Absolutely true.
I think people are still used to the manga/anime culture of female artists and writers creating stories purely for the erotic scenes, masked as romance. Sites like Lezhin don't help it any (I've read some of the comics they put out and there's definitely a reason I don't read them anymore). I've found Tapas to be an entirely different community, with a steadier focus on healthy relationships with many artists- though of course I still come across the 'omg gay people are hawt' stories which give LGBT+ media the bad, fetish name a lot of people still relate it to.
The number of times I've been labelled as straight and female by fans, even when I have blatantly stated in multiple places that the label doesn't even begin to fit me, is distressing. Especially since part of the reason why I began writing LGBT stories was because I know there's people like me out there who grew up without positive examples of LGBT+ in media and I wanted to be one of the people who could provide that and show LGBT+ isn't any different than the hetero stories (which is why I hate the sole BL genre because the whole point is to show we shouldn't need our own genre and it's literally just romance, the gender shouldn't matter but that's another argument.
On this note, it's not that we want to separate ourselves. At no point have I put the BL label on my stories because I want to say it's different or needs to be put in a different category because my main romantic interests are male.
I put it there because, inevitably, there's some homophobic reader who's going to get to a romantic scene and go 'ew gross how could you not warn us I wasted so much time reading your story to get to this'.
It's not that I have any desire to separate my story from others. It's that I don't want to deal with the idiots who aren't going to read the summary, or pay attention to the multiple hints. The small, underwhelming BL label on all my branding images here isn't to say 'omg look boys have sex' it's to say 'if you dont' like it stay away'. Just like I warn ahead of time if there are going to be any triggers in a chapter (self-harm, etc).
Would I love to not have to include that without risking being flamed? Yes. Is that likely to happen? No.
We shouldn't have to. We also shouldn't have to slot our stories into the BL genre like they don't have anything else to them other than the fact that there is gay romance involved.
I can't get behind a BL genre because it's a way to herd all the gay romance stories into a corner. It ignores the GL category, and literally every other LGBT+ bracket as if they don't exist or just aren't important. I could get behind it as a sub-genre, and I've always loved it as a tag on sites where searching by tags is a viable option (pretty much the only thing I liked about wattpad). But making it the sole option as a genre rubs me all the wrong ways.