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…
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 come by back then, especially growing up on an island. I could only get my hands on BL when I traveled to the US. Heck, I consider The Vampire Chronicles part of my BL experience.
— 34, She/Her, Dominican Republic
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…
