Femslash was pretty much what softened me up to accept my sexuality also; at the time I was still in high school, convinced I was a straight girl, and scrambling to reconcile my family's Christianity with my personal views. But it wasn't so much a panfandom thing as it was sort of a group of people WITHIN a megafandom, a very loosely-knit subfandom of sorts a la Homestuck's ~femslash brigade~. And yeah, the fact that it was women with women (in a male-dominated canon to boot) was a big motivation for me too.