I actually really like gay fiction and have read quite a bit of it. I'm not even talking about Tales of the City or other mainstream fiction with gay characters in it. No, I mean the insane drag queen filled weirdness that you only find in gay bookstores. It's interesting to see how this genre is influenced by various facets of gay culture. It's very self-referential and meta in its own way, but it draws from a set of cultural knowledge not held in common by slashers, so many slashers aren't going to be drawn to it.

Reading it is, however, a good antidote to the irritating slashers' inferiority complex since it's just so clearly a different type of writing. I'll admit though that I have been guilty of telling people that the character they're writing "doesn't sound like a real man". Bad me. I really should say that those characters don't sound like actual humans since the ones I complain about certainly don't sound like real women either.