I mentioned Minekura because Saiyuki is the best comparison I can muster: it's a shounen manga written and drawn by a female artist with BL sympathies. Sometimes it shows. GetBackers is a shounen manga written and drawn by male artists with BL sympathies. Most in the fandom bump their foreheads painfully against this one, sooner rather than later, because does it ever show. "What is this- shounen for girls? Are they clueless, or are they making fun of us? Are we sure they're guys?" Well, not really, no, no and yes. They just happen to be men who like yaoi, and probably straight men at that. The latter do exist. Counting Queer As Folk fans, I've several friends who fall into said category, and many others who tolerate it well enough to enjoy the occasional episode of Gravitation. Japan, of course, is much better about that sort of thing than North America is.
(Okay, precision. Ayamine is a dorky T&A-loving otaku who also likes yaoi, and burbles on about both sides of the coin at length. He's the one whose personality "shines" through the text. Aoki doesn't give freetalks, and is thus a bit of a cypher. But given that he wrote a sensually rendered and utterly gratuitous m/m kiss into his purportedly shounen manga, chances are he's not a raging homophobe. For all I know one or the other might be gay, whatever that means for a Japanese shounen-weekly mangaka who never gets to leave the house, but don't quote me on it because I really haven't the slightest.)
It starts with Ban and Ginji - of course - who have one of those just-add-sex-and-stir shounen manga relationships that are the doujinshi industry's bread and butter. Shared angst, meaningful looks, the whole nine yards. A lot of hugging. When they're wending their separate ways through series of battles the editor sticks in helpful margin comments like "kotoba wa naku tomo tsuujiau futari no kokoro!!!" (ballpark: even without words their two hearts communicate!) for all as if he were annotating Fushigi Yuugi. Unintentional hilarity aside, the trust Our Heroes place in each other and the various ways in which it's tested and reaffirmed form the emotional backbone of the series. It's an odd trust, one begins to realise after a while, because neither Ban nor Ginji is the typical obnoxious/sunao shounen-manga hero he seems to be. Ban is hiding a coolly analytical mind and a mind-boggling education behind his swagger, and Ginji is hiding - well, repressing psychosis with happy dorkdom, really, in the grand old Battousai split-personality tradition. Ban's a natural loner with a progressively tragic past, Ginji's the teenage warlord-messiah of an environment straight out of Battle Angel Alita. Neither is particularly trusting or open to begin with, and the first time they meet - oh shounen manga! - they beat the living hell out of each other. We never get to see that fight (which is a maddening stroke of genius), only the distant aftermath that is the series' present. In that present they've constructed their entire lives around the other's presence, to the point where "emotional dependency" doesn't cut it as a description. "Call me at once if anything happens," Ban says to Ginji - and appears fully capable of hearing said call from several miles away. "You don't need to say anything, I believe in you," Ginji says when Ban trys to tell him about his past, and sticks to that line even when Ban's embittered ex-friends shove their dead siblings in his face. It's one of those pairings where one rather forgets to write yaoi, because the relational component is laid out in canon and needs no extrapolation.
(Ginji is exactly 1cm taller than Ban, which has got to be the mangaka making fun, because he's... I'm trying to get through this review without using the words "obviously uke", because that would be unfair. Especially with a Western fandom that would like him to top purely for the kink of contravening stereotype. So he clings to Ban's neck and cries when things go wrong; going by character strength, which is as good a bellwether as any, Ginji in his Raitei persona is arguably the most kick-ass fighter in the series. Then again, in his Raitei persona he's not obviously uke. Oops, pretend I didn't just say that.)
Then there's Kadzuki and his faithful adjutant Juubei, who're canon. They just are. 
Short of denial over the semiotics of two characters being bound to one another with a literal red thread - Kadzuki uses threads in his attacks and Juubei uses needles, which is why there's a sewing kit in the official merchandise - there's no psychologically feasible way of reading their relationship as non-canon. Even Ayamine thinks they're together, and happily natters about smutty doujinshi possibilities in his web freetalks- "And then Kadzuki gets *bleep* and then he *bleep* and then Juubei has to come and save him!" No word from Aoki, but the buck's gotta stop on someone's desk.
The colour spread artists over at Animage - ravening plebian fangirls. Not another word on their account.
And it goes on. There's Toshiki - I'm tossing out names at this point, cast of hundreds, just go read it if you're curious - who rivals with Juubei 
for Kadzuki's affections. Emishi's dorkboy crush on Shido. Akabane's sparkly obsession with (killing) Ginji, which traduces itself into heartmarks and fruit baskets. Natsuki Amon, late in the storyline, who inspired the first canonical shounen manga mpreg gag in well, when did you last come across one of those? There's a good deal of f/f potential as well, if that's what you're looking for, and some of it is even classy and not male-directed saabisu (Clayman-the-dashing-art-thief is very attractive). It all makes for an odd sort of pan-sexual vibe, because there's a lot of T&A of the lowest common fanboy denominator. That part's Ayamine's contribution: nearly all the - quite likeable and personable - recurring female characters get their clothes ripped off for no reason other than his personal amusement. So not a manga for those who get huffy about panty shots and moaning women bursting out of their tops either, though the anime is an after-school program and thus much more circumspect. I'm watching it now, and I keep getting distracted by all the girls who're gratuitously clothed when I expect them to be naked.
How to put it? CLAMP has a recurring conceit regarding non-gender-specific love, the idea of one's "special person". GetBackers does non-gender-specific booty call instead. Kadzuki for one is classified as a woman for all official art and a great many story purposes, and he's not even okama. There's an essay to be written here on what the putative intended male audience is supposed to think of it, but I'm not sure there's anyone in the Western fandom I'd trust to know. What's the male fan of a cross-dressing cross-talking Japanese pop celebrity supposed to think of him? Probably nothing, apart from "Hey, sorta cute there" We do get a throwaway clue during the inevitable onsen episode, when Ban settles for ogling Kadzuki through his fingers. "He'd make a pretty hot chick," he says, "if you cover the bits that don't work." It's as good a philosophy as any for a straight guy to approach BL with, I suppose, and a straight-guy mangaka idem.
(Links for further exploration)
English:
Dakkanya.net (whom we thank for permission to use their images)
Far And Away
Japanese:
Shounen Magazine's Official Series Page
GB Fansite Search Engine (that
glorious Japanese efficiency!)
Dakkanya Webring