Content warning for discussion of rape fantasies, illustrations of penises, and strong irony regarding sensitive topics. I’m really serious about the content warning.

About Gengoroh Tagame. GENGOROH TAGAME was born in 1964 and lives in Tokyo. After graduating from Tama University of Art, Tagame worked as an art director while writing manga and prose fiction, contributing illustrations for various magazines. In 1994 he cofounded the epochal More about Gengoroh Tagame.

This essay is potentially triggering and extremely NSFW. At the Toronto Comic Arts Festival last weekend, announced their titled Massive. This news has been met with congratulations from all corners of English-language manga fandom, which is fantastic, because congratulations are in order. What this excitement has occasionally been accompanied by, however, are snide comments about BL manga. To summarize and simplify these comments: Male sexuality is BEAUTIFUL. Female sexuality is GROSS. Pornography drawn by men is ART.

Pornography drawn by women is TRASH. Male sexual fetishes are EXCITING AND REVOLUTIONARY.

Female sexual fetishes are DESTROYING FEMINISM AND/OR LGBT RIGHTS FOREVER. In other words: Bara manga is GOOD. BL manga is BAD. This sort of mentality is often accompanied by essentializing statements such as: All bara manga is AUTHENTIC. All BL manga is HOMOPHOBIC. The idea behind the above sentiment seems to be that, while all bara manga is always, by its very nature, an accurate depiction of the realities of the gay male lifestyle (note that there is apparently only one gay male lifestyle), BL manga, because it is always drawn by straight women, cannot accurately depict the concerns of gay men.

Okay, so if bara manga is always an accurate depiction of the gay male lifestyle then Tagame Gengorō’s one-shot manga “Standing Ovations” (pictured above), which is about a boxer who is drugged and forced to become a slave and repeatedly raped in front of a live audience, is apparently an accurate representation of the reality of what it means to be a gay man. In another of Tagame’s stories titled “Arena” (pictured above), a boxer is drugged and forced to become a slave and repeatedly raped in front of a live audience. Except he’s eventually chemically lobotomized, and he ends up loving the rape, so it’s not really rape anymore! I had no idea that all gay men everywhere in the world are either attending or participating in these sorts of rape battles. This makes me wonder about bisexual men, or straight men who participate in group sex. Do those guys have their own separate rape battles, or are they just not invited to the rape battles? What about transgender men?

Do they still get to go to the rape battles? And what about the gay men who aren’t interested in rape battles? Do they still get to be gay?

Or am I just being a silly vagina-head by assuming that all gay men are not all totally alike? It turns out that Tagame also wrote stories that were published in BL magazines like June, as well as magazines that have a balanced male/female readership, such as Kinniku otoko: “I wrote ‘Hairy Oracle’ knowing that half of the readers were going to be women, so I tried to include some elements of romance and lightheartedness,” explains Tagame. Pokemon 8: lucario and the mystery of mew cartoon out. “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. So that’s a big difference when I go for writing for one or the other.” Wait So Tagame Gengorō has written BL manga And BL manga is not authentic, because it’s all written by straight women Which means that Tagame Gengorō is a straight woman? My head just exploded.