As a caveat: the two books you pinged as bad pacing were two that I absolutely loved (and Naomi Kritzer is the only new author with gay characters that I follow), so who knows if I'm a good judge of anything that you'd like. That said, if you haven't read it, I think you'd like Victory of Eagles a lot more than the others-- she had a lot more time to write it, and it shows.

That said, it's not sf/f, but I would recommend Sarah Waters' Affinity because it's deeply entrenched in Victorian spiritualism and meets the criteria of having openly gay characters.

If you haven't read Ricardo Pinto's novels, you might want to try them? I suspect you'd have similar problems with pacing, because I honestly can't remember much that happens in the middle of the first book, but the worldbuilding is gorgeous, the characters are openly gay, and, now that the second book is out, I feel I can rec the first without it being OMGWTFBBQCLIFFHANGER.

If you're branching out into genderqueer, I'd definitely recommend The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin and Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman (huhuhu unreliable narrators). But they don't really meet the qualification of gay so much as… gender.

That… is all I can think of at the moment :|a