A Brief History of Yaoi

by M. J. Johnson

So what's yaoi? Generally speaking, it describes comics and stories featuring male/male relationships and/or sex. Otherwise, it's a word that's the source of a *lot* of confusion.

Yaoi in Japan means very specifically fan-produced works using other people's characters. It began as a form of aniparo – animation parody – the fan genre that was largely gag and humorous. Aniparo liked to do silly things with manly male characters, like putting them in ballet tunics or giving them kitty ears. One of the silly things the fans did was put the manly males in bed together. And so, in the mid-to-late 80s, a genre was born. 'Yaoi' is an acronym for 'no peak, no point/ending, no meaning' – to emphasize the frivolous and arbitrary nature of this fannish activity.

Fast-forward a few years. Yaoi had grown to be a huge proportion of the amateur manga market. Certain amateurs, most notably Ozaki Minami, went pro with their series. With names and details changed so its anime roots didn't show, Ozaki's series Bronze became a roaring success. Publishers took note, and soon there was a boom in pro m/m manga, with magazines and publishing companies sprouting like mushrooms. Needless to say, these manga were aimed at women only, being mostly romantic and angsty stories of m/m love with very little depiction of m/m sex beyond some aesthetically raised legs and tear-stained visages. This makes perfect sense from the Japanese point of view, where people's worlds and marketing targets are both kept quite separate. Gay men have their own m/m publications and don't need – or want – to read women's m/m publications.

However this new pro genre wasn't yaoi. Yaoi was still (in a slightly derogatory sense) the mindless fan-produced stuff. There wasn't any one word in general use for the pro version until recently, when BL (boys' love) finally became widespread. But the western fascination began before that, and for lack of any other term, 'yaoi' was adopted to mean all versions of m/m.

It's hard to tell in a mass movement like this just where it all began over here. I believe yaoi came to the west largely thanks to the efforts of Chinese and Korean-American fans, who had come across it translated into their mother tongues and wanted to make it available in English. The Taiwanese translations of Japanese manga (pirated, of course) often included twenty-odd pages of (equally pirated) Japanese doujinshi at the end for fun. That's where Susan Chen, who founded Aestheticism, first ran across the amateur genre. She began the paper zine of Aestheticism in 1996 that went into a web version the next year. Not much later Monica Shin began a Bronze web page where Ozaki's decadent and high-temperature illustrations made people sit up and say 'What's *this?!!' Many early fans got their introduction to the genre through Bronze, which for them was the series that defined what yaoi is. (Unrealistic, overdone, melodramatic, featuring semi-insane characters – like that. ^_^)

Obviously the explosion of yaoi here is due to the net. People finally had a way of telling other people – a lot of other people – about the weird and wonderful things the Japanese were doing with their characters. Myself, I think a liking for m/m is one of those things hard-wired into certain women's systems. From the days of Star Trek slash fandom onwards – thirty-plus years now – women have been saying 'Oh my god, I thought I was the only one having these fantasies.' With the net it became a lot easier to discover not only that you weren't the only one, but also that in certain countries m/m for women is a full-scale industry.

The other major gateway to yaoi was Japanese animation, which became more accessible in the late 90s. At that time the big source of amateur yaoi in Japan was a series called Gundam Wing. GW fan subs appeared here along with its reputation as a hotbed of m/m stories, and many fans jumped on the bandwagon of this novel and exciting idea. Pairings and characters got talked to death on the mailing lists – mostly; it was felt, by younger teenaged fans with a lot of enthusiasm but not much hard knowledge. They also began writing their own, because the Japanese fan doujinshis are expensive, frequently obscure and require being over 18 to buy. Probably for the majority of western fans 'Yaoi' means English stories based on their favorite anime series, but there are still many die-hards who seek out both the Japanese fan productions and the pro manga.

I do think pro yaoi manga fans tend to be older than the general run of anime-based yaoi fans. It's harder to find these manga in America, they're more expensive than online anime episodes or fan subs, and very little has been translated into English – three factors that can discourage the high school and university crowd from looking at Japanese yaoi unless they read Chinese. The most popular manga are those that have English translations or summaries available on the net: Ozaki's Bronze and Zetsuai, Kodaka Kazuma's Kizuna, Matoh Sanami's Fake; or series that can be 'picture read' easily. (Kodaka is an easy picture read, Ozaki not so much so.) Equally, once a 'yaoish' series gets animated, it gets a larger audience interested in the manga. Examples would be Murakami Maki's Gravitation and Matsushita Yoko's Yami no Matsuei.

Mentioning Yami no Matsuei brings up another point. YnM isn't BL by Japanese standards. It's a mainstream girls' series that has a lot of heavy emotional connection between the men, but nothing explicitly sexual. A lot of girls' manga has this kind of romantic 'fanservice' even in a story that's mainly about an m/f relationship. These 'yaoish' manga are also very popular amongst western readers- works by the group CLAMP or Higuri You that do 'indicated but not explicit' m/m between impossibly beautiful characters. You can see these as part of the yaoi wave if you like, and I think that if Japanese m/m ever goes mainstream here it will be these borderline series that do it best. At the same time more explicit manga are appearing in Japan. Tohjoh Asami has done explicit m/m series for the crossover magazine ReijinM. (She also does explicit m/f hentai for other magazines. She's explicit. End story.) Nitta Youka has two main series, one about two porn stars who become mainstream actors and lovers, the other about the shifting affairs among a group of men who are 'hosts' in a club that caters to women, but who sleep with each other. It's these series that could be more easily marketed to a gay male audience, and that may be what happens.

Myself, I rather hope that yaoi doesn't go mainstream here. I don't think the general westerner is able to cope with the idea of m/m for women, but for me that's the essence of the genre. What excited me about yaoi in Japan was that it was produced in an all-female environment for an all-female audience. As I say, Japan likes to keep separate things very separate. This was the first time I'd seen female erotica produced with *no* reference to the male version at all. It wasn't a corrective to male porn, it wasn't following any political or feminist agenda (are you kidding? In *Japan*?), it was just young women – high school and university age – drawing and writing the things that turned them on. But I don't see this 'disconnectedness' going over well in the politicized and reality-valuing west. Already in the English-language yaoi fandom we've got critics saying that women are 'using' gay male men for their fantasies, that yaoi doesn't reflect gay male reality and should, that it's just gay porn by another name and women should stop pretending it isn't.

All of this misses the point. Most yaoi characters aren't even realistic men, let alone gay ones. Most yaoi is fantasy pure and simple, on the level of unicorns and elves. It may be the only fantasy here that's 100% female-created, and I think should be cherished just for that. But this flies in the face of western belief that the personal is political, and that a fantasy can't exist totally separate from social reality. If yaoi goes mainstream, I think it will be forced, consciously or unconsciously, to conform to notions of what's politically correct and acceptable. At that point it will cease to be the untrammeled expression of female eroticism, as it is in Japan, and will cease to be yaoi.