Speaking of gay comics, and Canada, blogger and retailer Christopher Butcher provides gay man’s guide to yaoi for Toronto’s Xtra (probably NSFW):
Japan has a long tradition of romance and relationship-oriented manga for girls and women, and yaoi (rhymes with wowee) grew out of that. In the late 1970s and ’80s girls’ romance comics began to include stories where male/female romances were supplanted by a sort of idealized, platonic male/male friendship and then later a male/male romance. Although the work was created entirely by women and was serialized in women’s magazines, the male/male relationships became a hit with the readership and the audience demanded more.
Why? Well the males in question were about as effeminate and nonsexualized (and therefore nonthreatening) as possible and many manga fans argue that this created a perfectly safe and balanced — although incredibly unlikely — template onto which female fans could project themselves. Relationships in yaoi break down along hard lines of submissive (”uke”) and dominant (”seme”) and with women officially removed from the proceedings the female reader could project herself into either role (apparently none of these people has ever heard of a power-bottom). While the work has gotten considerably smuttier since its platonic origins the reality of gay male romance still has more-or-less nothing to do with most of the relationships depicted in these pages. The men in yaoi have often been compared to the “lesbians” in porn for straight men, there for the titillation but about as realistic as unicorns.
Butcher also provides a rundown of some of the better yaoi titles and publishers.
* I’m sure I’ve used a similar headline on numerous occasions, but hey … blame Blur.
