Archive for the LGBTQ Category


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.





Soulmate, Volume 1, Guest Review by Laurent Lignon

May 11th, 2022

Welcome to another Guest Review Wednesday and welcome back to Journaliste/Chroniqueur Laurent Lignon! Laurent is going to introduce us to the French-language edition of a Chinese webtoon and I, for one, am thrilled to have some manhua on Okazu! So settle in, give Laurent your attention and your usual warm welcome. Laurent, the floor is yours!

Hello there, this is Laurent, your Frenchman guest reviewer. I wish to once again express all my thanks to Erica for running such a great website and allowing a French guy like me to talk about some Yuri that may not have been translated in English yet. Enough talk, on to the review ! Soulmate, Volume 1 has been released as a webtoon in Mandarin Chinese by Kuaikan Manhua and the printed version in French by Nazca Editions.

Qi and Yuanzi are 27 years old each, and have been living a happy couple life for the past 5 years. They started to date when they were students but knew each other since high school, albeit from a distance. When one morning Qi wakes up 10 years in the past, her adult mind stuck in her teenage body, she sees this as a chance to start to date Yuanzi 5 years before their official meeting. However, what she don’t know is that her teenage self has woken up in her adult body, with strictly no clue of what has happened during the past decade and is struggling to adapt to this new environment… Including the fact that she has fallen in love and live with a woman who has a few years left to live.

From then, we follow alternatively Qi in the two different timelines. Adult Qi has no problem to adapt to her past life, having already lived it. She actively starts to befriend the lonely Yuanzi, much to the astonishment of her classmates. This change the way Yuanzi lived her school years, as she was already aware of her own attraction to girls and voluntary avoided any friendship for fear of being forced out of the closet. We see that, even back then, she had already noticed Qi and was probably feeling attracted to her, despite being ignored.

On the other hand, Teenage Qi has difficulties adapting to her adult life, both professional and private. Most notably, she lashes out violently at the idea that not only she’s attracted to women, but also is currently living a satisfying couple life with one. Her angry reaction to this has the side-effect of revealing, both to Teenage Qi and the reader, that Yuanzi is dying and may have only a few years to live, if not months, due to an illness that went undiagnosed during her high school years (a fact that Adult Qi is well aware of, and which his fueling her need to date Yuanzi earlier than expected in order to have her diagnosed and saved). Yuanzi takes Teenage Qi’s angry rants for a way to cope with her incoming death while Teenage Qi learn to adapt her mind to the difficulties of her professional life, as well as trying to understand how her relationships with Yuanzi came to be and what it mean about her own possible internalized homophobia.

Both timelines features dangers for the couple. In the past, there is Chen Shuo : the most popular boy in school and Qi’s best friend, who is secretly in love with her and feels suddenly rejected when she prefers to spend time with the lonely Yuanzi instead of him. In the present, there is Xinjue : Qi’s 20 years old and rather intrusive assistant, who seems to have a toxic infatuation with Qi.

Wenzhilizi (writing) and Keranbing (drawing) deliver here an interesting and beautiful story about what it is to be a lesbian couple in contemporary China. The main characters are well fleshed out, both in their adult and teenage years. The story eschews lesbian clichés, but simply shows two women in love living a simple life together to the fullest until what they know will be the inevitable end. Qi’s fight in the past is all motivated by her love for Yuanzi : she does not want to just be with her for 5 more years, she want Yuanzi’s disease to be diagnosed early enough so it can be treated and they will live a longer life together. She understand that Yuanzi is her soulmate and that no other woman could ever replace her. In the present, seeing the toll the disease takes on Yuanzi allows Qi to become more mature and to understand that a couple life is not the romanticized version she fancied in books and movies, but an everyday struggle to enjoy those moments of happiness. As the volume ends, danger lurks on the horizon for Qi in both timelines, with Teenage Qi about to face a betrayal that could put her professional life and her couple in danger.

Ratings:

ART : 7 – Keranbing’s art is very similar in style to Japanese manga. Considering the story was designed to be read on e-readers and cellphones, you may find the computer-generated colors quite awkward on the first reading. I find those perfectly fitted to the story myself, with warm and sweet colorization being the norm. As with all manhua, the volume is fully colorized and must be read left-to-right.

STORY : 8 – Well written, full of characters one can relate to and some cultural differences are pointed out (most notably the fact that military service is a mandatory part of the school curriculum). It’s pure slice of life, except there’s that fantasy body switching twist thrown in it.

CHARACTER : 8 – Qi and Yuanzi are endearing characters : I’m eagerly waiting to see how they will face their incoming challenges and hope that all will end well for them. The secondary characters aren’t as fleshed out yet, with the exception of Xinjue which will be important for the second volume.

SERVICE : 1 – The story open on a two pages love scene. However, due to the Chinese censorship concerning sexual acts, it is all done with some beautiful non-ero way to show what is happening and strictly no nudity.

YURI : 10 – It is a story of a lesbian couple in today’s China, but it is also a story about two women that are more than just lovers. The title doesn’t lie, and it is expressed in every way when Adult Qi is looking at Teenage Yuanzi and Adult Yuanzi do her best to reassure Teenage Qi.

OVERALL : A good story, that manages to alternates fuzzy moments with more dramatic ones while never succumbing to either full sugar-coated love story or dark, devastating pathos. The comic moments are well dosed (using super deformed for Adult Qi’s teenage life). The cliffhanger is perfect, and announces a more intense second volume.

A SMALL NOTE ON LGBTQ+ RIGHTS IN CHINA : Homosexuality was accepted in China from ancient times until the Westernization of the country in the late 19th Century. It was then banned for the most part of the 20th century until being fully recognized and legalized in 1997. However, same sex marriages or civil unions aren’t recognized (but a legal guardianship agreement exists in order to protect the rights of the couples), same-sex couples cannot adopt children and trans people can’t legally have their gender recognized on their legal documents unless they have undergone a complete gender reassignment operation (which is extremely expensive in China). Due to family pressures, most gay people in China are closeted but the number of coming-outs is rising by the year with microblogging sites existing to help people come out to their family. Homophobia exists and is generally fueled by Western ideas found on social networks.

Erica here: Thank you so much, Laurent. I’m very excited that you’re brought this to my and everyone else’s attention!  I’m very interested to see how the story develops.

Thanks to Luce for the heads up – you can read Soulmate in English on webtoon platform Tapas!

 
 
 




Order By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga Today!

May 2nd, 2022

20 years in the making, By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga, is a ground breaking history of the Yuri genre.

Factual, funny and highly entertaining, By Your Side is a series of interlocking essays, articles and lectures from Yuricon founder Erica Friedman’s work on Yuri anime and manga. Meant to be approached as informal discussion in the manner of convivial conversation over multiple dinners, or panels at an anime convention, through these essays, readers will become familiar with the key creators, tropes, concepts, symbols and titles of the first 100 years of the Yuri genre. Walk by our side as we journey through the past, present and future of Yuri!

By Your Side will be released out in time for both Pride Month and the 20th anniversary of Erica’s blog, Okazu! 

Here’s what early readers have had to say about By Your Side:

“By Your Side is the complete Yuri resource I only ever dreamed could exist. Decades in the making, this glorious collection surveys, analyzes, and contextualizes Yuri with unparalleled detail and enthusiasm. Friedman graces readers with illuminating insights as they follow her through a century of the genre’s evolution and revolution. By sharing her extraordinary knowledge, she provides inquirers, scholars, and aficionados alike with a deeper appreciation and understanding of lesbian anime and manga while galvanizing them towards the next era of Yuri.”

-Nicki Bauman, Yurimother

 

“The first in-depth study of Yuri in English.”

-James Welker, Professor of Cross-Cultural and Japanese Studies, Kanagawa University

Order your copy of By Your Side today!