Here’s a last little excerpt; as always, please keep in mind that it’s very rough, first-draft work:

Jay spun around and lunged forward, aiming low and holding his forearms braced over his head.

He rammed into the hips and groin of the man who’d opened the door, driving him backward and into the hallway.  Somebody swore and Jay threw himself to one side, kicking out. His heel hit something and he used it to push himself farther away, rolling over the floor and up to his feet.

Two men there, one he recognized from the autocarriage, one — the one on the ground — whom he’d never seen before.

He spun and ran off in the opposite direction.

A window, a window — he needed a window without bars, but all that lined the hallway were closed doors. The stairs he’d climbed up were behind him. He hoped this corridor wasn’t going to dead end; what kind of building would that be? There had to be another stairwell down at the other end of the wing.

He spun around a corner. Two men — he angled himself toward the wall and sprang up onto it, crouching low and running as fast as he can. Startled, both men jerked away in surprise as he ran across the wall and past them before kicking himself off and back to the floor again.

“Jay Whitsun!” one of them shouted. Jay faltered a second before catching himself.

It wasn’t Bishop’s voice or a member of his family’s, and he didn’t give a damn about anyone else.

“Stop!”

Not a chance. He careened left and spotted stairs. Perfect; the architect hadn’t let him down.

“Somebody — stop him!”

Up or down? Usually he preferred up — few men were willing to chase him onto the rooftops — but in a building with barred windows, he had no guarantee of finding easy access outside. On the other hand, down likely meant more guards and that damned glass-shard-covered wall again. But down meant doors, too.

He made up his mind and dashed down, only two see two large men running up with leather-wrapped clubs in their hands.  He jumped up onto the wooden handrailing and leaped foward over their heads, tucking his knees to his chest and allowing himself to spin once in midair before opening his eyes. Off — he braced — and landed, hard, dropping to one knee that slammed against the floor. He winced and stood. Pain in his hand, pain in his knee, pain in his ribs.

Then somebody tackled him from behind, arms wrapping around his midsection and throwing him forward. His injured knee gave out and he landed badly, hissing as he reached out to break his fall with his wounded hand and it slapped against the floor, leaving a smear of crimson from his blood-soaked bandages.  He started to squirm, but an expert arm wrapped around his neck and began applying pressure.  He struggled as his vision began to darken.

As always, my thanks to the good folks who put on National Novel Writing Month each year; it’s always inspiring to participate!

Anyway, an excerpt. You know the “it’s all raw” drill by now, right?

Jay studied Bishop’s profile, seeing the small, pale scars that criss-crossed the left side of his face, the glimmer of silver where the inspector’s eye used to be.  It wasn’t that Bishop was a handsome man.  Striking, but not handsome.  Not the kind whose face would spark romantic interest in most other men … well, or women. Jay had found himself drawn in by Bishop’s intensity, at first, and then of course he couldn’t fail to have been touched by Bishop trying to save all those innocent people in the Haulyard Riots and nearly losing his life in the effort.  The inspector had a good heart, although he tried his best to hide it, and the more Jay got to know him, the more he wanted to touch that heart.

“Here —” Bishop turned, holding a piece of paper, and then froze.

Jay’s heart thudded as he realized the inspector had caught him staring. Their eyes locked for a second that seemed to stretch on forever.

Bishop broke their gaze first, dropping his eyes to look down at the sheet of paper in his mechanical hand. The paper began to rattle as his prosthesis jittered. He’d sketched something on the sheet, but the image didn’t interest Jay. What interested Jay was the slow crawl of red moving up the inspector’s cheeks.

He’d provoked that flush twice before, once inadvertently when he’d been changing his clothes in this room and once intentionally when he’d been teasing Bishop in the coffeehouse.

But he wasn’t doing anything now that might embarrass the Stoic-minded inspector. Nothing but look at him.

“Dammit,” Bishop breathed, grabbing the paper out of his shaking metal hand. He thrust the sheet forward, still avoiding Jay’s eyes. “Look at this. Do you recognize it?”

Oh. He was embarrassed by his malfunctioning hand. Well, that wasn’t quite what Jay was hoping for, but it was a problem easily solved.

“Just a minute.” Jay leaned forward and grabbed Bishop’s hand, wrapping his fingers around the cold metal.  “All right. Take a deep breath and relax.”

“It’s not —” The inspector broke off whatever he was about to say with a frustrated hiss.

“I think it’s caused by the temperature change.  Your hands seems to twitch more whenever you move indoors or outdoors.”  Jay wrapped both of his hands around Bishop’s prosthesis to warm it.  “I noticed it back in the autocab the other day, and in the coffeehouse earlier, and now.”

“It’s not the temperature,” Bishop said, his voice tight. “The damn thing’s just broken.”

“Well, warming it up seems to help,” Jay said, feeling the metal shudder one last time before it stopped moving between his palms. “See?”

“Whitsun….”

“It’s all right.” Jay leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees while he clasped Bishop’s hand. “I don’t mind. The metal should be room temperature in another minute or two.”

Bishop fell silent. Jay didn’t want to look at him, afraid that doing so would trigger the older man’s defenses again.

Besides, it was nice just to sit here in the lamplight, their knees nearly touching, and hold his hand.

He heard the inspector sigh. Then the sheet of paper was placed on the bed next to him. The inspector tapped it with the hand that wasn’t being held.

“The design. Have you ever seen it before?”

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are “betwixt and between” standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called “transitional objects.” These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of “mind meld” when using software, saying things such as “When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen.” Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one “hears” psychodynamic issues, one “hears” family history, one “hears” a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not “just” tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

Because liminality fascinates me and because I pursue minimalism, I found Turkle’s comment on evocative objects to be, well, evocative. My dissertation was on clothing and the ways people used it to escape and to enforce categories of gender, of race, of social status. In the old days, clothing, like computational technologies today, allowed people to try on different selves, to exist (or imagine they existed) in some liminal space between categories. Clothes and computers are both, in other words, potential tools of transformation.  Other objects and behaviors hold the same magical transformational promise; I wrote in 2008 about magical possessions, magical ownership, and, in 2010, even about magical thinking about minimalism.

So, to turn to a different kind of technology … what is it about steampunk’s artefacts that’s so evocative?  Is it the transformative promise of steampunk cosplay and artefacts, suggesting that we can return to a time when clothing and objects were made to higher standards of material quality and aesthetic design?  Is it the promise of a return to some neo-Victorian form of ultra-polite social etiquette and interplay, a la Stephenson’s The Diamond Age? Is it the promise of a return to a simpler time, when technologies were controllable rather than controlling, as some steampunk scholars have suggested? (Of course, this wishful thinking ignores the dark side of the Victorian Empire; those wise in the ways of myth will remember that Cinderella’s slipper was stained with blood….) Is it just another form of technology promising to erase, or permit, or ease, liminal existences? (Click on the image and read artist Molly Friedrich’s description of the mechanical womb for a case of liminality & steampunk.)

I don’t know. I’m just throwing ideas out there right now, inspired by Turkle’s lovely phrase, “evocative objects.”

Listen to an MP3 of the show on the Subversities blog!

We would like to get together with other BL scholars, fans, and interested parties at Yaoi-Con on Friday, Oct. 29, probably at the hotel’s Knuckles bar (which allows in people under 21) — I’ll post more about it here later as we firm up the time. You are going, aren’t you?

But in the meantime, I have some bishies and betrayal on Uraboku to return to….

The Edo-Tokyo museum is filled with artefacts, dioramas, and reconstructions from, yes, the Edo period to the 1940s. It was filled with school children and features reproduction fire standards to hold up, water-carrying pails to shoulder, palanquins and rickshaws to sit in, and buildings to walk through (shoeless, of course), as well as glass-covered displays. I took numerous photos of the printing technology and a replica trading ships; I’ll spare you the photos, since they’re mostly for my writerly reference.

After lunch at the museum we split up; most of the students headed to Asakusa and Akihabara (and then clubbing). Two headed off to Tokyo Disney and one came back tonight with over $600 of Stitch paraphernalia! Akiko and I, however, headed to Otome Road, colloquially nicknamed “Maiden Road,” the prime Tokyo destination for women who are fans of BL. We wandered in and out of various anime/manga/dojinshi stores; I picked up a dojinshi based on the manga I mentioned yesterday, but I haven’t opened it yet.

When our 4:35 reservation time arrived we headed to the Swallowtail Cafe. This is one of the very few butler cafes in the world; the more elegant of the two Akiko located online. No photos were allowed inside, unfortunately — it would ruin the mystery and atmosphere! However, my online Tokyo album shows the entrance.

At the bottom of the stairs and were greeted by a slender man in a swallowtailed black butler’s tuxedo who bade us wait. Then we were allowed inside an entry hall and waited a little longer outside what looked like a mansion door while we watched other women leaving, giggling wildly. At last we were ushered inside and greeted by handsome young men in tuxedos as though we were the owners of the mansion — “Welcome home, mademoiselle!” The interior was designed after an elegant English tea room, full of brass tea carts, delicate china teacups and saucers, crystal chandeliers, a great faux-baroque fireplace, lace curtains, and ornate furniture.

Most of the other guests were more elaborately dressed than we two tourists, many of the young women in lace-and-ruffle covered Lolita dresses. Akiko and I were led to our table in a quiet lace-curtained alcove flanked by “English library” leatherbound books. We chose a light Diane Rose tea and the Victoria platter — a scone and preserves and several finger sandwiches, with a platter of sweets for dessert — all served to us on pretty, floral Noritake china.

Although I didn’t understand the Japanese, Akiko translated as the stunningly bishonen head butler checked on us and our unfortunately less-amazingly BL-mangalike waiter described the food, the type of china we were using, and so forth. We were given a small bell with which to summon him, and he hovered nearby to dotingly refill our teacups or exchange our plates — one doesn’t do those sorts of things oneself when one is the mademoiselle of the mansion, after all!

Our waiter seemed tickled to be serving two Californian teachers and asked us a lot of questions, probably breaking his role to do so in a way he wouldn’t with local guests. Few foreigners visit the cafe; after all, only manga fans — and probably only BL fans, really — would know to go looking for a butler cafe. Not that there was any BL going on between the waiters to watch, it was all very formal and proper.

At any rate, guests only get 80 minutes to enjoy their food — no extensions! — so we had to leave sooner than we would have had we been given more time. We were escorted out again by the waiter and head butler, who carried our bags until draping them over our shoulders at the door, sending us off as the Japanese do, both bidding us come back “home” again soon as they opened the door to let out out into the “front hall” once more.

The experience was a little pricey — and we chose the relatively inexpensive ¥3,200 tea!　— but my attitude over years of traveling has become “enjoy unique local experiences and don’t worry about the money.” After all, when will I be back in Tokyo again, or find a butler bar in any other country? Nobody blinks at the thought of men wanting to be served liquor by beautiful women, but the thought of women wanting to be served tea or wine by handsome men just isn’t in most cultures’ social vocabulary! I regret that I don’t speak Japanese, though, so I couldn’t appreciate all of the details.

Since our reservations had been late afternoon — the cafe books up early and quickly — our initial plan had been to grab a few drinks afterward. However, we were so full of sweets that we ended up not bothering, instead walking around Akihabara’s “electric town” so I could see all the neon signs lit up before heading back to the hotel.

The Skin Tight party — in which the costumes range from the familiar (like Spider-Man) to ones that only a comics geek would recognize (like the 1993 version of Superboy) — is one way that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender comic book fans are expressing themselves today. They are coming out, loud and proud, in blogs, peer groups, Web comics and more, simultaneously pronouncing their sexual identity and their devotion to comic books. But it wasn’t that long ago that the environment was less than welcoming for those who wanted to make the two seemingly disparate worlds one.

Those who didn’t grow up as superhero fans and/or students of the queer in popular culture may not realize that there has been a longtime gay/lesbian subculture of interest in those men and women in tights. Recognition of this interest occurred as early as 1954, when Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a diatribe against comic books that led to a Congressional inquiry and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority.

“Comic books stimulate children sexually. That is an elementary fact of my research,” he argued on p. 175.  Then, later, “The muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well emphasized, is in the setting of certain stories the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and stimulation.” (p. 188).

Batman and Robin were called out, specifically, as a problematic case of pederasty in comics.

At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and “Dick” Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a “socialite” and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce’s ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace, the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: “Something’s wrong with Bruce. He hasn’t been himself these past few days.” It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend’s arm. [...]

Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident. (p. 191)

Needless to say, reading Seduction of the Innocent is an exercise in campy fun nowadays — “good heavens, beautiful flowers in large vases! Your honor, I rest my case.”  Go ahead and read Seduction yourself, especially Chapter 7.  Some parts are pretty amusing; other parts will make you glad that some of comics’ worst offenses (especially violence against women) were reined in.

Of course, Wertham was absolutely right in his suspicions. Only the most naive of readers could possibly miss the Batman and Robin subtext. (Their relationship, as a side note, was inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Watson, another couple often given a queer reading — a Holmes/Watson comic with canonical text can be found here). And the rest of those early male superheroes were much the same. Although they hadn’t settled down into Bruce and Dick’s comfortable companionship, they nevertheless ran around in skin-tight suits doing manly things with other men and hiding their true selves from the women in their lives — none of whom they married, at least no longer than a hallucinatory or alternate-world sequence.

Wonder Woman, Wertham helpfully pointed out, served as a role model for lesbians.

Where Batman is anti-feminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following. They are all continuously being threatened, captured, almost put to death. There is a great deal of mutual rescuing, the same type of rescue fantasies as in Batman. Her followers are the “Holliday girls,” i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the gay girls. Wonder Woman refers to them as “my girls.” (p. 193)

Wertham could be dismissed as reactionary, but in fact we know from anecdotes both published and spoken that some members of the GLBT community were inspired and aroused by superheroes as children. For example,

Novelist and art critic David Galloway (1987) testifies that, contemplating Warhol’s painting, he was transported back to adolescent erotic fantasies inspired by Superman comics — fantasies in which he recognized the emergence of his own homosexuality. He recalls “lying in the grass imag[ing] Superman’s pulsing thighs hovering over me. The forbidden world of comics thus acquired a fresh, engrossing dimension of Taboo. Batman and Robin suggested nimble variations on the theme, but Superman remained my own tender, indigo-haired ravager” (quoted in Collins & Cowart, p. 115)

Edward H. Sewell Jr.’s chapter “Queer Characters in Comic Strips” provides a history of the comic-strip recognition of homosexuality. He notes that a (coded) gay male character was introduced in 1936, and a lesbian in 1939, in Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, but it wasn’t until 1976 that an openly gay male character appeared in a comic strip — Andy Lippincott in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

But those are hardly comic-book superheroes. What about those daring young men and women in tights? When did they come out of the closet as well as out of of the phone booth?

The 1960s included some parodic gay and lesbian heroes, but the mainstream comic industry in America waited until the late 1980s and 1990s to feature openly gay or lesbian characters, starting with extras and walk-ons and moving into supporting characters. Marvel’s Northstar was one of the first major superheroes to come out as gay, in 1992, the same year the British comic 2000 AD introduced muscular gay exorcist-priest Devilin Waugh, who was consciously created as a foil for Judge Dredd.

Since then, a number of other openly gay superheroes have been created, several of them appearing in X-Men, a series that has always been read as a metaphor for various oppressed or repressed subcultural groups. (Of interest, in the backstory for Colossus, who is gay in the Ultimate X-Men spinoff, we see him keeping a much-creased Captain America poster under his bed — perhaps he hid it because he grew up in Russia, but….). And an established, living-together gay superhero couple, Apollo and Midnighter, is featured in The Authority.

By contrast, relatively few superheroes have come out as lesbian. However, the 2006 lesbian incarnation of Batwoman makes her as the most mainstream, well-known LBGT superhero — Batwoman, after all, has been around in one persona or another since 1956. There’s still no comparably vintage, openly gay male superhero yet.

At least, not outside the Stonewall Inn.

References:

Collins, Bradford R. & Coward, David (1996). Through the Looking Glass: Reading Warhol’s Superman. American Imago 53.2, 107-137. Quote originally from Galloway, David. 1987. “Pop Goes the Hero.” In Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend. Edited by Dennis Dooley and Gary D. Engle. Cleveland: Octavia. 116-22.

Sewell Jr., Edward H. (2001) Queer Characters in Comic Strips. In Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, Jr., and Ian Gordon (Eds.), Comics & Ideology. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 251-274.

Wertham, Frederic. (1972 [originally printed 1954]). Seduction of the Innocent. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press.

More Reading:

A useful list of “Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Super-Heroes” can be found online courtesy of Beek’s Book; it includes both mainstream and indie comics.

Comic-book panels shamelessly ripped off of Superdickery, a site guaranteed to keep you hooked for hours.

McLelland is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wollongong. He’s published numerous papers in the fields of sexuality, fandom, and legal issues, recently guest-editing Intersections’ special issue on Japanese Transnational Fandoms and Female Consumers, which was largely dedicated to boys’ love. In February, his paper  “Australia’s Proposed Internet Filtering System and its Implications for Animation, Comics and Gaming (ACG) and Slash Fan Communities” will be published in Media International Australia.

If you haven’t run across Mark McLelland’s BL-related research yet, a few of his articles listed on our scholarly bibliography at the Yaoi Research Wiki include

• McLelland, Mark. (2000). The Love Between Beautiful Boys in Japanese Women’s Comics, Journal of Gender Studies, 9:1, March 2000, pp. 13-25.

• McLelland, Mark. (2000.) No Climax, No Point, No Meaning? Japanese Women’s Boy Love Sites on the Internet, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24:3, July 2000, pp. 274-291.

• McLelland, Mark. (2005). The World of Yaoi: The Internet, Censorship and the Global ‘Boy’s Love.’ The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 23, 61-77.

• McLelland, Mark. (2006/2007). “Why are Japanese Girls’ Comics Full of Boys Bonking?” Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 10.

• McLelland, Mark & Yoo, Seunghyun. (2007). The International Yaoi Boys’ Love Fandom and the Regulation of Virtual Child Pornography: Current Legislation and Its Implications. Journal of Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 4(1), 93-104.

Henry Jenkins, who has hosted McLelland’s guest article, is a professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California (where I earned my Ph.D.!). He studies media spectatorship and participation, with an eye toward where the interests of fans and corporations clash. His many publications include the classic Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and his two latest, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

(Censorship button courtesy of politicalstupidity at Zazzle.)

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)

— NPR, In Japan, ‘Herbivore’ Boys Subvert Ideas Of Manhood

I thought this was an interesting article about some of the changes in gender performance in Japan, and not just because I regularly mull over the Otomen manga at Borders, wondering if I’d enjoy it if I bought it. I know it’s not boys’ love, but it always looks like it might be fun in a sort of Ouran High School Host Club way….

What interested me more about the article, however, was the “gee whiz” surprise it exhibits at the idea of men uninterested in sex, seen also in earlier articles by Slate, “The Herbivore’s Dilemma: Japan panics about the rise of ‘grass-eating men,’ who shun sex, don’t spend money, and like taking walks,” and Reuters, “Japan’s ‘herbivore’ men shun corporate life, sex.” All of the articles seem to find the subjects’ lack of interest in sex to be especially interesting or unusual. Is it because asexuality isn’t understood well, because they’re men, or because they’re Japanese men, I wonder?

When I surveyed 478 BL readers — none Japanese — I asked about sexual orientation and found that 7 percent, or 28, of the respondents self-reported being “not interested in sex.” All were women. The Italian-language version of the survey carried out by Castagno & Sabucco found 3 percent of its respondents reporting the same, although I don’t know the gender of these respondents (see “Reading Boys’ Love in the West“).

Learning that a fairly large number of my respondents reported having no interest in sex didn’t surprise me too much; I’d put the option into my survey because I knew several women who have declared themselves not interested in sex — a few use the term “asexual,” which has become the common descriptor for this inclination.  What did surprise me was that the percentage was so high; both our surveys found more respondents reporting apparent asexuality than has been reported in larger-scale surveys — according to a 2004 study, only about 1 percent of the general population of the UK reported being asexual (see Asexual Explorations for a rundown of research on the subject). It’s a reasonable assumption that the population of the UK doesn’t differ too much in overall sexual drive and inclination from the population of similar highly developed, ethnically and religiously diverse nations. So why did our numbers differ so much? The fact that our two survey populations were drawn specifically from boys’ love fans may account for higher percentages, although why it would account for higher percentages is a matter for speculation and more research. (Hmm … but, wow, would I be venturing outside of the traditional boundaries of my academic discipline.)

On the other hand, if the article from NPR is correct — and I admit that it’s a big if — the number of male asexuals in Japan, about 60% within a certain age category, is monumentally higher than the overall 1 percent reported in the UK. Why? Is it a real trend, or just a lip-service fad? Is this just another name for metrosexuality, or maybe increased sexual politeness, or something different? And now that we’re seeing more media attention being paid to such a movement in  Japan, might we expect to see asexuals in the U.S. and other countries coming to the surface as a more open social movement?

(Image of Asuka Masamune ripped off of Otomen by Aya Kanno)

Wicked Gentlemen is a dark and lush gaslamp fantasy set in the Victorianesque city of Crowncross, where the Covenant of Redemption brought Ashmedai, Sariel, and Satanel up from hell to experience baptism and the Great Conversion. Now the demonic offspring of hell’s great princes, the Prodigals, dwell in the Crowncross slum called Hells Below, where they petition for equal rights and are closely monitored by Inquisitors and Confessors intent on maintaining peace in the Holy Capitol.

The novel, which won the 2008 Gaylaxicon Spectrum Award, consists of two sequential books. In the first, “Mr. Sykes and the Firefly,” readers meet first-person narrator Belimai Sykes, an ophorium-addicted Prodigal hired by the Inquisitor Captain William Harper and his brother-in-law Dr. Edward Talbott to help investigate the disappearance of Harper’s half-sister, Talbott’s wife, Joan. Joan Talbott, who was an active advocate for women’s and Prodigals’ suffrage, vanished from a locked carriage just a few minutes from her house. The only clue Harper has is a handful of letters written to her by a fellow suffragist that warn of some impending danger.

Sykes is initially hired to talk to the letter-writer, a Prodigal who is being detained in the Brighton House of Inquisition. But when the suspect is found brutally murdered in his holding cell, it becomes clear to both Prodigal and Inquisitor that this mystery won’t be so easily resolved. And neither will be the partnership between them, as Sykes and Harper find themselves drawn to each other but separated by differences in upbringing, values, and rank that seem impossible to overcome.

As they unpeel the layers of corruption and black magic that lie behind Joan’s disappearance and the Prodigal’s death, both Sykes and Harper find that they must rethink their relationship with their own pasts in order to reach a decision about their relationship with each other.

In the second book, “Captain Harper and the Sixty Second Circle,” the story shifts to Inquisitor Harper’s third-person point of view. While on his way out of Crowncross to visit his family estate, Harper is drawn into a murder investigation that is quite obviously being manipulated to protect the rich and guilty and frame the poor and helpless — that is, the Prodigals. Soon realizing that Bellimai Sykes is on the short list of suspects, the captain must move quickly to hide his ailing lover, only to find himself drawn into the frame. Ethics and necessity clash as Harper pits himself against his own superiors to avenge a child’s death and save an innocent man from execution.

Wicked Gentlemen is a short but rich read, a male/male romantic thriller with a touch of polite reserve that gives it a charmingly Victorian sensibility. Both Sykes and Harper are appealing characters, each struggling with his own weaknesses but essentially good at heart. Interestingly, their two story arcs form something of an X — while Sykes’ story arc moves him from cynicism to hope, Harper’s story arc goes in the opposite direction, as he becomes increasingly dismayed by the Inquisition he serves.

The city of Crowncross is also well-described, allowing for the restrained presence of magic but otherwise maintaining an atmosphere of fantastic realism. With its urban backdrop and restrained use of magic, Wicked Gentlemen calls to mind Ellen Kushner’s male/male romance Swordspoint (it’s tempting to draw parallels between Alec and Sykes and Richard and Harper), and its use of a fantasized Christian mythos invites comparison with Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy novels. However, Wicked Gentlemen‘s Crowncross is more modern and oppressive than Kushner’s Riverside, and less erotic and magical than Jacqueline Carey’s Terre d’Ange. Indeed, despite its references to demons and the Inquisition, Wicked Gentlemen avoids any direct mention of Christianity, using its religious allusions primarily to create a framework of political and social oppression within which its cross-class romance and mysteries can be set.

If Wicked Gentlemen has any weakness, it’s that by the end of the first book, one has to wonder why Harper hired Sykes in the first place.  However, that’s a minor plot quibble, not hard to rationalize away — most readers won’t even pause to think about it as they eagerly turn the page to start Harper’s story.

I bought this novel from the publisher’s booth at Yaoi-Con 2008 hoping that it would be the kind of story that would please a boys’ love fan, and I wasn’t disappointed. Wicked Gentlemen is, without question, better-written than any of the boys’ love novels currently being translated from Japanese, although some BL fans may find its sex scenes overly restrained. Nevertheless, it’s an excellent example of the kind of male/male romance that’s starting to be recognized as a distinct publishing genre in the U.S., and its Victorianesque fantasy setting couldn’t help but appeal to me. I turned the last page hoping that Ginn Hale will soon revisit Sykes, Harper, and Crowncross in a sequel. In the meantime, I’ll be reading the excerpts from her latest fantasy, Lord of the White Hell, on her blog….