Love Thai BL? Its Roots Go Back to 1970s Japanese Girls’ Comics
A 50-year history of yaoi, BL, and the women who built a genre.
Every time a Thai series trends worldwide or a new BL manga tops your bookstore chart, you’re seeing the latest chapter of a story that began half a century ago, in the pages of Japanese shōjo (girls’) manga.
The 1970s: the pioneers
In early-1970s Japan, a group of young women manga artists — often called the Year 24 Group (Nijūyo-nen gumi, named for their birth year, Shōwa 24 / 1949) — began publishing shōjo manga about intense emotional and romantic bonds between beautiful boys, works like Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas and Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze to Ki no Uta. These weren’t erotica; they were literary, often tragic explorations of love written by women, for female readers, at a time when stories centered on women’s own desire faced heavy social constraints. Specialty magazines (most famously June, launched 1978) then gave the style a commercial home.
The 1980s–90s: “yaoi” and the dōjinshi explosion
In the amateur self-publishing (dōjinshi) scene, fans began creating parody works pairing male characters from popular series. This scene coined the tongue-in-cheek word yaoi — an acronym of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (“no climax, no resolution, no meaning”), a self-deprecating joke about plotless fan comics. Through the 90s, the commercial industry professionalized around the friendlier marketing term Boys’ Love (BL), which is what Japan’s industry uses to this day. So: shōnen-ai is the vintage 70s term, yaoi carries dōjinshi/parody connotations, and BL is the modern commercial umbrella.
The grammar of the genre: seme and uke
Japanese BL developed its own narrative conventions, most famously the seme/uke (roughly “top/bottom”, but really “pursuer/pursued”) role pairing, notated with an “×” — the order of names around that × is sacred grammar in the fandom. Whether these conventions liberate or limit the genre has been debated for decades inside Japan too, and modern BL increasingly plays with or subverts them.
Why women? The question with 50 years of answers
BL was created overwhelmingly by women, for women, and researchers have spent decades discussing why: safe distance from patriarchal romance scripts, freedom to write desire without a female body to be judged, pure narrative experimentation. There is a rich body of Japanese academic work on this (BL studies is a real field). At the same time, an honest history must note the long-running debate about BL versus real LGBTQ representation — including Japan’s own 1990s “yaoi debate” (yaoi ronsō), when gay critics challenged the genre’s fantasy portrayals. Contemporary Japanese BL and its readership have engaged seriously with these critiques, and the line between BL and queer literature is far blurrier today than in 1995.
From Japan to the world — and to your country
Japanese BL spread through Asia from the 1990s–2000s, directly inspiring the creators who would later build Thailand’s BL drama industry — today a government-backed export business, with Thai authorities promoting BL/GL content abroad and studio GMMTV alone planning 21 BL titles for 2026. In the Spanish-speaking world, the licensing of Junjō Romantica by Ivrea is widely credited with opening the door to commercial BL publishing, and today publishers like Panini (with its playfully named “BLanini” line), Milky Way, and Arechi maintain active BL catalogs. In Brazil, BL is now a fixture of a record-breaking manga market. In the Philippines, BL manga has reportedly sold at bestseller levels in major bookstores since around 2015 (fan-site sourced; unverified).
Why the history matters
Knowing this lineage changes how you read everything: Thai dramas stop being a trend that appeared from nowhere, and become the newest branch of a 50-year-old tree whose roots are still in Tokyo — in shōjo magazines, dōjinshi halls, and the pens of women who wanted stories no one else would write for them.
Sources: Historical outline (Year 24 Group, June, yaoi etymology, yaoi ronsō) is standard, widely documented BL scholarship — see e.g. overviews in Wikipedia: Yaoi fandom (ES) and academic BL-studies literature; specific dates/details should be verified against primary scholarship before quoting precisely. · Thai government BL/GL export promotion (Thailand Hyperlinks) · GMMTV 2026 lineup (Animate Times) · Spanish BL publishing statistics (Zona Negativa) · Brazil manga market 2025 (BBM) · Philippines BL retail claim (BL Bliss — unverified)
