Drawn Together

"You don't need to eat tomorrow; you don't need to pay rent!" exhorts the auctioneer, a plump woman bursting out of a black vinyl bustier. "Multiple credit cards welcome!" The two boys eventually go for $700 to a team of young girls in schoolboy outfits, who jump up and down, squealing with delight at their purchase.

How will they fulfill their desires, now that they're in possession of two of the prettiest boys at the auction? As with most yaoi fans, the girls seem more practiced in fantasizing than in fulfillment. For all the wildness of the auction, and for all the innuendo about what the winners would do with their bishounen, "President Shinra," whose real name is Devon Jacobson, later says that they had a pretty tame night. They went to the dance organized by the convention, "but it was hot and they were playing pretty bad music," he explains. So the group of girls just took some pictures together, snapped a few shots of the boys embracing, and drove around looking for fast food at 6 in the morning.

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English-language manga is one of the fastest growing segments of the American publishing industry. Sales of that category amounted to about $175 million in North America last year, around triple the sales in 2002, according to Milton Griepp, who tracks the manga and anime industries on his trade news Web site, www.icv2.com. National chain bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble are scrambling to find more shelf space for these hot-ticket items, and are installing benches and couches at which readers can lounge. In that context, yaoi is the success story within the success story: According to Griepp, a light yaoi series called Loveless is No. 5 on his list of manga best-sellers in the United States.

Yaoi's success with its target audience has surprised even comic industry insiders. "When it was first presented to us, we were very skeptical," says Joshua Hayes, associate director of sales and marketing for Diamond Book Distributors of Maryland, the largest U.S. distributor of graphic novels. "Even though everyone told us that it was going to be sold to female consumers of a certain age level, we just couldn't believe that was true. I was looking at the first volume, untranslated, and thinking, 'There's no way; surely this would sell to a homosexual audience.'"

In fact, yaoi has collected only a small contingent of gay fans in America. "Here's a personal take on it: I don't think most gay men find yaoi very hot," says Justin Hall, who curated a show on queer comics for San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum earlier this year. "At least for me, I tend to like more masculine men. Most of the yaoi men are very androgynous, and just not hot," he says. Beyond the visual element, Hall says the stories don't resonate with many gay readers: While many queer comics deal with themes like gay identity and the struggle to come out, yaoi almost always ignores such knotty issues. "It's more about titillation and fantasy than about cultural context," says Hall.

Meanwhile, the girlish impulse to gaze at pretty boys is an old and powerful one. Within the yaoi tradition, the ideal bishounen is usually slender and pale, with a heart-shaped face and enormous eyes, like two fishponds. His smooth pectoral muscles are hairless, but his head is covered by a tousled and feminine mop, with strands that fall fetchingly across his face when he's feeling shy. The genre's appeal to women and girls isn't hard to fathom: Put two of these pretty boys together on the page, and it's double the fun. Plus, the female reader isn't forced to compare herself with some idealized girl or woman, because there are none. "I know what I look like naked," says one San Francisco fan, who goes by the name Betsy Tea (she preferred not to give her real name to protect her privacy). "I don't want to have competition. ... I'd rather see a couple of beautiful boys." Yaoi, then, is the female equivalent of the girl-on-girl porn made for straight men.

If one does feel the need to psychoanalyze the phenomenon, however, academics have arrived at a standard interpretation. "It's a way for young women and girls to explore sexuality without it being too intimately connected to them," says Susan Napier, a professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Without a female character in the book, readers can choose which male character to identify with, instead of feeling forced into one role. "They can enjoy seeing sexual situations with handsome young men, and can play out different sexual scenarios without having to put themselves into it, so it's less intimidating or threatening," Napier says.