Bara

About

Bara (also known as Men’s Love) is a genre of fictional media that depicts homosexuality between hypersexualized men, though characters can range from "ripped" to "burly" to "bear" and beyond.

Origins

The origin of the word itself is not clear. It was first used in a mainstream setting in the title of a semi-nude photobook featuring gay author Yukio Mihima, Bara kei, published in 1961^[1]. In 1971, the magazine Barazoku became the first gay men's magazine to be sold in mainstream bookshops in Asia, where it and the shortened form "bara" quickly grew to prominence. In contrast with Yaoi, bara is predominantly authored by gay men for gay men, while yaoi is largely marketed towards women and features more traditional dominant and effeminate roles.

History

Gengoroh Tagame, considered the most influential creator of gay manga^[2], credits the beginning of modern gay erotic art to the fetish magazine Fuzokukitan which ran from 1960 to 1974. Though it included heterosexuals and lesbians, the magazine gradually increased its gay content and articles, and featured mostly male erotic cover art. It also featured American physique magazines and artists, such as Tom of Finland^[3]. Fuzokukitan's editor, Mamiya Hiroshi, went on to contribute to the magazine Barazoku, and many artists who debuted in Fuzokukitan eventually ended up working for a privately published, limited circulation magazine, Bara.

Reception

The 1990s saw a surge of gay rights advocacy and acceptance, with many considering it "the social-change issue of the 90s"^[4]. Throughout the early-mid 2000s, websites like LiveJournal and Tumblr were launched for the first time, reaching a global audience which enabled the spread and sharing of modern bara works that helped launch the genre into the mainstream. It is now widely accepted and enjoyed, and its fundamental differences to yaoi are still hotly debated^[5] among artists of gay works today.

Fandom

Like yaoi, bara has a large internet presence, notably among the furry community where it is well-represented in artwork. All of the following links are NSFW.

Tumblr

Tumblr features many explicit bara blogs, and any number of different characters from various fandoms, as well as original characters, can be found in the general bara tag^[6]. Among the many blogs, Bara Hardcore is notable for reblogging only the newest art directly from its creator.

Image Boards

The primary bara-centric image board is BaraChan, consisting of five main boards (/2D/, drawn bara; /3D/, real bara; /fur/, furry non-humans; /alt/, the fetish board; and /gray/, anything too ambiguous to fit anywhere else) as well as areas for fic writing and roleplay.

4chan's /y/, though dedicated to yaoi, often has a bara thread floating around. Many threads feature characters that would qualify as bara, though are not implicitly labeled so (Avengers, Mortal Kombat, etc).

Furries

Bara is exceedingly popular among the furry community. A search for "bara" on Fur Affinity brings up nearly 6,000 submissions.

Notable Artists

Bara doujinshi artists have been able to sell their work to a wider audience with the rise of the internet. Some artists have become incredibly popular among Western fans, many who started on the popular Japanese art-sharing site, Pixiv, before gaining enough popularity to begin publishing professionally. These artists include Mentaiko and the circle BlackMonkey Pro.

Various Examples

External References