“rose tribe”) in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. Bara-eiga (“rose film”) was additionally used in the 1980s to describe gay cinema.īy the late 1980s, as LGBT political movements in Japan began to form, the term fell out of use, with gei becoming the preferred nomenclature for people who experience same-sex attraction. The term was revived as a pejorative in the late 1990s concurrent with the rise of internet message boards and chat rooms, where heterosexual administrators designated the gay sections of their websites as “bara boards” or “bara chat”. The term was subsequently adopted by non-Japanese users of these websites, who believed that bara was the proper designation for the images and artwork being posted on these forums. Since the 2000s, bara has been used by this non-Japanese audience as an umbrella term to describe a wide variety of Japanese and non-Japanese gay media featuring masculine men, including western fan art, gay pornography, furry artwork, and numerous other categories. This misappropriation of bara by a non-Japanese audience has been controversial among creators of gay manga, many of whom have expressed discomfort or confusion over the term being used to describe their work. Artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame has described bara as “a very negative word that comes with bad connotations”, though he later clarified that the term is “convenient for talking about art that is linked by characters that are muscle-y, huge, and hairy”, and that his objection was the term’s use to describe gay manga creators. Artist Kumada Poohsuke has stated that while he does not find the term offensive, he does not describe his work as bara because he associates the term with Barazoku, which featured bishōnen-style artwork rather than artwork of masculine men. Gay manga is typically categorized based on the body shape of the characters depicted common designations include gacchiri (“muscular”), gachimuchi (“muscle-curvy” or “muscle-chubby”), gachidebu (“muscle-fat”), and debu (“fat”). While the rise of comic anthologies has promoted longer, serialized stories, most gay manga stories are one-shots. BDSM and non-consensual sex are common themes in gay manga, as well as stories based on relationships structured around age, status, or power dynamics.
Often, the older or more senior character uses the younger or subordinate character for sexual purposes, though some gay manga stories subvert this dynamic and show a younger, physically smaller, often white-collar man as the dominant sexual partner to an older, larger, often blue-collar man. As with yaoi, the bottom in gay manga is often depicted as shy, reluctant, or unsure of his sexuality. Consequently, much of the criticism of yaoi – misogyny, a focus on rape, the absence of a Western-style gay identity – is similarly levied against gay manga.