BIPOC authors began to be welcomed and get (openly) published. Furthermore, their contemporary category romance novels began to reflect the U.S. referenced earlier—with more of its racial diversity and thirst for a career-focused identity for all genders, as well as a less prudish perspective on sexual desire, a normalization of Black female sexuality, and the inclusion of many kinds of beauty.

General publishers like Doubleday were listlessly putting out romance novels in the 1960s and 1970s, partly through their Literary Guild and Romance Library book clubs and in paperback through Dell Candlelight Books, but they were no competition for Harlequin Mills & Boon till Stephens got herself hired at Candlelight in 1978 (Kleinfield, 1979, F1–F5). She was in her 40s at the time and had already worked in the airline industry, education, and as a researcher for Time-Life. Wanting to work in publishing, she talked herself into interviews till she had success. When Dell hired her as an Associate Editor, the romance division was a blip on the company's radar, and manuscripts obtained from a literary agency were just lightly copy-edited by secretaries and sent off to print. There was no record keeping of sales nor a general editorial vision. Stephens was to transform this set-up within a few years, starting with learning how to work with agents and authors, how to purchase manuscripts, and how to shape them into novels that represented her America. Entering the business under Dell's new editor Kate Duffy, and with Ellen Edwards as an assistant (both of whom went on to build successful romance lines elsewhere), she began with the brief to publish five novels a month, some of them contemporary category romance. She studied the romance market and Dell's competition and began buying, shaping, and publishing manuscripts with assertive characters. Subsequently, once Duffy left to establish Silhouette Romance, she was promoted to the line's editor-in-chief by August 1979. She led a team of readers who used her written guidelines (“tip sheets”) to review incoming submissions and worked closely with writers to improve their manuscripts. In long phone conversations, she would coach writers toward sharper character portraits and plotting that reflected contemporary mores about careers, gender roles, and sexuality, and settings that American readers would find both romantic and familiar (Moody-Freeman, 2022b; Stephens, 2022). In her short tenure there, she readied hundreds of romance novels for publication.

Stephens is known for upping the sensual quotient of category romance in addition to encouraging her writers to write heroines with a backbone; what I want to highlight here though is her foregrounding of BIPOC as both romance protagonists and writers, seconding Rita Dandridge's claim that recognizing “the inroads that Stephens made into the predominantly Caucasian mass paperback industry enable a greater appreciation for her initiatives to scale barriers of racial and cultural exclusivity” (Dandridge, 2022). As Stephens was bolstering the sales of Candlelight Romance by updating outdated characters and plots, she was also persuading friend and journalist Elsie B. Washington to write a romance novel. Stephens recalls that her supervising editor referred her to the Dell sales department for their opinion on her proposal to publish a Black romance, and their only question was whether Harlequin had any Black romances in their list; on hearing that they did not, they okayed the novel, which Washington published under the Rosalind Welles pseudonym (Moody-Freeman, 2022b).

Due to Stephens's initiative, Dell thus published the first known contemporary category Black romance in 1980. Stephens remembers that she worked with the art department to design the cover of Entwined Destinies (Welles, 1980) so it would not be a racist caricature, noting “I didn't want [the hero] to look like a pimp” (Moody-Freeman, 2022b). Accordingly, Joel Iskowitz used fashion models to illustrate the cover, which shows two Black characters in business attire superimposed over an image of Westminster, indicating the book's setting in London and the protagonists' class status. In its “Picks and Pans” column, People magazine reviewed Entwined Destinies with the opening line “The desegregation of the paperback romance novel arrives…” and the book sold well (Bray, 1982, 72). Sales figures aside, Stephens says that readers used to call her at the Dell office to give their opinions and she heard no negative reactions to the protagonists being Black (Dandridge, 2022).

Riding this wave, she would soon pitch a separate line of romances that she felt reflected the contemporary culture more accurately (including sensually explicit episodes of pre-marital sex between educated and ambitious characters). She named it Candlelight Ecstasy and welcomed manuscripts for both lines from any writers who wanted to tell these stories, irrespective of race. As the line gained readers at a meteoric rate and Stephens became known to aspiring writers through conferences, her fame spread. She appeared on news broadcasts and her role in setting up the RWA was also widely noted in the popular press and industry publications (FanVids, 2017). It spurred her on to cultivate more good romance writing, including from BIPOC authors. As the epigraph shows, she had not internalized the industry bias toward whiteness as the prerequisite for love stories and wanted to showcase the many Americans who could be protagonists in these tales of courtship and marriage and who would speak to and represent the country's diversity. The Tender Mending (Lia Sanders, 1982) was the second Black Candlelight romance (no. 41 in the Candlelight Ecstasy line), written by the team of Angela Jackson and Sandra Jackson-Opoku, under the name Lia Sanders in 1982).

The date deserves some attention. While some sources note 1982 or 1983 as the year Stephens moved to Harlequin, a February 1984 Essence article states that Stephens was wooed away from Dell by Harlequin in August 1981 (Goff, 1984, 56). A December 1982 article in Black Enterprise confirms that she switched publishing houses in 1981 and mentions that she was soliciting manuscripts for Harlequin American in 1982. But while it names Anne Gissony as the Senior Editor for Dell's Candlelight Ecstasy at the moment of printing, it attributes The Tender Mending to Stephens' editorial tenure at Dell (Bray, 1982, 71). So The Tender Mending was published in 1982, but Stephens bought and put it into Dell's slate prior to her departure from Dell. Notably, that year, Dell Ecstasy was number one in the B. Dalton list of romance publishers, knocking Harlequin out of the first spot (Guiley, 1983, 173).

After Stephens became Editorial Director for Harlequin's American romance line, she began lining up her front list for the coming years, including Sandra Kitt's Adam and Eva (Harlequin 1984a), making Kitt the first Black romance writer to publish a romance with Black characters for Harlequin in 1984. That same year, Veronica Mixon would publish Kitt's All Good Things as well as Stephens's sister Barbara's novel A Toast to Love, both for Doubleday Starlight Romance, making them the first known (to date) Black category romances in hardcover. The lead-up to this moment started in 1974. Mixon began working that year at Doubleday for editor Larry Ashmead right after graduating from Long Island University with an English degree, having gone to college as a slightly older student. She learned the ropes from Ashmead, who edited fiction and non-fiction and then worked with Sharon Jarvis, who was editing genre fiction, including sci-fi and romance (Mixon). After Jarvis's departure in 1983, Mixon competed for the position of romance editor, her confidence in her capability overriding the racial barriers in the business (Moody-Freeman, 2021). Not only did she have years of experience on the job, she had majored in English and understood the line's adherence to the romance plots of classic novels as well as the company's edict that their romance fiction be “sweet” (without sex), which likely clinched her the position. Following her promotion, she began to include authors and stories who had previously been left out, though she had to convince other Doubleday editors, something I will return to below. Her aim was to publish contemporary stories of all Americans, including African Americans, and fill the lacuna in examples of Black romance in popular culture, including movies (Mixon).

She reviewed unsolicited submissions from authors as well as agented ones, though agented work was easier for her to ready for publication if the agent had helped the writer refine their novel. With new authors, she preferred receiving completed manuscripts because they sometimes struggled to turn the few chapters they had submitted into a full novel. She also attended professional conferences to seek out talent and assured new writers, including the BIPOC ones who approached her with their stories of BIPOC protagonists, that she wanted their work if it fit the line and they were willing to follow her editorial advice.

After reviewing a submission, she would reach out to promising writers with an offer, delighting unpublished newcomers, especially those who had not been taken seriously even by their own families. She edited drafts on paper and sent feedback, largely relating to the plot structure and realistic representation of background information (Mixon). With new writers, this might lead to multiple exchanges regarding content; for instance, she once had to suggest that an author change the kind of food a wealthy protagonist might provide guests during a social outing (Moody-Freeman, 2021). She also worked closely with the writer and the copyeditor to fact-check terminology and ensure that the final draft was free of other errors. Alongside this standard editorial practice, she instilled confidence in her authors, some of whom were breaking new racial ground, and provided assistance tailored to a writer's specific situation; for example, Valerie Flournoy was a well-known children's book author (and later a romance editor herself) and Mixon worked with her to ensure that she portrayed an adult sensibility in her novel Until Summer's End (Flournoy, 1986). When it came to author Sandra Kitt, Mixon recalls, she was already a strong storyteller, a quality that Mixon most valued and sought out.

That Stephens and Mixon both published Kitt was not happenstance. The two editors knew each other (having been introduced by another powerhouse Black editor at Doubleday's Anchor imprint, Marie Brown), and the two appear to have collectively cultivated aspiring BIPOC romance writers. Mixon had discussed her romance imprint (which published one hardcover romance novel per month) with Stephens and decided to name it “Starlight” in order to stand out against competitors like Silhouette, Harlequin, and Candlelight. She recalls that Stephens was a charismatic speaker who vocally championed romance novels, while she herself was quieter but just as convinced that anyone with writing skills and a willingness to revise using editorial feedback deserved a chance to publish (Moody-Freeman, 2021). Together, the two are responsible for what I'll term the “first five” Black contemporary category romances in this essay.

In publishing these novels, the editors were pioneers, centering the Black romantic experience and providing opportunity for Black authors to break into the mainstream romance novel market in the United States. Not only are the authors identified as African American in the paratext (or their ethnicity signaled in other ways, such as in the dedication “For Black Girls and Women” in The Tender Mending) the novel protagonists are Black. Additionally, heroines have distinctive careers. In other words, they are all women building a professional life, as in many white contemporary romances published by American houses at that time, but they represent a previously invisibilized Black female upward mobility.

In effect, the gap in representation in the genre that these novels were bridging was about gender, race, and class, with the earlier exclusion of the last two resulting in the erasure of a specific habitus. The “first five” address this absence of Black middle-class life, introducing characters with economically strong and socially sophisticated backgrounds (by hegemonic white standards, of course) (Dandridge, 2022). They are well-educated, well-traveled, have comfortable or even wealthy economic backgrounds, and are rising professionals in fields like academia, media, and law.

These portraits capture the reality that after Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the Black middle class grew by 30% into the 1970s in what would later be termed a “black bourgeoisie boom,” a group that “symbolize[s] gains made during the civil rights era” (Ellis 14). But romance publishing overall seemed uninterested in Black characters in general, middle-class or not. As Stephens and Mixon have said in many interviews, however, they grew up in a middle-class milieu, in families that read for pleasure and education, and were part of a Black generation that had a variety of careers and lifestyles (as well as modes of dress and rituals like tea parties and recitals that indicate middle-class status) (Moody-Freeman, 2021; Swartz, 2020). Stephens has talked about wanting to represent how Black people “dance between the raindrops,” her phrasing for the diverse jobs, hobbies, and other practices of Black Americans that are rarely associated by the racial majority with Black life and leisure (Moody-Freeman, 2022b). The racist and classist stereotypes of Blackness that dominated the public discourse at the time did not acknowledge the lives of such people in Stephens's and Mixon's circles and that perception permeated the genre in the years before the two entered it.

It is clear when looking at the “first five” novels that both editors welcomed (and shaped) writers who represented the Black segment of up-and-coming, professional, independent women, their habitus, and their love stories with equally high-achieving Black men: a transnational American oil company executive with an Ivy League education, a caring physician who also provides support and guidance for young parents, a marine biologist, an influential and ambitious Texas legislator, and an academic and artist.

These characters fall into what would later be termed “Buppies” or Black Urban Professionals (Jones, 1986, 188) and some have the Black elite backgrounds that Margo Jefferson and Lawrence Otis Graham have discussed (Graham, 1999; Jefferson, 2015). Yet, while the novels showcase the Buppy class that was less visible in fiction, Stephens says that she was not invested in publishing Black romance for its own sake, but in representing all the ethnic groups in America and meeting the needs of that readership. Mixon also recalls that she explained to a skeptical board of senior white women editors in the trade publishing unit of Doubleday that Black people were no different from white Americans and her Black romance novels would not include anything “controversial” (Moody-Freeman, 2021; Mixon). In other words, while advocating for publishing diverse romances (i.e., with racially diverse characters written by authors who share that ethnicity), they framed their vision as an inclusive, ecumenical approach that emphasizes the similarities between people of various ethnicities when it comes to romance, relationships, and the rituals of major life stages.

It could be argued that in downplaying racial specificity as a defining element of the characters' lives, and in representing only a Black professional class, the “first five” novels are akin to the 1980s' New Black Aesthetic (NBA), termed a “cosmopolitan account of race and culture,” and which gained prominence in the era of reformist Black politics (as opposed to the revolutionary Black cultural nationalism of the 1960s) (Dubey, 2003, 7). But despite the novels' resemblance to the work of NBA members who “saw themselves as heirs to a culturally pluralist America” while also representing Black people in relation to each other (rather than in relation to whiteness), they differ from the NBA in that they are not parodying earlier Black artistic output or self-consciously depicting intra-Black conflict (Dubey, 2003, 7). They showcase people and lifestyles absent in a discourse that stereotyped minorities and are somewhat closer to Toni Morrison's interest in representing lived Black existence without “explaining, explaining, endlessly explaining everything about ourselves to [white people]” (1974, 89). Indeed, the Black Enterprise article mentioned earlier notes that the authors of Tender Mending “don't feel compelled to explain being black—but, on the other hand, object strenuously to the idea of ethnic romances that fail to reflect black cultural values” (Bray, 1982, 72).

In this sense, some of the “first five” resemble Pancho Savery's conception of the “Third Plane” of Black literature, in which Dubey sees echoes of the NBA (Dubey, 2003). Savery saw Third Plane writers as those who “do not question their own humanity or feel the need to prove it to white America; nor are they embarrassed by the variety and fullness of African-American life” (242). For Savery, Third Plane writers (who began publishing from the late 60s and continued into the 80s) are successors to the Harlem Renaissance and the Black arts movement/“Second Renaissance,” drawing on both in terms of having a formal literary structure and an introspective as well as proud attitude toward Black identity and heritage. There are glimpses of this blended perspective in the “first five,” making them the commercial fiction cousins of the NBA/Third Plane and also akin in that they were written by women, rebalancing the skewed gender composition of previous Black literary traditions.

Further, Lisa B. Thompson's observation about late twentieth-century Black literary and cultural output that contains complex representations of “middle class black sexuality that are neither pathological nor perfect” applies to the “first five,” especially their fictional Black women whose portraits go “beyond the black lady” burdened by respectability (Thompson, 2012, 5–6). Like the women in the works that Thompson profiles in her study, the “first five” heroines “do not attempt to revise beliefs about Black hypersexualization by erasing sexual matters; instead, they challenge concepts of acceptable sexual behavior for middle-class black women” (6). (More on Black female sexuality later).

Much of the literary tradition and new writing by Black women that was getting noticed in the 1980s, however, was embroiled in controversy: as writers like Ntozake Shange, Michelle Wallace, and Toni Morrison voiced Black women's experiences about multiple oppressions, including sexism from Black men, they were perceived by some as a conspiracy against the new assertion of Black men, a white feminist attempt to undermine Black communal solidarity, and racially treasonous behavior by Black women (Hernton, 1984). Black romance was perhaps too new and too commercial to get caught up in this argument, but it's likely that its writers and editors were aware of the debates as they circulated in popular media. Magazines like Essence, for example, published essays by Black queer socialist feminists like Chirlaine McCray, one of the members of the Combahee River Collective, and some like Ebony included articles discussing the causes of the alleged rifts and friction between Black men and women. In these debates, people took different positions on whether racism or sexism was the real enemy and what was necessary—individual or structural change—to sustain Black love (“The War Between the Sexes”; Hernton, 1984; Springer, 2005). The latter articles—popular diagnoses of the problems/barriers to Black romantic relationships—were in dialog with the abovesaid Black feminists' critiques of sexism within the community.

At the same time, articles on being single received praise from some readers, while others offered opinions on how Black romantic relationships could be true partnerships founded on mutual respect and equitable division of labor instead of “restrictive and detrimental to growth” (McIntosh, 1979, 16). Other female readers of articles that highlighted eligible bachelors praised the ones who mentioned their religious dating preferences, commended them for having a “sense of purpose” and for being “decisive and energetic,” and saw them as partners that Black women should aspire to, and be worthy of (Allen, 1979, 15), while others wrote in to advise Black men to get to know a woman before initiating a sexual relationship because “We want to be regarded as man's intelligent, witty, sweet little lady, not as a good lay in the hay” (Fossett, 1979, 16). Meanwhile, some male readers condemned the perceived mercenariness of Black women and others advised women that if they wanted to “keep” their man, they should create a home life that would compensate for the racism Black men suffer outside (Adams, 1979, 14; Hoard, 1979, 14).

This discourse seeps into the “first five” in different ways, with some parallels to the broader genre and societal grappling with issues of gender and sexual agency. By and large, the “first five” do not contain any hyper-critical portraits of Black men (whether the main love interest, former boyfriends, or male relatives), and Mixon has talked about how her books always cast the Black male heroes in a very positive light (Moody-Freeman, 2021) while editor Valerie Flournoy called on aspiring writers to write “stories that portray black women as ‘lovely, lovable and loved by black men’” (Bray, 1982).

But the conflict between the couple, while a standard feature of category as well as longer romance novels by then, shows the Black heroines experiencing sexism from Black men, and also dramatizes Black women's experiences of battling stereotypes and misconceptions, particularly about women's roles in professional and domestic spaces. In this sense, the novels prioritize a Black female perspective that is “faithful to the actual experiences of Black women in America” and a woman-to-woman (if not always feminist/womanist) narrative (Hernton, 1984, 143). This woman-to-woman perspective that Hernton identifies in Black feminist writers of the 1980s is visible in the female solidarity between Black women, particularly in Tender Mending and All Good Things, though the stock romance fiction character of the Other Woman appears in the former, as well as in the other three novels. (See more about the link between this character type and the controlling image of Jezebel/“hoochie” below). The overall romantic tension between the hero and the heroine and its relationship to 1980s' Black life rests on three key ideas: college-educated and career-minded Black women heroines, the controlling images of Black women that continued to dominate popular and political rhetoric, and complicated ideas of Black beauty.

All these nuances of 1980s' Black romance are liable to be overlooked if one thinks of commercial fiction as lacking artistic intent or political goals; even scholars willing to commend popular Black women genre writers of the period, such as science fiction writer Octavia Butler and Young Adult novelist Mildred Taylor, tend to overlook romance novels despite their popularity and the press coverage they received (Hernton, 1984, 726). Yet Black romance authors were arguably doing something that Black literary writers, including the Third Plane, did not do: apply the “retrospective method” that guides the “jazz aesthetic” (Savery 246). Jazz, a sub-genre of the most significant African American art—music—riffs on the past rather than practicing the “blueprint method” of doing new drafts and revisions; the “tip sheets” and formula-tethered novels that Stephens and Mixon helped their writers improvise developed that jazz aesthetic in American category romance throughout the 1980s. Additionally, these novels center on Black women who are independent professionals, and they express the “pleasure, exploration, and agency” that have been considered missing in creative and theoretical discourse, which instead focuses on trauma or looks past Black female sexuality. Lastly, they offer a snapshot of Black beauty standards in the early 1980s, after the heyday of “Black is Beautiful” had turned into a blended aesthetic that showed a white beauty standard regaining ground even as natural Black hair maintained a presence.²

It must be acknowledged, however, that while the “first five” writers (with their editors), like NBA artists or even some Third Plane writers, might not have made racism or sexism their main antagonist or been caught off guard by it, it is because the editors chose to seek out only joyful Black romance manuscripts. As the same Black Enterprise article mentioned above notes, Stephens “had a lot of trouble finding black books by black authors; she says the manuscripts she has received are so filled with misery and unhappiness that they're totally inappropriate for the genre” (Bray, 1982, 72). The situation arose perhaps because many of the storytellers did not have the privileged remove from racism that NBA practitioners claimed, or they lacked models for happier Black love stories. It thus follows that the “first five” novels are not representative of Black political thought or of the romance manuscripts that Black writers were turning in (and that were being turned down because of their themes and tone); nevertheless, the ones that were published are immersed in the fabric of contemporary Black American life, mainly of the successful or aspiring professional class who gained from welfare policy implementation during the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Mixon has said that her own decision to pursue a college degree was due to a program that aimed to improve BIPOC access to higher education degrees (Mixon)).

Despite Stephens and Mixon's work, and some similar interventions by editors at other houses, Black romance continued to be sidelined by romance publishing over the 1980s. Even after the runaway success of Dell romance (both the Candlelight line that Stephens energized and the Candlelight Ecstasy line she introduced, which transformed the industry) as well as the publicity surrounding Stephens' role in the formation of the RWA, when Stephens was offered a job by Harlequin in 1981, Dell declined to match the offer (Moody-Freeman, 2022b). Not only did it let her go, but the publisher also essentially buried most of the BIPOC manuscripts she had bought and prepared for publication, folding Candlelight entirely soon after (Bray, 1982, 72).

Harlequin hired Stephens to launch their American line in August 1981, as noted earlier, since Dell and Silhouette were giving them a run for their money, but then fired her allegedly because their buy-out of Silhouette Romance from Simon and Schuster created redundancies in the editorial division in 1984 (Grescoe, 1996, 189; McDowell, 1984, 11; Swartz, 2020). It could also be that the recently established RWA showed some unsound fiscal judgment, which reflected badly on Stephens at her new job, or that Harlequin did not want “ethnic” romances with the “vernacular of America's ethnic groups,” which they thought would be difficult to translate to its international market (Dandridge, 2022). Stephens recalls that Harlequin's Vice-President, David Galloway, and she vocally disagreed during the focus group they did for the launch of Harlequin American's first novel. He had picked A Strong and Tender Thread (1983), a Black romance written by Jackie Weger (a white author), without giving Stephens advance notice and then proceeded to discomfit the focus group with repeated, pointed questions about the characters' Blackness. He apologized later and also admitted that Harlequin should have a diverse line-up but still did not want her to buy any more “ethnic” romance manuscripts (Stephens). Following her ouster from Harlequin, no publisher, including Avon or Dell, would work with her in any capacity that she proposed (“Interview with Vivian Stephens” 5; Moody-Freeman, 2022b).

Meanwhile, Doubleday was purchased by German firm Bertelsmann in 1987, which also led to staffing redundancies and Mixon was let go in 1988, after working there for 14 years (McDowell, 1987, E6; Moody-Freeman, 2021). Before this, she published Final Summer (Vivian, 1988), attributed to Vivian Stephens and Angela Dews, a novel that is immersed in an elite Black community and a proud lineage as well as community uplift ideology (Dandridge, 2022). Mixon's last Starlight Romance with Black characters was by a new author, Rochelle Alers, who praises Mixon for working closely with her to get the manuscript of Careless Whispers ready for publication. Indeed, she notes that the edit was so extensive that had she known that Mixon would soon be leaving Doubleday, she might not have had the will to follow her edits through; Mixon admitted to her in their final meeting that she deliberately withheld that information so that Alers would complete the re-write instead of losing momentum. (Moody-Freeman, 2021, 2022a).

The first wave of BIPOC American romance in the 1980s is punctuated by Alers and Stephens getting together in 1990 to launch the Women Writers of Color/Readers Plus group to continue shifting the behemoth of American publishing toward equitable racial representation (Agyemang-Badu, 1992, 123). While Mixon moved on to working in entertainment journalism, Stephens continued to train new Black writers for many years, as well as judging fiction contests for Essence magazine and trying other independent ventures (Dandridge, 2022). Both women's recent interviews for the Black Romance Podcast are rich with their experiences in the primordial soup of American mass-market romance in the early 1980s.

Hill and others who began to come into print in the 1990s were the second harvest of the seeds of Black love and happiness that Stephens and Mixon had sown in the 1980s. As Gwendolyn Osborne has noted, Kensington became the first publisher in 1994 to create a line devoted to African American romance, Arabesque, putting about 250 titles by 50 Black authors into print before selling the line to Black Entertainment Television's book division in 1998 (Osborne, 2002, 50) (Editor Monica Harris, a young Black woman, is widely regarded as being key to this period). Despite this efflorescence, the path of Black romance, like true love, has not been smooth. Beverly Jenkins sketches that bumpy racist road well into the 1990s (Jenkins, 2022, 13), while recent surveys, such as by the Ripped Bodice bookstore, document the continuing low representation of BIPOC romance in mainstream American publishing (“The State of Racial Diversity”). Nevertheless, as Jenkins says at the end of her history, Black writers continue to publish romance, creating space for themselves in many sub-genres and mediums.

The late 1970s and early 1980s are often discussed in terms of the rise of women of color feminism, particularly because of major manifestos and scholarly contributions such as “Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement” (Eisenstein, 1978), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981), Angela Davis's Women, Race & Class (Davis, 1981), and bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Hooks, 1981) and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Hooks, 1984). Kimberly Springer explains that “black feminists are, historically, the first activists in the United States to theorize and act upon the intersections of race, gender, and class” (Springer, 2005, 2). This essay suggests that Black romance editors and writers in the 1980s are the first to conceive of and act upon the intersections of race, gender, and class in American romance fiction. The impact of their intersectional vision has sometimes taken center stage but has also been sidelined at other times by a monoracial white perspective. In our current moment, while romance fiction is again buffeted by the periodic tides that reject diversity and normalize bigotry and xenophobic sentiments, my essay not only documents how Black contributors developed the popular romance but also offers their work as a model of how others can combat the genre's culpability in our contemporary reactionary climate. But most of all, in resurfacing 1980s' Black romance editorship and foregrounding narratives of love and a HEA that include Black protagonists and a range of women's professional and erotic desires, this study shows that an inclusive Black vision of love and happiness was not just present in early American romance publishing but was constitutive of it.