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?