In one study on visual kei, 37% of Japanese fan respondents reported having ' yaoi or sexual fantasies' about the visual kei stars. At least one butler café has opened with a schoolboy theme in order to appeal to the Boy's Love aesthetic. Yaoi fans have been characters in manga such as the seinen manga Fujoshi Rumi. The words' origin can be found in the online image board 2channel. A male fan of yaoi is called a fudanshi ( 腐男子, 'rotten boy'). 'rotten girl'), denoting how a woman who enjoys fictional gay content is 'rotten', too ruined to be married. In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi ( 腐女子, lit. Most yaoi fans are teenage girls or young women.
English-language fan translations of From Eroica with Love circulated through the slash fiction community in the 1980s, forging a link between slash fiction fandom and yaoi fandom. Despite increased knowledge of the genre among the general public, readership remains limited in 2008. In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000–500,000 people. The yaoi fandom consists of the readers of yaoi (also called Boys' Love or abbreviated to BL), a genre of male x male romance narratives aimed at those who participate in communal activities organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to fansites, creating fan fiction or fan art, etc.
