Male/Male Romance Novels in the News
Boys' Love / Yaoi, Male/male Romance Comments (4)
My chapter in our upcoming boys’ love anthology compares heterosexual to male/male romances, and as I’ve written here before, I’ve been thinking about turning my research attentions away from yaoi and toward the new genre of original, English-language, female-authored male/male romance novels. Lo, yesterday a friend sent me this link to an article in the LA Weekly about just that phenomenon: “Man on Man: The New Gay Romance … Written By and For Straight Women” by Gendy Alimurung.
The article does a good job of delving into the subject. However, although it does, around page four, discuss the history of slash (fan-created m/m homoerotica drawing upon copyrighted or real-life characters), it doesn’t mention the historically analogous rise of boys’ love in Japan. So I will.
Since its inception in the ’70s, slash fiction has had to remain more or less underground due to its use of copyrighted characters. Boys’ love, on the other hand, did not have the same problem in Japan because it used original, rather than copyright-protected, characters. Setting aside the male/male love affair mentioned in Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, written in the 11th century, the rise of boys’ love fiction in Japan is typically dated to the publication of Hagio Moto’s shōjo manga Heart of Thomas in 1974, a homoerotic story about young men in a German boarding school. Heart of Thomas kicked off a genre that seemed to enjoy immediate popularity. Yaoi, the fanfic of boys’ love manga, may have started in Japan after original BL manga; it’s impossible to say with any certainty, but we do know that the term “yaoi” wasn’t publicized until 1979.
Either way, while in English-speaking countries, female-authored m/m homoerotica started as fan fiction and remained an underground publishing phenomenon, in Japan at about the same time it started as an original fiction genre and became wildly popular, spreading from Japan out to other Asian and, eventually, European countries.
I’m strongly tempted, in fact, to say the incursion of boys’ love manga into the U.S. has been a major influence on the rise of female-authored male/male romance novels here.
I wouldn’t say that it is the only reason, of course.
For one thing, the new popularity of the male/male romance genre in the U.S. certainly wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the groundbreaking efforts of gay male romances, by which I mean m/m romances written by and primarily for gay men. Gay male romances have become increasingly mainstream over the last few decades, the result of a long struggle for public acceptance and visibility that should in no way be overlooked or diminished. The authors who fought to get these works published, and the publishers who took a chance on them, were all pioneers, and it’s because of them and the work of the GLBTIQ community in general that same-sex romances appear in all sorts of genres, quite often without any fanfare whatsoever.
In addition, the attention being paid in the U.S. to contemporary male/male romance novels, by which I mean m/m romances written by and primarily for women, tends to ignore the fact that women have been writing such works for a long time, and not only in the form of fan fiction. For example, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976), Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap (1979), Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987), Storm Constantine’s The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit (1987 — technically hermaphrodites), and Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn (1989) leap to mind as a few early mainstream examples, even though most are not, technically, romances. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if many of the women now writing original male/male romance novels, especially paranormal m/m romances, cited one or more of these authors as inspirations.
And, of course, we can’t forget fan fiction itself. Slash began as an underground genre in the ’70s, disseminated in the form of newsletters and zines. It wasn’t until the advent of the internet that it began to come into its own, linking different fandoms that had hitherto relatively little interaction with each other and becoming more visible to mainstream readers who might stumble across slash fiction while hunting down information about the TV series or novels they enjoyed. Although “discovered” by academia in 1992 with the publication of Henry Jenkin’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, slash is still more or less an underground phenomenon, re-”discovered” by the media every few years with another gee-whiz article about those funny women who write porn about the men of whichever TV, novel, or movie series is popular at the time. But despite the wide-eyed surprise these articles affect, fans, especially female and gay male fans, are already quite aware of slash’s existence, and I think it’s very likely that the women currently writing original male/male romance novels have read or written slash at some point or another.
Nevertheless, the reason I want to argue that the incursion of boys’ love manga into the U.S. has been a major influence on the rise of female-authored male/male romance novels here is because of BL manga’s influence on publishers. Sure, women have been writing this stuff in the U.S. for years — but up until now, relatively little of it has been picked up by publishers. So what’s changed?
My opinion is that publishers couldn’t help but have noticed the immense popularity of BL manga in the U.S. BL manga went mainstream here starting with TokyoPOP’s translation of Gravitation 1 in 2003 (see my timeline), and it enjoyed immediate popularity with the fans who’d encouraged its publication in the first place. In fact, BL was, at one point, the fastest-growing niche within manga publication in the U.S., and although its sales have slowed down since that intial boom, it remains a strong element within the manga market.
How could other publishers ignore that? I suspect that many saw the largely untapped market of women interested in m/m homoerotica and decided to pursue it. Novels, after all, are cheaper to publish than manga, and they’ll reach a wider audience. I think that many publishers began to take a second look at the male/male romances they were being sent, or even to actively solicit them, and I predict that this is going to continue and spread to larger, more mainstream romance publishers, probably in the form of specialized imprints, much as was the case for manga publishers.
Other essays I’ve written related to this topic:
A Note on Boys’ Love and “Straight” Readership: In which I explain why I don’t argue that male/male romance is written by and primarily for straight women.
Boys’ Love vs. Yaoi: An Essay on Terminology: My preliminary attempt to broaden the category of “boys’ love”; I’m now calling this category male/male romance, instead.
Another article:
Zipper Rippers: Women Write Gay Male Romances for Women (Baltimore City Paper)
drupagliassotti @ January 4, 2010
While I actually really appreciate the nod that you give to BL/yaoi when discussing m/m fiction, I do have to point out a variable that factors into your discussion of the recent influx of original m/m fiction written by women: the POD/e-book publishing model.
Print on Demand/e-book technology became extremely accessible in the last 5-6 years (increasingly so) that these small presses don’t have to take on the financial risk that a traditional publisher does to publish something that is still very niche, like m/m romantic fiction. One of the first e-book publishers that made a name for themselves, Torquere, was started by slashers. So was MLR. I wouldn’t be surprised if several of the other POD/e-book publishers also have slash backgrounds. As these took off, the already well-established market of het romance POD/e-book publishers took notice and took a chance. Now it’s very prevalent to see original slash on romance e-book sites. Slashers, by their very natures, are voracious readers (rarely sated) and the POD/e-book model can fill that need at a very low overhead. Sometimes, sadly, that also means a low quality level, but that is a whole other discussion. =) So is the fact that, regardless of the e-book/POD boon, you’re still not seeing these books picked up by traditional publishers; Running Press is the only one thus far. Even established print publishers of gay fiction haven’t jumped on the bandwagon. Alyson, Cleis, Kensington…you find /very/ few female writers of gay fiction/gay romance in their catalogs. In fact, as you pretty much noted in your above examples, the only publishers that seems open to m/m fiction are fantasy. With the exception of ‘The Catch Trap’ (one of my personal faves), all the others are scifi/fantasy (and you forgot the Nightrunner series by Lynn Fleweling, but I digress
)
So, personally, while I am glad to have you give the appropriate nod to BL/yaoi (since, I too noticed the lack of reference in the article you mentioned), I’m not so sure it was a translated managa influence that has increased the number of gay romance novels written for and by women as it’s a factor of available publishing technology. Though, I think print publishers /should/ look at the presence and popularity of BL manga as a positive trend and evidence of a viable market…I’m just not convinced that they have.
I know this probably goes without saying, but the web didn’t just link people and interests, it changed the face of distribution and marketing. I just finished Archer’s Heart (which was pretty good) and I would never have known Blind Eye Books was nearby if it weren’t for the web. But also Blind Eye Books couldn’t stay afloat if it weren’t for the possibility to have digitalized media that could be sent quickly and cheaply to printer X in city Y to be distributed by company Z to person W in city V. Before, all those steps were cost-heavy. Now, you might say there’s a glut of BL and male/male romance out there, which exists alongside the relative lack of it coming from major publishers. Should we privilege the glut or the lack? =p
A question about the yaoi anthology: I know I did, but did any other contributors also touch on why/who/how of lesbian readership?
Devbasaa: Doh, Nightrunner! How could I neglect to mention that series?! Thanks for the reminder! I write about slash in sci-fi/fantasy because that’s what I read, primarily. I haven’t noticed it as much in other genres, but I don’t read them as often, so I may have just missed a trend. Or maybe there’s no trend to miss. Gotta rely on someone else for that….
Good points on the slash-writer-to-m/m-publisher connections. We see the same kind of development in BL manga publishing, btw; for the most part, it’s the BL fans who have become the BL editors and publishers. I think that’s a logical progression. I hope we’ll see more mainstream publishers picking up on the movement, though — maybe from editors who read it, like it, and decide to push for it. Or, alternatively, some of the POD/small-press publishers might get bought up as imprints by major publishers who want to enter the market the easy way. That’s one of the fascinating things about watching all of this now as a researcher and reader; being able to track, guess, and hope.
Ninelegyak: Speaking of glut … the worst thing about BL’s growing popularity is, IMO, that we get a lot of weak stuff published by publishers jumping on the bandwagon. I used to buy all the BL manga I could get my hands on, because of the lack you mention, but now that there’s a glut, I’m a much more discerning consumer. And, frankly, I’m getting pretty tired of the same old stale salarymen and schoolboy stories! Send more fantasy and sci-fi BL….
Re: lesbian readership; right offhand, I don’t remember many of the chapters addressing the topic. Uli’s might have in its general discussion of queerness, but that’s the only chapter that leaps to mind….
Well there are a lot of reasons. I agree with those of Dru, Devbasaa, and Ninelegyak. Another big one is fans driving what they want from the commercial manga publishers in the U.S. You see this in fan posts to publishers’ blogs, on fan sites/LJ, and of course at the publishers’ panels at Yaoi-Con. I guess that this works similarly for POD/small-press publishers and authors. Maybe this is part of being a fan? I’ve made requests to authors of male/male romance published in the U.S. and to authors of male homoerotic fiction published in Latin America.
“Lesbian” is used in eleven chapters. Tan Bee Kee discusses yuri briefly and we have an entry in the glossary. (One of our contributors has edited yuri manga but she doesn’t write about it in our book.) There’s a literature of female-female relationships, the Relationship of S, wildly popular in the 1910s-1920s, Yoshiya Nobuko’s novels but many others. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and others have done some very good scholarly work on it. Also Rebecca Copeland on Meiji women writers generally, the apotheosis in my mind being Higuchi Ichiyō, not S from the few stories of hers I’ve read, but as good a realization of mono no aware as I’ve seen and among the most beautiful and powerful prose I’ve ever read. All this helped encourage other women to create fiction.
As to the glut, sorry Dru, but I want more schoolboy stories as long as they’re good ones.
あけましておめでとうございます everyone.