Yaoi, also known as boys' love and its abbreviation BL , is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is typically created by women for women and is thus distinct from bara, a genre of homoerotic media marketed to gay men, though yaoi does also attract a male audience and can be produced by male creators. Yaoi spans a wide range of media, including manga, anime, drama CDs, novels, video games, television series, films, and fan works. While "yaoi" is commonly used in the west as an umbrella term for Japanese-influenced media with male-male relationships, "boys' love" and "BL" are the generic terms for this kind of media in Japan and much of Asia.
Mari Mori, whose tanbi novels laid the foundation for many of the common genre tropes of shōnen-ai and yaoi
The manga artist group Clamp, whose works were among the first yaoi-influenced media to be encountered by Western audiences
Otome Road in Ikebukuro became a major cultural destination for yaoi fandom in the 2000s.
Artwork depicting a seme (top) and uke (bottom) couple
Bara is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as gay manga (ゲイ漫画) or gei komi . The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. Bara can vary in visual style and plot, but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
The term bara translates literally to "rose" in Japanese, and has historically been used as a pejorative for gay men roughly equivalent to the English language term "pansy".
A musha-e print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (c. 1834)
Gengoroh Tagame, whose manga in G-men is credited with shifting the aesthetics of gay manga towards masculine men
Gay manga often features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair. This is a drawing of a muscular man without defined abdominal muscles, which provides a typical example of a gachimuchi body type.
