Archive for the LGBTQ Category


Flamecon 2022 Event Report

August 23rd, 2022

If you paid any attention to my social media this weekend, you knew that I was attending FlameCon 2022, back in New York City for the first time in a few years.

My FlameCon started with…a panel! And, in the tradition of this particular panel, technical difficulties!  ^_^  But being one of the first panels, meant that I had the rest of the con to enjoy myself. This year, that mean hanging out with Rica Takashima, selling her self-published mini-comics edition of Rica ‘tte Kanji!? and, of course, By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga!

The energy  at FlameCon was amazing. It took Rica and I 20 years, but there I was at a queer comics convention not explaining Yuri manga, so much as just telling everyone to go watch Birdie Wing. ^_^

It was great to see some folks who have been following Okazu for years! Thank you all for coming by and chatting. It was also really lovely to catch up with old friends.

Day one, I spoke with Jennifer Camper, who was in to do a retrospective of Howard Cruse with co-chair of Queers & Comics, Justin Hall, along with Rupert Kinnard, Carlo Quispe, Denis Kitchen and Karen Green. Howard is among those first-gen gay comix artists who we have only recently lost. The Queers & Comics conferences were designed to create an archive of their stories, so when they were no longer with us, we would have a record. (It was incredible for the years it was held and the information is and will be  invaluable for years to come. ) Jennifer said she’s working on a collected retrospective of her work. The world actually needs this. While it’s true that we’ll start losing first-gen gay comix folks, we still have second-generation folks like Jennifer and Alison Bechdel, whose recent success – I hope – signals interest in other queer comix artists. 

Jennifer noted that the one thing this con had very little of was queer comics. She wasn’t wrong. As I walked the floor, there were some comics by queer folks, but surprisingly few queer comics. I especially felt there was very little comics by/ about/for queer women. Most of the comics on sale were by/about/for queer guys, with a small showing of women doing fannish comics of queer guys.

I spoke with Justin Hall about that on Sunday. Justin is an amazing comic artist as well, and the editor in chief of No Straight Lines and QU33R anthologies. Justin noted that it’s relatively easy to create a print, and with digital tools, you can make it shiny and colorful and print off a bunch and sell them, in the time it takes to make one page of a comic. Then you have to do the next and the next and tell the story…. so folks are going for merc,h that is easier to make and sell over comix/comics which are much less so.

I also had a theory that maybe, with so much queer content out there these days, there isn’t the desperation to tell those stories there used to be. Sure folks want their story and art on the table , and I did see some lovely minicomics for sale, but fan art and merch (fannish and original) was primary.

That said I did meet a bunch of folks doing fun stuff!

I spent a moment admiring Shauna Grant’s new book, Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe, which is out now from Scholastic Books (how exciting!) about Mimi, who wants to be valued for more than just her cuteness. I love her work. It is, actually, quite cute. ^_^ The one ‘zine I picked up was by Ruya Hopps, Mannish Women and Violet Decor:The Language of Lesbianism in Pre-Code Hollwood. Rica immediately pronounced this “precious” because of the level of work creative ‘zine work. To be very honest, I really felt that way about every comic there.

And I love Emily K’s, “off-brand Sailor Moon” (her quote) comics, Gothic Cosmos Child and Lunar Felines. She’s got some of these up on Twitter. Really funny stuff.

I was gifted a beautifully dark Sweeney Todd comic by Nakata “Knack” Whittle, when she dropped buy Rica’s table to get a signed copy of BYS. And I met a lot of great new friends there, plus I was able to see some old pals and just hang around with Rica for a couple of days which we have not been able to do in years. Put a pin in that, I want to get back to us.

But, very importantly, I was able to speak with the adorable and talented folks from Yurisoft Games! Their new game The Songbird Guild is going to be out by the end of this year, hopefully, but I told them I’d tell you and you’d make them get it out. ^_^ This Magical Girl story started life as a jam. You can wishlist this on Steam and follow them on itch.io.  Here’s the synopsis from their site:

“The Kotori Mori has always looked up to her father.  As one of her town’s only (competent) magical boys, he almost singlehandedly protected their community from the dark creatures that tried to tear it down.

Now, at the age of 21, Kotori is finally old enough to pursue her own magical girl dreams in the biggest city of them all: Larimar.  However, she finds the life of a big city magical girl more difficult than anticipated, and soon the decision will threaten her life.

Kaida Hikari, a slightly older magical girl, becomes inseparably close to her during this ordeal, but will their bond be enough to get them through it, or will they crack under the pressure of being the city’s guardians?

It’s really cute and also kind of dark. ^_^ Emily, Kale and Tess introduced me to the spider lady villainess, Elledonna. I made a deal with them that if they gave her a wife who loves how evil she is, I’d actually read the VN. By Sunday they had a sketch. I’m doing this thing, I hope!

Overall Flamecon was exceptionally well-run and super welcoming and friendly. I was busy at the table so saw none of the other panels (and nothing short of being drugged insensate will get me over to the stage to see the performances, I am allergic to skits,) but I heard all sort of great things about them.

Justin and I agreed that we’d like to see more narrative work and, we’d like to see Flamecon if not require, then prioritize and feature folks making narrative content. The room we were in would have been perfect for the “mini-comics room.” But, then I am always wanting to recreate Comitia at every event. Probably why I like TCAF so much. ^_^

Lastly, I want to thank and celebrate Rica Takashima. In the 1990s, she wanted to see a comic about real queer life in Tokyo and so, she drew one. In 2003, Rica ‘tte Kanji!? became the first Yuri manga published in English. Since then, Yuri has blossomed around the world and as we signed copies of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga  – and just about sold out for the weekend! – we high fived, because it took us 20 years, but we actually changed the world. It felt damned nice. ^_^

And check these out! Rica brought me a pair of the Family Mart Tokyo Rainbow Pride socks from Japan. She gets me. ^_^

So thank you, Rica, for a great weekend and thank you, FlameCon, for a lovely convention. I hope to see you again next year!
 





I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 5

August 4th, 2022

“What if you had the chance to remake the entire world in order to save the person you love…and learned that the world was never what it seemed?” is what I said when I reviewed Watashi no Oshi ha Akuyaku Reijou. Volume 5 (私の推しは悪役令嬢。) in Japanese. And, now, you have had the chance to read I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 5 and can, I hope, understand what I meant. ^_^ I’m still trying to avoid spoilers, as best I can. ^_^

The Nur arc comes to a crashing, sword-waving, magic-using, epic ending, that has shockingly little to do with Nur and Bauer at all. Because Volume 5 is about the Demon Queen and the truth of the world. Basically, if you primarily read isekai, you are probably mostly unprepared for just about anything here, until it all settles down.

As I re-read this volume I am fascinated by the scope of this story, which has implications far beyond this narrative. Will future volumes of the upcoming She’s So Cheeky For A Commoner (which I have reviewed in Japanese, as Heimin no Kuse ni Namaika, Volume 1)  – and any series will come after –  let these petals fall and be dispersed, or will they float around reminded us over and over of what, exactly, is going on? I look forward to finding out. There was a great deal of territory covered in this volume and repeated visits in future volumes might help to reify it.

Even more broadly, this series does all sorts of interesting things with the concept of “another world.” Like the Locked Tomb series, it is simultaneously both fantasy and science fiction and some new hybrid child of those genres and isekai. AND it contains that single important question that fills so much classic science fiction anime – what does it mean to be human?

Despite all this, this novel never pretends to be be meaningful in that pretentious literary way of very serious men writing about humanity. It is a human look at the power of community. Once again, I must quote myself here, when I wrote, “If you are familiar with Doctor Who, you will entirely understand how everything in this book works…and how it must work. ^_^ This leads to the only criticism, if you can even call it that, I have. Because of that specific narrative structure, there was no way to give it a punchy ending, which was perfectly okay. It ended as it had to…and then didn’t end for a few more post-epilogue shorts. When you like your characters, it’s hard to let go, I understand completely. ^_^ ”

What I mean to say here is that this ending was the right ending for this book. ^_^ This series ends where it must, with home and family. I have said this about a dozen times recently, but I’ll repeat it – this is what I am looking for these days in the books I read. Future-building with hope…hopepunk, as Ada Palmer calls, it. Stories in which communities come together to build a better tomorrow. The fact that the leaders of this particular community are queer women is delicious icing on this sweet and satisfying narrative cake.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 10
Service – Very little, for perfectly good reasons.
Yuri – 10
Queer – 10

Overall – 10

This…was a very good book. I hope you’ll all read it. If you have read it, do let me know what you think in the comments!

 





Plain Bad Heroines written by Emily M. Danforth, illustrated by Sara Lautman

July 17th, 2022

In 1902, at a boarding school for young women in Rhode Island., a book is making an indelible impact upon both the student body and the school headmistress, leading to a series of tragedies. In 2022, the same book – is having an equivalently huge impact on the stars of a movie about those tragedies. In Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth creates a meta-novel about a meta-novel, full of gothic horror, women in love and the memeification of fear and desire.

Brookhants (pronounced, Brookhaunts, we are assured early on) is a school on the property of a man who was deeply, obsessively, interested in the occult. The grounds, the buildings, the flora and fauna of Brookhants are saturated with the occult. But  the occult is just the gold lame draped over this story. Under the turban and giant earrings, is a psychological thriller about social media in 1902 and 2022. The girls at Brookhants share their obsessions through songs and rhyme and images, and promises, the young women of the 21st century share Instagram photos and memes, images and promises. What ties these two threads together is a book that was a huge hit in 1901, The Story of Mary Maclane, one girls’ diary of desire for other girls and desire to be released from a boring life. Both this book – which is a real book – and the “author” of the novel are ever present in the narrative. They will be there with us, every step.

This story begins with a tragic sapphic love; two young women who die a horrible death together instead of living horrible lives apart. These deaths bring about more deaths, and the separation of an adult lesbian couple who had, until this tragedy, managed to find joy together….they hoped.  A hundred years later, a movie about these stories is being filmed as a kind of true-horror story, with real, imagined and staged mysteries that keep the two leads – a famous up-comingstar and the daughter of a B-movie has been – and the woman who is credited with writing the book about the book, in a state of high anxiety, until they find each other and redeem both the film, themselves and each other. The several levels of meta-novel lean heavily on one another. If you were, for instance, to pretend that memes don’t have power, this book probably would have no power over you. But…you’d have to pretend, because we know for a fact that memes do have power. ^_^

What this book does right is the slow-burn of the obsessive thoughts and behaviors that creep in and out of the pages until, unbidden, they come to your own mind in a similar situation….the perfect meme, even if that meme is a bit destructive, like invoking Bloody Mary on Halloween.  Even though the book is not entirely happy, if you’re fond of gothic romance – the penny dreadfuls of the turn of last century – you’ll probably enjoy this. Certainly, Sara Lautman’s illustrations remind us exactly how we should be reading this story – late at night, with a candle or lamp for atmospheric lighting, maybe on a stormy, cold, dank day.  Whether from the cold or the fear, or the quiet longings of our own history, doesn’t matter – we should be shivering.

Despite the many tragedies of the story, it does have what I consider to be a happy ending. The happy ending is tied up in the existence of a three-person relationship that exists in a space that isn’t one thing or another, yet.  Where the girls and women of 1902 were not given the space to determine what they might be to one another, the happy ending is that the three of 2022 will have time and freedom to figure it out for themselves…

Ratings:

Art – Atmospheric
Story – A LOT of story
Characters – Fascinating and deeply flawed, like people
Service – Yes, actually. But I can’t tell you what it is or I’d ruin it
Lesbian – Several different kinds of sapphic relationships, spanning a century.

Overall – Complex, overwrought, a very good read that will stick with me for a long while

Listening to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast over the past several months I find I do not actually enjoy that much historical fiction. As I mentioned when LHMP interviewed me last month, I do tend to prefer contemporary fiction that becomes historical over time. The historical part being just one layer of this novel gave it depth, rather than being a lesson on “the time period I researched” as so much historical fiction feels to me. And the contemporary side of the story is cemented in it’s time and place with any number of cultural touchpoints that will disappear and become historical footnotes, for a doubly historical piece any day now. ^_^





A Transition Telegraphed by Yuri: Learning to Love Myself By Reading about Girls Loving Girls, Guest Post by Meru

June 30th, 2022

We’re just squeaking into the last hours of Pride Month and I am so happy to bring you an article that I’ve been dying to read! I spoke to Meru some months ago about an article for Okazu, about navigating Yuri fandom as a queer black Yuri fan in a world where fandom seems to be filled with more angry people who take their shitty choices out on others than it used to be. Time got away from both of us, but now I’m super excited to have this article right now, at the end of what has been a month of jumping years backwards.

As a reminder, Stonewall Uprisings were a protest against mistreatment by cops and government – it was followed by the first Pride March, as queer folks stood up and said “We Exist.” This Pride month, the story we’re sharing is that no matter what the worst people say, we can’t be made to go backwards. It’s not possible. We’re still here and are joyfully embracing our truest selves.

Please welcome back Meru to Okazu with your warmest thoughts.

This article has been a long time coming: I’ve thought of a multitude of topics, of ways to approach. Initially, this was going to be about being a Yuri fan in Japan: I was going to recount going to events and reflect fondly on Yuriten 2019 in a world where conventions seem like a dream to me. But this Pride Month, I’ve decided to do something wholly personal and brave since Erica’s given me the space to continue to be myself.

I’m going to come out as trans, and yes, it’s because of Yuri.

I first got into Yuri as a middle-schooler on the cusp of matriculating into high school via Kashimashi, also known as Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl. The first volume, published in English on November 29, 2006 by Seven Seas, was precious to me, spirited away from the shelves of my hometown’s Borders bookstore to my rickety particle board bookshelf heaped with discounted manga from the local Half Price Books. I passed the volumes around between childhood friends, the sole sapphic in our group. Secretly, I envied Kashimashi’s lead Hazumu, a trans girl who well… got to transition. I couldn’t place the feeling at the time: I thought my jealousy was more about , especially since I was, technically, female. It was the gender marked on my birth certificate: presumably, I’d always circle “F”. After all, what else could there be?

Growing up, I believe that I was a girl: society told me I was, my parents told me I was, and the burgeoning, often frightening changes in my body told me I was going to be female, whether I wanted to be or not. I grew my hair to the middle of my back, wore pinks and pastels and soft colors, learned to sway my hips, raised the pitch of my voice, and did all the things girls should do. At the height of my adolescent femininity, I added makeup, smearing on caked-on layers of vivid gold eyeshadow from the local pharmacy via dipping my thumb directly into the palette. I tried so hard to be a girl, tried so hard to give into being soft and pliable and feminine. It was a daily struggle: I thought that if I could erase my fatness, which I now readily embrace, I’d be one step closer. When that didn’t work, I thought if I just doubled down and was hyperfeminine, that might cancel out my physical body.

Amidst that all, I frequently lamented having hormones: when my cycle came, unpredictable and unrelenting due to my PCOS, I wept, begging my mother to take me somewhere where I could get my hormones removed. I wanted to rid myself of my endocrine system, so desperately desired to toss the whole thing out and be born anew. I don’t think I wanted to look different: I just wanted to not be a girl. I didn’t have the words and wouldn’t until about 2012 when I joined Tumblr and found the word “non-binary” on a blog post.

By proxy, my Yuri collection started to grow: BL —Boy’s Love— has always appealed to me, but as my gender started to flux and force me to ask questions too big for my teenage mind, I snuck more Yuri into my collection. My next volume, after sneaking in Kashimashi’s five volume run, was Voiceful: fitting for a bass clarinet player in love with music. After that, it grew and grew. I added bigger and better titles while in college: in Japan, I’d start to collect Kase-san, Yuri is My Job!, and a slew of Japanese titles. When I left Japan on August 11, 2020, the bulk of my collection followed me back to the US, bouncing around from residence to residence until I came to reside in Northern Washington just two months ago. I’ve since added Sailor Moon, which I suspect will be incredibly formative to my gender exploration with Haruka and Michiru, and heck, even Usagi and her crushes on her fellow feminine teammates.

But in the end, I always seemed to come back to Kashimashi.

It’s meditative, in a way. At least once every year and some, I circle back around to thumbing through physical and digital copies of the series, enough that I’ve even podcasted about it and have a small collection of merch dedicated to the series. When my thoughts go quiet, I drift back to Kashimashi’s storyline, and up until recently, I pondered why I still envied Hazumu when I had long since divorced myself from “she/her” and found mild comfort in “she/they.” As I shifted to the more fitting “they/she” and now fully to “they/them”, it became apparent to me, albeit over the course of about two years: I envied Hazumu’s transition, not their gender. I envied being able to wake up as a version of myself that was different, desired a paradigm shift from feminine to wholly de-gendered, save for the aspects of gender I wanted to play with.

Nowadays, the manga is very outdated, at least to me: the way Hazumu is treated makes me think of the kind of person who views transition, and generally being outside the binary, as something that changes the personality of the individual, versus being something that affirms them. As a feminist, I find it hard to read because there’s a lot of biological essentialism tucked around the edges, leaving very little space for any of the characters to question what it means to be attracted to someone pre- and post-transition, and how that may beautiful broaden their own understandings of their gender and sexuality. It’s also got the world’s worst dad, but… this isn’t about that. Plus, I think that there’s something radical about embracing flawed media: we’re not made of perfect instances after all. Each of us is wholly human: shouldn’t our media be just as messy?

I sit here, today, with an inch of hair, with a prominent mustache above my lips —a natural result of my PCOS and higher testosterone levels— and a gorgeous unibrow as thick as. I use they/them freely, and truncate my name to the more pleasant sounding “Meru” versus the overtly feminine sounding full name that I inch closer to casting aside. 

And now, when I look at Yuri, I see myself: I see the soft butches that could, in another series, be they/them or even they/he. I see bodies and ideals and identities that mirror myself. I feel less alone. I feel natural in a country that would rather me turn my back on playing at soft masculinity and gender ambivalence in exchange for kitten heels, a lack of body hair, and legs crossed at the ankle. When I crack open a volume of Yuri and see tomboys and boyish girls and girls straddling the lines of socially acceptable gender and being themselves. 

I see myself in hands held, in kisses traded between sapphic, feminine characters so in love with their partners that it becomes their sole reason for breathing. I find my own heart, genderless as it is, in series like Roadqueens, Our Teachers Are Dating, and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. (Really, anything Nagata Kabi writes, if we’re being 100% honest here.) Because of Yuri, my life is full of a desire to exist, and the more and more I see myself reflected in each manga or light novel I devour, the more and more Yuri guides me towards becoming who I desire to be.

I suppose that in the end, that’s why Yuri matters so much to me: it’s a look in the mirror at a version of myself worth loving, of a sapphic body that has meaning and is worth loving, kissing, and being affectionate with.  It’s my way of examining the world, a lens for my feminist praxis and by proxy, a way to telegraph my non-whiteness into media made by non-white creators. It’s a way to explore gender, and a way to radically recognize who I am and who I have the potential to be. Yuri is powerful like that, and something tells me its inherent power will only grow, given its century long history.

It’s why on today, June 30th, 2022, I can say/type this: My name, for now, is Meru, and I am a trans masc non-binary feminist who loves Yuri. (I am also a very, very soft boi too. Yuri brought me that as well.)

As my thoughts wrap up, there’s a multitude of people I’d like to thank: first and foremost, Erica here at Okazu for giving me the space. This is not at all the article I expected to write, but is very much so the one I needed to. I’d also like to thank Vrai Kaiser of Anime Feminist for (unknowingly) modeling tran masc happiness, and for generally being one of the best people in my life; TJ Ferentini, an Editor at Kodansha and a dear friend, for showing me that transition is what we make it, and that it only takes a declaration to yourself to be who you are; Kit, one of the cohosts of TomoChoco and my best friend who loves me all the time, no matter what pronouns I use; and my partner, Kaylyn Wylie, who has supported me and certainly will hold me when I inevitably weep from seeing this piece go live.

Honestly, I don’t know where my transition —ongoing as it is— will end: I don’t know if it’ll one day involve testosterone or if one day, I’ll decide that a different shape to my feminized body will suit who I am better. I suppose that’s why it’s called a transition, right? It’s a process with no time limit, even though there’s days where I’d love to be. My evolution into who I am is far from over: but hey, at least there’s heaps of good Yuri to help me envision a future where I am me and, by proxy, I matter and have a right to exist.

 

Erica here: Welcome to your self, Meru! You know you’re always welcome here as a writer and a Yuri fan. Thank you for this post and a happy  fucking Queer Pride to all of us. ^_^

 





Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith

June 6th, 2022

Rarely have I read a more captivating biography and rarely have I read so beautiful a comic. Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer is  a magnificent work about a deeply flawed and complex person….a person who would likely have loathed this book about herself.

Patricia Highsmith is a name well-known in older lesbian circles as the real name of Claire Morgan, the author of the first lesbian novel with a happy ending published in the United States. That novel, The Price of Salt, was one of my foundational novels as a young lesbian, as it has been for many others. It was made into the fabulously well-done movie Carol, which I have reviewed here. But to the rest of the world she is far, far more famous as the author of suspense novels, the first of which, Strangers on a Train, was made into a rather famous movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

That said, Patricia Highsmith is not the hero we need. Even if we take away the obvious stress of being a lesbian in a time where that was understood to be a form of mental illness, Highsmith was an unpleasant person; anti-Semitic, racist, and often extremely nasty to the few people around her she could call friends. Ellis addresses this in the foreword, but the script isn’t nearly vulgar enough to have any impact. One can see that they were juggling the idea of making her a bigoted harridan and a semi-sympathetic protagonist, but failed. There’s really no way to sugar-coat hatred and give it any impact, sadly. 

What did have impact was Templer’s art. Templer portrayed Highsmith’s life in three different templates, using one style for the day-to-day experiences, a second for the comic book scenarios Highsmith was cooking up for her job with Timely Comics, while struggling with her sexuality and her writing career. Her suspense novels are given a third style, and they and comics alternately fill Highsmith’s head as she balances all of these things with an increasingly difficult life as a lesbian.

Ellis and Templer’s portrayal of Highsmith is, simply, outstanding. We are left with a very heartfelt portrait of a miserable person who did little to many anyone else happier than she. Highsmith would have hated this book, which is why I love it to much. It’s more sympathetic to her than she ever was to anyone, including herself.

Ratings: 

Art – 10
Story – 10
Writing – 9 Balancing the shittiness of a shitty person with making a books people want to read is hard. 
LGBTQ+  – 9 Highsmith might have been happier if she was alive now…or she might not

Overall – 10

If you’re looking for an excellent Pride month read in comic form, I’m going to strongly recommend you reach for this comic. It’s only weakness is that it is just slightly too kind for the real Patricia Highsmith, which works just fine.