Say what you will about problematic tropes and elements in fandom today but we’ve come a really long way since I first started participating in it.
It’s been almost ten years since I first started reading fic (yikes). I was mostly on fanfiction.net, but also a small slew of fandom-specific sites for Harry Potter, Buffy, and, later, Psych. I got into slash probably about a year after I started reading fan fiction, first being weirded out by it (in my defense, I was fourteen and it was the mid-2000s), then intrigued, then reading it almost exclusively (until I came to terms with my love of ladies when I was nineteen, but that’s a different story).
Back then, slash was treated one of two ways.
Either it didn’t exist, because the sites didn’t allow it. Those sites (always fandom specific in my experience) had mods looking through all fic before it could be posted. You could gain trusted status after a while and be allowed to post without someone looking through your stuff first, but I don’t know how long that took. I broke too many rules to ever get there.
Or you warned for it. On fanfiction.net, this was done in the author’s note or the summary, but some sites had it on a list of content warnings you had to check if applied. Otherwise, your story wouldn’t get posted.
And all of this was treated as preference. Not wanting same-sex relationships in stories on your site was just like not wanting crossovers, or (more problematically) smut, incest, or underage. It was reasonable to be grossed out by slash and it was expected that you would get flames for posting it.
(I have no idea how femslash was treated at the time because I never sought it out. I did write some Buffy/Dru and Buffy/Faith fics at age fifteen though, but they got shamefully deleted before I ever posted them).
Idk where I’m going with this. I guess I’m just grateful things have changed. And obviously my experience is nothing like that of even older fans. I remember talking with some women in their 40s and 50s back when I was into Star Trek and also on LJ, and back when they first entered fandom through zines, stories involving slash almost always included some form of “it’s not all men, it’s just you”.