It’s our very great pleasure today to introduce a new guest writer to you…a person I met online under what has to be some of the strangest circumstances ever…  and I am so pleased to have here! Please welcome Laetitia Albine Kambou with her report of Y/CON 9, France’s Yaoi and Yuri convention. ^_^ Take it away, Laetitia!

It was promising. Even exciting. After a 2022 edition sold out weeks before the event, Y/CON – the one and only convention dedicated to homo fictions in France – moved to a bigger space near Paris for its 9th weekend. More accessible (relatively speaking, because everyone knows how terrible the Paris metropolitan is when you are disabled), with more people able to attempt. Everything went higher, even the ticket, but hey, that’s the price of glory.

November 4 and 5. Two days in what is described as the safest con to be when you are queer. A wholesome crowd eager to discover talented artists in every genre and fandom possible. Yuri, bara, fanart or original creations, books or comics, fluffy or pervy, you name it, they have it. Diversity is everywhere on each side of the tables, alongside a simple and strong feeling to be back at home after one year navigating in the Big Bad Heteronormative World.

Publishers like Taifu, Hana, Akata or Reines de Cœur were just robbed of their merch. In France, LGBTQIA+ sections are nearly non-existant in general bookstores, so the majority of the sales are made on the internet and during cons. This year saw the great entrance of the webtoon format with Kbooks releasing two anticipated titles, Rose and Champagne and The Dangerous Convenience Store, two 18+ yaoi.

But, as much as I enjoyed my days in this bubble of happiness, acceptance and too much money spent on cute goodies and prints, some clouds appeared above the parade. Being bigger seems to make things more obvious, especially when my personal awareness of all problems queer people must face on a daily basis grows equally bigger.

As the name of the organizing team, Event Yaoi, suggests, Y/CON was originally fully about Japanese boy’s love, acknowledging other genres, medias and demographics as the audience make it clear they want more variety. This year, yuri and other sapphic stories received a well deserved recognition during the panels, and more artists were selected because of this content. Yaoi is always dominant but things are in progress.

What needs to be done better are panels and moderation. Sure, some guests came ready to have fun, but also talk about creation, history and representation of queerness, publishing and more, but other panelists showed a disturbing lack of reflection about those same subjects or their own work. After #MeToo and the rise of topics questioning how queerness is portrayed on medias, hearing people saying they don’t see their work as a window or a way to talk about it is a let down, to say the least.

And on that, the casting of the panels was the real issue. With Ttung Gae, korean illustrator of Rose and Champagne webtoon, canceling their venue, it appeared that the majority of the guests were cis white non (visibly) disabled people, contrasting with the more diverse public mentioned before. Such assembly can only result in failing or dodging  to talk about more specific matters, and stay at the surface.

No one, at least for now, asks Y/CON to become a place of activism and claiming equality in a political way. In a country like France, being The Safe Place for a week-end is already a huge step and commitment. But as the people attempting it are constantly and unwillingly subjects to debate, it demonstrates by its very existence that a certain number of voices wish to be heard, and found an echo chamber there. It would be interesting if these voices, in all their diversity, could now grab a mic and get real visibility and interaction with the public.

See you next time, 9-10 november 2024.

Erica here: Thank you so much Laetitia, for the thoughtful report. The issues you bring up are common to many events and having folks speak up to con organizers and take an active role themselves, are the best ways to fix things.

I hope to be able to attend that this year, so if you are local to Y/CON do tell them you’d love to see me as a guest. ^_^ But I’ll be just as white and not-visibly disabled as the rest, which would not address this issue at all.