Right. There's this definition of slashy (which seems to be at use in our social circle but perhaps no where else upon this green earth) which is an aesthetic definition -- I said genre definition before, but that was wrong. Anyway, there's some aesthetic quality that we identify as being present in some books & not in others, which is *not* present in every romance novel, or every character-driven novel, or every novel with a strong internal arc. This aesthetic quality seems most often found when women write about male/male relationships, but it isn't always there, and can be found in lots of other places. truepenny's novels have it, and so does Laura Agiri's The God in Flight, and so do many Mary Renault novels (Promise of Love has it in spades). And I would even go so far as to say that the C. S. Friedman novel about the two people who are obsessed with destroying one another (In Conquest Born) has this quality, despite the people being opposite-gender and it not being remotely a romance.

As I've been writing this, I remembered the mailing list I was on many years ago (1999?) called slashy-pronovels, the focus of which was to recommend novels that had this particular aesthetic. I think that's where I acquired this use of the words 'slash' and 'slashy'.

Anyway, this is clearly not how truepenny et al are using the term.