This is an often-mentioned factoid, but I doubt its accuracy. Several academic works on gay culture in Japan indicate that a significant proportion of gay men read at least some mainstream (girl-oriented) BL, and anecdotally I hear that gay men’s bookstores usually carry some BL in addition to gay men’s manga; the Juné anthology magazines were reportedly staples of gay bookstores in the 1990s. Plus now there are several anthology magazines that could best be described as “hybrids”, with the apparent intention of attracting mixed-gender audiences.

Slash and yaoi fandom look the same on the surface, but they’ve come to look very different to me. Slash writers tend to take het characters and make the characters the most realistic gay men they can. Yaoi writers write fantasy, romance novels. They’re very different end products. I don’t like to read slash – it’s usually too depressingly rooted in the real world. Yaoi is more escapist to me, which is what I’m looking for when I turn to it.

You did another good job covering all the opinions out there, and presenting them without bias.