Boys' love

• 1. Introduction

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  Boys' love, usually shortened to BL, is a genre of Japanese fiction about romantic and erotic relationships between male characters. Its most famous nickname began as a joke. In the late 1970s, manga artists coined the word yaoi from a Japanese phrase meaning "no climax, no point, no meaning." They aimed the insult at themselves. It described self-published stories that dwelled on sex while ignoring plot and character.

  Today the genre runs through manga, anime, drama CDs, novels, video games, television series, films and fan works. Most of its creators are women, and most of its audience is female. That sets it apart from gay manga, a separate tradition made by and for gay men.

  This documentary follows several questions. How did a self-mocking label grow into an international industry? Why do so many women write and read stories about men? How do those stories treat real gay lives? And why have some governments moved to ban them?

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• 2. Names and Labels

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  In 1991 a magazine called Image reached for the English words "boys' love" to gather several scattered labels under one name. The phrase is a Japanese-made English construction, built from a literal translation of shōnen-ai. It became widely popular in 1994 after another magazine adopted it. Across Japan and much of Asia it now names male romance media marketed to women, though Western usage is inconsistent.

  Shōnen-ai, meaning boy love, came first. It once carried an older meaning tied to adult attraction to adolescent boys. From the 1970s it labeled a new strand of girls' manga about bishōnen, a word for beautiful, androgynous boys. Early shōnen-ai drew on European literature, the writer Taruho Inagaki and the Bildungsroman tradition. The researcher Kazuko Suzuki calls it "pedantic" and "difficult to understand," full of "philosophical and abstract musings." Young readers often grasped the deeper themes only as they grew older.

  Tanbi is older than the manga. It first described erotic, highbrow literary fiction by authors such as Yukio Mishima, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata. By the 1980s, magazines for shōnen-ai fans stretched the word to cover amateur and professional prose, and work by writers such as Oscar Wilde and Jean Cocteau.

  June takes its name from a magazine of male romance manga, and the label first described work resembling that magazine's art style. By the 1990s it had largely faded. One suggestion holds that publishers hoping to enter the June market coined "boys' love" to distance the genre from June's publisher.

  The word yaoi was coined by the manga artists Yasuko Sakata and Akiko Hatsu. Its ironic edge also poked at the classical Japanese story pattern of introduction, development, twist and conclusion. In Japan it now tends to mean fan-made or sex-focused work. American manga publishers preferred it as an umbrella term, because they believed "boys' love" hinted at pedophilia. Western fans often split the two, using shōnen-ai for romance-led stories and yaoi for sexually explicit ones. That mismatch confuses audiences on both sides.

  Scholars have not settled the matter. In a 2015 survey of professional Japanese writers, Suzuki identified five subgenres. Kazumi Nagaike and Tomoko Aoyama deliberately avoid defining them, since the differences are ill-defined and the subgenres "remain thematically intertwined." Yaoi and boys' love both exclude bara, the gay manga genre written for and mostly by gay men. Suzuki observes that Japanese has no convenient shorthand covering all male love fiction made by and for women.

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• 3. Roots in Girls' Comics

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  Mari Mori's 1961 novel A Lovers' Forest follows a professor and his younger male lover, and later writers treated it as a precursor of shōnen-ai. Mori drew on European literature, especially Gothic fiction. Her work set up habits the genre would keep: Western exoticism, wealthy and educated characters, couples with large age gaps, and fanciful or even surreal settings.

  She wrote in a country whose attitudes had hardened decades earlier. Homosexuality and androgyny have a history in Japan reaching back to ancient times. During the Meiji Era, from 1868 to 1912, Westernization brought hostile attitudes and anti-sodomy laws. Artists who wanted to show male homosexuality did so through subtext. Illustrations in the boys' magazine Nihon Shōnen laid the groundwork for the bishōnen look, with young men defined by "ambivalent passivity, fragility, ephemerality, and softness."

  In manga, the gekiga movement of the late 1950s pushed comics toward serious, grounded stories for adults. That opened space for realistic human relationships and for exploring sexuality without pornography. Hideko Mizuno's girls' series Fire!, published from 1969 to 1971, eroticized its male leads and set male homosexuality inside American rock and roll culture.

  The 1970s brought the Year 24 Group, a generation of girls' manga artists who widened the genre's themes with Japanese and European literature, cinema and history. Keiko Takemiya's In The Sunroom, from 1970, is considered the first shōnen-ai work. Moto Hagio followed with The November Gymnasium in 1971. Hagio's The Heart of Thomas ran from 1974 to 1975, and Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta from 1976 to 1984. These were typically tragic romances between androgynous boys in historic European settings. Though nominally for adolescent girls, they also drew adult gay and lesbian readers.

  The year 1971 also saw Barazoku, the first commercially circulated gay men's magazine in Japan, which strongly influenced Takemiya. Publishers soon noticed the market. A house that already ran a gay manga magazine launched June in 1978, and another launched Allan in 1980. Both ran articles on homosexuality, literary fiction, illustrations and amateur yaoi. One description called their shōnen-ai "halfway between tanbi literature and pornography."

  By the late 1980s professionally published shōnen-ai was losing ground. Stories turned toward Japanese settings and older protagonists, in a realist style typified by Akimi Yoshida's Banana Fish, which ran from 1985 to 1994. The genre also spread into other formats. The 1982 anime Patalliro! was the first television anime with shōnen-ai themes, and Earthian arrived on home video in 1989.

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• 4. Fan Tables and Magazines

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  In 1975 the first Comiket gathered amateur artists who made dōjinshi, meaning self-published works. That scene had grown up alongside BL during the 1970s. Early yaoi dōjinshi sold there were typically derivative, built on existing manga and anime, and glam rock performers were popular subjects thanks to the influence of Fire!. They were also more sexually explicit than shōnen-ai. Many were written by teenagers for teenagers, free of the rules that bound commercial media.

  The titles Captain Tsubasa and Saint Seiya popularised yaoi in the 1980s. Fans read homoerotic implications into the close male friendships in boys' and men's action series like these. Weekly Shonen Jump is known to have a large female readership who engage in BL readings, and its publishers may make homoerotic-themed merchandise as fan service.

  The range of subjects had almost no limit. Any male character could be paired off, from figures in The Lord of the Rings or Final Fantasy to real actors and politicians. Some authors even turned abstract ideas into characters, as with the personified countries of Hetalia: Axis Powers, or complementary objects such as salt and pepper. Japanese labels list the two leads' names joined by a multiplication sign, with the pursuer first and the pursued second.

  Professional publishers were watching. The artist group Clamp began as a circle making yaoi dōjinshi based on Saint Seiya. Youka Nitta and Shungiku Nakamura found mainstream careers after being spotted through their fan work. Minami Ozaki's Zetsuai 1989, which ran from 1989 to 1991 in the girls' magazine Margaret, began as her own Captain Tsubasa dōjinshi. By 1990 seven Japanese publishers carried yaoi, and between 1990 and 1995 thirty magazines devoted to it were founded. Magazine Be × Boy, launched in 1993, became one of the most influential.

  Clamp's RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon and Cardcaptor Sakura all carried yaoi elements. In North America they were among the first yaoi-influenced works Western audiences met. The 2000 broadcast of Mobile Suit Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network is noted as crucial to Western BL fan fiction. Writers compare that fiction to the Western practice of slash, but a commentator named Levi points out that the youthful, androgynous look of BL manga is much harder for slash writers to achieve.

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• 5. Debate and Audience

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  The letter that ignited the yaoi debate called fans "disgusting women." The gay writer Masaki Satō sent it to the feminist magazine Choisir, which hosted essays on the subject from 1992 to 1997. He accused the genre of homophobia for portraying gay men inaccurately, and said fans "have a perverse interest in sexual intercourse between men." Fans and artists answered that yaoi is entertainment for women, not a realistic portrait of homosexuality, and that it works as a refuge from the misogyny of Japanese society.

  The argument left lasting marks. It produced the scholarly field of BL studies, which examines the genre and the relationship between women and BL. It also changed careers. The author Chiyo Kurihara left yaoi to focus on heterosexual pornography. Hisako Takamatsu weighed the critics' points and made work more welcoming to gay readers.

  Suzuki acknowledges that audience research on BL is underdeveloped, yet she says the overwhelming majority of readers are women. One figure puts the female share at 80%, and the American convention Yaoi-Con was 85% female. Men are present too. A 2008 bookstore survey found that 25-30% of yaoi readers were male. A 2007 survey of patrons at a United States library found about a quarter were men, while two online surveys put men near 10% of the English-speaking readership. In a 2008 survey of English-speaking readers, 50-60% of the women said they were heterosexual.

  Why women read it remains contested. In 2004 Paul Gravett summarized four leading theories. Japanese women might be bored with classic male-female romance. The bishōnen might be a backlash against male fantasies of feminized teenage girls. The genre might offer a safe space for sexual fantasy with a free choice of whom to identify with. Or readers might simply interpret the male characters as girls.

  Other voices emphasize pleasure. The science fiction writer Mariko Ōhara said she wrote Kirk/Spock fiction as a teenager because conventional pornography was made for men, and she found "limitless freedom" in BL. Critics of the patriarchy theory note that BL-like media also took off in other societies, such as Western slash fiction. Rachel Thorn suggests that BL and slash fans are discontented with the standards of femininity expected of them. Female fans were once insulted with the word fujoshi, which they later reclaimed as a name for themselves.

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• 6. Faces and Roles

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  Björn Andrésen's portrayal of Tadzio in the 1971 film version of Death in Venice helped shape the look of the BL hero. So did the glam rock singer David Bowie and the kabuki onnagata Bandō Tamasaburō. Bishōnen are "highly idealised" boys and young men who blend masculine and feminine qualities, and authors often use their androgyny to probe ideas about sexuality and gender.

  A 2017 survey by the BL publisher Juné Manga showed the ideal shifting. Over 80% of its readers had previously preferred bishōnen bodies exclusively, but 65% now enjoyed both bishōnen and muscular types. Critics see the line between BL and gay manga blurring. The anthropologist Thomas Baudinette found that gay men in Japan saw no need to sharply separate BL from gay manga when talking about gay media.

  The pairing at the genre's center is described by the words seme and uke. These terms come from martial arts, and Aleardo Zanghellini suggests they resonate in Japan because an archetype of gay love there is the bond between samurai and their companions. He links that archetype to the age gaps and power differences in many BL couples. The seme is usually older, taller and more stereotypically macho, with a stronger chin, shorter hair and smaller eyes. The uke tends to have bigger eyes, a smaller build and softer, more feminine features. Roles can also be set by who dominates, so a character may be uke simply by being pursued by a more forceful partner.

  Not every work follows the script. Mark McLelland notes that authors are typically "interested in exploring, not repudiating" these dynamics. Couples whose roles can swap are called reversible, and the possibility of switching is often a source of playful teasing. Some authors portray both lovers as "equally attractive handsome men," or make the uke the more aggressive partner.

  Gay manga offers a contrast. Graham Kolbeins argues that BL can be read as a feminist phenomenon, depicting sex free of the patriarchal trappings of heterosexual pornography, while gay manga is chiefly an expression of gay male identity. The 2010s added a new branch. Omegaverse, which originated with the American series Supernatural, divides humans into dominant alphas, neutral betas and submissive omegas, and a related "dom/sub universe" subgenre emerged in 2017 and became popular in 2021.

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• 7. Fantasy and Its Limits

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  Nariko Enomoto, herself a BL author, says women are usually left out of the stories because they add a realism that distracts from the fantasy. Historically, female characters held minor roles or were absent. Mothers in particular are often painted unfavorably. When a parody dōjinshi is based on a work with female characters, the women are typically minimized or killed off. Yukari Fujimoto wrote that "it seems that yaoi readings and likeable female characters are mutually exclusive." Since the late 2000s, women have appeared more often as supporting characters, and Lunsing reads this as readers overcoming an old hostility.

  Homophobia is handled lightly. Akiko Mizoguchi notes that early stories used shame about homosexuality to heighten drama, but from the mid-2000s series such as Brilliant Blue told stories of coming out and gradual acceptance. BL typically shows Japan as more welcoming to LGBT people than it really is, which Mizoguchi calls a form of activism. Some longer stories, such as Fake and Kizuna: Bonds of Love, have couples cohabit and adopt children.

  Even so, Hisako Miyoshi of Libre Publishing says the genre has grown less realistic and more comedic over time, and is now "simply for entertainment." The author Makoto Tateno doubted realism would catch on "because girls like fiction more than realism." Rachel Thorn adds that romance readers may be turned off by political themes. In 2019, magazine editors said that stories built on a man's fear of coming out had become uncommon, and that the trope can now look outdated.

  Tragedy once dominated. Early June stories often ended with one or both lovers dying by suicide. By the mid-1990s happy endings were more common, and when a tragedy does occur, the cause is usually "the cruel and intrusive demands of an uncompromising outside world" rather than a quarrel between the pair. Thorn theorizes that tragedy and abuse in BL let readers come to terms with their own experiences of abuse.

  Eroticized rape is often associated with BL, and it is one of the genre's most criticized conventions. Kristy Valenti of The Comics Journal observes that such scenes tend to frame the uke as irresistible and the seme as unable to control himself, which absolves the seme of responsibility. Some stories, such as Under Grand Hotel, subvert the trope by presenting rape as traumatic. A 2012 survey of English-language BL fans found that just 15% were made uncomfortable by it. A content analysis found that only 13% of original Japanese BL available commercially in English contains a depiction of rape.

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• 8. Across Borders

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  The first officially licensed English-language yaoi manga reached North America in 2003. By 2006 roughly 130 translated titles were on sale, and by 2007 more than ten North American publishers were in the business. Diamond Comic Distributors valued United States yaoi manga sales at about US$6 million in 2007. Marketing helped the genre find LGBTQ fans. The 1994 anime Kizuna: Bonds of Love was sold by Ariztical Entertainment as "the first gay male anime to be released on DVD in the US," and The Advocate reviewed it. Many Western fans also pirated BL, and scanlations are common.

  The Thai film Love of Siam, released in 2007, grossed over TH฿40 million at the box office. Love Sick, broadcast in 2014 and 2015, was the first Thai television series with two gay leads. Between 2014 and 2020-57 BL series were produced in Thailand, including 2gether: The Series from the studio GMMTV. Thai fans and producers sometimes call these dramas Y series. The studio's idols are styled as khu jin, or imaginary couples, in the manner of K-pop celebrity culture. Backlash followed. The public broadcaster MCOT cancelled the BL series Love by Chance in 2018, and in 2020 Thailand's broadcasting commission issued new guidelines on sexually explicit or suggestive scenes. I Told Sunset About You won International Drama of the Year at the Seoul International Drama Awards in 2021.

  In Japan, the TV Asahi drama Ossan's Love, which began in 2016, turned an all-male love triangle into a commercial and critical success. Fujimoto called it and similar dramas a "'missing link' to bridge the gap between BL fiction and gay people." In 2022 Kaoru Azuma of Kadokawa founded Tunku, a label for live-action BL dramas, and said that prejudice against the genre had dwindled.

  China took a harder line. Fans there know the genre as danmei, and a 2009 ordinance banned most online danmei fiction. Addicted, the first Chinese BL web series, reached 10 million views in 2016 before iQiyi pulled it. When Guardian was adapted for Youku in 2018, its central romance became a close friendship, so fans of Guardian and The Untamed used the hashtag "socialist brotherhood" to dodge censors. Anhui TV reported that at least 20 young women writing danmei novels were arrested in 2014. In 2018 the novelist Tianyi was sentenced to prison for producing "obscene material for profit." The show Word of Honor was banned in August 2021, and policies introduced in January 2022 cancelled all planned BL dramas.

  In South Korea, Where Your Eyes Linger became the first domestically produced BL series in 2020. The genre gained little traction until Semantic Error became a social phenomenon in 2022. Most recently, the Canadian sports romance series Heated Rivalry has been considered a Western adaptation of BL.

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