Japan's progressive sex: Male homosexuality, national competition, and thecinema

This essay serves as a broad investigation of the origins of what came to b e called the "gay boom" in 1990's Japanese cinema: a culmination of print m edia television, and especially films which made the gay male not merely a visible (political) subject but also the site of displaced contestations of gendered (female) desire. The most visible transnational signifier of the "gay boom" was the 1992 film Okoge, a film which, in keeping with a Japanes e trend which relocates the gay male as a safe displacement of female desir e, posits the heterosexual female as the audience's point of identification in a film about the lives of gay Japanese men. Using this as a starting po int, this essay seeks to explore how male homosexuality and gender construc tion operate within both Japanese nationalism and the transnational discour se of Japanese cinema's dissemination.