Hello! I'm new here and not quite sure if this is the correct place to post this. I'm a huge gl fan! I have read various shoujo ai/yuri manga and manhwa and recently decided I wanted to buy some physical copies. I still live with my family who are very homophobic and unaware of my interests. I'd be paying for them myself through amazon and was wondering how could I possibly sneak them in? I'm so afraid of them seeing the boxes and asking me to open it.

I do not have a po box and they are at home all the time, what could I do?

Do your parents know you're interested in manga at all? A lot of shoujo titles have cute girls on the cover, so they don't need to know the characters are gay.

If they insist on flipping through your books and/or questioning you about them then I would recommend sticking to digital manga that you can privately download. All the yuri titles I've read usually involve kissing.

Yeah, ceruleantear's recommendation of buying digital is probably the best advice in this situation, especially if your family members are the nosy kind. If you like dead-tree versions of certain series, I'd recommend waiting until you move out or going to the local bookstore and buying them retail.

Otherwise, I know there are folks who write rec lists for "stealth LGBTQ novels" (as in, you can't tell there are queer characters in them from either the cover or the back blurb), but I have no idea if anyone has done this for manga.

I have bought manga before, and they didn't mind a whole lot. I agree there are some mangas I could buy and get away with, but the ones im interested in have slightly explicit covers. "Citrus" and "Bloom into You" are the ones I'm looking to buy, but bc of the cover I'd be unable to say "they are just friends totally not gay".

I've read almost all my yuri/gl manga online and after finally getting a job I was looking to finally be able to have physical copies of my own. Guess not 😕

Do you have any physical bookstores nearby? Those GL you mentioned are fairly popular, and so should be in most (big) brick and mortar stores, and if they aren't, you can ask them to order them for you. Then you just have to put some fake dust jackets on them, and voila!

Sadly no, my only options right now would be to buy it online.

In my opinion, some of the Bloom Into You covers are pretty nondescript so maybe you could just order those for now.

Do you live near an Amazon locker? If so you could have the books shipped there, and then you could go pick them up once they arrive. You could also try specifying a delivery location in your order so the packages are placed somewhere your family won't see, but not every Amazon deliveryperson cares enough to follow those directions, so this method could be risky.

Another possible method is ordering your books gift-wrapped, which would give you some plausible deniability about who the books are for, and hopefully reduce the chance of your family opening up your purchases. Unfortunately Amazon doesn't offer gift-wrapping services for books, but I'm sure other bookstore chains (for sure Barnes and Noble if you're in the US) do.

Sorry you're in a situation where you have to sneak around just to purchase some lovely GL books. Wishing you the best of luck!