I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not I wanted to post anything to the BLog for Pride Month. On the one hand, using Pride to push products is generally frowned upon, and this is a company blog, even if we’re still just discussing the things we love on it. And on another hand, BL manga isn’t technically 100% intended to be LGBT media and some people don’t like it being treated as such. But on another hand (yes, we have three hands), as a queer person whose love for BL manga is heavily entangled in my identity, I feel like it’s worth using this platform to discuss and highlight the queerness of BL as a genre and fandom (whether intentional or unintentional), and the queer communities that often spring up around BL.
I feel like the general surface-level understanding of BL manga is that it’s MLM stories by and for straight women. Which is partly true; it would be an outright lie to claim the intended demographic for BL isn’t, for the most part, women. BL started as a subgenre of shojo manga, and it’s still heavily associated with that niche. When you go to the BL section of most stores, 99% of the customers are women. The branding often uses colors associated with women and femininity. It’s also very common to refer to all BL fans as “fujoshi” without even considering there may be non-female fans as well.
However, I feel like most people who take part in fandoms around BL manga have realized… it’s kinda gay in here. It’s like that joke in queer circles where more and more of your friend group keep coming out as you get older, and it’s just kind of because queer people seem really good at intuitively finding each other—even if they don’t know it at the time. I’ve had a similar experience with my circle of BL friends.
So, let’s explore why this might be the case through the lens of my own journey. If BL isn’t an inherently LGBT media, and if it’s supposedly actually quite offensive to LGBT people and their experiences, then why do so many of it’s biggest fans and supporters end up being LGBT?
I grew up in a small town in the midwestern United States to a low-key religious family. The makeup of my neighborhood was incredibly homogenous, and there were certain roles people were expected to fill and certain ways they were expected to act. And for a long time, I felt like I filled my role pretty well. But there was always some weird dissonance that made me realize I didn’t fit in. I thought I liked guys, but it wasn’t in the same way my boy-crazy friends did. I didn’t get excited when they talked to me and giggle about it with my female classmates. I kind of wanted to race them during recess, and talk about Pokémon cards with them. I figured that’s what ‘attraction’ must feel like.
Around the same time—late elementary school—I was introduced to BL (yaoi and shonen-ai, as it was exclusively referred to at the time) in the form of Gundam Wing (Trowa and Quatre, ftr) fanfiction posted to an ancient GeoCities webpage. Originally I was scandalized and shocked—but for some reason, I was fixated on this content and kept going back for more, perusing the webring of fellow Gundam Wing yaoi pages. When I realized there was a subculture in almost every fandom of people making the boys kiss, I was hooked. In the blink of an eye, that was the only content I wanted to see. I had never been into shipping or anything previously, but now that I knew I could make the two boys kiss, I was all in.
At that time, I had considered myself the stereotype of a fujoshi: a straight girl who liked shipping males together. Only because of my original interest in BL and wading into the fandom around it did I start to understand that there are a myriad of sexual and gender identities. I joined the GSA once I entered high school. I started attending Pride as an ally. And all through this, I was starting to slowly, slowly, ohhh so slowly realize that there actually was a reason my “like” for guys and my female friends’ “like” felt different. But I still considered myself straight, for the most part.
All the while, I continued building a friend group around my interest in BL. Over time, my love for shipping turned into a love for original BL, as I realized I didn’t have to suffer through all the sports content and fighting scenes in shonen manga to get the content I actually liked and wanted—the relationships, the social commentary, the emotional catharsis. I became an avid fan and defender of original BL, because for all its faults it really meant something to me. Something about it resonated with me so deeply—I just wasn’t sure what, yet.
As more and more of my BL fan friends opened up to me about their own identities and experiences, I finally started to understand my own sexuality. And we all shared a similar love and appreciation for BL as a safe and comfortable space for us to slowly nurture and understand ourselves.
It’s often cited that BL (in a commercial sense as well as a fandom sense) is treated as a vehicle for its mostly-female reader base to explore their own feelings around sexuality, relationships, and society. A question that’s asked frequently of women—both straight and WLW—is why would we read gay stories? Why would we consume gay porn? Why not straight content, or bi/lesbian content? But the important thing that’s being missed, is sometimes you don’t want to relate too directly with the characters or stories you’re consuming. Sometimes it’s painful or triggering to feel like you’re supposed to relate to it, or even to actually relate to it too heavily. For those women, sometimes removing the “female” aspect from the story entirely makes it easier to enjoy, and more comfortable to explore concepts that would make them really uncomfortable if the main character was a woman.
For me, BL has always been a safe space to explore my own sexuality—even before I understood that was what I was using it to do. I was able to take myself out of the equation entirely while enjoying stories of people who happen to have these similar feelings to mine, juggling similar worries to mine, with the added benefit of not having to feel that strange crushing social pressure of consuming media that did follow the norm that’d been pushed on me for much of my life of the man and woman living happily ever after and eventually building a family together.
In truth, I personally prefer BL over even a lot of western LGBT media since the stories resonate with me more—as someone whose life didn’t follow the “I knew I was LGBT since I was a child and came out and everything worked out somehow” trope, I’m really grateful BL manga is there to even it out with a lot of different sides to what it might look like to have these feelings or experiences. BL manga may not be an inherently LGBT media, but the reality is it contains all the greats many LGBT people can relate to: accidentally falling in love with your best friend, struggling in a society that was only made to fit a certain type of life or experience, dealing with your coworkers pestering you about marriage and kids while you’re stuck “playing straight” for the billionth time to not make waves, weighing the glory of being true to yourself with the fear of all of your friends and family treating you differently. Yeah, it has a lot of stuff that bothers people, too (for instance, the “I’m not gay, but…” trope) but not everything is going to be relatable and enjoyable for every single person.
So, this Pride, I’d like to thank the creator of that Gundam Wing Trowa x Quatre fanpage. It was a long journey, with each silly OTP, each new fav BL artist, and each wonderful person I met in the community helping to guide me to the end goal. I love that BL manga has been this wonderful, inclusive community of discovery and acceptance for me, and I hope it continues to be one for everyone else who reads and enjoys it—whether it’s those who have a similar experience to mine, or others who enjoy it for a multitude of different reasons.
May BL manga continue to be a fun and nurturing space! If you’d like to read more about BL as a community space for LGBT people, I also really recommend our report on the Meiji University’s “LGBTQ Issues and the Globalization of ‘BL’” academic symposium, which was a wonderful two-day event featuring many of the top BL scholars discussing the intersection of BL as a genre and the queer communities it impacts!
In truth, Pride in Japan is in April and is actually pretty uh… short, to say the least. It’s also much quieter than you might see in other countries. But I get excited when Family Mart brings out their Pride famichiki packaging. Japan, in general, isn’t a country where affection is displayed openly, even more so for LGBT people, so it can sometimes feel a bit isolating. I’m admittedly not one for huge parades and the tons of socializing that usually comes with Pride events (I’m a “sit in a quiet space reading all day” kind of dude) but it always makes me happy to see even the smallest glimpses of people getting to live their lives true to themselves, whatever form that may take.
Be proud of who you are, and be proud of what and who you love.
Happy Pride.
rentaBLog 