Where do we start, then?  I think it's always best to start from one's own experience and move on from there.  Mind you, I would have the innocent reader bear in mind that, as in all discussions of fandom stuffs, generalizations can be dangerous, and not every story is as good as the next.

I grew up in a small town in the middle of Newfoundland.  White, middle-class, religious and very heterosexual would describe the inhabitants.  Everyone was heterosexual.  Or that's what everyone thinks.  Turns out, hey, look, I'm a lesbian...and I'm from that town.  I know of exactly one other gay person from my community.  I'm sure there are more out there.  Statistically there should be around 300 of them.  I've only ever met one, and he didn't come out to me, he came out to my brother who happened to be his friend.

I grew up thinking I was just 'different'.  That staring at the girls in my class might be ascribable to jealously that they were the ones dating and I wasn't.  It never once occurred to me that I might be jealous of the boys who were the ones dating the girls I wanted to.  Being gay or lesbian wasn't an option.  Being a homosexual was something that never came up.  I didn't have a television for the most part of my childhood, but there sure weren't many serious gay role models out there.  I can't remember the first time I encountered the concept of homosexual, but I think it was well into my highschool years.  Some of that has to do with the fact I can't remember much about my childhood, but sexuality wasn't ever talked about in terms of anything other than heterosexuality.

What does this have to do with slash, you ask?  And what does it have to do with Simon and Rafe doing it in Simon's office while Jim and Blair boff like bunnies in the broom closet and Megan and some lady (maybe Rhonda, 'cause I wouldn't force Cassie on Megan) kiss in the elevator?  Well, it has to do with role reversal, acceptance, and challenging social norms.

In most of our lives we are faced with heterosexual images.  I remember my shock, and joy when I saw a commercial on Showcase (a Canadian channel that is wonderful) that had two women lying in bed together in a clearly non-platonic way.  Finally, the visibility of lesbians was becoming more acceptable.  Mind you, this is from a channel that has no compunctions about showing erotic movies and Queer as Folk, completely uncut and uncensored.  If one looks at mainstream television, gays and lesbians are constantly constructed as the 'other', the 'different', or the absurd.  The only forum in which gays and lesbians have managed to gain any 'airtime' have been in sitcoms (Will and Grace for example) or stand up comedians who are free to flaunt their sexual orientation.  It is rare that a lesbian or gay character is simply there, a character like all the rest.  (One notable exception which I can think of was on ENG in the early nineties, where one of the characters was gay and he was really no different from any of the other characters)

Is it any surprise that people desire to reverse the 'natural' order of things and challenge the images which we are given?  Furthermore, when such a scenario as EIG throws us out of a story, why is it that we find it hard to accept?  My personal theory is that it tends to be rooted in the prevalence of heterosexuality.  Anything which challenges that paradigm, intentional or not, makes us stop.

I concede that there are poorly written EIG stories out there, just as there are poorly written heterosexual romance, angst, hurt/comfort and every other genre out there.  But I also have an intuition that we are more inclined to think that EIG stories are poorly written because they do challenge the norm.  People argue that fiction has to be believable, and that 'fact is stranger than fiction'.  EIG stories challenges beliefs and perceptions about the world.  The possibility that everyone is gay, strikes people as odd and strange, and I think that's partly due to the prevalence of largely heterosexual settings and contexts which barrage us.  Finding spaces where everyone is gay is rare, unless you happen to live in the wonderful world of Queer as Folk, where all your friends are homosexual and you manage to find that supportive environment.  Some of us don't have that though, and the images and contexts in stories where everyone is homosexual allows us to wallow, just for while, in the possibility of acceptance without fear, and tolerance without hidden moralizing.