LGBTQ+ stories in manga
6The Care · 87From the shōnen-ai of the 1970s to manga about transgender youth, gay families and queer memoir, how manga has told LGBTQ+ stories.
6Filed under 6. The Care takes an obligation, and this explainer is holds one.
A long history
Manga has told stories of same-sex love and gender for decades. In the 1970s, women artists of the Year 24 Group created shōnen-ai, stories of love between boys written for girls, in works such as Moto Hagio's The Heart of Thomas. Riyoko Ikeda's The Rose of Versailles made a woman raised as a man its hero.
Boys' love and yuri
Shōnen-ai grew into boys' love, or BL, a large genre written mostly by and for women. Yuri, stories of love between women, developed in parallel. Both are genres with their own conventions, and they do not always reflect the lives of real LGBTQ+ people, but they have been important to many readers.
Trans stories
Takako Shimura's Wandering Son (2002–2013) follows two transgender children through puberty with honesty and tenderness. Yuhki Kamatani's Our Dreams at Dusk follows a gay teenager who finds a community of LGBTQ+ people.
Families and society
Gengoroh Tagame's My Brother's Husband (2014–2017), published in a mainstream magazine, follows a father learning to accept his late twin brother's Canadian husband. It was written to explain gay life to a general audience and won wide attention.
Memoir
Kabi Nagata's My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (2016), an essay manga about sexuality, depression and family, found a large audience abroad and showed how personal manga could speak to readers' own experience.
Why it matters
These works show the range of LGBTQ+ stories in manga, from genre romance to realism and memoir, and how they have changed over time.
Where this explainer is shelved
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 87, which folds down to 6. The weight sits in “stories”, which carries 33 on its own and reduces to 33.
Six is nurturer & harmonizer — care, community, and the weight of duty. The reference files it as an obligation. Read that way, what the explainer is really recording is the 6's pull toward responsibility, care, and the people involved.
The vowels alone reduce to 4, the consonants to 11. Foundation underneath, vision on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The 6 smothers. The same instinct that protects a readership produces the paternalism several of these entries document. What the 6 still asks is that you name the people this was answerable to. The other explainers that reduce to 6 are collected on The Care.
Common questions
- What is a good manga about transgender characters?
- Takako Shimura's Wandering Son follows two transgender children from primary school to adulthood with great care.
- Is boys' love the same as gay manga?
- Not exactly. Boys' love is a genre mostly written by and for women. Manga made by and for gay men, such as the work of Gengoroh Tagame, is a separate tradition.
- What is My Brother's Husband?
- A manga by Gengoroh Tagame about a Japanese father whose late twin brother's Canadian husband comes to visit, and how the family learns to accept him.
- Are there memoirs about LGBTQ+ experiences in manga?
- Yes. Kabi Nagata's My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a frank autobiographical manga about sexuality, mental health and family.