In the wake of Heated Rivalry, the Canadian TV show, there has been much talk of fujoshis, a Japanese word that literally translates to “rotten women” but is mostly used to denote women who are consumers and fans (and sometimes creators) of “boyslash”, which is media that depicts romantic and/or sexual relationships between men.
I first became aware of boyslash as a teenager, when I regularly sought out femmeslash fanfic and manga. However it has now burst through the more niche containment of the online world and proliferates in mainstream media. Fujoshis can be queer women but are predominately straight, and it is the latter that I will be referring to here.
There are several things that interest me about this topic. First, the potential for toxic parasociality when the characters involved are either real people, such as in the case of Harry and Louis from One Direction, or acted by real people (such as Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the stars of Heated Rivalry).
Second, what it says about straight women’s relationships with gay men generally and gay men’s with them. And thirdly, how much of this is already embedded in our culture without us realising it.
There is a long tradition of straight women writing in depth – and often well – about gay men. The 1953 English novel The Charioteer by Mary Renault is the earliest I have found and read. It is about the romance between a young soldier and a naval officer in the Second World War and is unique for having a happy ending. It was the first book published in the UK to end that way. (Maurice, by E.M. Foster, though written in 1913, was not published till 1971).
I really enjoyed The Charioteer. It felt sweet and wholesome and moved me emotionally, as did the 1997 short story Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx.
Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 American novel The Little Life I found relentless for the visceral pain inflicted on its characters. It was the first time I felt conscious of the fact that I was reading a story about gay men written by a straight woman, and felt there was a huge distance between her and them which gave her this almost scientific detachment.
Why are straight women drawn towards gay men, often sexually and romantically? Perhaps it is because gay men are not perceived as a physical threat the way so many straight men are. They feel safe with them.
Also, gay men often share interests with them that straight men may not have – interests ranging from musical theatre to fashion to basic hygiene. I have often seen trans women complain online about still being attracted to gay men post transition, because gay men are who they feel more culturally similar to. But this feeling is not necessarily reciprocated – and it is a very particular conundrum to be no longer desirable to those you were once desirable to. However it is not only trans women who feel that.
Audrey Hepburn famously fell in love with Hubert de Givenchy, a gay man, just as Elizabeth Taylor did with Montgomery Clift. Both of these turned into lifelong and very loyal friendships. In the 2001 American TV show Six Feet Under, written by the gay writer Alan Ball, one of the characters says falling in love with a gay man is a rite of passage for a woman.
When I went to a gay go-go bar in Pattaya, I was expecting the clientele to be all white men. However it had the atmosphere of a gay bar, with lots of Thai gay boys the same age as the boys working there and even tables of middle-aged Thai women who squealed as they picked out which boys they wanted to hire.
The working boys were all lined up on stage with obvious work done to their faces, looking like K-pop stars and occasionally dancing. These boys, who to me were so noticeably gay, were appealing to the straight women as objects of desire – and perhaps that was because they were so noticeably gay.
Anne Rice, an American author who is famous for her Vampire Chronicles which began in 1976 with Interview with a Vampire, has said that she “felt like a gay man in a woman’s body… I wished I was a gay man… I felt that the physical response I had to men must mean that I’m a gay man.”
To some degree this cuts both ways. There are many gay men who are equally obsessed with women, who feel there is a woman inside them and that they like men the way straight women do.
The historian Karina Longworth tells an excellent story about this in her podcast, You Must Remember This. In her episode on Judy Garland, she recounts the story of Judy at a party and how all the gay men were magnetically drawn across the floor towards her, deserting their beards. Without Judy even saying or doing anything, they gathered in a circle around her.
I have seen this phenomenon before, and Christopher Isherwood writes about it in Goodbye to Berlin through the character of Sally Bowles. She went on to inspire another such straight woman written by a gay man, Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Tennessee Williams – also gay – was a writer whose most fascinating and enduring characters were women. And Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about the sexual frustration of a straight woman married to a gay man.
However, the female fascination with gay men can, sometimes, cross over into the predatory. There is a memorable sequence in Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots where a “fag hag” who sees it as the ultimate triumph to fuck gay men manages to fuck one that she has been chasing, proving her own desirability and power.
And in Robert Plunket’s 1992 novel Love Junkie, he writes from the perspective of an aspiring “fag hag” who falls in love with a gay man and, by funding his lifestyle, draws him into a sort of pseudo romantic and sexual relationship.
On a personal level, I remember warning a very good-looking gay guy friend of mine in Berlin that some of the straight women in his life were using him as an emotional boyfriend, both as a stand-in and in the hope of more. Naturally, whenever they were all high the women repeatedly asked him “would you fuck me if you were straight”?
But this is the wrong question in Berlin, as sexual preferences cease to exist once you’re inebriated enough. I’ve seen straight men fellate gay men for drugs or status. I’ve seen a girl fellate her gay friend and forever ruin their relationship – he couldn’t view her the same once they sobered up. The one-way sexual attraction had been disastrously revealed.)
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We all saw how toxic the Heated Rivalry fandom became, and there has been much written on that. To me there was a lot of crossover between the behaviour of those fans and another contentious figure, that of “Club Chalamet”, which is how the 59-year-old American woman Simone Cromer is colloquially known.
Through running her Timothée Chalamet fan club, Club Chalamet, Cromer developed a highly possessive relationship with the actor. Before that, she ran a Tom Hardy fan group, but turned away from him when he got married. She also lost interest in Chalamet when he began a committed relationship with a woman.
She has now picked her new object of obsession, Connor Storrie. While she is not technically a fujoshi, I do see some commonalities between her and the Heated Rivalry stans. In some ways they see the actors as available to them and seem to think this gives them some hold over their lives. And, I think that Cromer is drawn towards men who are somewhat culturally gay so that she can fantasise about them without another woman getting in the way.
Hardy is bisexual, having been open about his experiences with men in the past. This was appealing to Cromer, till he settled down with a woman. Chalamet, though not remotely gay, came to renown through playing a twink in the 2017 gay romance film Call me by Your Name. This meant that effeminacy and twinkdom were projected on to him until he began to speak publicly about his very heterosexual desire to have children with Kylie Jenner. Storrie, a self-described “sissy boy”, is a safer choice for her fantasies. He won’t defect to be with a woman.
Gay men are not just the targets of fixation. The Barbs – Nicki Minaj’s stans – are incredibly vicious, infamous for such tactics as doxing and are largely gay men. Rapper Cardi b has referred to this, tweeting in 2021 that “white twinks on this app are weird… ya love to hide behind black female artist pictures on your avi and be the ones saying the most disrespectful shit about women & dictating their moves and start wars between female artist fans ALWAYS!”
There is obviously plenty of misogyny in the way gay men feel entitled to criticise and incite conflict between women online, just as there is plenty of fetishisation and infantilisation in the way straight women talk about and attack gay men online, sometimes even under the guise of protection. There is often racism and homophobia: both of these were apparent when Heated Rivalry stans harassed Williams and Francois Arnaud. As always, the act of reducing someone to an idol can also be dehumanising.
What I find most revealing though is that these dynamics, while heightened by social media, predate the internet.
As a lesbian, I sit outside of much of this. While I understand it when straight women say that they find a gay man the ideal man, I can’t relate to it as I am preoccupied with the ideal woman. And as a femme, I don’t imagine a more powerful, fabulous woman outside of me that I can project myself on to. I can already tap into that inside of myself.
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