Telling (Love) Stories

At Oberlin, Dominic Lim ’96 was far too busy on campus to imagine life after college. The psychology and law and society double major sang in the Obertones and was a founding member of two Oberlin institutions: the Oberlin Musical Theater Association (OMTA) and Third World Cooperative. 

Still, he pondered becoming a psychologist or pursuing his extracurricular passions to work as an actor and singer. And although Lim’s now a proud card-carrying Actors’ Equity Association member, he never expected that he would become a best-selling romance author—one whose books cleverly use rich love stories to explore complicated themes of identity, culture, race, and queerness. 

“I wanted to put it in a love story because people who are buying and reading romance and reading happy ever afters aren’t necessarily looking for these kinds of issues,” Lim says. “But when they’re there, they are suddenly forced to sort of deal with them and think about them.”

His 2023 debut novel, All the Right Notes (Forever), which appeared on the year-end best-of lists in USA Today, Goodreads, and Entertainment Weekly, follows the romance of two men: piano star (and Oberlin grad) Quito and Hollywood heartthrob Emmett, who have an unfinished story that reaches its conclusion when they reunite for a charity show. The success of this book led Lim to his second novel, Karaoke Queen (Forever). Released in September, the book follows Rex, a Filipino American former drag queen who resurrects his drag persona, Regina, to help save the failing karaoke bar run by his “one that got away” college ex. 

Unfortunately, Rex realizes that the ex he’s going to such great lengths to help (and win back) isn’t interested in dating a drag queen. In response, he decides to hide his drag identity and keep the personas separate, prompting a ruse that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as Regina’s popularity grows. 

“Karaoke Queen is about embracing your true identity,” Lim says. “It’s about love. It’s about gay men being able to embrace the femme and feminine sides of themselves. And it is a statement on what’s going on with drag right now.”

Lim’s own pop culture interests heavily inform the worlds within his writing. These include RuPaul’s Drag Race (both the U.S. and Philippine franchises), Filipino karaoke culture, classic show tunes, and contemporary queer artists like Chappell Roan. When writing, Lim also called back to the pop culture phenomena from his time at Oberlin—“Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Erasure, New Order, Ani DiFranco, George Michael, and all that amazing queer and queer-coded stuff out there,” as he puts it. (Lim previously told Entertainment Weekly that his first exposure to drag was Oberlin’s Drag Ball.)

With All the Right Notes and Karaoke Queen in the hands of readers, Lim now has the space and time to devote himself to his third novel. “Most writers find that a lot of their fantastic writing comes when you’re not doing your actual writing,” he says. “It comes when you’re going for a walk or in the shower or when you’re driving. You need that space for ideas to percolate and pop up. When you’re writing on a deadline, you don’t have that space.” 

But he’s continuing to consider these important themes of identity and performance as he writes books for the next generation of romance readers looking for stories and characters as diverse as the lives they lead. 

“That’s what I love to do as a writer, is to use genre as sort of a back door,” he says. “I’m currently writing romance, and it is a great way for people to say, ‘Oh, I never knew that Filipino culture was like this. Oh, I’ve never met someone who's nonbinary or trans. They sound awesome. I would love to meet someone like that.’”

Serena Zets ’22 is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist and essayist and a regular contributor to Washington City Paper.

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine.