The ickiest part of it, for me, is that the bulk of slash fanfic is being written by people who, for various reasons (ranging from age-related sexual inexperience to the unavoidable fact, she said as tactfully as possible, that so many of the older slashsmiths are sexually inexperienced due to social awkwardness and/or emotional or physical unattractiveness), have smeg-all knowledge of How To Do Sex, much less How To Do Sex in Prose. I've by now read a small but not surpassingly small amount of slashfic, and to a piece it's been a snarfleworthy kitschfest of purplishly overeffulgent, embarrassingly-Anne Rice-wannabe Romance-with-an-uppercase-R. In other words, instead of two boys or men acting like boys and men do when they're shagging each other, they act more like three-legged gay girls. Dude. Not that men can't be tender an' a' tha', but (whether a matter of cultural conditioning or hardwiring) it's not the same sort of tenderness. Erm, am I making any sense?

We have sexually open characters here and there, e.g. Inara, in sf series now, but yeah, main storylines don't often centre on same-sex relationships. Though there was the plainly depicted though unresolved physical and emotional attraction between a couple of B5 women - lessee, Ivanova and the telepath Talia IIRC.

Indeed, it would be Joss who had the maturity to portray same-sex relationships...heheh.