by Tim Anderson
So it wasn’t a spasm!
It makes cultural sense that homosexuality is not the most comfortable of subjects for the Japanese public to confront. There is a definite history of hot man-on-man action amongst the samurais of the Shogun era. But those times are long gone and do not really gel with life in modern Japan, with its belief in the importance of homogeneity, its dwindling birth rate, its aging population, and its preoccupation with safeguarding oneself and one’s family from any kind of public shame, like the kind that comes of being caught dancing to house music in a muscle-T at the club and singing into a hairbrush in one’s bedroom.
Overall, gay culture in Tokyo holds few surprises for anyone familiar with gay culture anywhere else. The gay district is called Ni Chome—“Second Street”—and is famous for being the best place in the city for a horny businessman to go to give and/or get a blowjob. Most places I’ve been to, like GB—the most popular bar for gay gaijin and the men who love them—really seem indistinguishable from any other big city gay place. Lots of useless diva dance music and power balladeering on the speakers, sinfully tight T-shirts on the bodies, and the smell of overpriced cologne mixed with cigarette smoke on every floating molecule of air. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping for, but I guess I wanted Japanese gay bars to offer something that I’d never before thought possible. I’ve always been frustrated with the mind-numbing predictability of the gay scene in general. The Japanese always take things and tweak them until they’re just weird enough. The mind boggles at what they could do with gay culture, already weird by definition. Like, instead of the obligatory gay uniform being tank tops and tight jeans, wouldn’t it be fun if it was hula-hoops and little pup tents? Or see-through kimono and banana hats? Fun, right?
But just when I’d written Japan off as having nothing new and jaw-dropping to contribute to Gay World, what should I come upon while browsing around a manga café one day but a certain genre of Japanese comic books that deals very openly and—to my infinite delight—graphically with the subject of love between men. Even more shocking is the fact that these comics are not written by gay men for gay men. No, gaywad, they are written by women for a target audience of teenage girls.
Manga comics are to the Japanese public what sitcoms, police dramas, and Dateline are to the American public. Here, comics are not just for thirty-five-year-old men who still live with their mothers and blush when asked about having a girlfriend. Comics are for everyone. They are an essential piece of contemporary Japanese popular art, as important if not more important than movies and television. There are comics for teenage boys, which includes stories on subjects such as sports, delinquent high school students (who invariably hang out with doe-eyed schoolgirls who can’t think of a good reason to keep their clothes on for more than a few pages at a time), the occult, martial arts, and motorcycle gangs; comics for adult males that offer stories involving hired assassins, samurai, big-breasted stewardesses, hapless office workers, and war; comics for adult women with lots of romance and period pieces; and those for young girls featuring schoolkids solving mysteries, grappling with the supernatural, and flirting and falling in love. But curiously, a growing number of young girls, who range in age from preteen to late twenties, wish to read stories from a genre of comics called yaoi, tales filled to the brim with the high drama and star-crossed romance that is best portrayed and appreciated when presented in the form of a gay male love affair.
I never would have thought I could have so much in common with thirteen-year-old Japanese girls, but the world is a very strange place, and I guess it just goes to show that there are indeed some needs that span cultures, genders, and generations. One of those, apparently, is the need to see and read about wispy, beautiful men with impossible cheekbones falling in love and passionately screwing around with other wispy, beautiful men with impossible cheekbones.
This is not simply animated gay porn. It’s more like an animated, all-male The Young and the Restless. Characters are developed and emotional, and often fatal conflicts are introduced. And the men’s bone structure, hair color, and wardrobe are infinitely more important than their equipment below the belt. These men are beautiful, their physiques patently unattainable. Broad shoulders, tiny waists, faces so angular they’re in danger of cutting themselves every time they swish their hands upwards to move their golden/purple/silver/magenta locks out of their eyes, all to achieve the perfect pose of pensive angst.
And these guys like to mess around. It could be a tormented university student lying with his equally tortured history professor, or a profoundly unhappy young banker making it with his best friend’s brother, but no matter the pairing, the sex is going to be dramatic, ecstatic, and often. The drama inherent in storylines involving men expressing their long-repressed desire for each other is the attraction for the girls, it seems. These stories offer for their female audience the ultimate tales of forbidden love. It’s Romeo and Romeo. And Juliet gets to watch.
Needless to say, I have now developed a mild obsession with these comics. And I’m hell-bent on learning more, to the point where when a young female student says in class that she loves comics, I wonder if there’s an appropriate way to ask her if she enjoys stories involving two guys getting it on, and if so, what the turn-on is, which positions she really likes to see them in, and by the way, can she recommend some good titles because I have a friend who’s interested.
When I first discovered yaoi comics at a manga reading room in Shinjuku, I pulled a few dozen off the bookshelf, retreated to a remote corner of the café, and thumbed through them greedily. Of course, I couldn’t understand what I was reading, but the pictures did help fill in quite a few gaps, if you know what I mean. Here are two college friends sucking face and getting to third base in their university library. And here is a mob boss giving one of his young charges an offer he obviously can’t refuse. Oh, and here are two long-haired warriors taking a break from all the chaos on the battlefield to vanquish each other in a cave. And they just happened to bring along their leather harnesses and candle wax. Great!
I emerged a few hours later bleary-eyed and thinking I really could have used those comics when I was thirteen.
In my research on the topic, I’ve discovered that the word yaoi is actually an acronym in Japanese meaning “no climax, no purpose, no solutions,” which is kind of a creed for the genre. A gay agenda of sorts. And though the appeal of such nihilistically themed stories does have its limits (many of them end with some sort of self-mutilation or terrible tragedy) and somewhat offends my American need for some type of reasonably workable resolution, any comic book series that offers spectacular scenes of wild, passionate, and otherworldly homo-sex is worth a second look in my book.
I now look at all the young ladies around me—in my classrooms, on the train, at the makeup counter—in a very different light. Are these girls, beneath their cotton tops and cardigans, behind their cherubic, innocent, immaculately painted faces, just mad for a peek at a lusty all-male hump-a-thon? Do they long to be a fly on the wall in the men’s locker room? Do they lose sleep palpitating over the divine clash of lips, cheekbones, and sinewy male flesh that fill the scenes in their precious comic books?
Your typical Japanese Joe finds it difficult to say the word “gay” without giggling, as if by uttering it he is professing to believe in mermaids. I sit on the train again and watch four young inebriated professional men stumble onto the train. They are impeccably put together, their skin polished to a fine shine, their hair sculpted in tight waves, their tailored suits pressed, their rock-solid masculinity melted by alcohol into a fluid and suggestible ambivalence. I look at the ringleader of the pack, the loudest one to whom the others obviously defer. He rubs his face languorously with his perfectly moisturized fingers, stands with his legs far apart and his crotch tilted out. He is telling a story and repeatedly putting his arm around his drunken colleague next to him to stabilize himself as he sways back and forth. I wonder if he realizes how often the young girls on the
train gaze at him as he banters with his be-suited colleagues—joking, laughing, snorting, backslapping—and how more than a few of these girls really wish that the guys would just shut up, unbutton their tailored shirts to the navels, whisk their hair out of their eyes, and start making out.
I know I do.
# times used Japanese-style squatting public toilet: 1
# times used Japanese-style squatting public toilet backwards: 1
# times wished to God Japanese public toilet offered toilet paper: 1
In which the resilient city of Tokyo is once again under siege and the city’s citizens must run for their lives from a giant foreign monster who has brought his own eating utensils.
“Just don’t forget,” Jimmy coos over the phone as we discuss the details of his upcoming trip to Tokyo on my dime. “You owe me.”
Normally that is no way to talk to someone who’s just spent over a thousand dollars on a plane ticket for you, but I can’t deny he has a point. I’ve been away for over a year now in one of the world’s most neon cities while he’s been back in sepia-toned Raleigh living the life of a starving artist, dealing with a cocaine-obsessed roommate, and constantly fielding questions about me from friends that he has trouble answering, like, “How’s Tim doing?” and “Is he ever coming home?” and “When is that cheap fucker gonna fly you over there?”
I do owe him. He’s been very accommodating of my oat-sowing. He deserves a vacation, and he’s going to get it. There will be temples, there will be shrines, there will be many, many Japanese pancakes.
“I know, I know. Listen, you’re coming, and we’re going to have a blast. I’m so excited!”
“No you’re not,” he deadpans.
“Yes I am!”
“Whatever. Anyway, is there anything I can bring? Do you need deodorant or magazines or anything?”
“Yeah, can you bring me a Cajun chicken biscuit from Bojangles? And some of the spicy fries? Oh, and some Pillsbury strawberry cake icing?”
“Sure.”
I can’t wait to see him holding that sweet, sweet pink frosting.
I remember fondly our last night together, the night before I left Raleigh. We’d gone for a romantic dinner at the Waffle House, the one downtown on Hillsborough Street where people go to get shot. We sat, ordered our burgers, and then I had a nervous breakdown. Have you ever cried and eaten greasy hash browns at the same time? If you ever plan to, bring extra napkins.
But though I was seriously losing my shit, my brain aflame with last-minute panic, Jimmy was holding up pretty well. When we first got together two years before, he quickly figured out that I had a bit of wanderlust in me that would eventually need to come out. (I think it might have become evident when I said, on the morning after our first night together, “I hate this fucking town; God, I can’t think of anything worse than staying here for the rest of my life!”) An army brat, he’d had his share of moving around the world, uprooting his life every few years, and was now completely uninterested in pulling up stakes again. Like me, he was desperately poor with no health insurance, but he liked being in one place. He was working on his art and enjoying his new job at a frame shop. Leaving Raleigh made no sense for him. So he’d resigned himself to the idea of my leaving. But because we’d drifted so effortlessly into each other’s lives, we both knew we wanted to stay together through my Tokyo jaunt.
So there we sat at the Waffle House, two years down the road, and I was leaving the next day. I don’t think either of us was convinced that it was realistic to try to maintain a long-distance relationship since I’d be gone for over a year. But that night we vowed to try. With the help of regular phone calls and some good porn.
As I sat sobbing and causing a scene like a toddler who hadn’t had his nap, a group of painfully upbeat teenagers in hipster garb walked in, sat down, and then one of them, presumably their leader, headed to the jukebox.
“Oh my God, Jimmy, if that skinny bitch puts on the ‘Waffle House Song’ I’ll just die!” I blubbered.
“I’ll slap her. Are you gonna eat your pickles?” Jimmy said, comforting me.
“Nmph. Tkmh,” I said, my mouth full of mucus, soggy red eyes bulging. I hadn’t touched my cheeseburger. He’d cleaned his entire plate.
There was an understanding here. He was being strong for both of us. He was holding it together because he knew I couldn’t. My system was too overwhelmed. And though his was too, he’d decided to take the reins and not allow us to sink into maudlin dramatics.
“You need to wipe your nose…God, get a napkin or something,” he said, laughing. His emotional bravery was heartbreaking.
The waitress arrived with our extra order of scattered, smothered, and covered hash browns. No doubt she cast her sympathetic eyes over us as we struggled to keep it together, our last night together, our farewell banquet of grease and butter.
“I’m gonna enter some stuff into the New American Paintings contest next month,” he said, trying to remain strong.
A fresh harvest of silent tears burst from my exhausted eyes. I began to make embarrassing noises when I inhaled.
Jimmy let my tears run their course, deciding at this point that silence was probably golden.
“Your burger’s getting cold.”
A few oceans of tears and mucus later, hunger finally gripped me and I downed the thing in three bites. As I chomped, he sat staring at me, his gaze a mixture of love, irritation, and acid reflux.
When Jimmy and I got together, we had both pretty much given up on finding a guy to spend our lives with who wasn’t a complete disappointment. We’d both been around the block several times. Jimmy came out when he was fourteen and was promptly sent off to a mental institution by his loving, hysterical mother who makes Piper Laurie from Carrie look like Barbara Billingsley; he then developed into a serial monogamist, having one unfulfilling long-term relationship after another. And me? I’d been around the block more in the sexual sense. (Is it considered a one-night stand if they kick you out of their bed before daybreak?) By the time our paths crossed, we pretty much immediately realized we were two potential peas in a pod: we shared a mutual love for Purple Rain–era Prince, tuna noodle casserole, Gore Vidal’s bitchy smugness, and Pedro Almodóvar’s use of primary colors and trannies.
Even better, we hated many of the same things (giant poodles and local gay bars being the first two among many). When I was able to convince Jimmy that Siouxsie Sioux could wipe the floor with Grace Jones if the two were ever to come to blows, our relationship was taken to the next level. I had a feeling it was true love when Jimmy, describing Alanis Morrissette as she performed on Letterman, uttered under his breath one of the finest and most apt similes I’d ever heard: “Plain as homemade soap.” And I knew I’d found the man I’d spend the rest of my life with when he smacked me in the face with his dick one morning—not as an overture for sex but just to say “good morning” as he was leaving the bedroom to make coffee.
Always a man of very few words and an effortlessly agitated artistic temperament, Jimmy, when he does speak, tends to create the wrong impression when he meets new people. He just doesn’t try that hard to make people like him. Not because he’s an asshole; he just doesn’t think about it. He once told my friend Dani that her quiche was “delicious, almost as good as mine.” He complimented a friend’s band one time by saying they “sounded so much better than the last time I saw you guys.” And when he first started coming to family dinners at my parents’ house, he would sit quietly and respectfully through dinner and then as soon as he was finished, he’d get up, wash his plate, put it in the dishwasher, and then plop himself on the living room sofa with my parents’ Parade magazine before anyone realized he’d left the table.
“They have lots of good drugs—you know, medicines—for depression now,” an aunt visiting from California who came to one of these dinners once said. She was convinced Jimmy was clinically depressed. But she’d never had the opportunity to see how his face lit up when talking about
Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Law of Desire. She’d not witnessed him singing along to Prince’s “Pussy Control” in our living room. She didn’t know that sometimes he laughs and says the word “turd” in his sleep. He’s not depressed. He’s just artistic.
But I have to admit I’m worried. I’ve been away for a year, and while Jimmy’s getting on with life at home, I’m living a completely separate life from him now, and it’s a life I’m really enjoying. Worse still, I’m smitten. Yes, I’ve been seeing someone behind his back, and though I think he knows, I’m dreading the talk we’re going to have to have about this third wheel. My new lover is complicated, schizophrenic, unwieldy, fast, and furious. In short, I’m in love with a crazy bitch named Tokyo. And she takes a back seat to nobody.
Over the past year during out periodic phone calls I’ve tried my best to convince Jimmy of my baby’s otherworldly charms.
“I saw a bunch of young girls dressed up as Victorian England–era prostitutes in Harajuku today!” I’d say.
“Interesting,” he’d reply after a long pause, during which he’s sucking in a massive bonghit.
“Oh my God, I got groped by a gross old man in a rush-hour train in Shinjuku!” I’d beam.
“Uh-huh,” he’d reply after drinking down a couple spoonfuls of NyQuil.
“Vitamin drinks in tiny cans are really popular here! I just drank three and chased them with vodka and then ate a big sushi!” I’d rave.
