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Concept
Bara (genre)
Summary
is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as gay manga or ゲイコミ. The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. Bara can vary in visual style and plot, but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.
The use of bara as an umbrella term to describe gay Japanese comic art is largely a non-Japanese phenomenon, and its use is not universally accepted by creators of gay manga. In non-Japanese contexts, bara is used to describe a wide breadth of Japanese and Japanese-inspired gay erotic media, including illustrations published in early Japanese gay men's magazines, western fan art, and gay pornography featuring human actors. Bara is distinct from yaoi, a genre of Japanese media focusing on homoerotic relationships between male characters that historically has been created by and for women.
The term 薔薇, which translates literally to "rose" in Japanese, has historically been used in Japan as a pejorative for gay men, roughly equivalent to the English language term "pansy". Beginning in the 1960s, the term was reappropriated by Japanese gay media: notably with the 1961 anthology ja, a collection of semi-nude photographs of gay writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and later with 薔薇族 in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. Bara-eiga ("rose film") was additionally used in the 1980s to describe gay cinema.
By the late 1980s, as LGBT political movements in Japan began to form, the term fell out of use, with ゲイ becoming the preferred nomenclature for people who experience same-sex attraction. The term was revived as a pejorative in the late 1990s concurrent with the rise of internet message boards and chat rooms, where heterosexual administrators designated the gay sections of their websites as "bara boards" or "bara chat".
Official source
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