22 Facts About Gengoroh Tagame

Gengoroh Tagame is a pseudonymous Japanese manga artist.

Gengoroh Tagame is regarded as the most prolific and influential creator in the gay manga genre.

Gengoroh Tagame is further noted for his contributions as an art historian, through his multi-volume art anthology series Gay Erotic Art in Japan.

Gengoroh Tagame was born in Kamakura on February 3,1964, into a family distantly descended from samurai.

The younger of two brothers, Gengoroh 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.

Gengoroh Tagame began drawing as a child, and by middle school was drawing amateur comics for his classmates and teachers.

Gengoroh Tagame found that he was uninterested in stories in Sabu focused on romance, and drawn to stories that focused on sadomasochism.

In high school Gengoroh Tagame began writing manga professionally, and contributed to the manga magazine June in 1982 under a pen name.

Gengoroh Tagame 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.

Gengoroh Tagame made his debut as a gay erotic manga artist in 1987, creating manga for Sabu.

G-men was a success, and by 1996, Gengoroh Tagame was working full-time as a gay manga artist.

Gengoroh Tagame continued to publish his serialized manga as books during this period, initially through gay pornography production companies, and later through formal publishers.

Gengoroh Tagame attracted an international audience beginning in the 2000s though the circulation of pirated and scanlated versions of his works.

In 2013, Gengoroh Tagame was approached by editors at the publishing company Futabasha about creating a manga series for general audiences.

Subsequently, Gengoroh Tagame pitched Futabasha for a series about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in Japan from the perspective of a straight character; the resulting series was My Brother's Husband, which was serialized in the seinen magazine Monthly Action from 2014 to 2017.

Gengoroh Tagame's artwork is often associated with bara, a colloquialism used by non-Japanese audiences to refer to Japanese erotic art featuring masculine men.

Gengoroh 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.

Gengoroh 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:.

Gengoroh Tagame is regarded as the most prolific and influential creator of gay manga.

Anthropologist Wim Lunsing credits the "bear-type" aesthetic pioneered by Gengoroh Tagame with provoking a major stylistic shift in Shinjuku Ni-chome, the gay neighborhood of Tokyo.

Gengoroh Tagame has won multiple awards for his work, primarily My Brother's Husband.

Works by Gengoroh Tagame were exhibited at the British Museum in 2019 as part of The Citi Exhibition: Manga, its exhibition on the history of manga.