Drawn Together

Publishers do release yaoi works without the graphic sex scenes, which are intended to be more appropriate for their younger readers. Those sweeter, fluffier books are generally classified in America as shounen-ai, or "boys love." At the Kinokuniya Bookstore in the Japantown mall, the yaoi books stacked under the "English Language Manga" sign run the gamut. There's Little Butterfly (published by June, out of Gardena, Calif.), in which the high school characters keep it clean on the page, sharing some passionate kisses and snuggles in bed, but leaving the rest to the imagination. One shelf over is the collection called ...But I'm Your Teacher, an offering from Kitty Media in New York City, which includes the title story about an aggressive 17-year-old who seduces his sexy substitute teacher, an affair shown in intimate detail: Orifices are probed, and juices fly.

Girls flitter into the bookstore after school hours, and hang out on the benches outside the store on weekends. Cellphones jangling, they compare notes on what they've heard about various titles, and sometimes stealthily strip the shrink-wrap off a book to thumb through the pages. The books are labeled in an effort to clarify who should and should not be reading them: Some use "parental advisory" stickers, like hip-hop albums, others put age ranges on the cover, and a few limit themselves to a discreet "mature content" label in a corner. Managers at the bookstore claim they check ID if the customer looks young, but the girls say it's not a hard-and-fast rule. "I just put my hair down and have my debit card out," says one girl, who claims to be 16. "I don't think they care that much about it."

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The convention Web site has a note and link posted prominently: "Why is Yaoi-Con 18+? See the California Penal Code 313-313.5."

According to that section of California law, it's a crime to sell or exhibit "harmful matter" to a minor — meaning material that appeals to prurient interests, which depicts or describes sexual conduct, and which "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." The punishment for doing so is a fine of up to $2,000 and up to a year in county jail. And while the staff of Yaoi-Con is happy to make the case for the genre's literary and artistic merits, the convention's organizers have apparently decided they would rather not have the discussion in court.

Some material at the convention does push the boundaries not just of taste, but also of morality and legality. On Saturday afternoon, for example, a small knot of viewers gathers in the video room for the screening of a short anime film called Papa to Kiss in the Dark. The glamorous, movie star father pushes his 15-year-old son down on the couch in front of a fireplace, and lowers his face toward his son's crotch. The boy's protestations die away — he has already admitted his desire to be "papa's bride." The animators don't graphically depict the action: In the "sex scene" a few minutes later, the image of a rosebud dropping from its stem fills the screen, and the viewers in the video room giggle. The young protagonist has been deflowered.

Yaoi is certainly not the only type of manga or anime to knock down sexual taboos. If you've watched enough anime, you've probably encountered "tentacle rape," in which an alien creature forces itself upon a struggling woman. Rape and sadomasochism are common manga themes, and the genre called Lolicon gratifies men's Lolita fantasies about underage girls. But yaoi is currently a hot topic of discussion in the comic and book publishing worlds, where outside observers are surprised to find that young girls can enjoy violent homoerotic fantasies, and where thoughtful fans explain that it can be empowering to see a man forced into a subservient position. (Those positions can get very subservient indeed: A notorious anime titled My Sexual Harassment includes a revenge scenario in which one man is tied down and anally raped with a corncob — a scene that's the source of endless hilarity to yaoi admirers.)

In the U.S., there have been a few legal cases regarding manga, but none yet specifically concerning yaoi. In 2000, a comic store owner in Houston, Texas, sold two sexual manga comics to an undercover police officer, and was promptly arrested on the charge of disseminating obscenity. The New York-based Comic Book Legal Defense Fund rushed in to help on behalf of the store owner, arguing in court that he had sold the comics to an adult, and that the books were properly shrink-wrapped and labeled to keep kids from getting into them. The Texas jury was not convinced. "The prosecution closed by saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we appeal to your common sense,'" recalls Charles Brownstein, the defense fund's executive director. "They said, 'Comics are for kids, they put this filth in this media that appeals to kids, and we can't allow them to get away with this.'" The jury delivered a guilty verdict within a few hours.