documenting the BL fan experience
BL (and GL) has always been a safe space for me since I was young— a space to explore kink and sensuality, love and romance, gender, and relationships. Having friends in the BL community was a guarantee of acceptance and that was a huge comfort…
There’s a lot to be said about availability privilege when it comes to media and content. We need to have a talk about people who live in places and countries without the privilege to access these things. The industry around distribution heavily affects all fans.…
First experiences with BL: Yu Yu Hakusho and Prince of Tennis doujinshi and fanart back in 2003-2004. The first BL manga I bought was “Only the Ring Finger Knows”— very silly and romantic. I liked so many things about BL and shipping— the distance from my own identity/lived experiences allowed me to explore ideas of sexuality, gender, and romance more easily, the coming out narratives were touching and acted like a guide for me, the community was so fun and completely open. Initially, I wasn’t part of the fandom as a whole, I suppose as I was quite young. But I often met other anime fans online and in real life who liked BL and I always got on really well with them. BL fans were often more creative, open-minded, and passionate in my opinion. I spent a lot of time on msn, yahoo, and gaiaonline. Mostly it was a pleasant surprise to learn that someone you met was also into BL (and usually Girl’s Love, too, at that time).
— 28, She/They, USA
I was in high-school and I had just realized I was LGBT+ and I was trying to figure out what that means for me in some way. I found the BL anime Gravitation on Comcast on Demand and so I watched and I fell in…
While many fans may not know there is not a difference really between “shounen ai”, yaoi, or BL, numerous sites with translated scanlations categorize them that way. Even though we may know about the history of the BL industry and how some subgenres varied under…
My first experience with a “boy x boy” pairing was Kunzite and Zoisite in Sailor Moon. I started watching Sailor Moon (the DiC/USA network version) in 1996, and became obsessed with it. The internet was very young at this point, and the “World Wide Web” was a new feature in America Online, one I had been cautious to avoid because it wasn’t a moderated, approved service like those in AOL. (This was back when everyone online was an axe murderer until you knew otherwise.)
Well, come to find out that the ‘girl’ Zoisite that was peddled on American televisions was actually a boy. God, that did something to me, to see a man be both effeminate and devoted to someone who protected and cherished him. There was something in me that saw Kunzite killed by his own weapons after Zoisite died, and I read his death as the last act of a desperate man with nothing to lose. How could anyone go on after losing the one that was important to them? How could anyone look at them and think that they didn’t mean everything to each other? It made Sailor Moon so much more brutal, to have people who were clearly fighting for everything dear to them on either side of the battlefield.
Online, I discovered the Anime Web Turnpike, and there were a few pages about the Dark Kingdom, including some with ideas and fanfiction about shipping these two together, even without official canon material. From there, it was a very short leap to CLAMP, and we all know what CLAMP does. My next stop after that was Final Fantasy VII and Xenogears, then FF8, and later Gundam Wing. That was when I discovered doujinshi available on a small site called eBay. That was really when I started to embrace BL.
— 38, She/Her, USA
I would not have been exposed to the content that made me love BL so much if it weren’t for my easy internet access even at age 12. The largest difference in the way the internet has affected BL from the early 2000s to now…
I think of BL like a big mirror. BL content in order to be popular at the time of its creation is going to mirror society at that same time. No one in non-Japanese BL fan spaces ever considers when the series was created. Problematic…
I don’t participate in many real-life fandom things, although a few of my closest friends are also BL fans. It’s still something that I largely interact with online. The past few years the fandom has gotten stranger as people are more quick to gatekeep, criticize, and even rank titles based on what they may personally find trite or problematic.
— 28, She/They, USA
