With regards to her own work, Hagio Moto has often talked about how writing boy’s love manga freed her to explore kinds of stories that she felt like she couldn’t tell about female characters, and 1985’s Marginal is a particularly interesting example of how BL comics can be used to talk about women’s experiences of their own gender and the patriarchy.
In the afterword of the first volume of Classmates, Nakamura Asumiko wrote of her first BL series, “I wanted to go with something cliche, almost hackneyed.” It’s true, Classmates does indulge many of the standards of the genre. Instead of using these cliches as shortcuts, however, Nakamura uses the reader’s familiarity to build a framework for a humanistic, multifaceted story about queer intimacy, connection, and joy.
In retrospect, I recognize those first fanfics as something that let me safely imagine myself as a boy in a relationship with another boy. That desire to find media that would let me project myself into the positions of these male characters was what led me to discover BL.
While the series itself is a sweet, wholesome story about self-discovery, it also offers an incredibly potent metatextual analysis of how queer media can help LGBTQ+ teens come to understand themselves.
Of all the amazing things about the show, one of the most striking to me was the revolutionary way it portrayed the intersection of queer and Slavic identity.
It took years of consuming BL and Yuri to finally face my truth: that I am queer.
Ash is a problematic depiction of a queer assault survivor, but also one that claws open some of my most private, difficult wounds.
FAKE is a BL mystery-drama manga originally published between 1994 and 2000. The dominant emotional line throughout the series is the evolving relationship between detectives Dee and Ryo. However, just as important as the mysteries and the growing romance is the found family that the detectives build and the support it provides them.
I related to given‘s Mafuyu in a way that was different from how I’d ever connected with a character before. He was queer. He was coping with loss. He was socially awkward. And, most importantly, he was autistic-coded to the max.
Queerness opened up a new world, one in which male and female were no longer black-and-white concepts. Gender became this beautiful shade of gray that I didn’t want nor need to be boxed into. The gateway for this freedom was in the queer bodies of Thomas.
AniFem’s Vrai Kaiser discusses the history of boys love manga with special guests Khursten and Sara.
Seldom is gay manga as wholesome as Go For It, Nakamura!, but this eleven-chapter manga is as soft and sweet as it gets. The comical hijinks and silly conflicts resemble the older romances of the ‘90s anime scene, becoming a window into what could have been if LGBTQIA entertainment had become more mainstream way earlier.
To some, boys’ love comics are gay romance and gay representation. To others, they’re an exploitation of gay male love for the pleasure of women. BL really exists somewhere in the middle, and there are plenty of gay and even straight men who enjoy these often erotic gay comics. I am one of them.
Vrai talks Boys’ Love (BL) and yaoi manga with special guests Devin Randall and Masaki C. Matsumoto!
