Katrien Jacobsinto a vast range of genres, including character types, s/m relationship types, genres centered on
specific taboos, or oddball genres such as “male pregnancy.” Browsers get immersed in a fantasy
gay world by searching and navigating, downloading and archiving parts of these collections.
Just like the products of adult video, the sexually explicit BL products are considered illegal in
mainland China, hence netizens amass private collections through social media chat rooms and
iCloud storage devices. Indeed, some of the Boys’ Love fan communities have been persecuted
through Internet censorship and even outward criminalization. At the turn of the twenty-first
century, mainland Chinese media were curious and supportive of the Boys’ Love fad, but they
began to shift their focus on its supposedly evil impact on youth as the subculture became more
popular (Liu 2008). As for the more recent persecution of Boys’ Love fandom in China, Erika
Junhui Yi provides an insider’s point of view as a Boys’ Love fan and a scholar of the genre. She
explains that a major crackdown of websites and fan forums, instigated by homophobic argu-
ments, happened in 2011, and saw well-known newspaper columnists and bloggers such as Dou
Wentao denouncing the Boys’ Love subculture. In 2011, the Zhengzhou police arrested 32 slash
fiction writers, and this news was widely commented on through statements and cartoons on the
social media site Weibo (Yi 2013). Many of these commentaries suggested that the subculture is
vast and robust and would be able to resist censorship. In one of the fan comics, an imprisoned
girl cannot decide which genre-specific cell to enter. Despite the humorous and supportive tone
of these commentaries, Yi describes a chilling effect produced by the 2010 crackdown, showing
that many Boys’ Love fans have resorted to ways of hiding their “inclinations.” At the same time,
some of the news items surrounding Boys’ Love started going viral and netizens showed their
support by fantasizing about “all going to jail together.” After another crackdown in April 2014
twenty fujoshis were arrested once again for “spreading pornography.” The incident sparked reac-
tions in the foreign and Chinese news media and netizens reacted by means of extensive debates
as well as fantasized comics and micro-fictions about their lives in jail. An article in the New York
Times by Didi Kirsten Tatlow was translated and tweeted by the Communist Chinese newspaper
Cankao Xiaoxi, and then was retweeted 3,000 times and received hundreds of comments, many
of them in favor of the subculture (Tatlow 2014).
One of the major websites, Jinjiang, was established in 2003 and boasts 5 million registered
users and over 300,000 registered writers (Xu and Yang 2013). Previously Jinjiang used to allow
its authors to post their uncensored stories in a specific section of the site named “the author’s
words,” while publishing self-censored versions in the “general” section. However, because of
the authorities imposing tougher policies for online materials, this section of unabridged stories
had to be closed down. Besides Jinjiang, there are sites such as Lucifer Club, and the Fictions
Website of Tanbi. The latter of which places on its homepage a call for stories “without descrip-
tions of sexuality and violence”^1 —an attempt to censor Boys’ Love’s tendency towards violent
and pornographic description.
Nevertheless, fans fully realize that this kind of rule is detrimental to the genre itself and have
found ways to circumvent such stringent guidelines. Due to a growing demand for BL fictions
with sex scenes, fans have made great efforts to adapt their ways of describing the sex scenes.
They may recompose the sex scenes in a euphemistic or literal manner and avoid the use of
taboo words. Or they may used code words such as “OO” instead of anus or anal intercourse,
just as in heterosexual fictions XXOO can mean “to make love,” XX signifies “penis,” and
OO denotes “vagina.” Sometimes they may use spaces and slashes around the taboo words to
avoid censorship and the sensitive words are divided by the symbols【】. On the other hand,
some sites also decide to comply with the rulings and have even built a website where fans can
scan their texts for sensitive contents. The website has installed similar filters for sensitive key-
words as those employed by government censors, and in this way fans can pre-scan their stories.