When he was fifteen, he traveled to Japan for the first time as a high school exchange student, staying in the small, southwestern Japanese city of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, which represented a turning point in his life.

Angles earned his Ph.D. in 2004 with a dissertation about representations of male homoeroticism in the literature of Kaita Murayama and the popular writer Ranpo Edogawa.

This is the basis for his book Writing the Love of Boys published in 2011 by University of Minnesota Press, which also includes new research on Taruho Inagaki and Jun'ichi Iwata.

These views, however, were countered by a number of writers who argued precisely the opposite: that it was a vital, powerful, and even beautiful experience that had a long, rich history in Japan.

In the conclusion of the book, Angles also discusses the ways that contemporary BL manga have inherited and built upon the ideas fashioned by Kaita Murayama, Ranpo Edogawa, and Taruho Inagaki several decades earlier.

Moreover, his translation of the classic modernist novel The Book of the Dead, written in the middle of World War II by the gay novelist, poet, and ethnologist Shinobu Orikuchi attracted a significant amount of attention, winning both the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work from the Modern Language Association[12] and the first-ever Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Prize from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.

[15] He has also been interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered about the short story collection Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion, which he co-edited with J. Thomas Rimer.