Warning: nekkid people!
Also, spoilers. Not for the thing at the end that everyone's seen on Wikipedia, for some things in the middle that you probably could have guessed.
Kaze to Ki no Uta is my favorite manga and this is why you should read it.
Some background info: Once upon a time (aka the 1970s) in a land far away (Japan, of course) there were a bunch of amazing women who wrote tons of kickass shoujo manga. Since the genre was so new, they tried out a lot of wacky things. One of them, Keiko Takemiya (of
To Terra... fame), was interested in writing a story about gay men. At first she was looking into doing something realistic, but movies like the French
This Special Friendship and the German
Death in Venice as well as the opinion of roommate Moto Hagio that realistic gay men were boring (seriously), made her go the dramatic romance novel-ish route instead. (I should point out that Moto Hagio was the first mangaka to do a proper BL series, but Takemiya couldn't get her stuff published for years, encouraged Hagio, and illustrated the first male/male kiss in shoujo manga, so I feel like they're tied as the first BL mangaka.)
ANYWAY, when Takemiya eventually debuted
Kaze to Ki no Uta (
The Poem of the Wind and Trees) in Shoujo Comic magazine, millions of teenage girls all over Japan, who are now your mothers' ages, by the way, swooned, cried, and fangirled, and they've never stopped since.
( And now, with pictures! )