Writing about the 1970s, with particular reference to Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner (1974) and Laura Z. Hobson’s Consenting Adult (1975):
Reviews of the decade’s major novels collectively tended to disparage the contributions of women who wrote fiction about gay men, for instance, while attempting to create and regulate the boundaries of an elite, literary, male fraternity of gay authors and critics authorized to undertake such writing and to represent gay people within mainstream culture.
(Distelberg, 2010, p. 394)
But reviewers faulted some books for countering “the old stereotypes” so insistently that gay men were now misrepresented as homogenously masculine, middle class, and white. They applied this analysis with the most vigor to the representations offered by positive novels with female authors: Warren’s books and Hobson’s Consenting Adult, which describes a mother’s slow coming to grips with her son’s homosexuality. The Front Runner‘s “heroic masculine characters” — a trio of track stars and their butch ex-marine coach — “are not the faggots that most of us know,” Allen Young wrote. Likewise, the protagonist in Consenting Adult (also a star athlete, as well as a medical student ultimately in a long-term relationship), like the main characters in similar novels, was in Thom Willenbecher’s estimation “not … the stereotypical fag.” Novels with female authors — Warren’s in particular — also received an especially intensive gender analysis not typically applied in other cases. [...] Although reviewers’ critique of Warren and their observations about the narrowness of her and Hobson’s perspectives had some merit, and although the particular prominence and success of these authors’ novels made them especially ripe targets, these criticisms allowed many reviewers not only to discredit the positive subgenre and the gay men it portrayed as too conventional but also to dismiss the contributions of these female authors.
(Distelberg, 2010, pp. 404-405)
Have perceptions changed among gay reviewers of female-authored m/m fiction?
Reference:
Distelberg, Brian J. (2010). Mainstream fiction, gay reviewers, and gay male cultural politics in the 1970s. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(3), 389-427. doi: 10.1215/10642684-2009-036