My earliest memory is of encountering boyxboy content in a fanfic I didn’t expect, when I was around 12 years old. I don’t remember if the fic was hosted in ff.net or yahoo groups or somewhere else. I didn’t think too much of it back then, but I remember not feeling disgust, just a vague curiosity and I kept reading because I was interested in the main hetero pairing (haha). My first “proper” experience with BL, when I learned what it was, was 3 years later when I met other otaku friends from my city for the first time and learned about forums. There I found out about the anime “Loveless”, which I also started not knowing what it was. In the 2nd episode, the characters kiss and I did find it strange enough to not keep watching, until a few months later when I decided to continue, and that time I found out it wasn’t as terrible as I thought. Following that, me and my friends started looking for similar manga and series, slowly started finding out about yaoi fanfics and games, although at that time (around 2006) there wasn’t access to much content compared to nowadays.

Among the local anime community, my group of friends were “the weird ones” for liking yaoi. It was also around the time Death Note was starting to air, so everyone was into that (us included).

— 28, She/They, Argentina

My first BL experience is linked to fan work. I was around 8 and I actually through that Oscar from Versailles no Bara was a guy so I thought he/she was a gay couple with André. My first experience with “real BL” was from the anime Yuyu Hakusho. I was really into Hiei and Kurama together and looking on the family computer I found some doujinshis and fanfictions. At the beginning I was kind of grossed out by original BL, I only liked yaoi with characters I knew. But the sexual aspect in doujins and fanfic was really eye opening for me (I rarely consumed pornographic content before). I also liked that in the original work it was more serious stories that the shoujo I could find. Fandom was very welcoming and active (in french, not Arabic). I went on Livejournal and had multiple accounts on websites where people would post fanfic, fanart and talk about the show.

— 28, She/Her, Algeria