Early life and career

Tagame was born in Kamakura on February 3, 1964,^[1][2] into a family distantly descended from samurai.^[3][4] The younger 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.^[4] 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.^[4] He began drawing as a child,^[5] and by middle school was drawing amateur comics for his classmates and teachers.^[5] 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;^[6] Tagame has remarked that he discovered his interest in BDSM before he realized he was gay.^[7]

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)^[8] and discovering the gay men's magazine Sabu [ja]. He found that he was uninterested in stories in Sabu focused on romance, and drawn to stories that focused on sadomasochism.^[8] In high school Tagame began writing manga professionally, and contributed to the manga magazine June in 1982 under a pen name.^[4][5] 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;^[4][6] Tagame's first story in June focused on a "pretty boy who cross dresses" whose father is murdered by his boyfriend.^[5][9] Tagame struggled with his sexuality and interest in sadomasochism through high school, and did not come out until his freshman year of college.^[8]

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.^[4][10] Throughout college he submitted gay erotic stories, illustrations, and manga to Barazoku, René, and other gay and BL magazines under a variety of pseudonyms.^[8][2] 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.^[11] While on a student art tour of Europe, Tagame discovered the American leather magazine Drummer at a bookshop in London.^[11] 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.^[8] After graduating university he began to work as a commercial graphic designer and later art director, while continuing to write manga and prose fiction.^[2][12]

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.^[13] 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.^[13] Tagame made his debut as a gay erotic manga artist in 1987, creating manga for Sabu.^[2] 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.^[2] His manga series The Toyed Man (嬲り者, Naburi-Mono), 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.^[13] 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,^[14] and established it as a genre "of cultural merit and artistic importance."^[13] Tagame's second longform series, the 824-page, three-volume historical epic The Silver Flower (男女郎苦界草紙～銀の華, Shirogane-no-Hana), 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.^[13]

In 1995, Tagame and two editors from Badi founded the gay men's magazine G-men, a shorthand for "Gengoroh's Men".^[13] The magazine focused on works depicting masculine, physically large men, and featured manga depicting older and muscular body types.^[2] G-men was part of a concerted effort by Tagame to "change the status quo of gay magazines"^[8] away from the aesthetic of bishōnen – delicate and androgynous boys and young men that were popular in gay media at the time.^[2][13] G-men was a success, and by 1996, Tagame was working full-time as a gay manga artist.^[12] 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.^[15] Tagame continued to publish his serialized manga as books during this period, initially through gay pornography production companies, and later through formal publishers.^[2] 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.^[2]

International and crossover success

Tagame attracted an international audience beginning in the 2000s though the circulation of pirated and scanlated versions of his works.^[16] 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.^[3] 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.^[4] American publisher PictureBox published The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame, an English-language anthology of Tagame's manga, in 2013;^[4] several of Tagame's works were also translated into English by the now-defunct publishing house Bruno Gmünder Verlag.^[17]

In 2013, Tagame was approached by editors at the publishing company Futabasha about creating a manga series for general audiences.^[8][10] 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 "didn't want to abandon my style and my audience by writing a more mainstream work."^[10][18] 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.^[10][18] Subsequently, Tagame pitched Futabasha for a series about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in Japan from the perspective of a straight character;^[10][19] 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.^[8] The series was widely acclaimed, won numerous awards, and was adapted into a live-action television drama that aired on NHK in 2018.^[20]

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."^[7] Our Colors, his second series aimed at a general audience, was serialized in Monthly Action from 2018 to 2020.^[21]

Hypermasculinity

The majority of Tagame's works depict men with personal and physical traits associated with hypermasculinity – developed muscles, hirsute bodies, large penises,^[30] an exaggerated volume of ejaculate, machismo,^[31] and participation in extreme or violent sexual acts.^[32][33] 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."^[34] 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.^[35]

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^{[lower-alpha 1]} and calling it "a very negative word that comes with bad connotations."^[36] 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.^[4] 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."^[29]

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."^[33] 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."^[30]

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,^[37] with White writing that "in Gengoroh Tagame's world, no man is ever penetrated willingly."^[33] Tagame's BDSM-focused works often depict other taboo subject material, such as rape, bestiality, incest, and body modification.^[8] 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.^[4] 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".^[4] 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.^[4]

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.^[22] Most often, these stories involve a masculine man whose engagement with BDSM transforms him from a dominant to a submissive sexual role,^[8] such as stories featuring "alpha" men who are sexually dominated and tortured^[2] or who allow themselves to be sexually debased out of a sense of responsibility or duty.^[3] Kolbeins argues that by depicting BDSM as a process of self-discovery, Tagame's stores are framed "within a relatable framework of human drama,"^[22] 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."^[29] 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,^[34] and Arena, where a Japanese karate champion becomes involved in an American fighting tournament where the winner of each match sodomizes the loser.^[33][38]

Japanese traditionalism

Tagame's works often depict Japanese historical settings, or draw heavily on traditional Japanese aesthetics in plot or subject material.^[34] 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.^[4] 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,^[34] or samurai characters that serve as symbolic representations of an unjust feudal order.^[3] 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:^[34]

Falling from hierarchy is the ultimate act of sadomasochism. I find the Japanese ideas of beauty and tradition unappealing conceptually, but as an element of fiction, I feel extraordinary Eros in the destruction of those principles.^[34]

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.^[8] 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;^[39] Kolbeins notes that the series "examines a time when male-male sexuality flourished in Japanese society, unfettered by Western notions of sin and 'sodomy'."^[13] In Country Doctor, which focuses on a pre-modern Japanese village where western-imposed taboos on sex are absent,^[40] 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."^[5]

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.^[8] 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.^[41][17] 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.^[10]

Manga

The following is a list of Tagame's serialized and one-shot manga works.^[42][43] 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.^[44][45]

Art books and novels

• Gay Erotic Art in Japan Vol. 1: Artists From the Time of the Birth of Gay Magazines (2003, Pot Publishing, ISBN 978-4939015588)
• Gay Erotic Art in Japan Vol. 2: Transitions of Gay Fantasy in the Times (2006, Pot Publishing, ISBN 978-4939015922)
• To the Future of Gay Culture (2017, P-Vine, ISBN 978-4907276867)
• Gay Erotic Art in Japan Vol. 3: Growth of the Gay Magazines and the Diversification of their Artists (2018, Pot Publishing, ISBN 978-4780802337)
• Gengoroh Tagame Sketchbook (2018, Massive Goods)