That it had a positive response from this fanbase might well have been predicted, but what has been more surprising to some is the show’s other core demographic: women, and specifically straight women. From Cosmopolitan to NPR many media outlets have been asking why the show’s male-on-male sex scenes have been getting women so hot-under-the-collar. Really though, this shouldn’t be a surprise at all – given the long history of women engaging with this kind of material, on the page if not on screen.
The history of the phenomenon
Since the 1960s, certainly, it is well-documented that male-on-male romance and erotica stories have provided fantasy fuel for a female audience. One notable case of this was when female fans of the then-new sci-fi series Star Trek began to imagine something going on between Captain Kirk and Spock. They wrote their own, intricate stories where these two characters were lovers, creating what has also become known as “slash” fiction, a particular type of fan fiction pairing up same-sex characters.
In a pre-internet world, it’s difficult to imagine how this very specific group of female fans with an unusual fantasy might have connected, but they found a way, explains Lucy Neville, author of 2018’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. “I interviewed a lot of women who were into fanfic back in the ’60s,” she says. “And it was all about photocopied zines. They would take them along to fan events and then try and sniff out other ‘slashers’. And they would form little subgroups, and they’d all swap their zines around and read each other’s stories. So it was very grassroots and organic.” However the arrival of the internet in the ’90s offered fans a more fertile space to create whole parallel romantic and sexual stories around characters on TV.
The publishing and literary world also has a long history of women creating and enjoying male-on-male romance stories. In 1970s Japan, a community of female artists known as the Year 24 Group began creating what was known as shōjo manga – Japanese comics aimed at girls, which sometimes explored same-sex male relationships. In the 1980s and 1990s, this evolved into the yaoi or Boys’ Love scene, which focuses exclusively on stories of male/male sexual relationships, typically written by women.
