Is the author male? I can't tell if it's just the hentai style, but this felt noticeably male gaze-y.

wh-what part of it??? i read this comment before i read the chapter, and expected much Much worse. sure, it's exaggerated but .. if this is the male gaze, it's incredibly tempered

Some of the position shots? Page 17 a bit, the top left of page 20 especially, not necessarily a lot of specific shots beyond those, just kind of the vibe.

As far as I can tell, Kitaku hasn't been in a good condition lately, and it's reflected in the drop of quality in their last doujins. The commercial hentais (the hetero ones) keep having good drawings because they have to meet a certain standard so they don't drop in their level of reception, so the hentayish angles you may have noticed from some pannels could be explained because Kitaku has been mainly focused in drawing hentai scenes. I can understand that, but I am disappointed anyway because it's clear that the best of their work is gonna always be in the hetero comics, and we have to conform with the more regular/low quality drawings (Unit Diary had many scenes with very disproportionate bodies, for example)

Here's the last hetero hentai they made if you're curious about it: https://hitomi.la/manga/senpai-no-sukinamono-%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87-2335783.html#1

I might remember this wrong but doesn't Kitaku also draws a lot of hetero stuff. Imo, I'm pretty sure Kitaku is male.

Just because an artist is drawing a particular genre that is liked by a remarkable demographic, it doesn't mean that the artist is lured by that genre or belongs to that demographic. There are a bunch of female hentai artists who draw very exaggerated and explicit content and just because of that you wouldn't say that they would love to get involved in a gangbang, would you? They could be making that kind of art to make a living, or to get more money so they can buy stuff they like, I don't know. There are people who love the work they do and get paid for it, and there are also people who work on things that they don't necessarily love, but through which they can get/do the things they love.

Hi! I just made this account to clarify some stuff about Kitaku since I am following this artist the first time I knew them by internet (I'm going to use this pronoun to refer to the artist since we cannot take anything for granted about them).

Let me explain.

Kitaku has three twitter acounts as far as I know: an artistic one, where they post their doujins and other yuri/Nijigasaki related stuff; a commercial one, where there's only information about the hetero hentai they make, and a personal one, when they post more yuri/Nijigasaki/idols related stuff and things they like/love/find cute. I think Kitaku is probably a female because in the personal account there are many posts of them showing the accesories, clothes, teddies, meals and other girly/cute items they have bought. I would say that those kind of things are not usually liked by males, or at least not to that extent. However, the evidence that most convinces me that Kitaku is a female are the following tweets:

Here they post an image of a female hand model she bought on Amazon, and then post another tweet saying: "If you bend your little finger slightly, you will get a sexy hand gesture": https://twitter.com/ktk_er18/status/1277247235206479876

Here Kitaku says something like "I became the camera girl of my dreams" referring to themselves: https://twitter.com/ktk_er18/status/1212192304133357569

In other tweets they identify with Yu in the sense of being a girl who is interested in collecting photos of pretty girls.

Buut, in any case, we cannot be sure about their true sex/gender since we don't have enough information about them that we can grasp from their twitter accounts. We just know that Kitaku likes Love Live series, cute/sexy girls, yuri stuff, little, fluffy and fancy items and the H genre (who wouldn't?)