documenting the BL fan experience
My first experience had three steps I can recall: first I uncovered the Duo Maxwell/Heero Yui ship in online forums and Google image search, then my best friend bought a VHS copy of Maki Murakami’s Gravitation, and finally I purchased a manga titled FAKE by…
The same as my opinion on m|w representation in romance… it depends on who wrote it, the story, and the characters. Everything stands alone. Yes, the genre has tropes, but I don’t like to assign a “genre” caveat to what I consume and generalize an…
Sometimes people will call me a fake or say that I am not allowed to read BL because of how I identify and my gender assigned at birth. Most people are okay with how I ID though.
— 18, He/They, Jamaica
I grew up in the era of Ai No Kusabi, Kizuna, FAKE and Ayano Yamane. I read Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 as queer (at the very least deeply queer-coded) and works like Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion were revolutionary to me. BL wasn’t easy to…
It has become easier to find the specific content you want, however there are still quite a few barriers (language, cultural, economical, etc.) that still make it hard for others to discover. I believe we shouldn’t pirate BL (and any media, especially foreign media, in…
I am very grateful to the internet for exposing me to BL. I would be a different person without the exposure and I enjoy reading the wonderful stories.
— 18, He/They, Jamaica
I feel BL is extremely diverse, there is no one linear way of how representation is/can be showcased in that medium and this applies to all queer media in general. Once again, at first glance it can be seen as “iffy” representation, but it’s just…
The BL fandom experience is directly intertwined with my own queer identity discovery experience, I can’t extricate one from the other, it’s how I found community, love and confidence within the LGBTQ+ community, and it’s how I continue to engage my own sexual expression and…
Love Stage!!! I saw it recommended on youtube when I was younger and I fell in love with BL/GL and other queer media since. I liked seeing non-heterosexual relationships in media that was not automatically demonized and existed outside of a Christian anti-gay perspective, and seeing characters perform gender roles outside of typical societal standards (feminine/femme men and masculine/masc women).
— 18, She/They, Barbados
