is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as or . The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. Bara can vary in visual style and plot but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
The use of bara as an umbrella term to describe gay Japanese comic art is largely a non-Japanese phenomenon, and its use is not universally accepted by creators of gay manga. In non-Japanese contexts, bara is used to describe a wide breadth of Japanese, Japanese-inspired, or not-at-all influenced by Japanese culture -gay erotic media, including illustrations published in early Japanese gay men's magazines, western fan art, and gay pornography featuring human actors. Bara is distinct from yaoi, a genre of Japanese media focusing on homoerotic relationships between male characters that historically has been created by and for women.
Etymology
The term , which translates literally to "rose" in Japanese, has historically been used in Japan as a pejorative for gay men, roughly equivalent to the English language term "pansy". Beginning in the 1960s, the term was reappropriated by Japanese gay media, notably with the 1961 anthology , a collection of semi-nude photographs of gay writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and later with in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. Bara-eiga ("rose film") was additionally used in the 1980s to describe gay cinema.
By the late 1980s, as LGBT political movements in Japan began to form, the term fell out of use, with 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 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 -style artwork rather than artwork of masculine men.
History
Context: Homosexuality in Japanese visual art
Representations of homosexuality in Japanese visual art have a history and context dating to the Muromachi period, as seen in and shunga (erotic woodblock prints originating in the Edo period). While these works ostensibly depict male-male sexual relations, artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame questions whether the historic practices of sodomy and pederasty represented in these works can be considered analogous to modern conceptions of gay identity, and thus part of the artistic tradition to which contemporary gay erotic Japanese art belongs. Tagame instead considers musha-e (warrior's pictures) to be a more direct forerunner to art styles common in gay manga: in contrast to pederastic shunga, both gay manga and musha-e portray masculine men with developed muscles and thick body hair, often in cruel or violent scenarios.
1960s: Early erotic magazines While erotic artwork was a major component of the earliest gay Japanese periodicals, notably the 1952 private circulation magazine , contemporary gay erotic art as a medium in Japan traces its origins to the fetish magazine . Published from 1960 to 1974, Fuzokukitan included gay content alongside straight and lesbian content, as well as articles on homosexuality. Early gay erotic artists Tatsuji Okawa, Sanshi Funayama, Go Mishima and Go Hirano made their debuts in the magazine, alongside unauthorized reproductions of illustrations by gay Western artists such as George Quaintance and Tom of Finland. Bara, the first Japanese magazine aimed specifically at a gay male audience, was published in 1964 as a members only, small circulation magazine.
Gay erotic art of this period typically depicts what Tagame describes as "darkly spiritual male beauty", emphasizing a sense of sorrow and sentimentalism. Men from "the traditional homosocial world of Japan", such as samurai and yakuza, appear frequently as subjects. The homoerotic photography of Tamotsu Yatō and Kuro Haga served as a significant influence on the initial wave of gay artists that emerged in the 1960s, with very little Western influence seen in these early works.
1970s and 1980s: Genre commercialization Erotic magazines aimed specifically at a gay male audience proliferated in the 1970s – first Barazoku in 1971, followed by and in 1974 – leading to the decline of general fetish magazines like Fuzokukitan. These new magazines featured gay manga as part of their editorial material; notable early serializations include by Yamaguchi Masaji () in Barazoku, and Tough Guy () and Make Up (メイクアップ) by Kaidō Jin () in Adon. The commercial success of these magazines resulted in the creation of spin off publications that focused on photography and illustrations: Barazoku launched , while Sabu launched and Sabu Special. Most notable among these spin-offs was Barakomi (), a 1986 supplemental issue of Barazoku that was the first magazine to publish gay manga exclusively.
By the 1980s, gay lifestyle magazines that published articles on gay culture alongside erotic material had grown in popularity: was launched by photographer Ken Tōgō, MLMW launched as a lifestyle spinoff of Adon, and Samson launched as a lifestyle magazine in 1982 before later shifting to content focused on fat fetishism. Most publishers folded their spin-off and supplemental publications by the end of the decade, though gay magazines continued to publish gay artwork and manga.
The artists that emerged during this period, notably Sadao Hasegawa, Ben Kimura, Rune Naito, and George Takeuchi, varied widely in style and subject material. Nonetheless, their artwork was united by a tone that was generally less sorrowful than that of the artists that emerged in the 1960s, a trend Tagame attributes to the gradual decline in the belief that homosexuality was shameful or abnormal. Their work was also more overtly influenced by American and European gay culture in its subject material, with sportsmen, jock straps, and leather garments appearing more frequently than yakuza and samurai. Tagame attributes this shift to the increased access to American gay pornography for use as reference material and inspiration, and the growth in popularity of sports manga, which emphasized themes of athleticism and manliness.
1990s: G-men and aesthetic changes
The trend towards lifestyle-focused publishing continued into the 1990s, with the founding of the magazines Badi ("Buddy") in 1994 and G-men in 1995. Both of these magazines included editorial coverage of gay pride, club culture, and HIV/AIDS-related topics alongside gay manga and other erotic content. G-men was co-founded by Gengoroh Tagame, who made his debut as a gay manga artist in 1987 writing manga for Sabu, and who would emerge as the most influential creator in the medium.
G-men was part of a concerted effort by Tagame to "change the status quo of gay magazines" away from the aesthetic of – delicate and androgynous boys and young men that were popular in gay media at the time – and towards the depictions of masculine men that gay manga is now associated with. The "bear-type" aesthetic pioneered by Tagame's manga in G-men is credited 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 hairstyle, and the broad muscular body, soon to evolve to chubby and outright fat, became highly fashionable."
Manga culture significantly influenced gay erotic artwork during this period, and gay manga occupied a central place in the editorial material of both Badi and G-men. G-men in particular served as an incubator for up-and-coming gay manga talent, launching the careers of artists such as Jiraiya. The magazine also encouraged steady readership by publishing serialized stories, which encouraged purchase of every issue. Conversely, Adon removed pornographic material from the magazine entirely; the move was unsuccessful, and the magazine folded in 1996.
2000s–present: The decline of magazines and the rise of "bara" Gay magazines declined significantly in popularity by the early 2000s, as the personal advertisement sections that drove sales for many of these magazines were supplanted by telephone personals and later online dating. Nearly all of the major gay magazines folded in the subsequent two decades: Sabu in 2001, Barazoku in 2004, G-men in 2016, and Badi in 2019. , only Samson remains active. As magazines declined, new types of gay art emerged from contexts entirely separate from gay magazines. Pamphlets and flyers for gay events and education campaigns in Japan began to feature vector artwork that, while not overtly pornographic, drew on gay manga in style and form. Art exhibitions also became an area of expression, as new venues and spaces emerged that welcomed the display of gay erotic artwork. With a lack of viable major print alternatives, many gay manga artists began to self-publish their works as dōjinshi (self-published comics). Gay manga artists like Gai Mizuki emerged as prolific creators of dōjinshi, creating slash-inspired derivative works based on media properties such as Attack on Titan and Fate/Zero.
Beginning in the 2000s, gay manga began to attract an international audience through the circulation of pirated and scanlated artwork on the internet. A scanlation of Kuso Miso Technique, a 1987 one-shot by Junichi Yamakawa originally published in Bara-Komi, became infamous during this period as an internet meme. Bara emerged among this international audience as a term to distinguish gay erotic art created by gay men for a gay male audience from yaoi, or gay erotic art created by and for women (see Comparison to yaoi below). The circulation of these works online led to the formation of an international bara fandom, and the emergence of non-Japanese gay erotic artists who began to draw in a "bara style" that was influenced by Japanese erotic art. This period also saw the rise in popularity of kemono (, "beastmen", or anthropomorphic characters analogous to the Western furry subculture) as subjects in gay manga, a trend Tagame attributes to appearances by this type of character in video games and anime.
Concepts and themes