Bara (genre)
While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
Bara is distinct from yaoi, a genre of Japanese media focusing on homoerotic relationships between male characters that historically has been created by and for women.
[5] By the late 1980s, as LGBT political movements in Japan began to form, the term fell out of use,[1] with gei (ゲイ) becoming the preferred nomenclature for people who experience same-sex attraction.
[1][3][7] The term was subsequently adopted by non-Japanese users of these websites, who believed that bara was the proper designation for the images and artwork being posted on these forums.
[7][8] This misappropriation of bara by a non-Japanese audience has been controversial among creators of gay manga, many of whom have expressed discomfort or confusion over the term being used to describe their work.
[9][13] While these works ostensibly depict male-male sexual relations, artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame questions whether the historic practices of sodomy and pederasty represented in these works can be considered analogous to modern conceptions of gay identity, and thus part of the artistic tradition to which contemporary gay erotic Japanese art belongs.
[17] Gay erotic art of this period typically depicts what Tagame describes as "darkly spiritual male beauty", emphasizing a sense of sorrow and sentimentalism.
[13] These new magazines featured gay manga as part of their editorial material; notable early serializations include Gokigenyō (ごきげん曜, "How Are You") by Yamaguchi Masaji (山口正児) in Barazoku, and Tough Guy (タフガイ) and Make Up (メイクアップ) by Kaidō Jin (海藤仁) in Adon.
[23] The artists that emerged during this period, notably Sadao Hasegawa, Ben Kimura, Rune Naito, and George Takeuchi, varied widely in style and subject material.
[20] Nonetheless, their artwork was united by a tone that was generally less sorrowful than that of the artists that emerged in the 1960s, a trend Tagame attributes to the gradual decline in the belief that homosexuality was shameful or abnormal.
[20] Their work was also more overtly influenced by American and European gay culture in its subject material, with sportsmen, jock straps, and leather garments appearing more frequently than yakuza and samurai.
[20] Tagame attributes this shift to the increased access of American gay pornography for use as reference material and inspiration,[24] and the growth in popularity of sports manga, which emphasized themes of athleticism and manliness.
[29][30] The "bear-type" aesthetic pioneered by Tagame's manga in G-men is credited with provoking a major stylistic shift in Shinjuku Ni-chōme, the gay neighborhood of Tokyo.
[39] Gay manga artists like Gai Mizuki emerged as prolific creators of dōjinshi, creating slash-inspired derivative works based on media properties such as Attack on Titan and Fate/Zero.
[42] A scanlation of Kuso Miso Technique, a 1987 one-shot by Junichi Yamakawa originally published in Bara-Komi, became infamous during this period as an internet meme.
[44] Gay manga is typically categorized based on the body shape of the characters depicted; common designations include gatchiri (ガッチリ, "muscular"), gachimuchi (ガチムチ, "muscle-curvy" or "muscle-chubby"), gachidebu (ガチデブ, "muscle-fat"), and debu (デブ, "fat").
BDSM and non-consensual sex are common themes in gay manga,[45][46] as well as stories based on relationships structured around age, status, or power dynamics.
[49] Nonetheless, some gay manga stories explore romantic, autobiographical, and dramatic subject material,[50] and eschew depictions of sex entirely.
[49] Several attempts were made at creating publications dedicated exclusively to gay manga prior to the 2000s, notably Bara-Komi in 1986 and P-Nuts in 1996, though none were commercially successful.
[61] The first gay manga to receive an officially-licensed English-language translation was Standing Ovations, a one-shot by Gengoroh Tagame published in the American erotic comics anthology Thickness (2011–2012).
[53] Gengoroh Tagame argues that these crossover publications represent the movement of yaoi away from aestheticism and towards the commercialization of male-male sexuality for a female market.
[77] Critics and commentators have noted that this shift in preferences among yaoi readers, and subsequent creation of works that feature characteristics of both yaoi and gay manga, represents a blurring of the distinctions between the genres;[11][76] anthropologist Thomas Baudinette notes in his fieldwork that gay men in Japan "saw no need to sharply disassociate BL from gei komi when discussing their consumption of 'gay media'.
