"The characters don't act like any gay men I know" -- no, nor do the characters in Stephen McCauley's work, even though they strike me as dealing with some sorts of truth. Nor do the characters in Chris Hunt's books, which might be considered kind of slashy, though I think the term "slash" was just about being invented at the time of the first one or two. These stories are not about reflecting life, they're about drama, which has a strong, true, but really tangential relationship to life.

I wouldn't say that gay men's romance was lacking in emotional content, but I would say that the emotional content's general range, while overlapping a great deal, differs from that written for women. Again, I can't quite describe the difference. It's subtle.

Also, I think sometimes in this discussion we're comparing the wrong things. I don't think that comparing erotica written for men and romance written for women, or erotica written for women and romance written for men, is necessarily all that revealing. But if you took the whole lot of each and compared how erotica and romance interrelate in the two cases (written for men vs. written for women) you might see something interesting.

It's not that erotica and romance are deathly different, it's that their purpose, tone, and conventions are not identical.