Growing Up with Yaoi

Yaoi (やおい) (aka Boys’ Love) is a popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by female authors. Originally referring to a specific type of dōjinshi (self-published works) parody of mainstream anime and manga works, yaoi came to be used as a generic term for female-oriented manga, anime, dating sims, novels and dōjinshi featuring idealized homosexual male relationships. The main characters in yaoi usually conform to the formula of the seme (literally: attacker) who pursues the uke (literally: receiver). [Wikipedia]

During my prepubescent years, anime was at the height of its popularity in the Philippines.

There was Ghostfighter (Yu Yu Hakusho), Samurai X (Rurouni Kenshin), Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi, Vision of Escaflowne, and all other sorts of series with genres ranging from science fiction to high school romance.

And as I grew a bit older, there was yaoi.

They came in various forms. Fanfiction, mostly rated NC-17, pairing an feminine-looking character (uke) to a tough macho one (seme). Fanart of my two favorite male characters in a very… compromising position. Websites dedicated to a popular male-male anime couple.

It gave me the shock of my life to know that fangirls actually liked it. As for me, it took quite some time to adjust to the culture shock. After all, the notion of homosexuality in the Philippines has a lot of differences from yaoi. Gradually, I began to accept it (for lack of a better word), since it was at least much better than seeing my favorite male character with a female one I hated.

Yaoi, as stated in the definition above, is a genre portraying boy-to-boy relationships. Nowadays, however, it has ceased to be limited to fan-made anime and manga, and can now also refer to any sort of male homosexual fanwork done for Japanese and Korean (and occasionally, Chinese) celebrities.

True enough to this new definition, I began to outgrow my addiction to anime and started focusing my attention on Japanese rock music during high school. But, as it turned out, the J-rock scene was also abounding with yaoi — both in fanfiction and fanart. And it didn’t just stop at fanwork. The musicians actually made a performance out of it, and termed it fanservice.

Japanese rock musicians under the visual kei genre often took to kissing their fellow male bandmates on stage, and sometimes liked to dress up in female clothing (this happens more commonly in oshare kei, though).

SodaHead.com
(Yes, these are guys.)

Having been exposed to it before in anime, I did not exactly get disgusted by it anymore. It actually somehow became rather entertaining, since some of the members actually looked like girls (uke and seme, remember?). And besides, a lot of these musicians who did these “kiss performances” were actually straight and had had relationships with women. If you knew the fandom well enough, the fanservice wouldn’t really make you doubt whether these people were gay or not. It was simply part of Japanese rock culture.

A couple of years later, when I was a college freshman, I moved on to Korean music. Even K-pop, however, had its own share of yaoi fanservice. And it wasn’t even limited to the rock genre. Even the most mainstream of Korean boybands do it, and boy, does it sell well with the fans.

Amusingly enough, they even have little TV mini-dramas that place these boyband members in compromising (that word again) situations that somehow suggest homosexual relationships with each other.

Dong Bang Shin Ki – Dangerous Love Mini-drama

Super Junior – Roommate Mini-drama

“Kiss performances” also pop up during concerts. (It is interesting to note that the androgynous guy who initiates the kiss in both videos is also a fan of Japanese visual kei rock.) This, of course, pleases the fans to no end, since it is certainly much better than seeing them kiss girls, given my their obsessive tendencies towards their favorite boyband members.

Looking back at what I’ve written, I can certainly say that yaoi, having grown up with it, has never failed to amuse me, probably because it is an entirely different form of subculture (or is it already a culture?) from all the ones we have here in our country. (I dare ASAP to stage a live “kiss performance” of Piolo Pascual and Sam Milby, and let’s see if the audience doesn’t recoil in disgust.) I am in no way criticizing our own kind of culture (which is also mighty entertaining in its own right), merely just stating how worlds-apart they are.

Writer Ian Buruma neatly sums up this cultural divide. “The difference is that one finds deplorable what the other adores (The Missionary and the Libertine).” However, this cultural divide should not lead us to treat what is different from ours as “disgusting” or “immoral”. After all, it is precisely these differences that should be celebrated as a part of each country’s uniqueness. ★