Закрытая запись, не предназначенная для публичного просмотра

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автоматический улучшитель настроения. лучшая музыка для предновогодних вечеринок
торрент



Caravan Palace

@темы: музыка

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хочу выложить зверски позитивную музычку, но имим ничего не принимает в себя
может, за посл год появились новые и легкие системы закачки муз файлов с плеерами, которые можно вставить в дневник?

@темы: музыка

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Знаменитый интернет-маркетолог Майкл Джойнер утверждает, что есть пять основных законов, с помощью которых мы можем добиться любых целей, исполнить любую свою Мечту.

Вот они.

1. Закон прямых линий: самый короткий путь между двумя пунктами - прямой. Также и в достижении целей: если вы хотите получить быстрый результат, выбирайте самый прямой путь, не нужно никаких лишних шагов и задач.
2. Закон ясного видения: цель, в которую вы должны попасть, вы должны видеть ясно. Для того, чтобы что-то получить, вы должны четко представлять, что именно вы хотите.
3. Закон сосредоточения внимания: пока вы не добьетесь своей цели, Вы не сосредотачиваете внимание ни на чем больше.
4. Закон сосредоточенной энергии: аналогично - пока вы не добьетесь результата, вы не тратите свою энергию ни на что больше.
5. Неизбежность действия-реакции: две неразделимые вещи, зависящие друг от друга: действие и последующая реакция.

как вы понимаете пятый пункт? это косяк переводчика?

@темы: психология

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они обсуждают, как книжному бизнесу пережить кризис
слушать это смешно, ей богу
научитесь выпускать книги в мягкой обложке, на желтой бумаге и оформляйте их попонятнее
название книги должно быть крупным, картинка должна быть вспомогательной, сзади книги должно быть написано, о чем она
и все!

@темы: культур

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с приближением нового года чувствую внутренние брожения
пролистала инфо розенкрейцеров (может, написать о беднягах?) и подумала: "в какой же жопе сейчас находятся духовные практики и культы! никому они не нужны и не интересны. и кого они планируют привлечь и научить, как они думают обновлять свои ряды, если в качестве бесплатного сеанса у них "чайка"? чайка была хороша 10 и 20 лет назад. не сейчас

стать что ли духовным лидером? но лень и на том свете пизды дадут

@темы: культур

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интересно, как переживает артемий лебедев свое первенство в конкурсе "тупая пизда 2008"?
кстати, никогда и ничего не слышала о его ориентации (никто из моих подруг с ним не спал, что странно)

@темы: культур

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Закрытая запись, не предназначенная для публичного просмотра

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Закрытая запись, не предназначенная для публичного просмотра

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читала форумы, скачивала кодеки\сплиттеры, но все равно

не читаются мульты в формате ass

нужен ваш совет

@темы: личное

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www.olivia-lee.com

@темы: дизайн

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в сложившейся ситуации у глянцевых журналов один выход: писать о том, как поддержать эффект ухоженности и благополучия меньшими тратами
наш главный вестник женского мира уже включился в игру
а поскольку много в этой жизни сейчас делается с оглядкой сетевых трендсетеров, изменения могут быть видны уже месяца через три (с учетом редакционного периода, который переживает каждый журнал)
усилятся рубрики "пироги и слойки" и "вяжем из собаки"

@темы: культур

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marlabella сосканировала несколько страниц журнала "фото япония" 1985 года













сканы полностью

из чего можно сделать выводы
1. в середине 80-х кавай если и существовал, то в виде отдельных "смешных" предметов, которые охотно покупались и носились - но акцента, собирательства таких предметов не было (вопреки письменным источникам)
2. в середине 80-х токийская уличная мода была полностью заимствована у америки (равно как и русская мода больших городов). вспомним цоя и нашу околороковую тусовку, в которой также были сильны модовские настроения. собственно, на картинке, где харадзюку сверху, никого, кроме классических модов и "цоев" я не вижу. но в отличие от московских дел, токийские шли без традиционного для нас отставания лет на пять (увлечение секондом постигло нас в 90-е, но возможно это было связано с кризисом и с тем, что само явление sh пришло к нам поздно)
3. степень фриковости была предельно низкой. клоуном названа девушка, одетая вполне уместно для работы в магазине подержанной одежды
4. мальчуковая любовь в середине 80-х - уже открытая тема (см рекламу магазина на первом фото)

@темы: история, мода

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не могу молчать. это прекрасно

молчел купил вышивальную машинку и - о чудо - начал ею пользоваться
вот его первые результаты

@темы: мода

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новая радость: ты пишешь коммент
потом уходишь на соседнюю страницу что-то уточнить, потом возвращаешься дописать - и видишь, что поле коммента пустое

у вас такое есть?

@темы: личное

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день смерти ow прошел в трудах
помянуть не удалось
продолжаю читать книгу и злиться
одни кудрявые волосы чего стоят
или абсолютно белая квартира
не поленюсь, найду источники, найду автора и запихаю ему в задницу
к сожалению, автор далеко

или вот: он, автор, утверждает, что жена ow, констанс ллойд, была предана ему до смерти. ага, именно поэтому, наверное, она сменила фамилии детям и запретила им видеться с отцом. а также сама отказалась от фамилии мужа
у меня есть одно объяснение. автор хочет выставить шерарда восторженным идиотом

@темы: книги

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Закрытая запись, не предназначенная для публичного просмотра

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почему постоянно выскакивают цифры в дискуссиях? щелкаешь, а там ничего нет. никакого нового ответа

@темы: личное

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плохо открывается
поэтому выложу для удобства здесь
может, не мне одной пригодится

Japan’s Original Gay Boom
M. J. McLelland
University of Wollongong, [email protected]
This book chapter was originally published as: McLelland, MJ, Japan’s Original Gay
Boom, in Allen, M, and Sakamoto, R (eds), Popular Culture, Globalization and
Japan, Routledge, 2006, 159-173. Copyright Routledge 2006.

Japan's Original "Gay Boom"
Introduction
In recent years, the internationalization of gay, lesbian and transgender identities and
cultures has been the focus of at times heated debate in both popular and academic
contexts.1 Some have taken the development of lesbian and gay media, particularly
literature and film, as well as characteristically western modes of activism and
visibility such as LGBTQ organizations, film festivals and parades in societies as
diverse as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, to be evidence of a "global queering"
(Altman 2001: 86-100). As Dennis Altman points out, "globalization has helped
create an international gay/lesbian identity, which is by no means confined to the
western world" (2001: 86). This interpretation, drawing on globalization studies'
paradigms, understands the emergence of ostensibly western "lesbian" and "gay"
identities and modes of consumption beyond the boundaries of the western world as
part of a process of “sexual westernization.” Assuming the centrality of western
approaches and paradigms, this model posits globalization as a process through which
"the Rest" variously imitates, appropriates, and resists "the West."
A second view, drawing primarily on ethnographic and historical sources, offers a
contrary analysis which tends to reify “traditional” cultures, positing non-western
societies as repositories of imagined “authentic,” “local” sexual identities. This binary
opposition between what may be termed "unique local essentialism" and "global
homogenization" analyses of “global queering” emphasizes the need for more critical
theoretical work as well as for more detailed empirical accounts of the development
of local Asian GLBTQ cultures and histories.
This chapter argues for a recently ascendant third position which challenges both of
the above opposing views. Moving beyond the "transcultural reductiveness" of
approaches which locate the sexual cultures and practices of "other" societies along a
continuum of sameness or difference from those of the west while simultaneously
resisting the tendency to see indigenous Japanese categories as somehow more
authentic or natural than imported understandings, I argue that both western and nonwestern
cultures of gender and sexuality have been, and continue to be, mutually
2
transformed through their encounters with transnational forms of sexual knowledge.
In seeking to transcend the opposed binaries of unique local essentialist and global
homogenization analyses of global queering, the hybridization model offers a more
productive framework for understanding transformations of sexual cultures. Through
an analysis of the emergence in the postwar period of one Japanese sexual category -
that of the gei bōi (gay boy) - I argue that this identity is not a simple importation
from the west, nor the residue of a fixed, unchanging premodern tradition which
managed to “survive” in the face of globalization but instead is the product of
hybridizing global processes.
In an earlier project (McLelland 2000), I traced the spread of the identity category gei
(gay) in Japanese popular culture during the closing decades of the twentieth century.
I argued that one of the key events which saw gei win out over a variety of other
competing categories for male homosexuality was the "gay boom" of the early 1990s
which saw mainstream media (print, television and film) interest themselves in
Japan's sexual minorities. The result of the boom was that gei and rezubian became
widely dispersed throughout the general population and have come to be used in a
manner very similar to the identity categories "gay" and "lesbian" in English.
However, my subsequent encounter with Japan's postwar "perverse press" (McLelland
2005; 2004), a large number of monthly magazines published throughout the 1950s
with titles such as Fūzoku kagaku, Fūzoku zōshi, and Fūzoku kitan has considerably
complicated my understanding of the development of the Japanese category gei. The
perverse press, specializing in stories of "perverse desire" (hentai seiyoku), is a
resource barely tapped in either Japanese or English research, and offers a detailed
account of postwar sexual categories, identities and cultures, including many accounts
written in the first person. Through careful archival work, I was able to trace the
development of the Japanese category gei and uncovered a fact not previously
reported that Japan's original "gay boom" (gei būmu), occurred in 1958, some ten
years prior to the widespread adoption of the term "gay" in English media.
However, before giving an account of the transmission and subsequent popularization
of the term gei in Japanese, it is first necessary to say something about the complex
3
set of understandings that positioned male homosexuality in the sexual culture of the
immediate postwar period.
Japan's postwar homosexual culture
According to reports in the perverse press, the most visible homosexual category to
appear immediately after the war was the danshō or cross-dressing male prostitute
who adopted a style similar to the female-role performers of the kabuki, the onnagata,
who had long been associated with male prostitution. However, the most common
term for such "passive" male homosexuals was okama, a slang term for the buttocks
(and thereby an allusion to anal sex) which can be traced back to the Tokugawa
period (Pflugfelder 1999: 323) and which is still used to refer to homosexuals and
other males who behave effeminately today (McLelland 2000: 8). Kabiya, for
instance, notes that "When ordinary people speak about homosexuals in general, they
refer to them as okama" (discussion cited in Ōta 1957: 421; see also Tanaka 1954: 19).
Unlike the premodern paradigm of transvestite prostitution associated with the
onnagata of the kabuki theatre, contemporary danshō were thought to have a
predilection for passive anal sex which, although they may have been introduced to it
while in the army, was part of their psycho-social makeup. Postwar writers largely
followed paradigms established by the sexological writers of the Taisho period (1912-
25) who, following German leads, had attempted to place the sexually perverse into
distinct taxonomic categories based upon their supposed psychological or
physiological constitutions. The category most commonly used to describe postwar
danshō was "urning" (ūruningu), a sexological term that had been devised by German
sexologist and homosexual, Karl Ulrichs (1825-95), to designate a "female soul in a
male body" and which had achieved widespread currency in prewar sexological
writings. Urning were considered to have woman-like bodies, small genitalia and an
"innate" (sententeki) desire for passive anal sex which led them to turn to prostitution
as a way of fulfilling their desires as well as earning a living. They chose to practice
as transgendered prostitutes because their constitution meant that they were already
woman-like and they had a predisposition toward narcissism (narushishizumu) and
took delight in dressing and making up like a woman.
4
Both danshō and okama were transgender categories strongly associated with
prostitution. However, a variety of other designations were used by masculineidentified
men who wrote in the perverse press about their own same-sex experiences.
These include the neologism danshokuKA which conjoins an alternative reading of
the traditional characters nanshoku (male-male eroticism) and the nominalizing suffix
ka or "ist;" hence danshoku-ist or "practitioner of danshoku." Another term widely
used in the immediate postwar years was sodomia from the English "sodomite" (or
perhaps "sodomy") which derived from the Old Testament story of the destruction of
the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, supposedly on account of the poor sexual etiquette
of their populations. In the postwar magazines, sodomia was not used to refer to anal
or oral sex (the "unnatural crime" of sodomy), but was used to describe male
homosexuality in general and could also be used as a designation for individual
homosexuals. The term could be used as a noun for individuals identifying themselves
as sodomia (homosexuals), as an adjective, as in sodomia "interests" (shumi) or
sodomii relations (kankei).2 Sodomia could also be used as a group designation or
form of address as in "sodomia no minna san" or "all you homosexuals" and could be
conceived of as a state that one could enter into as in "sodomia naru" or "become
sodomitical."
The English term "homosexual" was also widely used in transliterated form as
homosekushyaru, often abbreviated to homo. The Japanese translation of homosexual
into kanji, dōseiai (literally same-sex love) which was widely used in the prewar press,
also appears in the postwar publications, often conjoined with the suffix sha or
"person." However, dōseiai frequently appears with the rubi (superscript indicating
the pronunciation) "homo" written alongside. In fact, homo, used as an alternative
reading for the characters dōseiai, or written separately in the katakana sсript for
foreign loanwords, was, by the end of the 1950s, the most common designation
describing all men with an interest in same-sex sexual acts.
As the variety of terms - both foreign and indigenous - suggest, in the immediate
postwar period it is impossible to discern a pattern in their usage since they are often
used interchangeably in the same discussion. For instance, the January 1954 edition of
Fūzoku zōshi contains an article by Kabiya (1954) entitled "Danshoku kissaten" or
danshoku "coffee shops" which introduces some of the "brand-new homosexual
5
(sodomia) meeting places" where both "homo" (homo) and "non-homo" (homo denai)
customers can be found. Kabiya frequently switches between terms, speaking of "bars
for homosexuals" where the designation is sodomia; mentioning also danshokusha, in
which the suffix sha or "person" is conjoined with the traditional term danshoku,
hence "male-male eroticism persons," and elsewhere using homo.
The ability of the Japanese written language to use characters signifying a certain
meaning alongside superscript designating a non-standard pronunciation is a cause of
further confusion. While "traditional" terms such as danshoku lived on well into the
postwar period, the meaning of these terms had obviously shifted. The non-traditional
use of nominalizing suffixes such as ka (-ist) or sha (-person) now used to designate
specific types of sexual being were employed alongside the use of rubi to suggest new
readings of old terms. In the August 1953 edition of Fūzoku kagaku, for instance,
danshoku appears with the reading sodomia printed alongside.3 What nuance this
linguistic play added to these terms, or if such nuances were understood in the same
way by all readers, is very difficult to discern but is a clear indication of the hybridity
of postwar Japanese sexual categories. Old-fashioned terms such as urning, hangovers
from early twentieth-century German sexology, lived on alongside indigenous terms
such as okama and danshō. Sodomia, a Latin term which in Europe had strong
associations with the Church and was generally used to designate oral or anal acts of
"sodomy," in Japanese became a general rubric for describing all men with same-sex
sexual interests and, despite its disparaging connotations in English, was frequently
used as an identity category and a form of address. This very confused situation is
evidence of Fran Martin's contention that the circulation of global sexual categories
results not in the displacement of native categories by foreign but in "densely
overwritten and hyper-dynamic texts caught in a continual process of transformation
that occurs with the ongoing accretion of fresh discursive traces" (2003: 251) - a trend
illustrated by the popularity of another hybrid term, the gei bōi.
The rise of the gei bōi
The mainly American Allied troops who occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952 and who
continued to be based in the country throughout the Korean War included many men
with homosexual as well as heterosexual interests. Although the sexual services that
6
were set up during the Occupation to cater for heterosexual men have been well
studied (Tanaka 2002; Dower 2000), little attention has been paid to the sexual
interactions that took place between members of the Occupation forces and Japanese
men. One of the main results of this interaction was the transmission and widespread
dissemination in Japanese culture of the English term gay (gei) - an interesting
example of cultural "glocalization."
"Gay" as a signifier for homosexual men was not widely understood in the US in the
1950s and did not become widespread even in Anglophone societies until the Gay
Liberation Movement of the early 1970s. The term had only just established itself as a
common referent among homosexual subcultures in the US as a result of the mass
mobilization during the Second World War which brought a diverse number of
homosexual men and women together from all parts of the country and helped to
standardize homosexual slang (Faderman 1992: 163; Berube 1990: 117; Cory 1951:
107-8). Yet, as Cory points out, even in the early 1950s the term was "practically
unknown outside of homosexual circles, except for police officers, theatrical groups
and a few others" (1951: 108).
Compared with the slow dissemination of the word gay throughout Anglophone
societies where it was to take another twenty-five years before becoming general
currency, the rise of gei in Japanese was meteoric. Gay (gei) entered Japanese
immediately after the war via gay men in the Occupation forces who referred to their
Japanese partners as gei bōi or "gay boys" (Kabiya 1962a: 146) and by the mid 1950s
gei, especially as part of the compound gei bōi, was being used in mainstream
Japanese media to describe effeminate homosexual men. The sudden popularity of the
term was largely due to the fact that gei (written in the katakana syllables used to
transcribe foreign loanwords) is a homophone of gei (written with the character for
"artistic accomplishment" - as in geisha). Gay boys were sometimes spoken of as gei
wo uri, that is "selling gei" and it was easy to make a semantic slip between geinōjin
(an entertainer, where gei is written with the character for artistic accomplishment)
and gei bōi (where gei is a transliteration of gay). Gei bōi therefore came to be
understood, at least in part, as an occupational category, in a manner similar to
onnagata or geisha.
7
Unlike the danshō who were essentially street prostitutes, the gei bōi sought
employment in the bar world. In 1957 sexologist Ōta Tenrei published an edited
volume entitled Dai san no sei (The third sex) based on research he had conducted
into the gei bā that had sprung up in Tokyo after the war, pointing out that such bars
had not existed before the war. One of the earliest, Yakyoku (Nocturne) in Shinjuku,
was reportedly opened as early as 1946 and was much frequented by foreigners
(Kabiya 1962b: 102-3; Fujii 1953: 189). In the immediate postwar period, the small
bars where young Japanese men went to meet potential partners or clients had been
referred to as danshoku kissaten (coffee shops) or sakeba (drinking spots) but in 1952
a staff member of a Shinjuku danshoku bar named Adonis who disliked these oldfashioned
designations began to refer to his establishment as a gei bā (gay bar). The
term quickly caught on and by the mid 1950s was widely used, even in the
mainstream press. While the earliest bars seem to have been more informal, by the
early 1950s, the bars were staffed by between three and seven professional hosts
known as gei bōi who served drinks and provided conversation for customers, often
making themselves available for after-hours assignations (Ōta 1957: 306-10).
Ōta discovered nine gei bā in Asakusa, seven in Shinjuku and one each in Ginza,
Shimbashi, Ikebukuro, Shibuya and Kanda, a total of twenty one in all (Ōta 1957:
306). Even compared with a city like New York at this time, this was already a large
number. However, according to Ōta's account, most of the bars were modest watering
holes with only basic amenities since earlier attempts to provide more high-class
surroundings had failed. This was all to change very suddenly in the next few years as
Japan saw a "boom" in gei life resulting in a proliferation of bars as well as a
significant shift in the kind of clientele they attracted.
Japan's original "gay boom"
In the early 1990s Japanese media were swept by a "gay boom" (gei būmu) which saw
a rapid escalation in the amount of attention given to minority sexuality issues in the
press, on television and in movies. While this development has been widely discussed
in English (see for example, Hall 2000: 37-43; Lunsing 1997) and Japanese (Yajima
1997; Fushimi 2002), no commentators seem to have noticed that Japan's first gay
boom, using precisely this term, had actually taken place thirty-five years previously,
8
in 1958. While, in the early 1990s, the concept gei was beginning to be articulated in
a more political sense, often in the context of discussion of a gei and rezubian
"movement" (undō, the late 50s use of this term was quite different and is a clear
illustration of how the meanings of terms can shift radically over even short periods of
time.
The most significant event that enabled the rapid expansion of the gei subculture took
place in 1957, when, after years of campaigning, women's groups forced the
government to pass an anti-prostitution bill. As many businesses that had relied on
heterosexual prostitution closed down or restructured their activities, space was
opened up in former red-light areas for new sex-related businesses, including those
catering to homosexual men and cross-dressers. Since the law was targeted at the
open and conspicuous world of mainstream heterosexual prostitution, its impact upon
more covert homosexual practice was less severe and to an extent allowed
homosexual operations to move into former heterosexual red-light areas. Since neither
homosexuality nor cross-dressing was illegal in Japan and homosexual meeting places
were not raided by the police, as was routine in Anglophone societies, Japanese gei
bōi were able to go about their business without fear of police harassment. The only
restriction on gei bā intermittently enforced by the police, was the 1948 Entertainment
and Amusement Trade Law which ostensibly forbad trading between midnight and
sunrise. Consequently, Shinjuku Ni-Chōme (Shinjuku's second ward), which had been
a heterosexual red-light district, was gradually taken over by gei businesses from this
time and now houses the largest collection of bars catering to a homosexual clientele
in Japan (Ōtsuka 1995: 14-19; Fushimi 2002: 247-258).
While in 1957 there had only been twenty or so gei bā in Tokyo catering primarily to
a clientele of homosexual men, in 1958 the mainstream press began talking about a
"gay boom" (gei būmu) that had seen the number of gei bā shoot up to nearly sixty,
largely due to the cross-over appeal of these establishments to a clientele outside the
homosexual world (Shūkan taishū 1958: 24). Gei bōi were no longer catering to an
exclusively male (or homosexual) clientele but also provided companionship for
women. Ōta points out that while a large majority of the gei bōi working in the bars
were by temperament "urning," there were also boys who were not homosexual
(homo de nai) including students and other "semi professionals" who simply worked
9
for a time in the bars in order to earn money (1957: 308-9) and were happy to
entertain both male and female clients. Indeed, by the early 60s, evening editions of
the tabloid papers regularly featured over twenty advertisements recruiting "boys" or
"beautiful boys" to work as hosts in private clubs for "gentlemen." Known as "assisted
boys" (enjō sareru shōnen) (Satō 1960), these youths anticipated the "compensated
dating" (enjō kōsai) schemes later devised by Japanese high-school girls by some
quarter of a century.
The growing popularity of the gei bā among a more mainstream clientele makes it
difficult to equate these institutions with the developing gay bar subculture in the US
and other western countries. As Nancy Achilles points out, widespread sodomy laws
and restrictions on indecent behavior (such as members of the same sex dancing
together) made it difficult for gay bars to advertise their presence in the 50s and early
1960s in the US and news of their opening tended to be passed on via word of mouth
(1967: 232-33). Esther Newton (1979), in Mother Camp, an investigation of 1960s
drag shows in the US, does draw a distinction between "gay bars" where homosexuals
met and the more upmarket "tourist clubs" which put on drag shows for a
predominantly heterosexual clientele, but the latter were comparatively few and
remained largely subcultural with little impact on mainstream culture. In Japan,
however, the early 60s witnessed widespread media interest in the gei bōi
phenomenon.
For instance, an unsigned article in the April 1963 edition of the magazine Ura Mado
refers to the "touristization" (kankōka) that was sweeping through Japan's gei bā scene
wherein "homosexuals" (homo) were being displaced by "ordinary customers" (futsū
no kyaku) including many women.4 An article in Fūzoku kitan, also published in April
1963, warns homosexual men who visit "gay bars" in the expectation of making
assignations with the boys working there that some boys also "service" women.5 The
author suggests that when referring to such boys, panpan bōi (after the panpan girls
who catered to GIs during the Occupation), would be a better designation; although he
does point out that rather than "servicing" female clients "as a man," the boys "receive
caresses like pets." Transgender artist Miwa Akihiro reported that at the beginning of
the 1950s gei bā were rather furtive establishments where customers could be seen
passing to and fro waiting for a quiet moment to slip inside (Itō 2001: 2), but by the
10
end of the decade such bars had become avant-garde places of entertainment for a
more mainstream clientele.
In 1958, the popular magazine Shūkan taishū (Weekly popular culture) wrote about
Japan's "gay boom" (gei būmu), describing it as "the best in the world" (sekai ichi).
Unlike the previous category of danshō who were street prostitutes working by night,
gei bōi were considered to have "evolved" a new kind of "gay style" (gei sutairu) -
one that could "parade itself in an imposing manner even in daylight." Communities
of gei bōi were developing around gei bā all over Japan, estimates running to 2500 in
Tokyo, 1000 in Osaka, 500 each in Kyoto and Kobe and another 1000 or so spread
throughout the rest of Japan (Shūkan taishū 1958: 25). These reports encouraged the
conception that gei was very much a commercial category, with there being "in excess
of 5000 persons to whom the name gay (gei) is applied professionally" (shokugyōteki
ni).
While the "feminine" style preferred by danshō had been a retrospective one,
consisting of women's kimono and wigs in which long hair was tied up in a chignon
reminiscent of geisha, the gei bōi were more contemporary, even pioneering in their
self presentation. They had little interest in passing as women and did not see
themselves as female impersonators, considering their androgynous (chūsei), boyish
style to be "a new disposition" (atarashii keikō, more in keeping with the modern
world (Satō 1960: 60). Gei bōi were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, and
although born during the war, would have remembered little from this period. They
had no nostalgia for Japan's imperial past but looked abroad instead for inspiration
when fashioning their self identities. In the late 1950s, gei bōi were sporting the shortstyle
"Cecile cut"6 popularized by actress Jean Seberg, the androgynous star of Saint
Joan (1957), Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and A Bout de Souffle (1959). They wore light
makeup and dressed in newly fashionable slacks, under which they wore women's
pantyhose. They also had a preference for perfume, especially Chanel no. 5. Jean
Seberg represented a new, more androgynous model for women than had previously
been popular and the gei bōi saw themselves as "cultural women" (bunka josei), that
is, they had acquired their femininity by incorporating particular sartorial codes and
modes of behavior associated with cultural constructions of the feminine. Gei bōi
pointed out that while the basic categories of "man" and "woman" had not changed
11
since the time of Adam and Eve, they represented a new "sexual idea" (sei kannen) -
the cultural woman who constituted a third sex (dai san no sei).
While the gei bōi were clearly keen to differentiate themselves from the danshō, both
identities illustrate how the feminine was not reducible to the female body, but could
be seen as a set of practices able to be expressed by either male- or female-bodied
individuals. The femininity of the gei bōi was, however, by definition modern and
both forward and outward looking. The danshō, in continuing to dress and wear their
hair like "traditional" Japanese women, had carried over prewar modes of transgender
identity and performance but, when it came to the performance of femininity, gei bōi
presented themselves as quintessentially modern. Matsumoto Toshio's 1969 movie
Bara no sōretsu (Funeral parade of roses), the vehicle that launched gei bōi "Peter" on
his career, features a fight scene between Peter and his gei bōi companions and a gang
of real girls whom they dismiss as tada no onna - "merely women" - in a move
recalling earlier paradigms which regarded kabuki onnagata as more accomplished
performers of femininity than female actresses.7 Following Judith Butler we may ask
whether this is "a colonizing 'appropriation' of the feminine" - a question which only
has moral force in a belief system which "assumes that the feminine belongs to
women" (1990: 122). Historically, this has not been the case in Japan where sexual
tension had long been generated by the "dissonant juxtaposition" of feminine gender
performance played out with male bodies. Bara no sōretsu itself plays with this
dissonance in a scene where Peter (or Eddy as he is named in the movie) and his gei
bōi companions enter a male toilet and stand together at the urinals - much to the
consternation of the other male users. As Newton points out "drag questions the
'naturalness' of the sex-role system in toto; if sex-role behavior can be achieved by the
'wrong' sex, it logically follows that it is in reality also achieved, not inherited by the
'right' sex" (1979: 103). What Peter and the "real" girls are fighting over is not
therefore some residual or authentic expression of an inner femininity but rather the
right to enact femininity as a style, or even "way" of being in the world, a project to
which biology has little to contribute.
Although gei bōi stressed their modernity, they had much in common with their
prewar counterparts and their popularity was enabled by enduring assumptions about
gender, particularly as it was played out in the entertainment world, which had
12
survived into the postwar period. Drawing upon previous paradigms of transgender
performance developed in the kabuki theater, there was a tendency to view gei not so
much as a sexual orientation but more a kind of artistic skill. The fact that, unlike
danshō, gei bōi were not primarily prostitutes but worked in the bars taking care of
and providing entertainment for guests - similar to female hostesses in regular bars -
enabled them to develop skills as performers. One aspect of this performance was
heightened transgendered behavior, a trend that accelerated in the next decade. In
1961, for instance, Fūzoku kitan (1961a: 63) described the "flourishing" business for
"geisha boys" at high-class restaurants in Tokyo who, dressing as onnagata,
performed for an elite clientele. Also in the early 1960s, nightclubs such as Tokyo's
Golden Akasaka were frequently staging "imitation girl contests" which gave
contestants drawn from the country's gei bā the opportunity to compete with each
others for prizes (Hyakuman nin no yoru 1963b). In both cases gei bōi (homosexual)
elides into geisha bōi (entertainer) where the stress is not on sexual orientation so
much as artistic performance.
Hence, at a time when homophile organizations in the US were keen to stress the
"normality" of the homosexual, developing a quasi-ethnic understanding of "gay
identity" based on citizenship and rights (Epstein 1998; Plummer 1995: 90), Japanese
gei bōi actually embraced paradigms which emphasized their difference. By the late
1960s, emerging US gay activism was characterized by its militancy and chauvinism,
rejecting effeminate gender performance and "discredit[ing] camp and other evasive
techniques" (Levine 1998: 26). Transgender paradigms of homosexual identity
expression were rejected in favor of a more masculine or at times hypermasculine
mode of self-presentation (Levine 1998).
Japan's gei culture was, however, going in entirely the opposite direction, capitalizing
on the gei bōi's exotic difference. Nineteenth-century German notions positing male
homosexuals as a separate "third sex," contemporary European codes of androgynous
beauty and traditional Japanese understandings of transgender performance were
fused to create the figure of the gei bōi. Japan's gei bōi were cultural innovators who,
via their role as entertainers, were able to have an impact on society far wider than the
confines of the homosexual subculture and whose influence was to remain strong until
the early 1980s.
13
Conclusion
During the late 1950s Japan underwent a "gay boom" which saw an explosion of
homosexual discussion and representation in the popular media unparalleled by
developments in any Anglophone society until the early 1970s. Gei had already been
established as a term for effeminate young men who worked in the entertainment
industry by the mid 1950s - some twenty years prior to the adoption of the term gay in
English-language media. While gei is certainly related to the use of gay in English -
this latter term had itself only won out as a preferred term for self-designation within
US homosexual communities during the war and was not picked up by mainstream
media until the early 1970s. Hence, while it is clear that Japan's encounter with the
Allied Forces during the Occupation resulted very quickly in the generation of new
types of sexual discourse and the proliferation of new modes of homosexual practice
and identity, these Japanese subcultures were very different from the developing
"gay" subcultures in the US at this time, not least in terms of their apparent openness
and the freedom with which they were discussed in the press.
While in the postwar period in the US gay was associated with the development of
essentialist, masculine male homosexual identities, in Japan the development of gei as
a primarily transgender and also a commercial category encouraged a movement in
the opposite direction. The convenient homophony of gei as "gay" and gei as "artistic
accomplishment" only served to reinforce the hybridized manner in which this term
came to be used in Japanese to signify a new kind of sexual being - the gei bōi who
was defined more in terms of his role as entertainer than in terms of his choice of
sexual partner. Consequently, the Japanese gei bōi was as different from the American
gay man, as he was different from the danshō or male prostitute who had preceded
him.
However in the mid 1980s two simultaneous developments led to a gradual revision
in the way gei was understood in the Japanese media - the founding of in Japan of gay
and lesbian rights' organizations which drew upon a now international understanding
of "gay" as a self-referent for largely gender-normative homosexual men, and the
emergence of the term "newhalf"8 which was to become the new identity category for
14
effeminate homosexual men who lived and worked in Japan's bar and entertainment
world. The result was that by the time of Japan's second "gay boom" which swept the
media in the early 1990s, gei had displaced homo, emerging as the most common selfreferent
among homosexual men in Japan. To understand this as a process whereby
indigenous Japanese categories of sexual identity were displaced by foreign
borrowings, however, would be to efface the complex history of the term gei in
Japanese.
The fact that the gei bōi was able to emerge so rapidly as a "new sexual idea" in the
postwar period was in large part due to the fact that prewar nationalist notions of
embodiment had collapsed along with the government's rigid regulatory regime at the
war's end. The ideology of the prewar regime was so discredited that space was
opened up in the ruins of Japan's cities for the celebration of "the raw, erotic energy of
Japanese bodies" (Igarashi 2000: 48) enabling the development of new forms of
hetero- and homosexual practice and identity. The gei bōi rejected the aggressive
masculine gender performance and the procreative imperative of the prewar regime
but, instead aligning himself with discredited modes of "traditional" femininity
embodied by the danshō, he sought to embody the new androgynous ideal of beauty
emerging in Europe which was to dominate the cultural scene of the late 60s. The
hybridized gender performance of Japan's gei bōi, then, which drew upon earlier
paradigms of the transgender entertainer coupled with new western ideals of
androgyny, is an instance of what Iwabuchi terms "transformative local practices"
which result in "the formation of non-Western indigenized modernity" (2002: 40) and
is further illustration of Fran Martin's observation that in modern societies sexual
discourse is unavoidably "polyglottic and translational" (2003: 249). The gei bōi, like
the American gay man, can therefore be seen as a mode of subjectivity enabled by
changes taking place in postwar modernity but gei bōi is an indigenous Japanese
category which arose in relation to local Japanese conditions, not some copy of a
western original.

@темы: культур

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хорошая статья про фритерство
многое объясняет

молодежь, у которой нет примера

но, к сожалению, материал семилетней давности
все могло перемениться

@темы: культур