Yaoi — Japanese comics featuring romance and/or sex between men — is currently one of the most popular genres of manga in the U.S. Non-fans are often baffled by the popularity of yaoi with female readers, especially teenage girls. But fans love yaoi as romance, as drama, and as fantasy fodder. Whence comes this girly fascination with male homoeroticism? Yesterday, Shaenon Garrity took us on a tour of the history of yaoi. Today, she investigates the appeal of the genre itself … after the break!

Ask manga fans why they like yaoi, and you’ll reach no consensus. It’s worth noting, however, that yaoi isn’t responsible for introducing American fangirls to the titillating potential of homosexuality. “Slash,” fanfiction pairing male characters from books, movies, or TV shows, has been part of American science-fiction and fantasy fandom since at least the 1970s. The term “slash” originated in early Star Trek fandom as an abbreviation for popular fanfiction parings like “Kirk/Spock.” Slash fiction remains an extremely popular and widespread genre among American fanfic writers, mostly girls and women. Aside from taking the form of prose rather than comics, American slash fiction is strikingly similar to Japanese yaoi, although the two evolved independently. American slash fans were first exposed to the work of their Japanese counterparts in the 1980s when an unauthorized fan translation of From Eroica with Love spread through U.S. comic-book and science-fiction conventions.

Detail from Banana Fish © 2009 Akimi Yoshida

For a 2000 column in PULP magazine, Chikao Shiratori asked one of his Japanese students why she read yaoi. Wrote Shiratori, “According to her, girls… have sexual needs just as boys. However, if a woman, especially a young woman, were to walk into a porn shop, she would be seen as a nymphomaniac.” This is an answer given by many teenage girls, especially in Japan: yaoi manga, its sexual content hidden between innocent-looking flowery covers, is simply the most socially acceptable form of pornography available to them.

Manga critic Jason Thompson, who devoted a section to yaoi in his book Manga: The Complete Guide, takes issue with this simplistic explanation; in the age of the Internet, is yaoi really the only erotic material girls can get their hands on? (In the U.S., the Internet is where the majority of yaoi fans first discover yaoi.) What does yaoi offer readers, especially teenage girls, that other forms of romance or erotica don’t?

The most common answer is that yaoi is simply the mirror image of lesbian porn for men: it’s normal for straight folks, male and female, to fantasize about the opposite sex in homoerotic situations. Fantasies that don’t include oneself (or anyone of one’s own sex) as part of the scenario often provide a safe, comforting way to explore heterosexual desires. Plus, there’s twice the number of attractive people of the opposite sex to fantasize about.The “safe space for straight fantasy” theory is supported by the way that yaoi tends to ape heterosexual couplings in all but the physical sex of the participants. Although there are many exceptions, the vast majority of yaoi couples are seme (”attacker”) and uke (”receiver”). The seme is tall, dark-haired, and masculine; the uke is petite, blond, and effeminate. There’s seldom any question which gendered role each participant plays. In other words, even though the lovers are both men, they resemble traditional, even retrograde, male/female couples more than they do most real-life gay couples.

Many critics have theorized that, especially for teenage girls just beginning to get involved in romantic relationships, yaoi provides a fantasy space in which to explore male/female dynamics. In yaoi relationships, the seme and uke roles are just that — roles. They can be, and often are, reversed, stretched, and played with. For girls trying to figure out what it means to be a woman in a sexual relationship, that fluidity can be reassuring — or exciting.Some yaoi play knowingly with reader expectations about seme and uke roles. One clever example is Shout Out Loud!, by Satosumi Takaguchi, about a romance between anime voice actors. The actors discover their mutual attraction while voicing yaoi characters — but their real feelings don’t necessarily conform to the stereotypical roles given to the characters they read.

Many yaoi fans are also drawn to the “forbidden love” aspect of yaoi. It’s typical for yaoi protagonists to go through intense guilt over their desires and suffer exquisite torments of yearning before the final consummation. One reason fans often give for enjoying yaoi is that same-sex relationships have more potential for drama. Race or class differences are no longer enough to keep a fictional couple apart, but being the same sex is still enough to give pause. Even though few yaoi deal seriously or realistically with gay issues, the tension is there.In his landmark essay on yaoi and doujinshi, “Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand,” shojo manga scholar Matt Thorn talks to a yaoi artist who complains that she finds hetereosexual romances too “predictable.” Writes Thorn, “I pointed out that yaoi tended to be as formulaic as heterosexual romance stories. She laughed and replied, ‘Yes, but this is the formula I like.’”

On a darker note, torture, rape, and other forms of physical suffering are common elements in yaoi. At one time, romances that ended in suicide were extremely popular in June magazine. It’s worth noting that such dark elements are also common in American romance novels, suggesting that they reflect universal female anxieties about sex and power. Few graphically violent yaoi have been published in English, but it’s not uncommon for the sex scenes in available yaoi to involve aggression, rape, and/or an uncomfortable amount of coersion.The “forbidden love” may also include taboo elements like incest or underage sex. Incestuous relationships, especially between brothers, are common, although most such manga involve stepbrothers or work in a last-minute plot twist to establish that the characters aren’t biologically related. Yaoi featuring young or young-looking boys, called shota, represent a sizable subgenre, although only a handful of explicitly shotacon titles have been published in the U.S. — and those that have, like Mako Takahashi’s Almost Crying, are mostly innocent romances where the characters seldom do more than kiss. Relationships between teenage boys and adult men, often teachers or other authority figures, are common.

The earliest shonen-ai manga, like those published by Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya in the 1970s, tended to be more sociopolitically aware than today’s yaoi. Hagio’s and Takemiya’s same-sex romances reflected the artists’ larger interest in challenging assumptions about sex roles. Takemiya called shonen-ai a “first step toward true feminism.” Many shonen-ai stories of the 1970s introduce homosexuality and gender-bending as a way of exploring feminist issues: to what degree is behavior “masculine” or “feminine”? Is it possible to transcend the expectations of biology? What happens when people don’t adhere to rigid gender roles?

Modern yaoi tends to ignore such questions, exploring but seldom challenging gender stereotypes. The personal is not often political. As Thompson put it in a 2006 blog post, “There’s usually just enough acknowledgment of gayness for there to be a faint feeling of forbidden love, but not enough for any kind of political statement or even self-identification.” Thorn theorizes that shojo manga stopped being political in the late 1980s when the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble sparked an anti-feminist backlash. Since that time, feminism in Japan has made only limited progress, and most other progressive social movements, like the gay rights movement, lag far behind their counterparts in the U.S. The lack of social or political context is not unique to yaoi; manga in general, even manga aimed at sophisticated adult readers, tends to be surprisingly apolitical by Western standards.

The depictions of gay life in yaoi are usually transparent female fantasies of idealized male behavior. The stereotypical yaoi plot involves two men falling in monogamous love, often to the point of showing no attraction to other love interests. The uke is almost always a virgin, and it’s uncommon for either character to have a serious past relationship. Scenarios in which one or both of the characters has never been attracted to a man before are common. Infidelity is almost unheard of, nor do the characters explore open relationships or threesomes (with very rare exceptions). Although the characters may feel angst aplenty, few yaoi delve deeply into homophobia or other problems that might realistically affect a gay couple. The sex itself often looks like straight sex, with characters frequently assuming the missionary position. Nor is there much depiction of gay culture, which is still underground in most parts of Japan. (One translated manga that does provide a realistic glimpse into Japanese gay life is the doujinshi Ricca ‘tte Kanji!?, by Rica Takashima, a lighthearted autobiographical account of coming out as a lesbian in Tokyo.)In 1992, a debate raged in Japanese yaoi fandom when gay activist Masaki Sat? criticized yaoi as anti-gay in a letter to the feminist magazine Choisir. Yaoi fans defended their favorite manga but were forced to admit that the portrayal of homosexuality in most yaoi bears little resemblance to reality. A similar debate took place in American fandom in 2008 when blogger Isaac Hale complained, from his perspective as a gay man and manga fan, about the objectification of gay men at Yaoi-Con in San Francisco.

Nonetheless, some gay and lesbian readers enjoy yaoi for its glimpse into a gay-friendly fantasy world — often a gay-normative world where no one bats an eye at same-sex couples. This reaction seems to be more common in American fandom than Japanese fandom. In surveys of American yaoi fans, many self-identify as lesbian or bisexual, suggesting that yaoi fandom is, for some, a way of developing a gay identity and exploring issues of sexual orientation. Western yaoi fandom seems to attract more gay and bisexual men than Asian yaoi fandom. The percentage of male yaoi fans in the West is estimated at anywhere from 10% to 25% of the total yaoi readership, whereas in Japan and most other Asian countries the percentage of men reading yaoi is negligible.

Some critics have even speculated that yaoi, with its often feminine-looking men, is a roundabout form of lesbian fantasy. Others suggest that it’s a transsexual fantasy, the fantasy of, as Thorn puts it, “loving a man as a man.” Thorn quotes BL prose novelist Sakakibara Shihomi, a female-to-male transsexual who believes that many yaoi fans think of themselves as male or fantasize about being men. Thorn, however, expresses doubt that this explanation applies to most readers. He suggests that yaoi is more popular for its voyeuristic appeal, its glimpse into an idealized men’s world the female reader can never enter. Japanese yaoi fans speak wistfully of the otoko no sekai, the world of and for men, which is often portrayed in manga as a more exciting, fulfilling, and emotionally stirring place than the world of women. One of the first things many American readers note about yaoi is the near-complete absence of female characters.Some recent yaoi have made an effort to feature more realistic gay characters in plausible contemporary settings. In Yugi Yamada’s Laugh Under The Sun, the characters are bohemian twentysomethings, two of whom identify as gay, while the third struggles to come out of the closet. In Kazuho Hirokawa’s The Dawn of Love, the protagonists sleep around and have open relationships rather than falling instantly in monogamous love (although monogamy wins out in the end). Kazuma Kodaka, creator of the long-running series Kizuna, is one of the few BL artists who seems actively engaged with Japanese queer culture; her author’s notes mention clubbing with gay friends and receiving gay-positive mail from readers.

Nonetheless, even the most sophisticated yaoi are essentially sexual and/or romantic fantasies for straight female readers. Many Americans who pick up yaoi in search of challenging explorations of homosexuality — perhaps after enjoying literary-minded graphic novels like Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, or Ariel Schrag’s coming-of-age autobio trilogy — come away disappointed.

Thompson sums up the complex appeal of yaoi thusly: “When you think someone is beautiful and awesome, is it because you admire them and want to be like them, or because you’re attracted to them and want to have sex with them? Which is the stronger drive: sex or identity?… The (male) characters in shonen ai are escapist vessels into which (mostly female) readers can pour themselves… their bodies are the battlegrounds for fantasies which people can never play out, at least not under normal circumstances.”

Continue on to Part Three: Reading Yaoi!

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