If this sentence seems nonsensical to you, here I am, trying to frame what for me is a very LARGE component of my experience as a fan.
I have several real-life friends that write actual academic books on this topic, and, since I am just a consumer -a very old-timer one, but still, just a consumer- I will quote here, mostly, parts taken from Wiki or other websites, so to use the right sociology terms and stay in 2200 characters.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between characters of the same sex*. You probably know it as M/M now*, or, even, just "shipping", not really distinguishing heterosexual pairings from homosexual ones.
But, back in the day, the difference was there, and so, we were "slashers."
It is commonly believed that slash originated during the late 1970s, within the Star Trek fandom, starting with "Kirk/Spock" stories generally authored by female fans. The name arises from the use of the slash symbol / in K/S, identifying romantic and/or sexual Kirk and Spock fiction, as compared to & in K&S, conventionally used for friendship fiction. In its earliest days, slash has been particularly inspired by popular speculative fiction franchises (e.g. sci-fi), possibly because this kind of fiction lacked well-developed female characters or because the speculative elements allowed greater freedom to reinterpret canon characters. However, already at the end of the '70s, large slash productions were also based on non-speculative sources, such as "Starsky and Hutch".
Later, frustration with the portrayal of gay relationships in mainstream media fed a growing desire in authors to explore the subjects on their own terms, using established media characters. In a way, so, slash has been important to the LGBT community and to the formation of queer identities, as it represents a resistance to the expectation of heterosexuality. That said, though, slash is generally unrepresentative of the male gay community as a whole, since, primarily, filtered and coded by women*. It is worth noting, however, that the predominant demographic among slash readers and writers identifies as other than heterosexual.
*A quick note here. In today's fan fiction communities, the term "slash" is almost lost. M/M fiction, although deriving from slash, include also not canonically trans characters or canonically queer characters, so that it cannot be confined to a definition of "relationships between characters of the same sex". Additionally, the M/M genre is more and more written by young trans men, which shifts perspectives and nuances. Even not as a sociology academic, but as a 25+ years fan fiction reader, I can easily note many differences between a rather recent M/M creative work, maybe authored by a teenager trans man, and a 1995 slash fiction written by a cis woman. So to say, that my caption aimed to discuss specifically slash, not "modern" M/M.
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