ON YAOI AND AUTHENTICITY
This essay first appeared in yaoi zine 2: the anal/ysis issue.
One could say that I came into maturity during the golden age of yaoi. SasuNaru AMVs were a genre unto themselves on early YouTube. Lawlight icons were inescapable in LiveJournal comment sections. As a middle schooler who liked manga and spent most of my time online, yaoi was a spectre looming over my consciousness that proved impossible to exorcise.
I lived in fear that someone would accuse me of being a fujoshi. I hid the covers of the manga I checked out from the school library, even though I mostly read shoujo and shounen titles that weren’t predominantly associated with slash fandoms, like Fruits Basket and Rurouni Kenshin. I found the mere idea of yaoi fangirls petrifyingly embarrassing, and I was convinced that if I ever gained a reputation as one at school, I would achieve permanent social death.
Yes, I had previously spent six years as a Christian homeschooler. However, my understanding of queerness was more complex than a homophobia flat rate, as it were.
I was cognizant that I found women attractive. When I was 11 I told my younger sister that women were “objectively better looking” than men and this is why they were more often depicted as muses in Western art (LMFAO.) Even so, I resolutely refused to conceive of this attraction as romantic or sexual. If MOGAI tumblr had existed at the time, I would probably have clung to the idea that I had purely Aesthetic Attraction to women, but it didn’t, so I just came up with it on my own. I had very few friends at school, and the environment in which I socially thrived was Evangelical youth group. I experienced more cognitive dissonance about the constant misogyny than the blistering homophobia—I felt strongly that sexism was wrong, and, weirdly, felt like transness (in the abstract) was a completely separate thing from homosexuality and not sinful at all, but it was harder for me to come up with mental arguments against religious homophobia, specifically because I did find the idea of two men having sex scary and weird. (I had a hard time conceiving of two women having sex as existentially wrong the same way, even if it took a few more years to accept that I was sexually attracted to them, and I never sat comfortably with the label of “lesbian” despite feeling nauseated by the idea of dating men as a woman)
In my online life, I was adjacent to slash spaces. I had written fanfiction since I was a single digit age, though I didn’t post it anywhere; my first fic was OC-centric Harry Potter stuff. I didn’t actually read much other fanfiction, though, because I knew that fanfiction involved SEX (scary) and especially GAY SEX (really scary!!!!), so I rotated the subjects of my passions by reading a lot of analysis—meta posts on LJ or fansites, mostly, or TV Tropes. This felt much more dignified. I was partaking in discussions around the agora. Deepening my media literacy. Uncovering textual truths. I was getting at what the authors really meant, which was the opposite of being a yaoi fangirl, because being a yaoi fangirl was about making up a bunch of fake shit for prurient reasons and then insisting that it was real.
But my highly cultivated sense of shame could not stave off the tide of yaoi forever. My downfall came when I arrived at something that appealed to my literary sensibilities: something that felt, in some way, real.
Unfortunately, that means Harry Potter again. There’s a famous Remus/Sirius fanfiction called The Shoebox Project. The fic depicts a year in the life of the Marauders (Harry’s dad’s friend group) through ephemera kept in a shoebox. It incorporates multimedia elements, including visual art, and cemented a lot of bad fanon characterization. The concept was intriguing enough that I couldn’t resist reading it—out of literary interest, of course. (It helped that there was no explicit sex.)
But yaoi is like Pringles. You can’t stop with just one.
The moment before I knowingly clicked on the first explicit slash fanfic I ever read was one of the top 10 most terrifying experiences in my teenage years. The devil’s breath had never been so hot against my cheek, but I was reading about Remus and Sirius sucking and fucking and there was no turning back.
It was really sexy even though it freaked me out. I reacted by doubling down in my mind palace on the “realness” of it all—not just the ostensible canon compliance of the ship (at least in the precanon era), but those multimedia elements that made it feel more anchored in the real world to me, instead of the horny wish fulfillment of a bunch of sweaty nerd girls. The first fanfic I ever actually published was Remus/Sirius songfic to “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen, which is the most horny song ever recorded. But it was period accurate to the time I was setting my fic, so I could not be held responsible. I was just being authentic.
So my yaoi era was here—in theory. I spent the following decade quitting church, becoming radicalized, and reading gay erotica. I wrote my share, but I gravitated to creating my own fanworks about female characters (probably because they are Objectively More Attractive, or something.) I did, still, on some level, judge people who were primarily into yaoi, except this time it was because if they were more feminist they would care about the interiority of Women instead, instead of because butt sex icky/evil.
2009 was the year of my first yaoi reckoning, and 2019 the second. I was at a personal nadir, and my emotional lifeline became an overwhelming obsession with the manga Golden Kamuy. GK is a painstakingly-researched work of historical fiction about war and colonialism and trauma. It’s also one of the most lovingly horny celebrations of the male form I have ever encountered.
For the first time in my life, I was churning out voluminous quantities of my own bespoke yaoi. It wasn’t cringe though, because I was doing a ton of extracurricular reading about male/male homoeroticism in the late Meiji period and writing the kind of fanfic that came with a bibliography. Part of this was, genuinely, because I love history and enjoy that kind of thing. But I can’t help but think that part of it was self-justification, like I needed to prove that I wasn’t just becoming a full-time yaoi content creator because I wanted to—I basically had no choice. Both Satoru Noda and the annals of history were holding guns to my head.
To keep a short story short, the year I spent writing 100k of GK fic was also the year I came to terms with a) being attracted to men as well as women, and b) the fact I wanted (needed!) to masculinize via medical transition.
The latter was an agonizing thing to admit. There was nothing more embarrassing than making up a bunch of fake shit and pretending it was real, and that was what it would be if I decided I was going to be a guy now (or something in the ballpark of a guy.) (Not for other people though! Just for me.)
Anyway. I think this is why a lot of young trans guys online get super weird about yaoi and the people who love it. When you don’t feel real enough for your own identity, it can help to draw lines around “your turf” and start yelling at the people who are even bigger fakey fakers than you are. I’m just so glad I wasn’t exposed to those specific lines of discourse when I was 15, because even though it might have been good to come to terms with being trans early on, IDK if it would be worth coming at the cost of becoming an anti-fujo crusader, and I can see that timeline through a glass darkly.
These days, my fanworks are still predominantly about women, and I don’t think it’s coming from self-hatred or anything; I just love women a lot and find them interesting to write about. But I love yaoi too, and I won’t apologize!
I think we should all love and respect each other, whatever it is that brings us to yaoi. There’s no wrong reason. Yaoi is spacious. Its hole is big enough for us all.