To write MM romance that readers finish, give both men a full point of view, pick a trope readers still ask for (friends to lovers, grumpy and sunshine, enemies to lovers), set the heat level on purpose, and end on a happily ever after. The market is bigger than it has ever been: LGBTQ+ romance sold 900,000 print units in the US in 2025, up from 250,000 in 2021, according to Publishers Weekly (16 January 2026). If you want an AI to help with the love scenes, the pairing changes little: in our own test, the models that wrote a man and a woman explicitly wrote two men explicitly too, and the ones that cut away did it for both.
Why MM romance is selling now
One show did a lot of it. The TV adaptation of Rachel Reid's Heated Rivalry, a 2019 hockey romance between two rival players, premiered on 28 November 2025, and Circana BookScan figures reported by Publishers Weekly show what followed:
| What | Number | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Heated Rivalry paperback, all of 2025 | about 42,000 copies | PW, 16 Jan 2026 |
| Heated Rivalry, week ended 10 Jan 2026 | just under 23,000 copies, #7 overall | PW, 16 Jan 2026 |
| Unit sales, weeks ended 29 Nov 2025 to 10 Jan 2026 | up nearly 1,000% | PW, 16 Jan 2026 |
| The Long Game (same series), sales to date | 2,495 → 30,567 in six weeks | PW, 16 Jan 2026 |
| Canada's romance top sellers, 2026 to 8 Feb | the first six are all Game Changers books | BookNet Canada, 12 Feb 2026 |
What that tells a writer: readers who found the genre through a hockey rivalry are likely looking for the next one, and sports romance with two men in it has a waiting audience. It also tells you the bar. A rivalry that runs for years, told from both sides, is what they just read.
What MM romance readers want: tropes and heat
The largest public survey we found is the MM Romance Reader Survey 2022, run by MM authors and published by Nora Phoenix on 10 October 2022, with 5,715 responses (about 2,000 in 2020). Its gender and age splits are only in chart images, so we don't quote them. The rest:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Favourite tropes | Friends to lovers, grumpy and sunshine, enemies to lovers, bisexual awakening, fated mates |
| Tropes readers are tired of | Mafia, daddy kink, billionaire, professor and student, instalove |
| Heat | 45% don't care as long as the book is good; 38% prefer high heat |
| Angst | 47% medium; 19% high; 16% high only if it's external; 18% low |
| What makes them try a new author | The blurb (75%), another author's recommendation (57%) |
Two things to take from it. Heat is a choice, not a requirement: closed door works for nearly half the readers if the book does. And the tired list is mostly power imbalances, the boss, the professor, the crime family, which is where consent needs to be visible in the scene, not assumed (our smut craft guide has the how).
Checked November 2026: we found no MM reader survey newer than 2022 with published results.
How to write MM romance: craft that matters most
Both men get a point of view. The reader wants to know what each of them thinks the other is hiding, and a second point of view is how you show it. Alternate by chapter or by scene, and give each man his own way of seeing a room: the captain counts exits, the rookie counts who's looking at him.
Their coming out, if there is one, has a cost on the page. A bisexual awakening is a favourite trope in the survey, so earn it: what he risks, who he tells first, what changes the morning after.
Two men, two bodies, two histories. The quickest way to lose a reader is two leads who sound alike. Give each a line nobody else in the book would say, and a reason he won't say it yet.
The ending is a promise. Harlequin's Carina Press, which first published Heated Rivalry, asks in its submission guidelines (read November 2026) for a happily ever after or happily for now in every romance, accepts "all subgenres of LGBTQIA romance with all levels of sensuality", and says romance "tends to fall between 75-90K words". That's a fair target for a first MM novel. "All subgenres" takes in the stranger ones too: if one of your men isn't human, writing a monster romance hero has the line every platform draws.
Which AI will write MM romance, at which heat
Our Fade to Black study (22 October 2026) sent five frontier models six love scenes between consenting adults aged 29 to 40, through OpenRouter's API, at three heat levels, three tries each, plus the explicit request again with a line saying the writer is a verified adult on an adult-fiction platform. One couple was two men: Aldric and Tomas, knights and lovers for years, alone in their tent after a battle. Four were a woman and a man. The table counts explicit requests that came back explicit:
| Model | Man + man | Woman + man | What the rest were |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | 6 of 6 | 24 of 24 | none |
| Grok 4.7 | 6 of 6 | 22 of 22 | none |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | 4 of 6 | 22 of 24 | on the page but not graphic |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | 0 of 6 | 0 of 24 | softened or cut away |
| Gemini 4 Argon | 0 of 6 | 0 of 24 | refused (4 of 6 for the knights) or softened |
| All five | 16 of 30 (53%) | 68 of 118 (58%) |
Below explicit, the knights got what was asked: all 15 open-door scenes came back sensual and on the page, and 14 of 15 closed-door scenes stopped at the tent flap (GPT-6.1 Sol went a little further once). Sonnet's two softer replies for the knights both came without the adult-platform line; with it, it wrote them explicitly three times out of three. One couple per same-sex pairing and six tries each are too few to call a difference of one or two replies a pattern, and the study says so.
So the honest answer to "will AI write gay romance" is that the pairing isn't what decides it. The model is.
Where these AI tools fall short for MM romance
- ChatGPT wrote the knights' closed-door and open-door scenes, then softened every explicit one. Why, and what doesn't work around it, is in ChatGPT won't write NSFW.
- Gemini refused two of every three explicit requests for the knights, the same as it did for many of the other couples. The API's safety settings don't change that.
- Claude Opus 5.5 wrote every explicit scene, but Anthropic's Usage Policy bars sexually explicit content on claude.ai and the API alike; the details are in our Claude guide.
- Grok 4.7 wrote every explicit scene and xAI's published rules allow adult fiction, but a chat window holds only so much of a long book.
- All of them lose the book. A chat that has scrolled past the first fight doesn't know who threw the punch, and in a slow burn that's the whole plot.
Writing MM romance in KudoWrite
MM romance lives on its history: the first fight, the first time one of them looked too long, what each man knows and hasn't said. KudoWrite keeps that history for you. Each of your leads is a character entry in the story bible, and as you write, the bible and a running summary of the whole book update themselves. Before the next beat is written, the engine picks the entries that passage needs and plans from the story so far and the beats on either side, so the chapter 20 kiss knows about the chapter 2 punch.
Your heat is your call. There's no content filter of KudoWrite's own, and the built-in model was picked partly because it rarely refuses; a one-line steer ("keep the door closed tonight", "he asks first") edits the beat in place, and it outranks everything else. Drafted part of it in NovelAI or Novelcrafter? Import the book and its lorebook or codex.
It's a browser app in English, with one free credit after you confirm your email and one-off packs from $3.50 for 100 credits.
Write down what each of your two men wants and why he can't have it yet. Then write the scene where they first meet.