The world was becoming slightly more accepting of new social rules, opening up new possibilities in queer literature. There have always been depictions of homosexuality, especially between men, in literature throughout history, but the genre the world knows and loves today began around the 1970s, which coincides with a lot of global and Japanese social movements.
Yaoi is considered an outdated term associated with fetishization, so it will not be used, but it is significant to know that this term existed and that it is still used on Wikipedia as the official term to represent this genre. The boys’ love genre, previously (and still known as) yaoi, began in Japan. But how did it get so popular, who is enjoying it, and what does its explosion mean for the LGBTQ and MLM communities? Get your notes ready for some recommendations and stay for some social commentary. There are several reasons for this: the general desire for queer representation, fatigue with heterosexual romances, or the fact that they are simply more interesting everybody has a different reason for enjoying it.
Whether it’s TV shows, movies, manga, or manhwa, every form of boys’ love has blown up in the past two decades - even more recently with the rise of social media. Trigger Warning: ‘The ‘Boys’ Love (BL) Genre’ mentions sexual assault in this article (specifically in the section “Normalization of Sexual Assault”)īoys’ love, abbreviated BL, is a genre where the main plotline is a romance between two male characters.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: and you might like to check out the growing collection of curated slang words for different topics over at Slangpedia. There is still lots of work to be done to get this slang thesaurus to give consistently good results, but I think it's at the stage where it could be useful to people, which is why I released it.
Please also note that due to the nature of the internet (and especially UD), there will often be many terrible and offensive terms in the results. Or you might try boyfriend or girlfriend to get words that can mean either one of these (e.g. The search algorithm handles phrases and strings of words quite well, so for example if you want words that are related to lol and rofl you can type in lol rofl and it should give you a pile of related slang terms. The higher the terms are in the list, the more likely that they're relevant to the word or phrase that you searched for. Note that this thesaurus is not in any way affiliated with Urban Dictionary.ĭue to the way the algorithm works, the thesaurus gives you mostly related slang words, rather than exact synonyms. The official Urban Dictionary API is used to show the hover-definitions. These indexes are then used to find usage correlations between slang terms. The Urban Thesaurus was created by indexing millions of different slang terms which are defined on sites like Urban Dictionary.