Click on any image below to see our past weeks' Yaoi pictures. Enjoy!

What is Yaoi?

Yaoi has become an umbrella term in the West for male/male manga or Japan-inspired comics, and it is preferentially used by American manga publishers. The actual name of the genre aimed toward women in Japan is called 'BL' or 'Boy's Love'. BL is aimed at the sh?jo and josei demographics, but is considered a separate category. Yaoi is used in Japan to include d?jinshi and sex scenes, and does not include gei comi, which is by gay men and for gay men.

Yaoi and sh?nen-ai are sometimes used by western fans to differentiate between the contents of the genre. In this case, "yaoi" is used to describe titles that contain sex scenes and other sexually explicit themes and "sh?nen-ai" is used to describe titles that focus more on romance and do not include explicit sexual content. However, Kaze to Ki no Uta ("the first commercially published boys' love story") was groundbreaking in its depictions of "openly sexual relationships", spurring the development of the sh?nen-ai genre in sh?jo manga. The use of yaoi to denote those works with explicit scenes sometimes clashes with use of the word to describe the genre as a whole. Yaoi can be used by fans as a label for anime or manga-based slash fiction.

While sh?nen-ai literally means "boy's love", the two terms are not synonymous. In Japan, sh?nen-ai used to refer to a now obsolete sh?jo subgenre that told stories of prepubescent boys in relationships ranging from the platonic to the romantic. The term was originally used to describe ephebophilia, and in scholarly contexts still is. Boy's Love, on the other hand, is used as a genre's name and refers to all titles regardless of sexual content or the ages of characters in the story (with the exception of titles featuring prepubescent boys, which are categorized as shotacon, a distinct genre with only peripheral connections to BL).