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Notes -
Coming from the other direction as the other commenters, gay men have been a (some-)straight-woman fantasy for some time now, it's just become more visible to the normies for the same reason that social media has made everything more visible to the normies. Mid-2010s Tumblr had big shipping communities devoted to the show Supernatural and its male leads; these were predated by the mid-2000s anime fandoms hyping up pairings such as Naruto/Sasuke or Death Note's L and Light to the point of yaoi paddles being sold at cons. I'm not sure what notable immediate predecessors to that locus of gay-men likers there were, but I do know that the practice goes back at least to the 60s with women putting together mimeographed and hand-stapled magazines with stories about Kirk and Spock getting it on.
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