The thing about allegory is that it isn't 1:1, and using the fight club and project mayhem as an allegory for gay men during the height of the aids crisis does not mean that gay men disproportionately engage in toxic masculinity or in misogyny any more than it means that gay men routinely gather in parking lots to beat each other up for fun. Trying to conflate the plot of the story with its allegorical meaning will lead you to draw incorrect conclusions like this - that would be like reading "the ant and the grasshopper" and your takeaway being that if you don't work hard and prepare for the future, you'll be scoffed at by a literal ant.
Narratively, the exclusion of women from fight club allegorically aligns with the disproportionate effect of AIDS on men, particularly within the queer community. (That isn't to say that women don't get AIDS and that queer women don't get AIDS, but the impact of the virus was very different.)
I'd also like to reiterate that the author of the novel is a gay man who lived through that time period.
I also strongly disagree with your characterization of a queer interpretation of fight club as being homophobic in any way. The point of the story in this interpretation isnt "gay men are toxic and hate women" it's "gay men were treated horribly by society, abandoned and left to die, and some subset of gay men engaged in self-destructive behaviors to cope with this." The narrator is never cast as being in the wrong for doing what he does, it's presented as a logical response to his material conditions — if the moral was "gay men are toxic and hate women" the whole story would be focused on all the ways that the narrator was wrong, and would end with him getting punished. Instead, the movie adaption ends with him blowing up the banks and the records of everyone's debt along with it.
The thing about allegory is that it isn't 1:1, and using the fight club and project mayhem as an allegory for gay men during the height of the aids crisis does not mean that gay men disproportionately engage in toxic masculinity or in misogyny any more than it means that gay men routinely gather in parking lots to beat each other up for fun. Trying to conflate the plot of the story with its allegorical meaning will lead you to draw incorrect conclusions like this - that would be like reading "the ant and the grasshopper" and your takeaway being that if you don't work hard and prepare for the future, you'll be scoffed at by a literal ant.
Narratively, the exclusion of women from fight club allegorically aligns with the disproportionate effect of AIDS on men, particularly within the queer community. (That isn't to say that women don't get AIDS and that queer women don't get AIDS, but the impact of the virus was very different.)
I'd also like to reiterate that the author of the novel is a gay man who lived through that time period.
I also strongly disagree with your characterization of a queer interpretation of fight club as being homophobic in any way. The point of the story in this interpretation isnt "gay men are toxic and hate women" it's "gay men were treated horribly by society, abandoned and left to die, and some subset of gay men engaged in self-destructive behaviors to cope with this." The narrator is never cast as being in the wrong for doing what he does, it's presented as a logical response to his material conditions — if the moral was "gay men are toxic and hate women" the whole story would be focused on all the ways that the narrator was wrong, and would end with him getting punished. Instead, the movie adaption ends with him blowing up the banks and the records of everyone's debt along with it.