Special Episode: Women Loving Women (with Kathy Tu)
Hot and Bothered
Not Sorry Productions
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While we're between mini-seasons, we wanted to bring you this special conversation with Kathy Tu. Kathy is the co-creator of the queer podcast Nancy and the Executive Producer of 99% Invisible. She's also obsessed with reading WLW romance novels. We brought her on to reflect on queer romance, spread the gospel, and give us some recommendations.
Books mentioned:
- Count Your Lucky Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur
- the Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur
- The Seal Cove series by Anna Berke
- When You Least Expect It by Haley Cass
- On the Same Page by Haley Cass
- Those Who Wait by Haley Cass
- How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang
- The Grace Notes series by Ruby Landers
- Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wisner
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In May of this year, 2025, Kathy 2, who is a friend and is the executive producer of the podcast 99% Invisible, who's a brilliant storyteller and is one of the founding hosts and producer of the fantastic podcast, Nancy, posted something on Instagram that caught my attention. |
| 0:23.1 | She wrote, and I quote, |
| 0:25.0 | If you don't know, I've been obsessed with reading slash listening to women-loving women romance novels this year. |
| 0:32.8 | As of today, this was in May, everyone, I'm over 50 books for the year 2025. Do I do anything else now? |
| 0:41.4 | No, just romance novels. Obviously, I was super happy for Kathy, and obviously I can relate. |
| 0:50.1 | We started hot and bothered in 2018 when I was in a very similar place with romance novels. |
| 0:57.1 | I was anxious about our recent presidential election and U.S. politics and climate change. |
| 1:05.5 | So I totally immersed myself in the fantasy world of romance novels and came to treat them as a sacred |
| 1:12.3 | practice in a way to stay engaged and politically motivated and still take care of myself |
| 1:17.4 | and believe in love and hope. And even though our current season of Hot and Bothered is about |
| 1:23.7 | romantic movies, not romantic novels, |
| 1:27.7 | I'm still really interested in the things |
| 1:29.8 | that romance novels can do for us. |
| 1:32.3 | And obviously, I think that these two things |
| 1:35.0 | are in conversation with one another. |
| 1:38.7 | But what's special about romance novels |
| 1:41.5 | is that they are written and published faster |
| 1:44.0 | than movies are made. |
| 1:45.8 | They don't need a studio's approval. |
| 1:48.4 | Often they are self-published, so there's more room for them to speak to our current moment, |
| 1:54.6 | urgently to speak to niche audiences, for you to find the exact hockey,, teacher, student, close proximity, love that |
| 2:05.1 | you want. And right now, there are more queer romance novels being written than ever before. |
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