Yaoi and Gay Romance

If you want to learn more about yaoi and gay romance, come back on June 22 for Manga and Romance Blog Hop! If you have a yaoi or gay romance blog or website and want to sign up to participate, please visit the main page here. We’re colliding two cultures, yaoi and romance, and partying all weekend! There’ll be a grand prize and a few authors are offering prizes as well.

For those who don’t know what yaoi means, it’s a Japanese term for a genre of boy’s love manga (comics) most popular with female readers. The comics depict gay relationships and may or may not include romance. There seems to be a fairly rigid guideline in yaoi comics of who tops and who bottoms and even the plot construction. While this isn’t true 100% of the time, it happens enough to be expected.

There’s western yaoi manga and internet yaoi now. The term “yaoi” might as well mean a drawn version of pretty men in love (or lust). At least that’s what I use it for. A web comic artist might have never heard of yaoi but could still be referred to as yaoi anyway.

Why do I personally love yaoi when the characters are stereotyped and plotlines expected? It’s hard to explain. The traditional yaoi from Japan might not be anything groundbreaking, but it’s fun, cute, and enjoyable to watch despite sometimes being infuriating. (Communication does not seem to be something gay people do in Japan.)

Even though I might make it seem that yaoi is squeezed into the same plotlines, it is still extremely varied. To really explain the yaoi genre would take weeks. Fans could discuss it for days and days. It’s a culture now with subcultures and warring debates over ukes and semes (bottoms and tops).

• You can check out yaoi from Yaoi Press and YaoiProse.com. This is an example of yaoi that isn’t Japanese. They have yaoi in comic and written form.
• And you can read more about yaoi and find unlicensed video and manga to download  (membership required) on aarinfantasy's yaoi forum.