The yaoi fandom consists of the readers of yaoi (also called Boys' Love or abbreviated to BL), a genre of male homosexual narratives. Individuals in the yaoi fandom may attend conventions, maintain/post to fansites, create fanfiction/fanart, etc. In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000–500,000 people. Despite increased knowledge of the genre among the general public, readership remained limited in 2008. English-language fan translations of From Eroica with Love circulated through the slash fiction community in the 1980s, forging a link between slash fiction fandom and yaoi fandom.
In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi (腐女子, lit. "rotten girl"), denoting how a woman who enjoys fictional gay content is "rotten", too ruined to be married. A male fan of yaoi is called a fudanshi (腐男子, "rotten boy"). The words' origin can be found in the online text board 2channel.
Yaoi fans have been characters in manga such as the seinen manga Fujoshi Rumi.[1] At least one butler café has opened with a schoolboy theme in order to appeal to the Boy's Love aesthetic.[2] In one study on visual kei, 37% of Japanese fan respondents reported having "yaoi or sexual fantasies" about the visual kei stars.[3]
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