The Things You Do For Love

Have had barely a moment to read this weekend so instead of a review you get another snippet from my life which, this time, highlights just how much hub loves me.

Hub is currently at a conference in Portland, Oregon, USA.  We were on Skype and he mentioned that there's a huge, famous second hand book store in Portland and asked if there was an out-of-print book I wanted that he might be able to find there for me.  Well, one book sprang to mind.  It was a book I'd tried to get hold of but seems to be out of print - it's not available at Amazon (except for a horrendous price) or at The Book Depository.

Yes.  It's an m/m.

So the conversation went a bit like this:
me: There is a book, but you won't want to get it for me.
hub: Why? Is it one of your rude books?
me: Yes, it's a gay romance.
hub: *sighing in a resigned manner* what's the name?

So I gave him the name of the book and he told me that he would look on the shelves to see if it was there, but he wasn't going to ask about it, if he couldn't see it.  Fair enough, I thought.

Anyway, today he Skypes again and he's got the book - yay!  But the thing is, he forgot to take the bit of paper with the name of the book on it to the shop and he could only remember the name of the author.  So he had to go to the guy behind the counter and ask whether he had heard of the author.  The guy very helpfully Googled the author and found the author's website where they could look at all the titles and see if hub recognised any of them.

Meanwhile hub is dying of embarrassment and feels the need to explain that the book is for his wife.

Eventually hub sees the book title and goes off to find it on the shelf.  He then has to take the book to the checkout where he suffers more embarrassment when the checkout girl looks at him funnily.

After he told me all this, I pointed out that the book cover was really quite innocuous with no gratuitous man-titty or headless torsos in sight, so the checkout girl couldn't have possibly known it was a gay romance.  It was at this point when he got the book out and showed me the words "The Gay Men's Press" in big black letters on the front and back of the cover.

Um.  OK.

I bet you're wondering which book it is now, aren't you?  Here it is....

So you see, my hub must love me very much because he suffered all the embarrassment of buying a paperback m/m romance just for me.

Thanks, hub
*mwah*

There's actually a serious point to make here.  Hub was embarrassed because he is a straight man buying gay romance.  Fair enough.  But it made me wonder how a gay man would feel to go to that checkout, hand over a gay romance and have the checkout girl look at him funnily.  It's no wonder ebooks and companies like Amazon and TBD are so popular.  It cuts out having to deal with insensitive checkout staff.