i will never get over how upsettingly widespread the idea is that BL & yuri (and even other asian LGBTQ genres such as danmei, everything below applies) are genres by gay fetishists for gay fetishists. as if every person who writes in these genres is a straight person and a fetishist with your worst interests in mind, and apparently all straight people are incapable of writing queer media with nuance and respect.
these opinions are most definitely held by people who have not read or watched anything in these genres in the past 10 years, or have not consumed any of the Good stuff that has existed for decades and decades before, their benchmark seems to be the fact they read some trashy yaoi when they were younger or they know about the existence of such content - while these things were indeed popular in the 2000s, its being used as a stereotype used to dismiss entire bodies of work. much like people write off all visual novels to be vapid dating games or degenerate porn.
i have no respect for these opinions being so widespread and respected (at least on twitter, they sure are) because i think there is a bigger, more disturbing implication to them, and it does boil down to being outright racist.
first of all, the assumption that these genres are made by and for the straight gaze frustrates me to no end, because in japan being openly LGBTQ is definitely harder to do than it is in america, (i imagine even worse in china) i've read about male BL authors using female pen names pre-2000s to avoid possibly outing themselves and i don't have any reason to believe thats fully stopped. even outside of pen names, a lot of authors don't mention much about themselves, especially not their sexuality or sex/gender, in their work or interviews - like gee, i wonder why. even outside of the perils of being out, theres a thing called privacy. and i really resent the concept that a good queer has to be an out queer, and its somehow their job to make known to the entire world that they are queer before making queer art & fiction. they are everywhere, you just don't know because you wrongfully assume everyone is cishet until proven otherwise. even then - whether you want to believe it or not, cishet people are genuinely capable of making sensible and good queer work. overall, stop thinking its your business.
secondly, this is a realization i came to the other day and it REALLY bugs me. even good BL & yuri is considered inauthentic queer media by western standards. many people act like its not a real "lesbian" story, its just "yuri" therefore, its not a work that displays queerness, its a work that "emulates queerness".
all of this, solely because its labeled by different words, coupled with weird subconscious bias and stereotypes against asian media. there is an unspoken assumption that the asian people creating these works are somehow naively creating LGBTQ content, almost as if its an accident. they don't know what "real queerness" is like the westerners do, again, they're simply all fetishists that want to titillate themselves with a fictional depiction of something that looks like queerness. and apparently thats all you need to know about BL & yuri! its all ~problematic~ trash always made by someone who couldn't possibly know what its like to be queer. not even going to bother to touch on the people who for some reason think media should be segregated by gender and sexuality and therefore you're ALSO a fetishist if you're a woman who reads BL, because we should definitely just reinvent the sex binary and police who can look at what. if only they knew its actually healthy to want to intake media about people who aren't just the same as yourself in every category.
its weird, its wrong, its racist, it reeks of an idea of superiority, i want to bite everyone who holds these opinions, etc. i think nobody should be comfortable holding these opinions but they seem to get away with it under the guise of "well i'm LGBTQ therefore people are out to get me, including tens of thousands of asian authors who definitely just see me as a toy" its hard to shut that up with "actually, you're just being weird and making racist blanket statements".