Introduction

Starting from the fringes, there was another cluster of subcategories that like sadomasochism made remarkable strides in eromanga. These subcategories, which often overlap, focus on the figures and themes of the “shemale” (shiimēru) and hermaphrodite (futanari), transvestism (iseisō) and drag (josō), shota and sex change (sei tenkan). While following the same basic pattern of moving from the periphery to permeate and spread throughout eromanga more generally, this cluster differs from other subcategories in that it makes “male characters” into objects of desire.

It is of course not the case that comics incorporating desire for men had been absent to this point. An older example is Tomi Shinzō's Life of a Beautiful Boy (Bidōki, published by Mitsunobu Shobō in 1967). Artists such as Tatsumi Yoshihiro, Kamimura Kazuo and Miyaya Kazuhiko also drew works with homosexual and drag themes. In gekiga treading into the erotic, there was a young gay man in a supporting role in Ishii Takashi's Angel Guts (Tenshi no harawata, 1972), and in third-rate gekiga, Miyanishi Keizō and Hisauchi Michio created works with a rich concentration of gay themes. However, in contrast to shōjo manga – which experienced a boys love boom centering on the works of the Magnificent 49ers in the 1970s and grew into a massive market with June magazine, yaoi zines and finally its own commercial subcategory of content in the 1990s – works for men tended to stand in isolation and never led to a boom. Sex other than the heterosexual kind, including but not limited to homosexuality, was mostly relegated to a very limited market “for a specific kind of reader.”

It is simple enough to grasp that operating in the background of this is male homophobia. Homosexuals and transvestites have been ridiculed as “queers” (homo) and “faggots” (okama) and turned into a punch line for jokes. Fear and laughter are two sides of the same coin, and the more male-dominated a community, the more homosexuality is discriminated against and marginalized. Destabilization of the discriminatory structure and its central tenet of machismo made possible the phenomenon of male characters becoming objects of desire in eromanga, as well as change in the treatment of homosexuals, drag queens and feminine men on television shows.