The history of Boys Love anime is a complex one, with a variety of genres and levels of explicitness appearing over the decades. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather a cross-section of the work available since the earliest days of BL anime.

The Song of Wind and Trees by Keiko Takemiya is one of the seminal shoujo manga titles of the 1970s, one of the earliest male/male romance manga stories created by women for a primarily female audience. It was adapted into an anime OVA under the title Kaze to Ki no Uta Sanctus: Sei Naru Kana in 1987, with a runtime of one hour and covering a small part of the manga's scope. 

Because it only covers the manga's opening chapters, the manga's ending – at best bittersweet, at worst tragic – isn't here, and the anime leans more into the bittersweet, with only a hint of the tragedy that ends the story of the original. 

Banana Fish, running in the eighties and nineties as a shoujo manga, arguably isn't BL – its Wikipedia page cites opinions both for and against it being classified as such. I've chosen to include it here because the 2018 anime adaptation was directed by Hiroko Utsumi, also known for her work on the first season of Free! and on SK8 the Infinity – both shows that, while not BL, are much beloved by BL audiences for their female-gaze fanservice of male bodies and intense male/male dynamics. 

Be warned, however, that unlike the anime of The Song of Wind and Trees, the anime Banana Fish is definitively sad; Utsumi's anime is marginally more open-ended than the definitive tragedy of the manga, but only by a fraction.

Gravitation is a manga that ran in the nineties into the early 2000s, and has two anime adaptations: a pair of OVAs from 1999, and a thirteen episode series from 2000-2001.

While still including its fair share of darker elements, Gravitation is overall of a lighter tone than a lot of other classic BL anime included here, with the original mangaka Maki Murakami explaining that "I actually did it because there isn’t that much humorous boys’ love in Japan. It’s always about tears of blood, and 'if you die I’m going to die, too.' So I did it because I wanted to see it."

Ai no Kusabi is based on a serialized novel, rather than a manga, and was described by Patrick Drazen as a "magnum opus of the yaoi genre" in his book "Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! Of Japanese Animation." 

Ai no Kusabi is dystopian science fiction and has a dark ending, and was adapted into anime twice, with two OVAs in 1992 and 1994, and a remake of four OVAs (of a planned and abandoned twelve) in 2012. The OVAs have been highly praised as an important part of BL anime's history. 

No.6 – Also known as Future City No.6 – is an eleven-episode anime from 2011, based on a series of novels by Atsuko Asano. Like Ai no Kusabi, it is dark science fiction, but the Boys Love content is very different to that series – here, a tender love story between two young men plays out against the dystopian backdrop, and the ending is bittersweet but hopeful. 

While the DRAMAtical Murder anime adaptation itself is not BL, an extra OVA created in 2014 included various bad endings from the game – creating a situation in which none of the consensual sex from the game is made explicit in the anime, but much of the darker content is present in the OVA. 

2016's Yuri!!! on ICE is technically a sports anime, rather than BL, but it would be remiss of me to skip mentioning it, as it actually played a key role in bringing Boys Love visual novels to English-speaking audiences – NITRO CHiRAL first decided to translate their games into English after seeing Yuri!!! on ICE's success worldwide, understanding that there was a huge audience for male/male romances among the anime-watching population. 

Given is an eleven-episode BL series based on a manga of the same name by Natsuki Kizu. It aired in 2019 and was followed by a sequel film in 2020, with another film announced in 2023. Its widespread popularity proves that Boys Love anime is just as popular now as it has ever been, with new viewers discovering the genre in all its diversity all the time.