Yaoi fandom refers to readers of yaoi (also called Boys'
Love, BL), a genre of male-male romance narratives aimed at a female
audience, and more specifically those who participate in communal activities
organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to
fansites,
creating fanfiction
or fanart,
etc. Most fans are teenage girls or young women. 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. In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi, a
pun which denotes their way of seeing homosexual relationships in media as
being "rotten". 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.
Yaoi fans have been characters in manga aimed at
both female otaku and larger audiences (such as the seinen manga Fujoshi Rumi),
and in a TV series. 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.