Gengoroh Tagame UP225
Gengoroh Tagame is a pseudonymous Japanese manga artist. Regarded as the most influential creator in the gay manga genre, he has produced over 20 books in four languages over the course of his three-decade-long career. Tagame began contributing manga and prose fiction to Japanese gay men's magazines in the 1980s, after making his debut as a manga artist in the yaoi (male-male romance) manga magazine June while in high school.
For much of his career Tagame exclusively created erotic and pornographic manga, works that are distinguished by their graphic depictions of sadomasochism, sexual violence, and hypermasculinity. Beginning in the 2010s, Tagame gained mainstream recognition after he began to produce non-pornographic manga depicting LGBT themes and subject material; his 2014 manga series My Brother's Husband, his first series aimed at a general audience, received widespread critical acclaim and was awarded a Japan Media Arts Festival Prize, a Japan Cartoonists Association Award, and an Eisner Award.
Tagame describes his style as Kuma-Kei (lit. "bear type"), a term he uses to describe the masculine, muscular, and hirsute men that he draws. Sex is typically the primary focus of Tagame's manga and his works are almost invariably fetishistic in nature, featuring depictions of bondage, discipline, leather, and sadomasochism. These themes are often amplified through his use of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction to create surreal and hyperreal sexual scenarios. Tagame has acknowledged that his manga "represents a very small minority of the world. In the real world, the large majority of people don't like torture in their sex lives, invariably. But I'm not writing for them."