documenting the BL fan experience
I guess being into BL was my way of exploring my sexuality for years without really noticing I was doing it. I had a very late “gay awakening” (at 21), which also helped me open up in terms of sexual acceptance, but it didn’t really…
On one side, it was because of piracy that I was able to find BL content in the first place (downloading anime and manga, and later on doujinshi). When I got into online fandom, nobody debated where the content had come from, we never stopped…
I’ve lost connection with local fandom years ago. My only reference is when I table at local cons, and I interact a bit with the attendees. What I noticed, though, is that the BL public is way younger than when I got into BL. I was 15 years old when I watched Loveless and I was one of the youngest. But recently I’ve met girls as young as 10 years old, accompanied by their parents, asking for TodoDeku stickers, for example. That absolutely didn’t happen in my time (hahaha). Even the concept of parents being in cons was alien back then. As for what this generation consumes or acts like, I suppose it’s quite globalized thanks to social media. They’re up to date with the newest releases and have a lot of access to BL original content and fan-content.
— 28, She/They, Argentina
Around the beginning, fandom was mostly my friends, the other people in the local anime forum/community, and some people on Deviantart. Social media didn’t exist yet. Instead of drawing for strangers on the internet, I filled up pages of drawings in my notebooks and brought…
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…
