Yaoi fandom

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 remains 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. At least one butler café 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.