Yaoi On The Down Low

I wouldn’t call it an epiphany exactly, but on the way to work today I shifted a bunch of puzzle pieces in my mind and came up with a slightly disturbing result. My wife, the I’m not Gonna Blog WillowBrow, has been reading I Say a Little Prayer which just came out. Just prior to that she’d read On The Down Low. She told me that both of these are stories about the secret lives of gay black men. I thought it was interesting that she was reading this, but really didn’t give it any other thoughts until one other piece fell into place. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XI lately and I usually play as a female hume warrior named Laureta, just my preference… I was joking with her about how most of the female characters are actually played by guys and she may some off the cuff remark about how they were gay guys. Well this morning all of these pieces came together and I thought, Ack! My wife thinks I’m on the down low!

Well, just to cut to the chase, I am not on the DL and she doesn’t think I am either…at least that’s what she said. Later I joked, What!? You don’t think I’m sexy enough to be on the DL! She told me that the books were interesting, but the romance scenes were a bit graphic. This immediately got me thinking about yaoi and all of the paddle waving fan-girls at anime conventions. There just seems to be something about attractive men in romantic relationships with other men that captivates some part of the female imagination. Perhaps it’s something about seeing men in a way they’re not accustomed to. Or maybe because the couples are men, there isn’t the same identification with the characters that there might be in a story featuring heterosexual couples which allows some freedom from whatever sexual constraints the reader may have. I strongly suspect that most of the readers of these books are women, as are most readers of yaoi manga. I’ve been to some yaoi panels and learned a lot (had a lot of fun too), and I still don’t completely understand the attraction. But I do greatly enjoy the freedom to discuss it! 😉 Apparently so will a whole lotta other people at Yaoi Con in the fall!