I’ve been meaning to write up an article on Yaoi for a long time but gay site Xtra has beaten me to it. Yaoi (pronounced “yowee”) is Japanese manga comics depicting romantic relationships between two men, some of it involving hardcore gay sex. Yaoi is almost exlusively written by women for a straight female audience. It’s been popular in Japan for a long time but has now broken into the US market.
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In the late 1970s and ’80s girls’ romance comics began to include stories where male/female romances were supplanted by a sort of idealized, platonic male/male friendship and then later a male/male romance. Although the work was created entirely by women and was serialized in women’s magazines, the male/male relationships became a hit with the readership and the audience demanded more.
Why? Well the males in question were about as effeminate and nonsexualized (and therefore nonthreatening) as possible and many manga fans argue that this created a perfectly safe and balanced — although incredibly unlikely — template onto which female fans could project themselves.
Xtra writes from the viewpoint of a gay man, of course, and provides a list of where to find the hardcore yaoi action.
I’m fairly unfamiliar with this genre so I probably shouldn’t comment on it too much. It seems to be a similar phenomenon to slash fiction, which also involves two male characters (i.e. Captain Kirt and Dr. Spock or Harry Potter and Professor Snape). The focus is on romance although that’s not to say there’s no interest in pure, porny perving. And of course, the popularity of gay porn among some straight women has been mentioned in this blog before – I think the focus there is on seeing good looking guys get it on with each other.