They are male, heroic and heterosexual. But it's their gay side that is winning female fans, the creators of Yaoi tell Haydn Shaughnessy
'You've got a lovely neck," Caled whispered. His free hand lightly stroked the sharp curve of the sorcerer's throat. Hadrian shivered, suddenly remembering intimate touches that he knew were best left forgotten. He gasped as Caled's lips grazed the side of his neck.
In the late 20th century, magazines such as Men's Health and GQ provided an outlet for male body idylls. Sleek men began to stride the catwalk, elegant and confident in the footsteps of female supermodels. Unshapely men did The Full Monty. There was something about men. Gay men enjoyed a modicum of violence-free liberation and gay iconography began to infiltrate the heterosexual consciousness. Men, psychologists told us, all have at least one homosexual encounter in their lives.
This is the territory that a new group of women writers want to seize. Homoerotic love, they believe, is in fact female territory. "Yaoi" is the name of their strand of popular culture. Yaoi in Europe and America is mostly web-based but is increasingly produced for video and PC games, following the trend in Japan. In Yaoi, women writers and women artists tell stories and draw pictures of heterosexual heroes who confront their momentary lapse into homosexual love.
All these parameters are important in such a highly stylised form of literature as Yaoi. The men are heroes. The men are heterosexual. The heroes lapse into homosexuality and engage with each other's bodies. Yaoi ranges from romantic descriptions of that liaison to full-on penetrative sex, described and drawn, of course, by those people who understand penetration best.
Men's bodies have rarely been put to better use, according to British Yaoi writer Helen Nightingale, who volunteers that Yaoi has allowed her to take a step beyond her own partial liberation as a feminist, to a fuller emancipation through exploring men.
Female liberation enjoyed headline status during those years hammocked between the sexy 1960s and the dull turn of the second millennium, but it was men's bodies that have recently become the subject of unprecedented fascination.
The perfect male physique became a consumer image du jour in the 1990s. At the same time, artists and television producers were busy putting all types of human body on display in increasing variety, from the titillating pornography of new TV channels such as Babestation - which allow young men to text requests to young girls in bras and panties (soft porn in the palm of your hand) - to documentaries on wayward sexuality, beginning with the Ibiza Uncovered series, to the body stripped of flesh in Gunther von Hagens's corpse sculptures. All have been shown on mainstream television in some part of the civilised West.
Our relationship with, and perception of, the body is clearly changing. Yaoi takes those perceptions in a different and fascinating direction.
While man on man is where it's at, these stories and images are used to explore female sexuality. The effect is, arguably, best seen in the bedroom. "Ask my husband, " offers Helen Nightingale.
Yaoi's origins are complex. Western Yaoi owes a lot to Japanese anime and manga, like the comic drawings above. Western Yaoi writers even borrow Japanese stories and heroes and rework them continuously for western audiences. But another root feeding this type of art is the fan magazines that now proliferate around any popular TV show.
Mr Spock and Captain Kirk may be known to the average viewer as the original Star Trek heroes, but to the gay community they have been icons for three continuous decades, fan-fiction superstars who never morphed into Patrick Stewart. Magazines for the "fandom", such as Trekkie magazines, are common and popular ways for people to interact with TV heroes.
The production of these magazines, and of stories based on sci-fi and soap characters, popular since the 1970s, created the perfect infrastructure for Yaoi. The practice of adapting characters from another genre, of creating small fan circles around specific heroes, or reworking stories for small niche audiences, are all familiar "fandom" practices.
Over the past 20 years, but particularly in the Internet age, Yaoi has spread across the globe. Most English-language Yaoi writers acknowledge that Japanese Yaoi has profound social significance in Japan. Japan, they argue, is still highly traditional and many women feel they are not able to explore their sexuality, that they are too subjugated to demand this luxury. The same writers, though, are reluctant to argue that Yaoi has a similar function for western women.
Few Yaoi writers, however, are prepared to talk publicly. There is no guru; no single author or artist leads this movement. Indeed one of the leading American Yaoi artists refused to allow her name to be used in this article. In the absence of obvious leaders, hundreds of women writers populate the Internet with images and stories of heterosexual men in love with each other.
Tricia Owens is a Las Vegas-based Yaoi writer and one of the few to earn a living from it. She charges for access to her Web stories is about to launch the first English-language Yaoi video game.
"I find that my audience breaks into two camps, generally," she says. "One side is a fan of romance. They want gentle, tender sexual scenes between the characters, the same as you would find in typical women's romance novels. The other camp is a fan of bondage and dominance/submission. D/S is extremely popular and crosses over into the romantics' side as well."
But, Tricia cautions, "I am in a unique position. I live in Las Vegas, where only conservatism is shunned. To me, Yaoi isn't something to be embarrassed about. I write it because I love it, not because I'm trying to make a statement. To me, there is no statement, it's no big deal".
So whereas western writers might accept that their Japanese counterparts use the androgynous features of their heroes as a route to fantasies about truly dynamic sexual relationships, the tendency is to see western Yaoi simply as fun. But Yaoi is an exclusively female art form and inevitably reflects a deeper struggle with female desire.
In some cases writers or artists are gay, but this is hardly the norm. Yaoi, they acknowledge, developed in Japan as a way for repressed Japanese women to explore their sexual desires in a form that insulated them from social opprobrium. They were not seen to engage in lesbian relationships; they were not seen to betray their dominant male partners.
But Nightingale and Owens advocate an interpretation of Yaoi as a superficial phenomenon. There is always the simple explanation that "one man is hot, two are hotter", says Helen, who, in her day job, works in learning development.
Yaoi plots are driven by men who temporarily or permanently enter what the stories make clear is the forbidden world of homosexual contact. Men transgress. More precisely, the point of the stories is that heroic men transgress the basic principles of masculinity. And the stories are often accompanied by graphic imagery of men making love for this female audience's delight.
That many women find that thought a stimulating fantasy is undeniable. Yaoi's success is evidence enough. But Yaoi heroes are slightly feminised men, which suggests to psychologist Catherine Salmon (co-author of Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction Evolution And Female Sexuality, which examines Yaoi culture) that Yaoi is a way for women to enter relationships as equals and to explore sexual possibilities from a position where they escape traditional dominance.
To the practitioner, such as Scribblemoose (one of Nightingale pen-names), too much theorising misses the point. What society has yet to own up to is that homoerotic relationships are a great turn-on and belong in women's range of erotic possibilities. So Yaoi is a medium for taking female sexuality into new realms?
"I've had these fantasies since I was 14," the 40-year-old Nightingale says. "It's only now women can talk about them openly."
Explicit male-male imagery and exploitative relationships have tended not to feature in Japanese Yaoi, where stories focus on heroism, the needs of heroic figures, or their temporary failings. In the West, Yaoi writers often transform this heroic ambiguity on occasion into Slash, stories and artwork where exploitation and explicit sexual acts drive Yaoi closer to pornography. That boundary is a point where writers and artists begin to differ about its significance or delights.
Perhaps it is as well to stay with Scribblemoose's simple principle that first and foremost Yaoi presents those women who want it with a great way of exploring diverse forms of pleasure and restating sexual status. In an important respect Yaoi may also be an art form that helps women to define where the real boundaries of "No" actually lie.
