Gengoroh Tagame

Who is Gengoroh Tagame?

Gengoroh Tagame is a Japanese manga artist who specializes in gay BDSM erotic manga, many of which depict graphic violence. The men he depicts are hypermasculine, and tend to be on the bearish side.

Born into a family descended from samurai, Tagame began his career as a manga artist in 1982, while he was studying graphic design at Tama Art University. His works have been published in several Japanese gay magazines, including Sabu, G-men and SM-Z. Since 1986, he has used the pen-name Gengoroh Tagame, and since 1994 Tagame has lived off the profits of his art and writings. In recent years, Tagame has edited a two volume artbook series about the history of gay erotic art in Japan from the 1950s to the present, 日本のゲイ・エロティック・アート volumes 1 and 2.

All his works contain "virile males, or youths, and their apprenticeship of physical and mental submission". Works of his include: Jujitsu Kyoshi at B Product; Emono, Shirogane no Hana and Pride at G-Project. Pride Focuses on a masculine power top who is discovered by his even more masculine professor as harboring masochistic tendencies. The professor and the student form a relationship with the professor being the dominant and treating the boy as a slave, using him as a human urinal by peeing in his mouth, and punishing him when he "deserves" it with ways ranging from beating him with a whip to defecating in his mouth to gang rape. Naburi mono, serialised in G-Men in 1994, is about the kidnapping of a wrestler who refused a yakuza boss. One of the yazuka falls in love with the wrestler. They go into hiding together and eventually commit joint suicide to preserve their honour.