Both are pretty typical of their genres, following plot lines that are set in fantasy worlds and characters who take on really specific, fetishised, sexualised roles – think pretty, queer boys and girls exploring the physical side of same-sex relationships via the medium of illustrated porn, which can often be extremely graphic and hardcore – especially in the case of yaoi. Two really popular examples of this are Ten Count, a yaoi manga which tells the story of a gay relationship between Shirotani and his counsellor Riku, and Citrus, a yuri comic which follows the evolving relationship between Mei and Yuzu… who also happen to be stepsisters. In fact, there are whole manga genres that depict same-sex relationships, yaoi or ‘boys love’ and yuri or ‘girls’ love’, which are extremely popular. “A lot of the information online said stuff like ‘you will die at the age of 30 if you take hormones’ or that I wouldn’t be able to live and work in Japan as a trans man” – Mika Yakushi “Before reading that comic book, I thought that I was different and I tried to hide it,” she explains, “but once I read the comic book I started to think it’s OK to be different and it completely changed how I thought about myself”. It’s an imaginary world where gender and sexuality are often very fluid and so many LGBT kids are turning to the pages of comics books for a sympathetic portrayal of queer characters In an interview with the HRW, Aiko from Osaka describes how important coming across a trans character in a manga book at 17 was for coming to terms with being transgender herself. In the pages of manga comics you can be anything you like – a superhero, a master villain, a supernatural being. “A lot of kids see that every day and they think they can behave in the same way towards LGBT kids.”
#Gay anime boys to draw tv#
“There are a lot of gay and trans people on TV shows in Japan, but they're often laughed at,” says Yakushi. Unfortunately, the portrayal of LGBT characters on Japanese TV isn’t positive and instead they’re often made figures of fun and derided. This means that Japanese kids have to look elsewhere for queer role models. For young people, even if they find a site that doesn’t tell scare stories, it’s mostly the medical side of being LGBT that’s addressed rather than the daily challenges. “A lot of the information online said stuff like ‘you will die at the age of 30 if you take hormones’ or that I wouldn’t be able to live and work in Japan as a trans man,” he says. Yakushi explained that the degree of ambiguity and lack of information surrounding LGBT issues is extreme. We spoke with Mika Yakushi, a trans man who runs the non-profit Tokyo-based LGBT support group ReBit, to talk about the situation for LGBT kids in Japan. To put it bluntly, neither Japanese schools nor the country’s wider society acknowledge LGBT issues, a silence that forces children to seek information from other sources. Bullying, isolation and misunderstanding are endemic in schools, leading to alarmingly high levels of self-harm and suicide amongst LGBT youth – around 30 percent of LGBT kids contemplate suicide. In Japanese schools, as in wider society, high levels of conformity are expected from young people and children who are different can be deemed ‘damaging’ to group harmony, in fact one of the HRW reports was called “ The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down”. The value of LGBT characters in manga has been highlighted in a number of recent Human Rights Watch reports explaining how kids are having to turn to manga because they’ve been let down by the state and by schools, which haven’t really, until very recently, acknowledged the reality of LGBT kids in the classroom.
#Gay anime boys to draw series#
Both Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, perhaps two of the most well-known and best-loved manga series ever feature gay individuals – in fact, Sailor Neptune and Sailor Moon are probably the most famous animated lesbian couple out there. Both manga and its animated version, anime, are places where transgressive behaviour is allowed or lauded and they’ve long been places where gay love stories are portrayed.
Japanese youth can find themselves seriously lacking in accessible information on LGBT issues, so they turn to alternative, escapist, fantasy literature to enter a world where queer people exist openly. While it might sound crazy, for many young LGBT people in Japan the only images they have of people they identify with are the stylised ones they see staring back at them from the black and white pages of manga comics. Imagine you’re flipping through a comic book when you suddenly come across a character you haven’t seen before and, for the first time in your life, you see yourself reflected openly in a public space.