I’m aware that subcultures centered around certain non-dominant fashion/music/literature/etc tastes and “fandoms” have existed in Europe for a long time. Was this a thing in other societies?
In short answer, yes.
As I briefly mentioned before in: How did The Romance of Three Kingdoms get popular in Japan?, popular literature and dramas in Edo Period Japan (especially those flourished in city cultures of Capital Edo with help of wooden printing medias) features a kind of alternative fictions based on medieval Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (, then in turn also roughly based on the History of the Three Kingdoms, official history).
Sorry for citing the blog entry (in Japanese) in this subreddit, but the wooden paintings in the linked blog (official one of Ota Memorial Museum of Art and authored by its curator), depicting three women, features the famous scene of RTK (Romance of Three Kingdoms), visit of the progagonist Liu Bei and two his brothers-in-law into the hut of Zhuge Liang.
I'm really not specialized in this period and time so that please take it with grain of salt, it is also said on this kind of trans-gendered portraits in popular culture in Edo Period that it was partly due to the influence of popular drama culture (Kabuki) in which male actors also played female roles in the drama.