A Brief Rant Concerning Yaoi Warnings

Many fics here are yaoi, so please be warned.

This story is YAOI, so if reading about two males together isn't your thing or makes you sick to even think about, please don't go on.

— Yaoi warnings which I've seen on the web

Lads and lassies, it’s time to grow up.

Yaoi warnings are ubiquitous. Every yaoi story, on every site, has a yaoi warning, maybe a yaoi warning page, perhaps a little yaoi ghetto of its own off the main site. And I’m not talking about steamy sexfests—I mean the bland, ordinary "Hiei gives Kurama chocolates for Valentine’s day" stories which would be too syrupy for a normal site if one of the pair were female. And it’s not a simple matter of helping people to find the stories they’re interested in; there’s a real element of fear in some of the warnings. In fact, there’s a feeling that posting yaoi stories is borderline illegal.

Ladies and gentlemen, homosexuality is not illegal. You can be gay in the streets. You can be gay on prime-time TV. And try as the hanging judges in Gooberville County might, you can be gay in the privacy of your own bedroom. (In most states.) So yes, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to thirty years of social evolution, you can have gays on your web page.

I know that homosexuality is still a fertile source of debate on the web. Most folks who keep yaoi pages have probably gotten flamed by folks who think that gays are vile, or sinful and damned, or just fine so long as they don't flaunt it in front of nice normal people. And many of the warnings at the tops of yaoi pages are efforts to forestall such flames. The trouble is that the warnings legitimate the flames; subliminally, they say, "We know that a lot of you take offense at this kind of story, and we understand, because it is offensive, so we're going to give you fair warning before you see something disgusting."

Not clear enough? Okay, here's an old trick: Change the words a little.

This story is about black people, so if reading about two blacks together isn't your thing or makes you sick to even think about, please don't go on.

A little clearer? Good.

Some of you are saying, "I can’t take my yaoi warnings down—some of my yaois are lemons!" So put lemon warnings up instead. With the current state of legislation in America, lemon warnings are a legal necessity anyway. But yaoi doesn't equal lemon.

I’m not arguing for the abolition of yaoi pointers. I’m all for it, in fact—it’s one of the ways I find the stories I want to read. But let’s take the element of fear out of it. Stop shuffling your feet and hemming and hawing when you tell readers that a story is yaoi. Don’t act like you’re doing something wrong. And don’t apologize beforehand for offending your readers’ sensibilities. Let’s bring otakudom into this century.

— Issendai