A new Golden Age of LGBTQ lit?

Writing in the June 28 New York Times, Aaron Hicklin, a bookstore owner and former editor-in-chief of Out magazine, lays out a provocative thesis:

"It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published Dancer From the Dance, Larry Kramer published Faggots and Edmund White published Nocturnes for the King of Naples." He goes on to assert that "This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters."

I think Mr. Hicklin lays out a persuasive case, and Lord knows I want him to be right! Yet this paragraph, in particular, gives me pause: "According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of LGBT. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life, heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of LGBTQ. fiction had reached more than $80 million, a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled. Over the same period, sales of literary fiction fell to around 33 million books per year from around 36 million."

Here's my question: Is being a bigger fish in a shrinking pool a sign of vitality or less competition? Or both? I encourage you to read the op-ed and decide for yourself.