Fujoshi

Yaoi fandom refers to readers of yaoi (also called Boys' Love or BL), a genre of male-male romance narratives aimed at those who participate in communal activities organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to fansites, creating fanfiction or fanart, etc. In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000-500,000 people, but in 2008, despite increased knowledge of the genre among the general public, readership remains limited. 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.

Most yaoi fans are teenage girls or young women. In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi, a pun which denotes their way of seeing homosexual relationships in media as being "rotten". The male equivalent is called a fudanshi. Both male and female fans are stated as being hetero- or bisexual; actual gay men fans are more likely to prefer Bara genre media.

Yaoi fans have been characters in manga such as the seinen manga Fujoshi Rumi. At least one butler cafe has opened with a schoolboy theme in order to appeal to the Boy's Love aesthetic. In one study on visual kei, 37% of Japanese fan respondents reported having "yaoi or sexual fantasies" about the visual kei stars.

Most yaoi fans are either teenage girls or young women. The female readership in Thailand is estimated at 80%, and the membership of Yaoi-Con, a yaoi convention in San Francisco, is 85% female. It is usually assumed that all female fans are heterosexual, but in Japan there is a presence of lesbian manga authors and lesbian, bisexual or questioning female readers. Recent online surveys of English-speaking readers of yaoi indicate that 50-60% of female readers self-identify as heterosexual. It has been suggested that Western fans may be more diverse in their sexual orientation than Japanese fans and that Western fans are "more likely to link" BL ("Boy's Love") to supporting gay rights. Much like the Yaoi readership base, the majority of Yaoi fanfiction writers are also believed to be heterosexual women. The reasoning behind this trend is sometimes attributed to the patriarchy- that women who write yaoi fanfiction are in fact acting out heterosexual fantasies through these male figures.

...
Wikipedia