First reaction to yaoi or shounen-ai...?

[Lady Gyrfalcon]

I can't believe I'm yet to post in this thread.

Well, it could have been that the first time I encountered anything that could be called "man on man" was reading Magic's Pawn by Mercedes Lackey. I'll admit, I B'AAAAAAWed.
However, I may have things completely out of sequence, so let's all consider this next charmingly inane and needlessly long story to be the official one.

Roughly more than three years ago, possibly more than four, I was appreciably new to the internet. Through means which I really can't remember, I came to join this really amazingly tiny forum called "Lonely Angels" which I thought was awesome cool.
It was basically a couple of people who'd been posting on the forum with each other for ages, so there were a load of huge threads and tiny threads scattered haphazardly about.
One of these threads was a picture-posting one. It was mostly regular random rubbish and fanart, but then there were some posts of Tales of Symphonia fanart, some that you'd kind of tilt your head at and wonder if it was supposed to generic or slashy (although I didn't know what slash was then) and finally the penny dropped for me when I saw this particular piece of fanart. (Which I just re-found in this guild's Tales of Symphonia picture post thread, holy crap.)

Anyway I pretty much had a critical comprehension failure and continued to fail to understand for the rest of the day. The day after, I went back and saved it down into my now long-gone folder of random anime-ish pictures.
However, I pretty much thought nothing more of it until I joined Gaia in '06, and the rest is history.  

[runes01]

I sort of stumblrd onto yaoi. I was reading so many action mangas so it was hard to avoid shounen ai. When I saw how funny some were, I started getting hooked, and reading more explicit manga