Checking, I find that Sonia actually wrote:

“As a married man, he was an adequately excellent lover, but refused to show his feelings in the presence of others.”
— “The Arkham Collector” #4 p116; reprinted in “Lovecraft Remembered” p275.

That’s a bit better than my mis-remembered version, but still strikes me as rather faint praise.

The evidence (I think) is that Lovecraft had a minimal sex-drive. I have wondered sometimes whether he was a deeply repressed gay man. (It is, for example, interesting that he appointed a young gay man [Robert Barlow] as his literary executor… I doubt whether Lovecraft was consciously aware that Barlow was gay, but…) Lovecraft was married for a while. Sonia, his wife, said that he was (I quote from memory) “a moderately adequate lover” — which struck me as damning with faint praise.

The absence of women in Lovecraft’s writings may be because he felt that he didn’t understand women very well. For the opposite reason, there are not many men in my fiction (although more than the women in Lovecraft’s).

The male gender role in Lovecraft’s fiction is, in itself, peculiar.

I heard that Lovecraft was essentially asexual; given the social conditions of the time he lived in, this may have led him to believe (ignorantly) that women simply weren’t worth writing about, since he himself had no interest in them. On the other hand, as you said, he did encourage female writers.

The problem with Lovecraft is, and this is by no means a defence of him, that he very often descends into self-parody, sometimes for commercial reasons or even simply for his own amusement. It’s often very difficult to determine where he is actually expressing a view, and where he is actually parodying his own earlier work and holding it up to ridicule. Of course, being offensive ironically is probably worse than being offensive ignorantly, but he is a very difficult writer to analyse, in my opinion.

“As for Lovecraft and the female gender role — it does not exist in HPL. Female characters are described in less detail and have a smaller role to play than the furniture. Their major role is to give birth to later characters. Asenath Waite of “The Thing on the Doorstep” turn out to be no exception, since this character is actually Ephraim Waite, possessing the body of his daughter.”

The absence of female characters seems to preclude misogyny (as such) in Lovecraft’s fiction. I’ve read many of Lovecraft’s letters, and a proportion of his essays, and can’t recall his expressing any overtly sexist view, let alone misogyny. His letters to women betray no sign of his holding them in lower regard than his male correspondents. Nor do the reminiscences of his female friends and acquaintances raise any complaint against him in this regard. And he certainly encouraged a significant number of women in their literary endeavours. Regarding Lovecraft as a misogynist seems to me even more absurd than viewing him as a feminist.

I don’t think Alan Moore has done anything worthwhile for a number of years. He seems to do nothing these days but sit and moan about mainstream comics, the success of films (often of his own creator owned comics), and ask to have his name taken off things. Neonomicon only serves to prove that. I read an issue myself. I didn’t go back for more.