You know, this isn’t the thing that fucks me up the most about BL/“yaoi”/fujoshi discourse, but it’s high up there so I’m going to say it.
It took me my whole lifetime to accept the fact that I’m a feminine guy. Every time I was laughed at for being girly, nonviolent, called a sissy, bitch, or worse, it hurt like hell. And when I realized I was attracted to boys, that was when I started to question whether I was a real man. It felt like a stab to the gut.
I was there, little teenage me, reading BL, because I couldn’t connect with anything else I knew of. Straight romance didn’t do anything for me. I watched Brokeback Mountain and liked it, but I couldn’t relate to almost any part of it. Gei Comi (“bara”) wasn’t my taste back then — I wanted to see boys who looked a bit like me, not big hunky adults with facial hair! So I fell back to BL.
And you people on here complain about “straight girls squeeing and saying ‘my sinful gay babies!!!’” — guess what, I was around when you actually DID see fangirls say this type of thing. I was there consuming BL and slash by the truckful, ignoring the occasional homophobic comments from the author/uploader. I saw all the hate every other corner of fandom threw at BL fans, and you know what.
None of that hate was because they had homophobic attitudes.
It was purely because “yaoi is for stupid girls”, and they were “ruining the source material with their dirty gay hands”.
If girls touched anything that was “meant for boys”, including male characters themselves, it was “dirtied”, “ruined”. (Sounds familiar?)
And the boys who liked BL? Who preferred a romantic manga about androgynous guys slowly falling in love, with cherry blossoms being swept by the wind in the background, rather than just watching gay porn featuring masculine men? We weren’t “real men”.
If you thought there isn’t a fuckton of toxic masculinity in the gay male community, boy do I have news for you. Feminine, camp, flamboyant men, they all “made gays look bad”. Because of us, cishet people wouldn’t accept gay men as “real men”, so there were attempts to exclude us to protect the reputation of the unoffensive, masculine macho gays.
Obviously, it didn’t work, but damn if it didn’t make me and guys like me feel horrible that even other gay guys hated us.
It took me a long time to accept myself. Little mid-to-late-teens me, with light hypogonadism that stunted my growth and made me look very feminine. Before I started taking hormones per my endocrinologist’s advice, I barely had appetite to eat decently. I only lost my baby cheeks and started gaining muscle mass a year or so into hormone treatment.
Me, still flaming gay.
As I grew up, came out, and made queer friends, I became less and less dependent on BL for self-esteem and entertainment. But BL fans were slowly being more accepted in animanga fandom (or at least, people made peace with the fact that we weren’t going anywhere). Same for slash shippers in western fandoms. I was so happy to see all the M/M content. I was so happy to see a space where girls could share their passion (including erotica) and support each other.
When they learned that a gay guy liked the same things as them, they were ecstatic. They never shamed me for sharing their “girly” interests. I had serious conversations with them when they said insensitive or ignorant things, but it was becoming less and less necessary to do so. Fans were becoming progressively more conscious of queer issues.
And now.
Now,
“Yaoi is for cishet girls.”
“You must be lying about being a gay man. You’re obviously a straight girl.”
“Nasty fujoshits.”
“If you have more m/m than m/f or f/f ships, you’re fetishizing mlm.”
Good fucking lord.
It’s so transparent. You feel so self-righteous expressing hate for women (plenty of whom are queer, but yeah, straight women too!) having interests, and god forbid, sometimes sexual interests (gasp!).
You dress it up as “concern for MLM” in the hopes that people will sympathize with your campaign to shame and harass women, men and gender non-conforming folk for daring to like content “not meant for them”, just like 2ch and 4chan dudebros in the mid-2000’s.
It makes me sick to the stomach.
Don’t pretend this is about homophobia. You don’t go after the exact same content if it’s made by “real men” featuring masculine macho “real men”.
You’ve heard of seme/uke tropes? Get ready for aggressive tops and “bottom bitches”! “Fetishizing Asian men”? Well, good thing that gay dudes have rice queens, and on the other end of the spectrum, “no fats, femmes or asians”. Transphobic themes? Some men consider “sh*male” or “tr*nny” to be porn categories! But neither anti-fujoshi nor transphobic gay men will talk about trans men — they’re “not real men”, after all, just “straight women invading gay spaces”.
And let’s not get into the rape, abuse, incest, racism, sexism, violence, and plethora of other problematic things that cis gay men portray in gei comi, original fic and fanfic — it puts dark BL and fic written by anyone else to shame.
But it’s okay, because it’s “real men” creating and consuming it, right?
Look, I get it. You want to seem like you’re doing good and fighting for queer men. I’ll hazard you even were fujoshi/fudanshi before and are ashamed of how you acted back then.
But all that you’re doing is misusing terms of a language you don’t know, from a culture you’re not part of and fandoms you don’t participate in, speaking over gay men and Asian fans, othering Asian people, and fostering an environment in which harassment of innocent fans is encouraged and marginalized people are used as scapegoats.
I feel for the trans guys, who go to fandoms to escape the hate and transphobia from the world, only to be misgendered and send hateful messages in the spaces they wanted to have fun in. Who are already accused of “faking it”, of not being “real men”, by bigots in the real world, and now have to face the same horrible things in fandom.
I feel for the queer girls, some of whom may not even be attracted to men, but to whom BL and/or slash means a lot. Who often don’t even have female characters to relate to, much less queer female characters, or simply can’t relate to them very well for a variety of complex reasons. They seek refuge in fandom, only to be misoriented, called “cishet”, having their identity erased to push an agenda.
And I feel for the straight, cis girls, who put genuine effort into educating themselves on queer issues, for whom fandom was a welcoming space where they could finally share their interests and be themselves, be allowed to have sexual interests… and now are being called perverts, deviants, and being told that they taint everything they touch.
And as much as it pisses me off to be called “basically a cishet girl”, it doesn’t get to me. At present, I’m secure in the knowledge that I am a real man, despite being gay, despite being feminine, despite liking BL. I am comfortable with myself and my identity.
But little teenage me would have been devastated.
Hey, anti-fujoshi? I don’t need your faux-activism. Kindly take your misogyny, efemmiphobia, transphobia and identity politics and leave us alone. Or —OR! Listen to the people you’re supposedly trying to protect.
Sincerely,
a gay, Asian, fem, queer as fuck fudanshi.
