EAPC 3 (1) pp.

59–72 Intellect Limited 2017

East Asian Journal of Popular Culture

Volume 3 Number 1
© 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eapc.3.1. 59_1

THOMAS BAUDINETTE
Macquarie University

Japanese gay men’s attitudes

towards ‘gay manga’ and the
problem of genre

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article critically analyses the concept of ‘gay manga’ to ascertain how fan Boys Love (BL)
‘produsers’ and casual consumers understand both geikomi (also known as bara) geikomi
and Boys Love (BL) manga. Drawing upon interviews with four Japanese gay men, manga
one Japanese Korean man and one Japanese Brazilian man, I investigate how ‘gay genre
manga’ is understood as a locus for the construction of gay subjectivity. I argue that affect
the informants understand BL and geikomi as two aspects of the same meta-genre, produsage
revealing how attitudes to the term ‘gay’ have evolved in Japan. For the inform-
ants, geikomi and BL are interconnected and they are both understood as legiti-
mate expressions of gay subjectivity that play a crucial role in their understandings
of gay desire. Importantly, by focusing upon readers’ subjective relationships with
texts, this article demonstrates how ‘gay manga’ is understood through an affec-
tive lens, with consumers locating their understandings of ‘gay manga’ within their
overall patterns of ‘gay media’ consumption. Throughout the article, I reflect upon
the necessity for scholars to engage with genre in a more nuanced fashion in order
to better understand how individual consumers engage with media texts in their
everyday lives.

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Thomas Baudinette

1. Throughout this article, INTRODUCTION

I place the phrases ‘gay
media’ and ‘gay manga’ One afternoon, I sat down with Shōtarō in a cafe in Shinjuku, Tokyo, for what
within quotation marks was to be the first of many interviews I conducted about his consumption
to visibly highlight the
nature of these terms of ‘gay media’.1 Conventional wisdom defines ‘gay media’ as that which is
as highly constructed produced for, and often by, gay men (GLAAD 2015). However, the meanings
and historically
defined.
that individual consumers attach to media texts often defy such common-sense
definitions based on market genre and normative audience. Furthermore,
2. All translations of
Japanese language
what is understood as ‘gay’ within a particular society may change over time
interview data are my (McLelland 2005: 177). This was certainly the case for Shōtarō, a young self-
own, unless noted. identified gay/gei Japanese man who listed ‘the most important’ media plat-
3. This naming practice form to his life as a gay man as gay manga/gei manga, further elaborating that
derives from the this category of media included ‘stuff like Boys Love/bōizu rabu and geikomi’.2
fact that some
geikomi were initially Boys Love (or BL) is an umbrella term that emerged in the 1990s to refer
serialized within a to a genre of manga and other related products, produced primarily for
1970s’ magazine titled heterosexual female consumers, that depict romantic and sexual relation-
Barazoku (The Rose
Tribe) (Tagame 2015: ships between beautiful boys (McLelland and Welker 2015: 3). On the other
116). It should be hand, geikomi (also known as bara)3 refers to a diverse range of manga that
noted that the term
bara is perhaps more
are produced for and by male homosexuals (Baudinette 2016; Lunsing 2006;
commonly utilized Tagame 2015). That Shōtarō linked BL and geikomi together as ‘gay media’
within western fandom in his narrative was particularly interesting, for much scholarly literature on
(see Kolbeins 2015).
James Welker (personal homoerotic manga in Japan has emphasized a sharp division between the two
communication) genres, with BL products not traditionally being viewed as ‘gay texts’ (Ishida
has highlighted that 2015; Kolbeins 2015: 32). Shōtarō’s comments seem to suggest that attitudes
geikomi are also
referred to as yaro–kei towards what constitutes a gay text in Japan may be changing, signalling a
(beast-style) comics in shift in understandings of BL since critical scholarship on the genre was first
certain Japanese fan
conventions.
conducted in the 1990s (Nagaike and Aoyama 2015).
Due to the separate developmental histories of BL and geikomi, the term
gay manga/gei manga is today usually utilized only within the emerging disci-
pline of manga studies to specifically refer to geikomi as manga produced for
and by gay men, distinguishing it both stylistically and theoretically from BL
(see Baudinette 2016). This use of ‘gay manga’ in manga studies discourse
also reflects how the term gay/gei is understood in contemporary Japanese
society as an identity category tied to an inherent and unchanging same-sex
attraction (McLelland 2005: 177). Thus, it is unsurprising that Shōtarō, a fan
of both BL and geikomi, was not the only informant whose notions of ‘gay
media’ and ‘gay manga’ appeared to contradict the definitions of what kinds
of texts are appropriate for consumption by gay men reported in previous
literature. All of the six young men I interviewed about their consumption of
‘gay media’ utilized the term ‘gay manga’ as a kind of meta-generic label to
organize their discussions of BL and geikomi, without any prompting from
me as an interviewer.
Forming part of a larger project investigating young Japanese gay men’s
consumption of various ‘gay media’, this article critically analyses the concept
of ‘gay manga’ as a form of meta-genre in discussions with four young
Japanese men, one Japanese-Korean man and one Japanese-Brazilian man.
The article aims to ascertain how both casual readers of homoerotic manga
and fan ‘produsers’ (Bruns 2008) may understand both geikomi and BL manga
as fundamentally linked within their overall consumption of ‘gay media’. As
such, this article addresses recent research trends that seek to move the focus
of discussion away from BL texts towards readers of BL (Galbraith 2015: 153).
Furthermore, this article reveals how changing attitudes towards the term
gay/gei have led contemporary gay male consumers in Japan to view both BL

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 Japanese gay men’s attitudes towards ‘gay manga’ …

and geikomi as inherently connected. The article thus also contributes to BL 4. ‘Fannish’ reading in this
context refers to an
scholarship by elucidating how self-identified gay men read BL, a phenom- affective engagement
enon that is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. with cultural
products typified by
hyper-consumption.
METHODS AND INFORMANTS Importantly, fans view
this consumption as an
In this article, I draw upon in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted integral aspect of their
during 2013 with six individuals concerning their consumption of ‘gay media’ identity (Stevens 2010:
208). This contrasts
to answer how manga, in conjunction with other media, is utilized to inform with ‘casual’ reading,
their understandings of their gay desires and identities. The informants all where the engagement
indicated during interviews that BL and geikomi played a significant role in may be affective, but
sporadic.
their lives as gay men. Rather than asking about which particular manga series
the informants read, the interviews focused upon broader attitudes towards
BL and geikomi, as well as asking informants to critically reflect on how and
why they consumed such manga. The interviews were audio-recorded and
transcribed, and then coded for the purposes of qualitative, discursive analy-
sis as is consistent with a cultural studies approach to media consumption
(Hartley 2012: 76–77). The coding privileged the vocabulary and concepts
that the informants themselves utilized to make sense of their ‘gay media’
consumption. The analysis employed theories arising from the ‘uses and grat-
ifications’ approach to media studies (Rubin and Rubin 1985), as well as ‘new
media’ studies (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006), both of which are defined below.
The participants’ demographic details are presented in Table 1. Of these
six informants, three identified as casual readers of ‘gay manga’ (Junho, Yōichi
and Kensuke) and three could be described as ‘fannish’ readers (Shōtarō,
Haruma and Márcio).4 The article explores the highly subjective ways in which
individuals engage with media texts, arguing that the six informants’ concep-
tualizations of ‘gay manga’ were derived from how they used and consumed
BL and geikomi. It must be noted that such a small sample is not necessarily
representative of the experiences of all gay male consumers in Japan. However,

Informant Age Ethnicity Education Employment Type of

Pseudonyms consumer
Junho 20 Japanese Enrolled at a vocational At his parents’ Korean Casual
Korean school (Japan) restaurant
Yōichi 21 Japanese Enrolled at a university At a gay bar and clothes Casual
(Japan) store
Haruma 24 Japanese Postgraduate student Tutor at a juku/cram Fannish
(Japan) school, research assistant
at a university
Shōtarō 24 Japanese University graduate Research assistant at a Fannish
(Japan) university
Kensuke 25 Japanese Compulsory high school Unemployed Casual
(Japan); enrolled at a
language school (England)
Márcio 27 Japanese University graduate Unemployed (student) Fannish
Brazilian (Brazil), enrolled at a
language school (Japan)

Table 1: Informants’ demographic details.

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Thomas Baudinette

their ethnic diversity and distinct and varied patterns of media consumption
are perhaps representative of the idealized target of the Japanese ‘gay media’
landscape, which is increasingly seeking to appeal to a highly diverse audi-
ence of gay men who engage with a wide variety of different media platforms
and content (see Baudinette 2016: 119–22).

GENRE AND THE HISTORY OF BL AND GEIKOMI IN JAPAN

Throughout this article, I critically reflect upon the relationships between an
individual’s consumption of media texts and the concept of genre. Following
Ryall, I loosely define genre as ‘patterns/forms/styles/structures which tran-
scend individual art products and which supervise their construction by artists
and their reading by audiences’ (1975: 28). Thus, genres represent paradigms
that consumers access to make sense of texts (Lacey 2000: 134). However, it
is important to note that genres are not static as they ‘continually change,
modulate, and redefine themselves’ over time (Turner 1993: 38). Thus, genres
are historically situated phenomena that cannot be approached without taking
into account discursive changes in the society within which they are embed-
ded (McLelland and Welker 2015: 6).
Genres ‘are often utilised as marketing tools’ that appeal to an audience’s
preconceived notions of what they expect to see (Lacey 2000: 169). This is
particularly true of the Japanese context where genres are often explicitly
defined via their relationship to a gendered audience (Clammer 1997: 110).
Some of the most common generic distinctions made between different
manga are based on gender, with sharp stylistic and thematic distinctions
made between shōjo manga/girls’ comics and shōnen manga/boys’ comics
(Unser-Schutz 2015: 135). Of course, this is not to say that women do not read
shōnen manga and that men do not read shōjo manga, because they clearly
do (Welker 2015: 62). Indeed, BL partly developed through young women’s
subversive readings of popular shōnen texts from the 1980s onwards, inspir-
ing them to produce parody manga with homoerotic overtones (Welker 2015:
55). Nevertheless, at the discursive level, female readers of shōnen manga and
male readers of shōjo manga are not normative consumers, as recent attempts
by the largest shōnen manga magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump, to discourage
female readership attest (Nikkei Entertainment 2013).
The generic distinctions between shōnen and shōjo manga have influ-
enced whether or not BL and geikomi are considered ‘gay texts’. Indeed,
previous scholarship has tended to emphasize the fact that BL should not be
considered as depicting gay/gei relationships or desires because BL emerged
from 1970s’ shōjo manga (McLelland and Welker 2015: 3). The origins of
BL can be said to be the work of members of the Fabulous Year 24 Group/
Hana no nijūyonnen-gumi, an influential group of female manga authors
born in or around 1949 (Shōwa 24) (Welker 2015: 44). Some members of this
group, including the seminal shōjo auteurs Takemiya Keiko and Hagio Moto,
began to write so-called shōnen’ai/the love of boys series within which the
love between beautiful boys was developed as a site to explore female sexual-
ity (Welker 2015: 46). BL eventually emerged as the preferred term for such
works as the genre became increasingly commercialized during the late 1980s
and early 1990s through the publication of shōjo manga magazines specifi-
cally dedicated to BL, such as Gust, b-Boy and Image (Welker 2015: 63).
On the other hand, geikomi had its birth in the late-1970s magazines that
targeted the homo sub-culture of same-sex-desiring men (Lunsing 2006).

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 Japanese gay men’s attitudes towards ‘gay manga’ …

According to Tagame’s history of Japanese gay erotic art, the manga appear- 5. As I will discuss below,
Tagame’s reading of
ing in these homo magazines, which were then known as homo art/homo āto these works as both
or bara, had important precedents within the works of artists active during the queer (kuia) and gay
1960s, such as Mishima Go and Oda Toshimi (2003: 10; 2015: 115). Tagame (gei) is somewhat
problematic.
notes that these artists’ valorization of ‘rough’ and ‘hard’ depictions of mascu-
linity played an important role in setting the tone of geikomi, which he explic- 6. Fushimi Noriaki’s
memoir Puraibe–to
itly situates in opposition to BL (2015: 116).5 The homo sub-culture from gei raifu (Private
which geikomi emerged developed during a time when the loanword gay/gei Gay Life) (1991) was
was typically utilized in Japan to refer to same-sex-desiring men who cross- especially influential
in promoting the
dressed and performed a stereotypically hyper-feminine identity (McLelland understanding of
2005: 110). Homo represented a subjectivity that specifically valorized hyper- gay/gei as an identity
category for same-sex-
masculinity so as to avoid the somewhat transgendered understandings attracted men.
attached to the term gay/gei at the time (Mackintosh 2010: 18). Three homo
magazines were particularly influential in the development of the geikomi
genre: Barazoku (The Rose Tribe), Japan’s first mainstream commercial maga-
zine for same-sex-desiring men (Lunsing 2006); its manga supplement Bara-
kei (Bara Style) (Kolbeins 2015: 32; Tagame 2015: 115); and the BDSM-themed
magazine Sabu (Welker 2015: 62).
Later, during the so-called gay boom/gei būmu of the 1990s, gay iden-
tity politics derived from the North American queer rights movement
received widespread recognition throughout Japan’s mainstream media,
and the transgendered nuance attached to the term gay/gei began to lessen
(McLelland 2005: 177). Due to these shifts, as well as the work of gay/gei
activists and writers such as Fushimi Noriaki and Ōtsuka Takashi,6 many
same-sex-attracted Japanese men began to explicitly identify themselves as
gay/gei, particularly as the term was popularized via the Internet (McLelland
2005: 184). During this time, Terra Publications, the publishers of the popular
gay/gei magazine Bádi, began to publish manga that were explicitly labelled
geikomi to differentiate their work from BL (Baudinette 2016: 107–08). Today,
both semi-professional and amateur geikomi artists have continued to label
their work as geikomi, with many choosing to primarily promote their work
online (Baudinette 2016: 110).

BL, GEIKOMI AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

Influenced by their understanding of gay/gei as an identity category explicitly
tied to their experiences of same-sex attraction, the six informants understood
BL and geikomi as interconnected and argued that they both represent equally
valid yet fantastic depictions of gay/gei subjectivity. For this reason, the six
men saw no need to sharply disassociate BL from geikomi when discussing
their consumption of ‘gay media’.
Stylistically, BL and geikomi differ greatly, although it is important to note
that both BL and geikomi are not monolithic and contain great stylistic varia-
tion across artists working in either genre (Baudinette 2016: 115; Welker 2015:
66). During interviews, the informants did raise particular stylistic differences
between BL and geikomi essential to their understanding of both genres. For
the informants, BL is typified by a depiction of its male characters known as
the bishōnen/beautiful boy aesthetic and a focus on romantic escapism (see
McLelland 2000: 64), although they recognized that some BL also contains
highly explicit (and often violent) depictions of sex (see McLelland and Welker
2015: 4). A focus on bishōnen is typical of shōjo manga, where the image of
the beautiful boy has been argued to represent a ‘softer’ masculinity that is

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Thomas Baudinette

7. This was particularly ‘safer’ for female consumption compared to typical depictions of masculin-
true of Sabu and
Adon but less true of
ity found in Japan (McLelland 2000: 69). On the other hand, the informants
Barazoku, which often viewed geikomi as depicting gay men having wild, rough and uncontrollable
contained images of urges, which previous scholarship suggests may be due to their emergence
bisho-nen (McLelland
2000: 130). from the 1970s homo magazines, such as Sabu, which promoted ‘hyper-
masculine’ visions of gay desire (Mackintosh 2010: 18).7 These depictions
8. This narrative is also
common in BL, as contrast quite significantly with the bishōnen aesthetic, although recent years
demonstrated by have seen the appearance of a significant minority of geikomi artists such as
Mizoguchi’s (2000) Nohara Kuro and Maeda Poketto who do include bishōnen within their work
analysis of BL texts
produced in the 1990s. (Baudinette 2016: 116).
Another important distinction between the two genres, which the inform-
9. Tagame’s argument,
which assumes that ants did not mention, is that there is a tendency within BL for the characters
all men who possess to not identify themselves as homosexual but rather as heterosexual men who
same-sex desire should
act in specific ways,
are somehow attracted to other men (Ishida 2015: 221). That is, their identities
fails to take into are not presented as linked to an inherent and unchanging same-sex desire
account the fact that but rather represent a contextualized attraction to a specific individual (who
geikomi is likewise
highly stylized and happens to be of the same sex) (Ishida 2015: 221–22). This is in distinction to
unrealistic. For a geikomi, where at least one of the characters is often explicitly identified as
critique of this view, either homo (during the 1970s) or gay/gei (since the 1990s) (Tagame 2015:
see Baudinette (2016).
116), although it is not uncommon for one partner to be a fetishized hetero-
sexual man (who is often a victim of rape) (Baudinette 2016: 118).8 As will
be discussed in the following section, the fact that the informants discounted
such a crucial generic distinction between BL and geikomi is firmly rooted in
their contemporary experience of identifying as gay/gei in Japan.
Since BL contains such representational practices, a debate emerged in
previous scholarship concerning whether or not BL can be viewed as ‘authen-
tically’ gay (see McLelland 2000; Mizoguchi 2000; Tagame 2003). These
debates had their genesis within the so-called yaoi ronsō/yaoi dispute of the
early 1990s (Lunsing 2006), with yaoi being a term for BL texts, produced at an
amateur level by fans, that was dominant in the 1980s (Galbraith 2015: 154).
Writing in the feminist coterie magazine Choisir, self-professed gay man and
activist Satō Masaki argued that the depictions of gay men found in BL were
‘effeminate’, linking this to the discriminatory tendency of Japanese society
to understand male homosexuality as transgendered (Ishida 2015: 214). Satō
(1996) claimed that such representations differed greatly to the lived experi-
ence of gay men and were ultimately reinforcing harmful mainstream ideas
about gay life in Japan. Satō’s position was echoed by Tagame Gengoroh, a
prominent geikomi artist, who argued that geikomi represents a more ‘real-
istic’ example of ‘gay erotic art’ that challenges normative understandings of
gay men as transgendered by focusing on the hyper-masculine and rough
nature of gay men’s desires (Tagame 2003: 13).9
In response to these arguments, female authors and BL fans such as
Fujimoto Yukari (1998) and Mizuma Midory (2005) emphasized that BL
instead functioned as a ‘fantasy’ that allowed young women to explore their
own sexuality in a non-threatening manner. Crucial to their argument was
the fact that the men depicted in BL were not traditionally expected to be
understood as gay/gei (Ishida 2015: 221). Thus, for these authors, whether
or not BL accurately reflected the lived experience of gay men was immate-
rial. Fujimoto (1998) and Mizuma (2005) argued that, because BL texts were
essentially women’s texts, all that was important was the fact that BL provided
women with the sexual agency to explore their identities and desires (see
Ishida 2015: 216). Such arguments, Ishida suggests, can be summed up as

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 Japanese gay men’s attitudes towards ‘gay manga’ …

centring on women readers’ use of gay men as surrogates for their own sexual
selves, a practice that he terms ‘the appropriation of representation (hyōshō no
ōdatsu)’ (2015: 217).
For the six informants, both BL and geikomi are equally fantastic and
claims that one is more authentic or real than the other were viewed with
derision. They each stated that they believed BL and geikomi depict two
different yet ultimately fantastic and complementary discourses of gay desire
and identity. This belief in the interrelationship of BL and geikomi repre-
sented the basis for the informants’ conceptualization of a meta-genre they
termed ‘gay manga’. The stylistic differences found between BL and geikomi
were reported as presenting two equally valid depictions of gay/gei subjectiv-
ity. In the words of Junho, ‘gay manga… that is BL and geikomi… show the
two sides inherent to gay men’. Explaining further, Junho suggested that BL
demonstrated gay men’s need for and investment in romantic relationships,
whereas geikomi depicted the ‘carnal’ nature of gay desire. A more fannish
reader, Haruma, claimed that BL can be understood as promoting ren’ai or
romansu, which both signify a spiritual or emotional love (Ryang 2006: 13),
whereas geikomi was linked to erosu or koi, terms that connote carnal lust
and bodily desire (Ryang 2006: 14).
For the six men, it did not matter that BL was typically written by women.
The gender of the author was not an important factor in how the six men
consumed and understood BL and/or geikomi. Rather, it was the content of
the media, and the ways in which the informants used them, that informed
their conceptualization of the meta-genre of ‘gay manga’.

‘GAY MANGA’ AS DEFINED THROUGH CONTENT

For the informants, understandings of BL and geikomi attached to content
were more salient than stylistic or market-based definitions. It is here that
the informants’ historically-situated understandings of what may be consid-
ered gay/gei play a particularly crucial role. The informants understood both
BL and geikomi as depicting ‘gay men’, and this is perhaps because it is now
becoming increasingly common for the characters in BL to self-identify as
gay/gei (Ishida 2015: 221). That both BL and geikomi contained depictions of
gay men (which were often sexually explicit) qualified them both for inclusion
within the informants’ definition of ‘gay media’. Indeed, the informants’ defi-
nitions of ‘gay media’ ultimately rested on this presence of, and focus upon,
gay men, relationships and sex.
The six informants reported that they consumed many kinds of media
content, which one would expect to be classified as ‘gay media’ due to their
explicit production for a gay male audience. This included gay pornography,
magazines, dating sites, gay news sites and geikomi. However, they all also
stated that they considered a genre of TV shows called one- variety shows/one-
baraeti bangumi as ‘gay media’, and they all consumed such shows with vary-
ing levels of frequency. One- variety shows are produced for the consumption
of mainstream audiences and star cross-dressing male ‘homosexuals’ known
as one-, which literally means ‘older sister’ but could be more idiomatically
translated within this context as ‘queen’ (Maree 2013). They are also known as
okama, but as discussed below this term is considered somewhat problematic
by certain groups. Within these shows, the one- celebrities are often the target
of crass and homophobic humour due to their inability to successfully ‘pass’
as women (McLelland 2000: 55).

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Thomas Baudinette

Whether or not onē/okama could truly be considered gay/gei became a

significant point of controversy among many gay activists during the early
2000s (McLelland 2005: 180). Sparked by outrage over the use of the term
okama within the magazine Shūkan Kin’yōbi in a 2001 article about self-iden-
tified okama activist Tōgo Ken (see Fushimi et al. 2002), many gay activists
argued that okama is a discriminatory term due to its implication that gay men
are ‘transgendered’ or ‘failed men’ (McLelland 2005: 181). While okama was
considered by both mainstream society and the gay community to represent a
transgendered subject during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Maree’s insight-
ful analysis of contemporary attitudes to onē/okama suggests that today onē
are widely accepted as being at least potentially gay/gei (2013: 11–12). Indeed,
all of the informants in this study besides Kensuke rated onē positively and
were happy to classify them as gay/gei, hence making onē variety shows a
form of ‘gay media’. This understanding is based on the recognition that onē
were, in Haruma’s words, ‘another kind of gay’.
Under a framework in which onē are recognized as ‘another kind of gay’,
it is unsurprising that BL and geikomi were also both considered ‘gay media’,
with Yōichi explaining that to conceptually separate them from each other
made little sense. He stated, ‘they are both manga, two sides of the same
coin… they have gay guys in them, even if they look different… so they’re
gay manga, right?’ This view was shared by the other five informants. While it
could be argued that such a definition of ‘gay manga’ is somewhat simplistic,
this does not delegitimize the fact that the presence of what the six informants
viewed as gay/gei men within manga was crucial to make consumption of
this media meaningful to them. The presence of gay men within ‘gay manga’
allowed for an affective engagement with the texts, empowering the inform-
ants to ‘use their imaginations to interact differently with media… and the
world around them’ in a way analogous to the female fans of BL (Galbraith
2015: 164). The informants were able to access a variety of different fantasies
concerning gay experience and relate these to their own everyday lives, sexual
desires and personal aspirations.
For the six men, the idea that something called ‘gay manga’ existed was
empowering. As Haruma explained, ‘both kinds of gay manga have played
an important part in teaching me about myself’. The ability to utilize media
according to their own needs and wants instilled the men with a sense of
sexual agency. Kensuke, who was perhaps the least frequent consumer of BL,
claimed that he occasionally read such manga so as to ‘explore how young
women understand the way guys like me live’. He believed that, although the
depictions of gay men found within BL did not specifically resonate with him,
they still had a legitimate place within the Japanese ‘gay media’ landscape.

‘GAY MANGA’ AS DEFINED THROUGH USE

The six informants also appeared to reflect upon the way they utilized BL and
geikomi to classify them as ‘gay manga’. The subjective meanings that derive
from how the men utilize ‘gay manga’ form the basis of their understand-
ing of these texts rather than their apparent market-based genres. Indeed,
the ways in which the informants drew upon their understandings of the
purposes to which they put ‘gay manga’ resonates strongly with the ‘uses and
gratifications approach’ to the study of media consumption (Rubin and Rubin
1985). This approach ‘seeks to explain the role of mass media for individuals
and society from the perspective of the consumer’ (Rubin and Rubin 1985: 36)

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 Japanese gay men’s attitudes towards ‘gay manga’ …

by focusing the discussion upon ‘the social and psychological origins of [a 10. An investigation of
this claim would be
consumer’s] needs, which generate [their] expectations of mass media’ (Katz an interesting and
et al. 1973: 510). useful direction for
In a statement that correlated with the experiences of the five other future research,
particularly since some
informants, Kensuke explained that, as both BL and geikomi typically contain scholars have argued
depictions of (what he considered to be) gay/gei sex, he would utilize both BL that heterosexual
and geikomi as an aid to masturbation. Such a statement clearly demonstrates women’s consumption
of BL could also
how the informants have internalized an understanding of all same-sex activ- be considered
ity between men as gay/gei, showing how they consciously disregard the fact pornographic (see Mori
2010).
that within BL in particular many characters explicitly reject identifying them-
selves as gay/gei (Ishida 2015: 217). All six informants quite candidly admitted 11. This is in
contradistinction
that they would often masturbate over the pictures found within both BL and to ‘Western’ (North
geikomi. Márcio and Haruma claimed that geikomi were more ‘exciting’ for American and
the purposes of masturbation. However, this was not because they personally European) gay media,
which McLelland (2000:
found these texts ‘more authentic’ but rather because the physical appear- 123–24) suggests also
ances of the characters in geikomi resonated with the physical appearances of serve an important
the men they found attractive ‘in real life’ (that is, large, bulky and rough, an community-building
function, which seems
aesthetic called gacchimuchi; see Baudinette 2016). somewhat absent
‘Gay manga’, referring to both BL and geikomi, were accessed by the six within Japanese gay
media. However, see
men online through the massive public access forum 2-channel (commonly Mackintosh (2010:
called Ni-chan) where they were often labelled as onani-yō okazu gazō/side- 43–93) for a persuasive
dish pictures used for masturbation. Threads on 2-channel that are labelled counter-claim.
‘side-dish pictures’ also typically include images from Japanese and western
gay pornography, and the inclusion of ‘gay manga’ with pornographic texts,
coupled with the informants’ use of ‘gay manga’ as a masturbatory aid, led the
six men to view ‘gay manga’ as primarily pornographic content. Importantly,
the informants stated that it was just as likely for BL to be presented as a ‘side
dish picture used for masturbation’ as geikomi, perhaps suggesting that there
is a tendency for gay men to view BL as pornographic texts.10
Here, yet again, the importance of an affective (and, perhaps, an ‘auto-
erotic’) relationship with the text is important to the informants’ understand-
ing of the texts. Although there was a shared belief among the informants
that BL was ‘romantic’ whereas geikomi was ‘erotic’, the six men’s consump-
tion of both kinds of text was quite similar to their consumption of porno-
graphic videos and ‘gay media’ content, which they all consumed extremely
frequently. As Yōichi, a casual consumer, explained, ‘as a guy, I am horny all
the time… gay manga is useful and I can cum quickly [when I consume it]/
otoko toshite, itsumo muramura suru… gei manga wa benri de, hayaku ikeru
yo’. The informants made no distinction between BL and geikomi when they
were approached for the purposes of masturbation, since the immediate aim
of consumption was sexual gratification.
The fact that both BL and geikomi are put to masturbatory purposes by
the informants demonstrates how these six men have incorporated their
consumption of these manga into their wider consumption of ‘gay media’,
since comments made during interviews indicated that masturbation was
a prime motivator for the informants’ ‘gay media’ consumption. This is
unsurprising since McLelland (2000: 123) has argued through his sociologi-
cal survey of 1990s’ Japanese ‘gay media’ that the majority of such media is
designed to cater to masturbatory uses.11 This demonstrates how the need to
experience sexual gratification through masturbation motivates consumption
and how this need forms the basis for an understanding of BL and geikomi
as ‘gay media’.

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Thomas Baudinette

‘GAY MANGA’ AS DEFINED THROUGH ‘PRODUSAGE’

To investigate consumer and use-based definitions of ‘gay manga’ in more
depth, I present brief case studies of how Shōtarō and Márcio both produce
and consume ‘gay manga’ as fan ‘produsers’. The concept of produsage was
developed by new media scholar Axel Bruns (2008) to emphasize the agency
of the consumer within a media marketplace that is becoming typified by
high levels of ‘convergence’. According to Jenkins, convergence refers to ‘the
flow of content across media platforms, the cooperations between multiple
media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will
go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment they want’ (2006:
2). Thus, a produser is a fan who not only consumes a particular commodity
but also creates it at an amateur level (Bruns 2008). Through their produs-
age, a fan has the agency to redefine and re-interpret media content in ways
that may challenge and subvert the way media were intended to be norma-
tively consumed and understood. Produsage has particular salience among
Japanese fans of manga and anime who are well known for their production
of unofficial fan texts (Welker 2015). Indeed, the production of homoerotic
dōjinshi, or fan-published magazines where fans depict their favourite char-
acters within parodic or erotic/pornographic situations, is an important aspect
of BL fandom in Japan (Welker 2015: 55).
Shōtarō has been consuming BL manga since his early teens, and began
supplementing this consumption with geikomi after encountering such manga
in Bádi in his 20s. Shōtarō is an amateur mangaka/manga artist who dreams
of one day working within Japan’s creative industries to produce his own ‘gay
manga’. Shōtarō spends much of his time drawing original homoerotic illus-
trations as well as BL dōjinshi of his favourite manga series, all of which he
uploads onto his Pixiv account. Pixiv (www.pixiv.net) is a personal portfolio
website popular with amateur artists that allows members to upload their
images online so that other members of the website may view and comment
on their work. Shōtarō is part of a large community of both BL and geikomi
artists on the site, including professional geikomi artists such as Kumada
Pūsuke, Tagame Gengoroh and Murata Poko.
On his Pixiv account, Shōtarō uploads his art and tags them as gei
manga/gay manga, rejecting the more common gei-muke/for gay men tag for
geikomi and fu-muke/for fujoshi or ‘rotten female fans of BL’ tag typically
utilized for BL. Indeed, Shōtarō, drawing upon his failed romantic adven-
tures in Tokyo’s gay town of Shinjuku Ni-chōme, hopes to create a ‘truly gay
manga’ that synthesizes the stylistic and thematic aspects of BL and geikomi.
As a produser, Shōtarō is representative of a movement among amateur
mangaka seeking to bring BL and geikomi into dialogue. This movement has
gained prominence in recent years due to high-profile support from estab-
lished artists such as the geikomi author and self-identified gay man Takeshi
Matsu and the prolific (female) mangaka Yoshinaga Fumi, whose innovative
and genre-defying work often plays with gender and sexuality. Ultimately,
through his amateur works, Shōtarō challenges and subverts the normative
view of BL and geikomi as incompatible and oppositional. His decision to
label his works ‘gay manga’, rather than geikomi or BL, represented a deliber-
ate strategy that sought to deconstruct or even ‘queer’ normative conceptual-
izations of these texts.
Márcio’s case is somewhat different. Rather than identifying himself as an
amateur creator, he is instead an amateur curator who runs an English and

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 Japanese gay men’s attitudes towards ‘gay manga’ …

Portuguese language Tumblr fan page upon which he shares BL and geikomi 12. This, and subsequent
quotes from interviews
images. Originally conceived as a BL fan page where he could share images about Márcio’s use
by his favourite BL artists, Márcio began uploading geikomi onto his site after of Tumblr, is from
moving to Japan and coming into contact with such manga. He explained interviews conducted
in English.
that his decision to include geikomi on what was originally a BL fan page was
motivated by his desire to ‘show-off the wide range of gay manga available in
Japan’.12 Importantly, Márcio’s Tumblr fan page also acts as an archive of his
favourite ‘gay manga’ to be used for masturbatory purposes, and he invites
other users of the fan page to similarly use his site to ‘get off’.
Throughout the site, Márcio utilizes the term ‘gay manga’ to discuss his
decision to create an archive that contains both BL and geikomi. Like Shōtarō,
Márcio is seeking to bring BL and geikomi into dialogue, and he thus rejects
the use of the term ‘gay manga’ to refer only to geikomi. Instead, he believes
that treating ‘gay manga’ as an overarching category or meta-genre within
which BL and geikomi are located represents a more useful way to express the
numerous ways male homosexuality is represented in Japanese popular culture
texts to foreign audiences, as well as a more suitable way to label a collection
of ‘pics to jerk off to’. Márcio’s desire to encourage his readers to masturbate
(virtually) together over ‘gay manga’ appears to represent his attempt to create
a community of ‘auto-erotic’ affect where the act of sexually pleasuring the
self becomes the basis for the interconnected consumption of BL and geikomi.
Through their produsage, both Shōtarō and Márcio set themselves up in
deliberate opposition to the conventional wisdom that seeks to disassociate
BL from geikomi. Their decision to engage in such subversion represents an
instance where their agency as producers and curators of homoerotic content
allowed them to fashion conceptual worlds in which their own personal
understandings of media destabilized market-based approaches to under-
standing BL and geikomi. Indeed, Shōtarō’s attempts to synthesize aspects of
the two genres within his dōjinshi indicates his investment in reconceptualiz-
ing what is and is not appropriate for a gay man to produce and consume. As
he eloquently explained, ‘the gay manga I create provides me with a frame-
work to explore my feelings of loneliness in the gay scene’, and he feels that it
is this personal and emotional attachment to ‘gay manga’ that is most impor-
tant for him. Márcio, seeking to ‘educate’ Brazilian fans of BL about the exist-
ence of geikomi, likewise finds ‘gay manga’ a useful meta-generic label to
destabilize the normative assumptions of these fans.
Within these two case studies, as well as the patterns of ‘gay media’
consumption of all six informants, we can see instances where fannish and
casual consumers create meaningful frameworks for their relationships with
media that are quite distinct from the frameworks that have been offered up
in previous scholarly and activist literature. Furthermore, much like female
fans of BL (Galbraith 2015), the informants are seeking to make affective
communities based on exploring homoerotic manga, regardless of the gender
of the authors who produced them.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Focusing on the specific attitudes and consumer practices of individual
gay readers of BL and geikomi, this article provides an important explora-
tive impression of an under-studied population of consumers in Japan.
Paying close attention to how gay/gei consumers of both BL and geikomi
have mobilized the term ‘gay manga’ within their discussions of ‘gay media’

www.intellectbooks.com   69
Thomas Baudinette

consumption, this article has shifted the focus of discussion away from
conventional, market-based definitions of ‘gay media’ to a definition based
more on consumer attitudes and experiences.
Consuming BL and geikomi provided the six informants with two different
yet equally valid understandings of same-sex desire, which they made relevant
through the various ways they used the texts. As such, this article demonstrates
how attitudes to what constitutes ‘gay media’ in Japan have shifted since much
of the work on BL was initially conducted during the 1990s, paving the way
for larger surveys of contemporary gay men’s attitudes towards both BL and
geikomi. In particular, there is a need to investigate which kinds of BL and
geikomi gay men in Japan enjoy consuming, as well as how they consume it,
to further understand how BL informs Japanese gay men’s understandings of
their gay desires and identities. Furthermore, work that explicitly compares the
attitudes of gay/gei BL consumers with those of heterosexual female consum-
ers also appears to be a fruitful avenue for future research.
Genre is becoming an increasingly important topic within the emerging
field of manga studies (Baudinette 2016; Unser-Schutz 2015). Thus, scholars
must continue to engage with genre from the perspectives of actual consum-
ers to critically investigate the relevance of such classifications to individuals’
understandings of manga. This article represents a first step towards such an
analysis, augmenting previous studies of manga fans’ reading practices and
laying the groundwork for more critical studies of casual and fannish readers’
affective engagements with, and understandings of, manga as media texts.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Baudinette, T. (2017), ‘Japanese gay men’s attitudes towards “gay manga”
and the problem of genre’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 3: 1,
pp. 59–72, doi: 10.1386/eapc.3.1.59_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Thomas Baudinette is a Lecturer of Japanese Studies in the Department of
International Studies, Macquarie University. His research investigates how
consuming media informs young Japanese gay men’s understandings of their
desires and identities. He also writes on the experiences of Chinese gay men
living in Japan and has a broad interest in Japanese popular culture. Thomas
welcomes questions and comments on this article and may be contacted at 
t.baudinette@gmail.com. 
Contact: Department of International Studies, Building W6A, Room 337,
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia.
E-mail: t.baudinette@gmail.com

Thomas Baudinette has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

72    East Asian Journal of Popular Culture