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REVIEW: My Brother's Husband GN 1

(please don't call gei comi bara, Japanese gay men find the term very offensive! Tagame himself has discussed this in several interviews)

No, it's written by a gay man whose writing normally falls into the "brutal and sadistic hardcore BDSM porn" category. I mean, he has written some "racy romance", but it's hardly what he's known for.... Which is why I was so surprised when he announced a project like this. It shows how wide a range he can cover.

Just to reiterate, as a couple of people have said, this series is plain and simple seinen, not BL or gei comi (please don't call gei comi bara, Japanese gay men find the term very offensive! Tagame himself has discussed this in several interviews).

Sure hope this isn't the start of turning Japan into another tumblr society a la Sweden.

I'm curious, is there a reason for taking offense to the term "bara"?

Anime fans always seem to act like the great Nippon is some pinnacle of modern society, yet it's one of the most xenophobic and conservative cultures on the planet.

I’ve answered this before so hopefully lebrel won’t mind me helping here:

Bara is an antiquated slur in Japanese which compares gay men to pretty, thorny flowers, roses.

Comparing it to “pansy” in English usually serves as a good example. Nobody really uses pansy in such a sense anymore, and if they did that wouldn’t be a very flattering descriptor.

The idea of bara as a genre label comes from the early male homosexual publications with “bara” in their name as the rose was a popular symbol for m/m eroticism in the 60s. People outside Japan became aware of later such publications as Bara-komi largely due to the Internet. So they called such content “bara”. However “gei” (gay) while being around since after WW2 started being a preferred term in Japan as early as the 1980s for gay men.

The West is of course behind on this shift in language or, like other terms that become adopted and morphed into nomenclature find bara is a simpler term to describe certain aesthetics of art.

As was pointed out Tagame doesn’t like his work associated with it for the negative connotations, as well as wishing for such a term to not have any connection to the gay community itself. Though in 2015 in this interview under “YAOI, BL, GAY MANGA, BARA: DO LABELS MATTER?” he softened a little on bara’s potential usefulness (along with tidbits on My Brother’s Husband).(Link does have some pictures accompanying it but limited to the mild beefcake variety.)

Frankly I’ve never used bara to describe gay erotic art from Japan but, that’s just my personal preference.

The West is of course behind on this shift in language or, like other terms that become adopted and morphed into nomenclature find bara is a simpler term to describe certain aesthetics of art.

Is there a general term for it all in Japanese? It sounds like "yaoi" refers to stories about pretty men mostly aimed at girls, "bara" refers to stories about muscular, burly men that tend to be erotic and aimed at gay men, and "gei komi" refers to stories with a focus on social commentary. Or is "gei komi" the general term for these comics? Or do I have it all wrong?

leafy sea dragon wrote:

Is there a general term for it all in Japanese? It sounds like "yaoi" refers to stories about pretty men mostly aimed at girls, "bara" refers to stories about muscular, burly men that tend to be erotic and aimed at gay men, and "gei komi" refers to stories with a focus on social commentary. Or is "gei komi" the general term for these comics? Or do I have it all wrong?

Someone can correct me on this, but I believe "yaoi" is specifically used for sexually explicit works which are often, but not always, doujinshi. These are aimed at women. BL (boys' love) is the catch-all term for male-male romance aimed at women. Bara and gei komi refer to the same thing, but as mentioned previously in the thread, bara is an offensive term in Japan. Gei komi (taken from "gay comics") is thus preferred. These are aimed at a gay audience and often, but not always, feature more burly men--contrasting with bishounen ever-present in BL series.

In English at least, BL and yaoi are often used interchangeably. People sometimes use shounen ai, too, but I feel like I see it much less than some years ago. People then use "bara" for male romances aimed at gay men, often unaware of the negative connotations of the term.

Is there a general term for it all in Japanese? It sounds like "yaoi" refers to stories about pretty men mostly aimed at girls, "bara" refers to stories about muscular, burly men that tend to be erotic and aimed at gay men, and "gei komi" refers to stories with a focus on social commentary. Or is "gei komi" the general term for these comics? Or do I have it all wrong?

RestLessone wrote:

leafy sea dragon wrote: Is there a general term for it all in Japanese? It sounds like "yaoi" refers to stories about pretty men mostly aimed at girls, "bara" refers to stories about muscular, burly men that tend to be erotic and aimed at gay men, and "gei komi" refers to stories with a focus on social commentary. Or is "gei komi" the general term for these comics? Or do I have it all wrong? Someone can correct me on this, but I believe "yaoi" is specifically used for sexually explicit works which are often, but not always, doujinshi. These are aimed at women. BL (boys' love) is the catch-all term for male-male romance aimed at women. Bara and gei komi refer to the same thing, but as mentioned previously in the thread, bara is an offensive term in Japan. Gei komi (taken from "gay comics") is thus preferred. These are aimed at a gay audience and often, but not always, feature more burly men--contrasting with bishounen ever-present in BL series. In English at least, BL and yaoi are often used interchangeably. People sometimes use shounen ai, too, but I feel like I see it much less than some years ago. People then use "bara" for male romances aimed at gay men, often unaware of the negative connotations of the term.

Yes that's pretty much correct.

Gei comi, gei/gay manga, or occasionally I see people use ML (men’s love) is the umbrella label for m/m comics aimed at gay men. There are also a lot of descriptive terms for say different beefy body types.

Stuff dealing in m/m erotic or romantic relationships aimed at women is generally just BL. BL is usually the label where you find most such content in stores or places like amazon.jp. But, Yaoi does get used as a catch all too. Yaoi for me has always been much more in line with independent and derivative female oriented m/m works. Not the professional commercialized and strict genre that has come about in Japan. Though really both BL and yaoi influence each other, many artists before they become professionals will begin publishing parody doujinshi, or established artists will make side projects because they have ideas they couldn’t publish regularly. So some “rules” so to speak of each category can crossover. I know several Western creators inspired by their Japanese counterparts tend to use yaoi to describe their original m/m works too.

Some shounen ai can be works that call up the idea of pederasty, but the term is mostly associated with the earliest comics dealing in m/m relationships done in the 1970's by the likes of girl’s comics artists like Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio. These usually deal more in spiritual or platonic love or attraction at least between leads. It doesn’t preclude sexual activity occurring however such as in The Song of the Wind and the Trees. I know a few people also suggest such works being called proto-BL.

And just to throw one more label out there I rarely hear people talk about "June" these days but, that subgenre comes from the JUNE magazine publication. Works are usually focused on some artistic and literary values. A lot are tragedies, and focus on some form of taboo or immorality in the relationship as the source of narrative conflict. The novel series Ai no Kusabi is probably one of the familiar examples from the prose sister magazine.

As a couple of people have mentioned, the distinguishing factor is the intended audience. BL (and yaoi / shounen-ai under whichever definitions) is for a female audience, gei comi / men's love / bara (if you must use that term) is for gay men. Who wrote it doesn't matter, what the characters look like doesn't matter, what the story is about doesn't matter, whether it has social commentary doesn't matter, just what audience the work is trying to reach. There is plenty of BL with social commentary, and a fair amount with big beefy guys; it's still BL. And there's a small amount of gei comi with pretty bishonen (relatively speaking, at least).

My Brother's Husband, being aimed at a general seinen audience, is neither BL nor gei comi, which is actually quite important; it's one of very few "entertainment" manga* about gay men and gay issues for an audience that isn't presumed to already be interested in those topics, and one of the very few mainstream manga by an openly gay mangaka. Hopefully it will pave the way for more such material.

* as I mentioned upthread, there are a fair number of non-fiction or semi-autobiographical "essay" manga by GBLTQ authors, but essay manga in general are pitched to a different audience than mainstream entertainment manga, just as memoir/nonfiction is in the Western publishing market.

Is there a term to refer to it all, regardless of topic or target audience? I would've figured "gei komi" would as the title would refer to what it's about, but apparently it isn't. I know there is much diversity in all this, and I would understand if there isn't a broad catch-all term. (Then again, books in the Anglosphere are also categorized by intended audience, though you also have broad genres like "fantasy" or "adventure" that stories with nothing in common could be part of.)

Hmm, that's pretty confusing. If this were a novel in a bookstore, what category would it be put under? Would it be simply "drama"?

Maybe I'm thinking of this from the wrong angle. I mean, as a film major, I took a lot of film classes, and gay film was one of the things I took a class for. I also got to see some behind-the-scenes stuff in filming movies about gay romance. It seems that any movie about gay romance gets the category of "gay film" regardless of target audience, level of mainstream awareness (or attempted mainstream awareness), the story other than the gay romance/sex, or anything else, though it can follow other categories as well. Brokeback Mountain, for instance, is both a gay film and a western. If My Brother's Husband got a live-action movie made in the United States, it would undoubtedly be labeled as a gay film too.

There is no industry category for "stories about gay men" as such, no. Some individual bookstores may have a GBLTQ section, in which case they may put My Brother's Husband and so forth in it, but that's a decision by that one store, not an industry category.

Well, Western media doesn't usually explicitly categorize itself by audience demographic, either; it may be clear who a given book/movie/whatever is targeting, but it won't say "for preteen and teenage boys" on the label and be shelved in a section of the store reserved exclusively for stories aimed at preteen and teenage boys. But once you have a system where you expect each work to be labelled "for men" and "for women", then having separate categories for "gay stories for men" and "gay stories for women" isn't so much of a stretch.

And since BL and gei comi are (partly for marketing reasons) their own little labelled niches, with their own magazines and imprints and defined target audiences, anything that's not in those niches and not aimed at those audiences doesn't get those labels. So My Brother's Husband is just plain seinen.