I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.
There’s a ton of queer fiction — especially YA— that is at best exploitative and more than a little problematic. I only speak of MM, but If someone tells me Call Me By Your Name, Simon Vs The Homosapien Agenda (Love Simon), or Red White and Royal Blue were there favourite novels, or ones they enjoyed, I’d assume they either haven’t had the opportunity to read queer fiction written by actual queer men, just saw the movie and thought it was the same thing, or they need more literacy skills or lack taste.
I imagine this goes the same way with a lot of men who write queer women fiction as well.
One of the best pieces of queer fiction I’ve ever read is the short story “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere” by John Chu.
Yeahhh. I used to read a lot of m/m, but this was back in the beginning of the genre when the writers were using pseudonyms to pretend they were men. I had to stop when I realized that these were all written by women and just how problematically bigoted and racist 99% of these women actually were.
I was super into the book reviewing community at the time and there was this huge brouhaha over the writers being outed. The writers then doubled down saying that women should be the ones writing this genre instead of men since it’s specifically for women, and that there’s no issue with women objectifying men in the ways they were doing it. They continued to say so after gay men spoke up about how they thought it was wrong. It was (and I’m sure still is) super gross.