Gengoroh Tagame
For much of his career Tagame exclusively created erotic and pornographic manga, works that are distinguished by their graphic depictions of sadomasochism, sexual violence, and hypermasculinity. Beginning in the 2010s, Tagame gained mainstream recognition after he began to produce non-pornographic manga depicting LGBT themes and subject material; his 2014 manga series "My Brother's Husband", his first series aimed at a general audience, received widespread critical acclaim and was awarded a Japan Media Arts Festival Prize, a Japan Cartoonists Association Award, and an Eisner Award. Tagame is further noted for his contributions as an art historian, through  his multi-volume gay erotic art anthology series "Gay Erotic Art in Japan". Biography. Early life and career. Tagame was born in Kamakura on February 3, 1964 into a family distantly descended from samurai. The youngest of two brothers, Tagame was forbidden from reading manga as a child with the exception of the works of Osamu Tezuka, which his parents believed had literary merit. He became exposed to a broader array of manga by reading "shōnen" (boys' comics) stories in barber shop waiting rooms, notably the works of horror authors Kazuo Umezu and Go Nagai, whose manga often featured violent  and sexual themes. He began drawing as a child, and by middle school was drawing amateur comics for his classmates and teachers. In his early teens he began drawing pornographic manga after reading novels by the Marquis de Sade and discovering the magazine "Renaissance", which re-printed material from underground BDSM manga zines; Tagame has remarked that he discovered his interest in BDSM before he realized he was gay. He became aware of his homosexuality after watching films featuring "naked and bound men" (such as the Italian "Hercules" series and Charlton Heston in "Planet of the Apes") and discovering the  gay men's magazine . He found that he was uninterested in stories in "Sabu" focused on romance, and drawn to stories that focused on sadomasochism. In high school Tagame began writing manga professionally, and contributed to the manga magazine "June" in 1982 under a pen name. "June" was a yaoi (male-male romance manga, also known as boys' love or BL) magazine that targeted a primarily female readership, and was noted for its avant-garde stories with complex plots and social realism; Tagame's first story in "June" focused on a "pretty boy who cross dresses" whose father is murdered  by his boyfriend. Tagame struggled with his sexuality and interest in sadomasochism through high school, and did not come out until his freshman year of college. Upon graduating high school Tagame moved to Tokyo to study graphic design at Tama Art University against the wishes of his parents, who expected him to attend the University of Tokyo and become a banker. Throughout college he submitted gay erotic stories, illustrations, and manga to "Barazoku", "René", and other gay and BL magazines under a variety of pseudonyms. He eventually settled on the pen name "Gengoroh Tagame"; both words are Japanese terms for  different species of water bugs, which Tagame chose to differentiate himself from the "macho or romantic" pen names used by other gay Japanese artists. While on a student art tour of Europe, Tagame discovered the American leather magazine "Drummer" at a bookshop in London. The magazine featured homoerotic and fetishistic illustrations by western artists such as Tom of Finland, Rex, and Bill Ward, and would heavily influence Tagame's art. After graduating university he began to work as a commercial graphic designer and later art director, while continuing to write manga and prose fiction. Gay erotic manga. The 1980s saw  an increase in the popularity of gay media in Japan, a trend inspired by the cultural importation of works by American gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Edmund White. As Japanese publishers sought to exploit this new interest in gay art created by gay artists, Tagame emerged as an influential artist on the basis of his work at "June", "Barazoku", and other magazines. Tagame made his debut as a gay erotic manga artist in 1987, creating manga for "Sabu". In contrast to the heterosexual and female-oriented "yaoi" and BL magazines that had published Tagame's previous works, "Sabu  was produced by gay men for a gay male audience. His manga series , originally serialized in the gay men's magazine Badi" from 1992 to 1993, was published as a book in 1994 and became the first gay comic work in Japan to turn a profit. The breakout success of "The Toyed Man" demonstrated the viability of gay manga – manga about gay relationships for a gay male audience, in contrast to "yaoi" – as a commercial category, and established it as a genre "of cultural merit and artistic importance." Tagame's second longform series, the 824-page, three-volume historical epic  , is noted by Graham Kolbeins as widening "the scope of what gay manga could be narratively" beyond stories focused largely on pornography to incorporate complex narrative and aesthetic elements. In 1995, Tagame and two editors from "Badi" founded the gay men's magazine "G-men", a shorthand for "Gengoroh's Men". The magazine focused on works depicting masculine, physically large men, and featured manga depicting older and muscular body types. "G-men" was part of a concerted effort by Tagame to "change the status quo of gay magazines" away from the aesthetic of "bishōnen" – delicate and androgynous boys and young  men that were popular in gay media at the time. "G-men" was a success, and by 1996, Tagame was working full-time as a gay manga artist. The magazine serialized the bulk of Tagame's manga published during the 1990s and early 2000s, notably "Do You Remember the South Island's POW Camp?" and "Pride". Tagame continued to publish his serialized manga as books during this period, initially through gay pornography production companies, and later through formal publishers. Beginning in 2003, Tagame began publishing the multi-volume gay erotic art anthology series "Gay Erotic Art in Japan", which follows  the history of Japanese gay erotic art from the 1950s to the present. International and crossover success. Tagame attracted an international audience beginning in the 2000s though the circulation of pirated and scanlated versions of his works. His works began to receive officially-licensed translations in 2005, after French publisher H&O Editions released a translation of his manga series "Gunji"; an exhibition of his works was held in Paris in 2009. In 2012, an English-language translation of Tagame's one-shot manga "Standing Ovations" was published in "Thickness", an erotic comics anthology published by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge , marking the first release of an officially-licensed English-language translation of Tagame's manga. American publisher PictureBox published "The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame", an English-language anthology of Tagame's manga, in 2013; several of Tagame's works were also translated into English by the now-defunct publishing house Bruno Gmünder Verlag. In 2013, Tagame was approached by editors at the publishing company Futabasha about creating a manga series for general audiences. Though Tagame had previously been approached by mainstream manga magazines about creating a non-pornographic autobiographical manga series, he had declined the offers, stating that he "did n't want to abandon my style and my audience by writing a more mainstream work." Beginning in the early 2010s, Tagame noted that while same-sex marriage was rarely covered in the mainstream Japanese press, the issue generated significant interest among his heterosexual fans when he posted about the topic on his Twitter account. Subsequently, Tagame pitched Futabasha for a series about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in Japan from the perspective of a straight character; the resulting series was "My Brother's Husband", which was serialized in the "seinen" (manga for young adult men) magazine "Monthly Action" from  2014 to 2017. The series was widely acclaimed, won numerous awards, and was adapted into a live-action television drama that aired on NHK in 2018. Tagame has continued to create erotic manga concurrently with all-ages manga, stating that the experience of creating "My Brother's Husband" made him "realize how much fun [all-ages manga] is to draw" and that balancing the creation of erotic works with the creation of all-ages works was "very healthy for me, mentally." "Our Colors", his second series aimed at a general audience, was serialized in "Monthly Action" from 2018 to 2020 . Style and influences. Tagame describes his style as , a term he uses to describe the masculine, muscular, and hirsute men that he draws. Sex is typically the primary focus of Tagame's manga and his works are almost invariably fetishistic in nature, featuring depictions of bondage, discipline, leather, and sadomasochism. These themes are often amplified through his use of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction to create surreal and hyperreal sexual scenarios. Tagame has acknowledged that his manga "represents a very small minority of the world. In the real world, the large majority of people don't like torture in  their sex lives, invariably. But I'm not writing for them." Tagame sparingly depicts extreme fetishistic material in work such as coprophilia or graphic violence, noting that the primary purpose of his pornographic works is to inspire sexual excitement and not disgust. While comic art featuring sexualized depictions of masculine men is not unique to Tagame, academic William Armour argues that his works are distinguished from his peers through his interest "in the way in which power relationships between men can be eroticised." His manga has been noted for their aesthetic qualities and psychological complexity, with Armour writing that "while  on one level Tagame presents stories as graphic cartoon porn, on another level he weaves into the images and wording a much deeper sense of how homosociality can easily transform into homosexuality, despite his male characters being positioned as examples of hegemonic masculinity." Tagame himself has stated that "what I have tried to do in my erotica is raise that to the level of art and think about it in terms of art being principally to the service of depicting humanity." While the majority of gay manga artists produce works targeting a gay male audience exclusively, Tagame is noted for  having a significant heterosexual and female audience. Tagame has stated that he adjusts his style if a work is being published in a format where it will be primarily read by a specific subset of his audience, noting that "when I write for gay men's magazines, it's primarily about the hero's initiative and interiority. When I know that women are also going to be reading it [...] they're more interested in seeing actual relationships and coupling." In considering why Tagame's works attract a diverse audience, Anne Ishii hypothesizes that "something about what Tagame does isn't  even about being gay [...] it's about desire and the darker side of desire. It doesn't fit into a sexual category to me." Tagame credits both Japanese and Western artists among his influences, including Caravaggio, Michelangelo, the Marquis de Sade, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Go Mishima, Sanshi Funayama, Oda Toshimi, Suehiro Maruo, Kazuichi Hanawa, Hiromi Hiraguchi, and Bill Ward. Nude figures in Hellenistic and Baroque art, initially encountered by Tagame in classic art anthologies he read as a child, heavily influenced his works. In considering his Western and Japanese influences, Tagame notes that Western Christian art has inspired his depictions of  nudity and humiliation (such as Caravaggio's depictions of the crucifixion of Christ), whereas Japanese classical art such as "shunga" (woodcut erotic art originating in the Edo period) has inspired his depictions of violence. Themes and motifs. Hypermasculinity. The majority of Tagame's works depict men with personal and physical traits associated with hypermasculinity – developed muscles, hirsute bodies, large penises, an exaggerated volume of ejaculate, machismo, and participation in extreme or violent sexual acts. Tagame has stated that he is interested in how men who are perceived as masculine "respond to societal pressure" and "perform their manliness beyond what's  necessary," and how those attitudes change "if a man loses his manliness [...] by participating in activity that normative society believes men would not normally participate in." Armour identifies "Pride", which depicts a dominant university student who is trained into submission by his masochistic professor, and "The Gamefowl in Darkness", which is inspired by Yasujirō Ozu's "A Hen in the Wind" and Edogawa Ranpo's "The Caterpillar", as representative examples of hypermasculine themes in Tagame's works. Tagame's artwork is often associated with "bara", a colloquialism used by non-Japanese audiences to refer to Japanese erotic art featuring masculine  men. Tagame has rejected this association, citing the term's historical use as a pejorative for gay men and calling it "a very negative word that comes with bad connotations." Tagame's works are often categorized alongside the "macho" gay art movement associated with artists such as Tom of Finland, which emerged in American biker culture in the early 1960s and was later adapted by gay men to counter stereotypes of effeteness and emasculation. Designer Chip Kidd has contested this association, arguing that "as delightfully sturdy and game as Tom of Finland’s characters depicted, they never quite seem alive . Tagame’s characters are, by vivid contrast, almost unbearably so." Edmund White argues that the hypermasculine ideal Tagame depicts is more categorically similar to Meiji period literature, specifically the character archetype of a man "who was homosexual because he was uncouth, not refined enough to be heterosexual and to please women, a warrior, a peasant from the south, not fit for decent society." Armour notes that Tagame's works are distinguished from his Western gay comic peers through his subversion of stereotypical portrayals of East Asian men as emasculated and asexual, writing that "while there seems little difference in how  Tagame’s men are drawn and how male characters in Western erotic gay comics are depicted [...] from a white, Western viewpoint, Tagame's depiction of hyper-masculine Japanese men can be considered to break down the stereotype within many Western gay cultures that Asian men in general are skinny, small-dicked, effete weaklings who are fucked for the pleasure of big-dicked, buff macho white guy." Sadomasochism and sexual violence. Though not all sexual depictions in Tagame's manga involve sadomasochism and sexual violence, it is a common theme in his work, with White writing that "in Gengoroh Tagame's  world, no man is ever penetrated willingly." Tagame's BDSM-focused works often depict other taboo subject material, such as rape, bestiality, incest, and body modification. Despite the often graphic subjects of his works, critics have generally not considered Tagame's art as ero guro, or "erotic grotesque" art that focuses on material that is disgusting or horrific. Rather than depict gore and horror overtly, Tagame states that he draws inspiration for his BDSM stories from Shakespearean tragedy, German opera, and Japanese folktales that depict the "beauty of destruction" and a "person who’s falling apart". For example, in his  manga "Missing", a man frees his kidnapped brother by killing the corrupt military officers who have captured him, though the murderous act is intentionally not directly depicted. Tagame's works focused on BDSM frequently depict a protagonist who goes through a process of self-discovery as a result of his participation in a BDSM or otherwise fetishistic relationship. Most often, these stories involve a masculine man whose engagement with BDSM transforms him from a dominant to a submissive sexual role, such as stories featuring "alpha" men who are sexually dominated and tortured or who allow themselves to be sexually debased  out of a sense of responsibility or duty. Kolbeins argues that by depicting BDSM as a process of self-discovery, Tagame's stores are framed "within a relatable framework of human drama," while Kidd notes that "a typical Tagame character can be seen as the ultimate mature brute symbol of authority for whom the tide has abruptly turned." Examples of these themes include "Endless Game", where a man taken as a sex slave comes to enjoy his new status and forces his captors to obey his desires, and "Arena", where a Japanese karate champion becomes involved in an American fighting  tournament where the winner of each match sodomizes the loser. Japanese traditionalism. Tagame's works often depict Japanese historical settings, or draw heavily on traditional Japanese aesthetics in plot or subject material. While homosexuality has a history in Japan dating to ancient times, the country shifted away from a tolerance of homosexuality amid Westernization during the Meiji era (1868–1912), and forms of gay expression that were once accepted became pathologized and criminalized. This tension between traditionalism and modernism manifests in Tagame's erotic manga through his rendering of hierarchies, such as works that focus on the patriarchal nature of Japanese  society, or samurai characters that serve as symbolic representations of an unjust feudal order. Tagame has stated that he is "fascinated by how these hierarchies fail," describing his simultaneous frustration and attraction to hierarchies associated with Japanese traditionalism thusly: One of Tagame's earliest long-form serialized works was "The Silver Flower", a historical drama set in the Edo period that follows a formerly wealthy businessman who is forced into sexual slavery in order to resolve a debt. Through the course of the abuse and humiliation he endures at the hands of his male clients, the character comes to realize  that he is a masochist; Kolbeins notes that the series "examines a time when male-male sexuality flourished in Japanese society, unfettered by Western notions of sin and 'sodomy'." In "Country Doctor", which focuses on a pre-modern Japanese village where western-imposed taboos on sex are absent, Tagame states that he seeks to "spin on its head is this idea that we think people were more conservative in the past and are more liberated in the present." Themes of traditionalism similarly manifest in Tagame's all-ages manga, albeit in a non-sexual context, through their examination of contemporary  Japanese social attitudes towards homosexuality. In "My Brother's Husband", protagonist Yaichi is forced to examine his own preconceived notions about gay people after meeting the husband of his deceased twin brother, with his initial homophobia mirroring the prevalent conservative attitudes towards LGBT rights in Japan. Tagame notes that Yaichi's character arc towards tolerance and acceptance further mirrors themes in his BDSM manga, where characters are faced with a choice between acceptance of reality or the denial of their own desires and happiness. Works. Manga. The following is a list of Tagame's serialized and one-shot manga works . Serializations refer to multi-chapter works that are typically later published as collected editions ("tankōbon"), while one-shots refer to single-chapter works that are sometimes later collected in anthologies. Reception and influence. Tagame is regarded as the most prolific and influential creator of gay manga. The manga anthology "" notes Tagame as "without a doubt the individual most directly responsible for the success of gay manga," while Kidd has compared his oeuvre to that of the Marquis de Sade, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Yukio Mishima. Anthropologist Wim Lunsing credits the "bear-type" aesthetic pioneered by Tagame with provoking a major  stylistic shift in Shinjuku Ni-chōme, the gay neighborhood of Tokyo. Following the publication of "G-men", the "slender and slick" clean-shaven style popular among gay men was replaced with "stubble, beards and moustaches [...] extremely short became the most common hair style and the broad muscular body, soon to evolve to chubby and outright fat, became highly fashionable." Tagame's work in establishing "G-men" is further credited as providing an incubator for up-and-coming talent in the gay manga genre, and launching the careers of artists such as Jiraiya. His archival efforts in producing "Gay Erotic Art  in Japan" are further credited with developing a "gay art canon" of Japanese erotic art. Among Tagame's critics are gay erotic artist Susumu Hirosegawa, who has described his art as "S&M theater" and criticized his manga as "simple emanations of the SM-"shumiō" [hobby] of Tagame." Lunsing concurs that "it is hard to counter [Hirosegawa's] argument, as [Tagame's] stories are not very elaborate." Tagame has won multiple awards for his work, primarily "My Brother's Husband". The series was awarded excellence awards at the 19th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2015 and the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in  2018. Internationally, the series won an Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia in 2018. Works by Tagame were exhibited at the British Museum in 2019, as part of its exhibition on the history of manga. References. Bibliography