Red, White & Royal Blue: The erotic romcom proving that America sees the Royal family as Kardashians

Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Henry and Taylor Zakhar Perez as Alex Claremont-Diaz in Prime Video's Red, White & Royal Blue. Photo / Amazon Prime

When Queen Elizabeth II died last September, the Empire State Building was lit up purple in her honour: just one expression of the outpouring of grief and respect from a nation plunged almost as deeply into mourning as our own. Forget the War of Independence and the modern rumblings about colonialism: Americans have always regarded our Royal family as if the latter were still theirs. To America, our princes and princesses, castles and crowns are the Disney fantasy incarnate: a very real world just across the Pond, where young girls really can grow up to marry a prince.

This might explain why one of the biggest fiction hits of recent years has been the 2019 novel Red, White & Royal Blue by the 32-year-old American author Casey McQuiston, in which a non-royal gets it together with a prince. The twist? It’s a gay love affair with geopolitical ramifications, in which Alex, the coolly charismatic First Son of the American president, embarks on a steamy love affair with the outwardly frosty, but inwardly carnally liberated, English Prince Henry.

So feverishly awaited is the forthcoming Amazon screen adaptation, which stars Uma Thurman as the president and Stephen Fry as the king of Britain, that a key scene from the trailer featuring Alex and Henry stumbling into a giant wedding cake has racked up nearly 25 million views on TikTok.

To say that Red, White & Royal Blue has taken the American publishing industry by storm is an understatement of “recollections may vary” proportions. It was initially published by St Martin’s Press, a US Macmillan imprint, to little fanfare, and without any of the usual endorsements, such as celebrity Instagram shout-outs and television book-club picks, that are often crucial Stateside in establishing a mass readership.

Yet in its first year it went through seven printings and sold 100,000 copies, propelled by word of mouth alone. It’s been a New York Times bestseller and currently has more than 43,000 ratings on Amazon, with an impressive average of 4.5 stars. It’s the quintessential publishing success-story that both defies the algorithms – its editor, Vicki Lame, has admitted that the prospect of a novel about the Royal family didn’t initially appeal – and hits the critical sweet-spot: a frothy, feel-good romcom that combines royal intrigue and political gossip with erotic titillation and zeitgeisty LGBTQ appeal.

Fictional dramas that exploit a transatlantic obsession with the Royal family are a mini-industry in their own right, be it Channel 4′s Harry Enfield satirical soap opera The Windsors or E!’s primetime series The Royals, starring Elizabeth Hurley, which ran from 2015 to 2018. Not to mention, of course, Netflix’s ongoing juggernaut The Crown, which incurs more public wrath with each new season for its creative blurring of fact with fiction.

There have been novels, too, mostly in the unashamedly commercial lowbrow romance genre, including Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan’s 2015 The Royal We – a giddy fairy tale about an American girl who finds love with a royal prince, and which McQuiston has cited as an influence on Red, White & Royal Blue. Forget the White House: evidently the real objective of the American dream is to gain entry to the British aristocracy.

Yet Red, White & Royal Blue is different. Its viral success can partly be explained by the way it taps into a particular American liberal wish-fulfilment fantasy in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. In the novel’s alternative America, a white female Democrat from Texas, Ellen Claremont, is in the White House (think a white Michelle Obama, more than Hillary Clinton), with a 20-something mixed-race son. Hot-button ideological conflicts between the Democrats and the Republicans shape much of the narrative backdrop. Then there’s positive identity messaging and the depiction of strong but sensitive, politically-aware masculinity – Alex and Henry romp beneath a painting of Alexander Hamilton – not to mention the way the novel leverages its gay storyline to take a pop at both the British and American establishments.

Alex and Henry, after getting it together on New Year’s Eve – “Henry gives as good as he gets, hooking one knee around Alex’s thigh… delicate royal sensibilities nowhere in the cut of his teeth” – must keep their love affair a secret to avoid damaging the Royal family’s reputation, Claremont’s 2020 election run, and the “special relationship”.

What’s more, McQuiston, who identifies as queer and uses they/them pronouns, has been canny in maintaining the novel’s cultural currency: alongside creating fake Spotify accounts for the book’s main characters, they regularly put out extra character trivia on Twitter. The novel’s afterlife has since taken off: you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with “Vote Claremont 2024″ on Etsy. The book has been so widely read that the author has reported octogenarians turning up at book talks.

Yet the novel’s success also raises ethical questions about the responsibility of fiction when it comes to playing fast and loose with the private life of a living person.

Prince Harry is unlikely to complain about the novel’s gay storyline, not to mention its gushy depictions of Henry as extremely hot in bed. But he may admit to some private misgivings over the way the book exploits the very real loss of his mother, albeit in loosely fictionalised form: Henry – whose siblings are “Princess Beatrice” and “Prince Philip” – has been badly affected by the abrupt death of his father 14 months previously. What’s more, Harry’s publicly articulated real-life struggles with mental health and battles with duty, family and the paparazzi provide much of the novel’s fictional emotional capital. And forget accusations of unconscious racial bias: this Royal family are nakedly homophobic.

Of course, if Harry does have anxieties about his private unhappiness being cannibalised by novelists in the name of art, not to mention money, you could argue he has only himself to blame.

“The popularity of this book does seem to suggest what many in Britain have long feared, that the Royal family have become the Kardashians of popular culture,” says the veteran British royal correspondent Robert Jobson, who regularly contributes to NBC and who was a script editor on The Royals.

“And that has partly come out of the whole Megxit affair and Netflix documentaries. Most of all, there was Harry’s book, Spare, which dealt with a lot of areas that wouldn’t normally come out in public. It’s interesting, because up to now, British publishers in particular haven’t been very interested in this sort of thing.”

Certainly, Red, White & Royal Blue wasn’t originally published in this country, although a new edition, tied to the film, was published last month. An industry insider, who didn’t want to be named, points out there are currently sponsored posts about the book on the UK Amazon site, which suggests the publisher is now putting serious money behind it. The book is also climbing up the Kindle and Apple charts.

ONE MORE WEEK ❤️🤍💙 @RWRBonPrime pic.twitter.com/iFb0QAKv97

— Prime Video (@PrimeVideo) August 4, 2023

“I do think the author has been very clever,” says Jobson. “It’s an LGBT project by a writer who knows the market and is utilising a genre to create a bestseller. If it had been written 20 years ago, there would have been more of an uproar about it. There’s a general apathy now among the younger generation, who don’t have the same connection to the monarchy.

“And I think certainly in America, among the general public, there is a greater frivolity in the way the monarchy is perceived.”

Does this mean the floodgates are about to open? Will we see a novel about an affair between Catherine and Camilla next? Watch this space.

Red, White & Royal Blue will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime on August 11