Tag Archives: GLBT/Q

Why I Adopted My Husband: The True Story of a Gay Couple Seeking Legal Recognition in Japan by Yuta Yagi

I’m behind on my reviews. In the works I have (finally catching up with the cool kids) Witch Hat Atelier and Kowloon Generic Romance. But, first, in honor of Pride Month, I give you Why I Adopted My Husband: The True Story of a Gay Couple Seeking Legal Recognition in Japan / Douseikon de Oyako ni Narimashita.

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When I was looking for some information on this title, I stumbled across a three-star review on Goodreads that basically praised this book, but felt that it was a deeply depressing comment on the state of the world, but specifically Japan, a country that exports so much LGBTQIA+ content. 

They’re not wrong.

It’s also a somewhat difficult read because it’s incredibly basic. I suspect this manga is incredibly important when it was first released in Japan in April of 2017 (同性婚で親子になりました from Bunkasha.) In a lot of ways it reminds me of My Brother’s Husband, in that, in the midst of some of the personal stories there are long chapter inserts that are how-tos. At one point, there is even a line-by-line instruction manual as to how to fill out the adoption papers, including directions for lesbian couples doing the same.

Unlike My Brother’s Husband, the story of Why I Adopted My Husband… is 100% autobiographical and, thus, a lot lighter. There are a couple of cute stories about how the couple broke the news to their respective parents, but largely it is meant to guide couples through getting legal recognition, which gave me huge flashbacks to life in, as my friend calls it, “the late 1900s.” When my now-wife and I were first together, we had to pay a lawyer a lot of money to try to legally cover all the things that married couples are simply granted by law once they tie the knot. Things like inheritance, hospital visitation rights, financial power of attorney, etc. 

So, if you read this as an American, think of it as a kind of time capsule. In the US, adult adoption is not common, but when you hit one of those walls of texts Yagi-sensei does list out all the things you need to try to cover legally if adoption is not on the table. It is, as he notes, much more complex and messy–since much of it still depends on whether or not your family will respect your wishes (or that of your partner.) And, yeah, that? That was my wife and I in the 90s. 

Is it a fun read? I mean, the chibi art is kind of cute. Yagi-sensei does not shy away from implied sex–though, obviously, there is no real smut in this manga. It’s complete in one volume and if you are fond of these kinds of autobiographical things, it is a very quick, fun read. It’s officially licensed in English (from Tokyopop), though I got my version from ComicsPlus Library.  If you need/want a pirated/scanlated version, the link is provided in the first paragraph of this review as usual, although now that I investigate it further, it looks as though they don’t have any chapters yet. Here’s a link to a place where you can read the first chapter for free: https://comics.inkr.com/title/2262-why-i-adopted-my-husband-the-true-story-of-a-gay-couple-seeking-legal-recognition-in-japan.

It’s hard to recommend that you spend a lot of money on it since it’s not really much of a story? But, if my library had it, maybe yours will too!

At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender: Life Lessons From a 50-Year-Old After Two Decades of Self-Discovery by Arai Shou

Here on this site, I have complained MANY TIMES that I sometimes have to wonder if librarians read the manga before they decide where to shelve it. But, this is the first time I’ve had to ask myself… did the Official English language publisher read this book?

Like, at all?

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They did potential fans of Arai-sensei a great disservice, in my opinion. Because, you might think, from the title, that what this story will be about is Arai-sensei’s self-discovery. What happened at 30 that caused Arai-sensei to declare they have no gender? What does it mean to Arai-sensei to be genderless? Are they coming out as non-binary or… something else?

Whelp, spoiler, literally NONE of that is in this book.

Zero.

Nada.

Zip.

This entire manga reads like if the intimate details of Arai-sensei’s life are well known to the reader.

They are, of course…

…IN JAPAN.

Arai Shou has written a ton of books about their personal gender discovery in Japanese. In fact, I might suspect, given the title, Seibetsu ga, Nai! ~ Ryouseiguyuu no Monogatari / No Gender! A Story of Androgyny of which there are 18 volumes might be the main place to read about Arai-sensei’s personal journey. Some of which, I presume includes how, after marrying a man, their body begins changing and they discover they are intersex, specifically that they have Turners Syndrome.

Moreover, reading this series, I suspect a reader might learn that despite having top surgery and taking male hormones, Arai-sensei has come to the conclusion (currently) that they are also non-binary.

What is distressing about the English-language translation of At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender: Life Lessons From a 50-Year-Old After Two Decades of Self-Discovery is that the publisher uses the “he” pronoun to describe Arai-sensei throughout the book, saying that that’s Arai-sensei’s preference–even though, throughout the book, the narrator looks out of the panels at the reader and tells us that they feel neither male nor female and that they struggle with this, as they present as masculine. I was like, okay, it seems rare that someone who uses he/him would still consider himself non-binary, but who am I to say? I can roll. Yet, the more I read the way Arai talked about themselves confused me to the point that I actually briefly thought that either the term intersex was being used interchangeably for non-binary in Japan… or I was loosing my mind and I no longer understood what intersex or non-binary ACTUALLY meant.

It was only after watching an entire documentary about Arai-sensei did this book–the only autobiographical manga of Arai-sensei’s to be either scanlated OR to get an official publication in English–even BEGIN to make sense.

So, why this book? Why is this the first we’ve met Arai-sensei??

What was TokyoPop thinking? Why not start with Seibetsu ga, Nai! / No Gender! ??? These kinds of gender and sexual autobiographical books are extremely popular right now–witness all of the reviews I’ve been doing lately along these lines. I’m not sure there isn’t a market for an 18 volume series about an intersex person discovering 1) that they are genetically intersex, 2) that they want to express more masculinity, but not ALL of it and, instead, intentionally live in-between as a non-binary person, and 3) hooking up with their cis male gay/pansexual assistant and trying to decide if that made them a gay man or what? And eventually deciding that it didn’t matter and that, in the famous words of Chuck Tingle, love is love.

That’s fascinating stuff! I’d read the f*ck out of that. And these covers are darling!

I can only imagine that what happened in the TokyoPop boardroom is that they started looking around at the books their rivals were buying (see: any of the zillion gender/sexual minority 101 autobiographies that seem to be sweeping the 2023-4 manga market) and just GRABBED one of Arai-sensei’s at f*cking random.

I kind of wish that I hadn’t returned my copy to the library already because now that I watched a full two hours of an explanation of Arai-sensei’s life, I’d like to see where they are now. I presume that’s the appeal to Japanese audiences of At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender: Life Lessons From a 50-Year-Old After Two Decades of Self-Discovery.

Sadly, it makes almost NO SENSE whatsoever to English-speaking audiences who have not had the pleasure to meet this mangaka and their darling partner Khou… not even through pirate sites! One of the few pieces of Arai-sensei’s work that you can read is their contribution to the anthology manga, Change H. The other thing by Arai-sensei that I’ve found that’s been scanlated is Yuzu no Koto. I have not yet read either, but I honestly may recommend reading these because at least they stand alone.

If you decide want to tackle At 30…, I recommend that you watch the documentary (in Japanese, with subtitles) that I linked to above. The documentary is fascinating. Arai-sensei is frank and forthcoming about their experiences and, unlike TokyoPop, uses “S” to signify Arai-sensei’s pronoun since, if you listen to the Japanese, it’s clear that they use NO pronouns at all (which is, of course, much more possible in Japanese than it is in English.)

So a mixed bag? Not sure I’d recommend the actual manga because it’s mostly about Arai-sensei freaking out about growing old while Khou still looks very young, random bits about their already established relationship with no other context (NO CONTEXT FOR YOU!!), and make-up and clothing tips for readers who have written in desiring to pass as one gender or another or as genderfluid.

It’s not a great introduction to the idea of being born intersex, the documentary does a much better job a that.

Because if this is your only introduction to Arai-sensei, they don’t come off great?

Like, this “hurt myself” line is a bit disturbing if you have no context.

Which you don’t.

Last Gender: Nanimono demo nai Watashitachi / Last Gender: When We Are Nameless by Taki Rei

I promised a return to smut, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to meet you halfway. There is a lot of nudity and sex in Last Gender: Nanimono demo nai Watashitachi / Last Gender: When We Are Nameless, but I’m not sure it counts as smut, per se.

I don’t know exactly what was happening in Japan in 2020-2021, but this is yet-another “gender and sexual minorities 101,” type of manga, but this one is fictionalized and framed around a sex bar in California where sexual minorities can meet and mingle.

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I was actually able to get the first volume of Last Gender from the Saint Paul Public Library, but, if you follow the link above, you can read the scanlation of first two volumes (the series is complete in three.) It’s an interesting set-up because the stories get told in a serial manner, by which I mean, a person introduced in the first chapter will tell their backstory in the next, and on and on, through various sexual and gender identities.

Things that appear in this book that rarely get much attention include an aro character who is not also ace. I’ve had aro friends complain about this, and so I can imagine that it might be nice to find a sympathetic aromantic character who is sexually active. For myself I got introduced to lithosexuality (someone who does not want romantic and sexual feelings reciprocated), as well as greygender (which I’d had a sense of, but never seen dramatized in a story.)

For the most part, these characters get–if not happy endings, a sense of belonging. There is, generally, this attitude I really like that I’ve come across a number of times now, which is this idea that you are what you are RIGHT NOW. That a person does themselves a big favor by allowing that they might change (or they might not.) By accepting a label, that doesn’t mean it has to define you exactly or even all the time. And, in many ways, the challenge is not letting anyone define you–not even your own community–but yourself. You get to decide which parts fit and which don’t and it doesn’t make you “less queer” or “not queer enough.”

That’s a pretty wholesome message for such a smutty manga.

I also love Taki-sensei just assuming America has sex bars, like it’s no big deal. (Private sex clubs, yes. I mean, technically, that’s what this is. Our first story implies that you need a membership card, but later in volume 2 a student is just able to get in, as if he just walked in off the street. But, America has nothing like Japan’s host/ess bars.) I suspect Taki-sensei would be surprised by how Puritanical most Americans/American cities are.

At any rate, despite the mostly feel-good aspect of a lot of these chapter long stories, I should warn readers, however, that the second volume focuses heavily on a character who loses his lover to suicide, after to being outed against his will. Even the scanlation has a trigger warning for homophobia, bullying, and bigotry, as well as information about a hotline for suicide prevention. But, that story, as harsh as it is, is actually largely about internalized homophobia and working through it… at least to some extent–and, thus, has a kind of coming-to-terms ending. There’s a sense that that character is starting the road to recovery, at any rate.

There are a lot of naked boobs in this. The penises, of course, are invisible, whited out–even on the trans woman, which is telling? Like, we will rate a book R, so long as it allows the “male” gaze to see all of a woman it wants, and yet holds this double standard if the woman we turn our acceptable male gaze upon has a penis. Like, we get to look a her boobs, but not all of her. Because penises are supposed to belong only to men, and thus, if exposed, make this book IMMEDIATELY X-Rated. (It angers me? Not only for the obvious reasons, but also because the censorship implies that there is a part of this woman that is NOT a woman. If we are allowed to “male gaze” all of a women’s body in R-rated things, then her penis should be part of that! Full stop.) WTF. In a book about gender and sexual expression, this censorship is incredibly hypocritical.

But, I suspect the whiting out happened on the official English translation side. Again, it’s just something that I imagine would surprise and horrify Taki-sensei, who set this story in California, a place that they imagined to be some kind of sexual freedom paradise.

Anyway, despite my complaints, I highly recommend this. The sex is sexy and the characters all have fascinating stories of coming out and coming to accept themselves.

So, if this sounds up your alley, check it out. The third volume, which I have not yet read, though I plan to look for it at the library, seems poised to follow the mysterious club owner whom we know nothing about in terms of sexuality or gender.

Shimanami Tasogare / Our Dreams at Dusk by Kamatani Yuuki

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Shimanami Tasogare was recommended to me by a commenter, FacelessGrunt, as a true-to-life GLBTQ+ story.

I was skeptical at first, mostly because it was published as seinen, which made me worried that “realism” was going to equal tragedy and nothing more. But, Kamatani-sensei is, themselves, non-binary, so I needn’t have worried.

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How do I even begin to describe this manga? I suppose it’s basically the coming out story of Tasuku Kaname, except that the story starts with him being outed by his browser history.and a group of nosy high school boys.  He considers suicide, but by chance thinks he sees a woman doing the same thing in the distance, and runs off to try to save her. Only it turns out that what he saw was (a vision?) of Anonymous, who runs and owns a clubhouse for queer folks.

The manga follows all the people who are regulars there as Tasuku gets to know them all.  A lot of gender and sexual identities are represented at the club: there’s a straight trans man, a lesbian couple, an androgynous asexual, an older gay man, and a lot of people just trying to figure out what they are, including a young boy who likes to crossdress, but who isn’t sure that means anything more than that.

They also all have a rehabbing construction company because the island they live on is full of a number of houses that are in need of repair…and that pulls in a number of people from around the island, including the boy that Tasuku likes.

This is probably the first manga that I would consider categorizing as ‘magical realism.’ There are a lot of scenes where the metaphors are drawn out as physical manifestations and there are times when Anonymous seems to be a magical creature who can fly and become transparent. The manga asks the reader to roll with it, much like Anonymous herself, expects the characters to accept her as she is, without questions.

There is tragedy, but there’s also love and acceptance. I cried both kinds of tears reading this.

I would recommend, 150%

Hanayome wa Motodanshi./ The Bride Was a Boy by Chii

I haven’t come across a whole lot of autobiographical manga, but Hanayome wa Motodanshi./The Bride was a Boy is one.

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The description goes like this: “Chii and her husband are like any other happily married couple, except for one thing: Chii was assigned male at birth. Chii details her autobiographical account of growing up with gender dysphoria and ultimately deciding to transition in her early adult years.”

I suspect that Hanayome wa Motodanshi/The Bride was a Boy was a much needed educational manga in Japan (it came out in 2016,) but it’s heavier on the information than it is on the drama.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

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I suspect that Chii-sensei quite intentionally focused on the positive stories of her life.

There are plenty of hints that everything was not always sunshine and roses for her, but the story of Hanayome wa Motodanshi/The Bride was a Boy is overwhelmingly happy.  Chii’s family all take the news that she’s trans very calmly and acceptingly. Her then-boyfriend/future husband has only a momentary pause when she comes out to him and his only concerns seem to be barriers her status might cause to their matrimony.

Obviously, this is Chii’s story to tell. If she wants to focus on the happy bits, she should.  A couple of them made me cry.

When they go to meet Chii’s family for the first time and Chii’s boyfriend asks for permission to marry her, this happens:

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The text reads: Dad “Please take care of our daughter.” Chi (thinking): “‘Our daughter.’ So even Mom and Dad see me as their daughter now.”

Is it dusty in here?

Likewise, there’s a scene near the end, when Chii is getting married and she’s waiting backstage with her father, who is about to walk her down the aisle, and she says to him, “I bet you never thought you’d be doing this again with me.” (Chi has an older sister). Dad looks really confused and says something that makes it very clear that he totally forgot that she was born any other way than as his second daughter.

This interaction may seem the most unrealistic, but it reminds me of how my parents are about my son.  They totally forget that he’s technically not mine by blood and say things like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a Morehouse trait,” etc.  Parents can have their moments, you know?

So, I thought this was a cute story and well worth a read.  The art style is very cutesy, but I thought it fit the tone fairly well.

Like in Otouto no Otto/My Brother’s Husband, there are mini-sections at the end of each chapter with information about Japanese (and international) GLBTQ+ issues.  Some of those bits in Hanayome wa Motodanshi/The Bride was a Boy are Trans 101 (which some people might appreciate and need!), but there’s a whole section in the later chapters about Japanese law and how it relates to trans folks, particularly where the law intersects with gay marriage (which is still illegal in Japan) which I found particularly fascinating.

If you’re interested in a more in-depth take on growing up trans in Japan, I would recommend checking out Hourou Musako/Wandering Son.

The Trials and Tribulations of Queer Otaku

I’m going to go off-script for a moment and make some general commentary prompted by an essay over on Yaoi Playground.  Apparently, there’s some shipping crisis over in the Tokyo Ghoul fandom.  I’m not going to pretend I know anything about what’s happening there. Knowing ship wars from Bleach, I’m sure it’s ugly af. But, Yaoi Playground’s essay implied that gay/queer ship fans are particularly angry.  As soon as I heard that, I have to admit, that my sympathy shifted 180 degrees.

Queer fans get the shaft a lot.  And not in a good way.

There’s a couple of things going on here that I’d like to address specifically from a queer point of view.

I feel like queer fans of shounen have been blind-sighted by sudden canon pairings a LOT.  Naruto and Bleach being the most obvious and most egregious examples of this. Both Bleach and Naruto are shounen manga. What most queer fans read shounen for is the same thing I imagine all shounen fans sign up for: Explosions! Action! BIG-SWORDS! Cool fights! Honor and Justice! Big, obvious, evil bads!  Random, unbelievable, but totally awesome power-ups!

Am I right, fam?

Romance, if it’s present at all, tends to be very much of a subplot.  Both Naruto and Ichigo had straight love interests, but that was not what the story was meant to be ABOUT, at least it didn’t seem that way when the stories started.

Then, all of a sudden, at the end, there were marriages and babies and WTF.

I think straight fans should have been angered by those endings, too, and, from what I can tell, many of them were.  Ending an action story with some kind of unnecessary time skip where there are marriages and babies makes literally no sense, and in fact does great harm to your story. You can tell J.K. Rowling I said so, too.  I get the impulse to tie up all the loose threads, but unless you’re specifically writing romance, what a good writer should focus on is making sure that the PLOT is complete: the bad guy(s) are defeated and the world/characters have changed/learned something.

Queer fans are particularly hurt by this impulse because no one ever thinks of us.  (Exceptions being Yuri on Ice! and Legends of Korra.) But, 99.999999% of the time, no matter how hard you shipped their ‘precious friendship,’ the likelihood that the male hero is going to end up with their best male friend/rival is zilch.

The reason queer fans get angry about this isn’t because we expect everyone to be gay, it’s because there is LITERALLY NO REASON TO END AN ACTION MANGA THIS WAY.  The manga can end without a canon ship tacked on.

You don’t see queer fans being upset when the shoujo couple gets together, do you?  (I mean, there are crazy fans, so probably you do, but…) most people know going into shoujo that they’re going to get a girl falling for a boy! That’s the main point of the genre.  Romance novels, end with a romantic HEA.  That’s the deal.

Similarly, no one expects a yaoi hero to suddenly fall for a woman at the end (though I have seen that happen in yuri, so I guess there are exceptions to every expectation/rule.)

My point is, I think queer fans get particularly bent out of shape when a manga that is not otherwise marketed as romantic feels the need to slap on a straight romance.

Speaking of Harry Potter, this move also often feels punitive. I am pretty sure Rowling knew how hard a lot of her fandom shipped Harry and Draco.  I’m also pretty certain that Kubo-sensei knew that most of his fandom preferred one straight ship over the other (all you have to do is see how the Bleach: The Musical was written to confirm.  Similarly, if Kubo-sensei was ever in the audience when the fans screamed when Renji and Byakuya held hands briefly or when Kyouraku flirted with Ukitake, he also knew that he was purposefully breaking hearts when he broke those fan favorite gay couples apart.)  I felt that, too, when Isayama-sensei tacked in a wholly unnecessary “no homo” comment on Reiner and Bertholdt in some of the later chapters of Attack on Titan. Like, it came so out of the blue, that my only conclusion is that the mangaka was reacting to fandom.

And, that’s the second thing.  We have to put up with a lot of queer-baiting.  When I discussed this before in conjunction to Let’s Take the Train Together, Shall We…? a lot of straight fans got bent out of shape.  But, this is a real phenomenon. There are plenty of examples of queerness being used as a tease or as a joke, so that the straight/cis reader can be titillated and/or have a moment of “Oh, haha! People think they’re a couple! How uncomfortable for them, teehee!” when the author has no intention of ever getting the two same-sex characters together.

Often, this happens in shows/manga that I really enjoy.  An example I brought up on my comment over at Yaoi Playground, is Free! Iwatobi Swim Club/Eternal Summer. I loved that show for its queer subtext, but let’s be honest: no one gets together at the end. No one ever explicitly comes out as queer.  People will argue that’s not what that show was about (it’s about swimming!), but I will argue right back that the writers knew what they were doing and did so intentionally.  There’s a whole episode that’s entirely subtextual where Nagisa has to “come out” to his parents and is kicked out.  I mean, sure, you can read that entirely on its surface, but subtext only works if there’s a there there, if you know what I mean?

Girl’s Monthly Nozaki-kun has a lot of this, too.  I also adored that story, and because it’s a shoujo, I was not mad about the ending of the anime.  But, there are definitely moments where there’s a gay element that gets played up…. remember the dating sim episode?  I loved it, but it was a wink-and-a-nod, not full on ‘baiting,’ per se, but it was queerness played for laughs.

These queer-baiting moments aren’t meant to be hurtful, I don’t think.  I think they’re just as the Wikipedia article defines queer-baiting: what they are is trying to draw in queer-friendly audiences.  But, that being said, they are also done with NO INTENTION of ever making good on the queer ship tease.

Queer fans get double-slapped this way.  We get your straight pairing rammed down our throats, while we’re also expected to laugh along at hilariously awkward it is when straight people get mistaken as a gay couple.

I’m not even going to touch the odd fetishizing of our sex that happens.

My point is, if you run across a queer fan who is angry about a straight ship becoming canon?  Try to consider the source. Some fans are just crazy, we all know that. But, sometimes this hurt we’re feeling comes from all the other places where we were unexpectedly, or even intentionally, jerked around. We love our ships with the same passion you do.  We hate to see ours broken, but was also have this huge history of having to be broken.  It used to be that even gay writers wrote only tragic gay romances, where you could find love, but it had to be torn from you.  Ukitake had to die, that was the only way to have pure queer love.

And we’re sick of it.

Thank goodness for “Yuri on Ice!,” eh, fam?

Otouto no Otto by Tagame Gengoroh

I’m obviously ripping through a ton of different titles at the moment.  So, apologies for the sort-of spamming of reviews that I’ve been doing these last few days.

This is all in prep for various up-coming MidAmericaCON II/WorldCON panels. I’m on two manga/anime panels.  One about horror anime/manga, and the other about yaoi/yuri.  I stumbled across a reference to Otouto no Otto/My Brother’s Husband while looking for some yuri, believe it or not.  You can find the first three volumes of this on-going series at a number of places, I read it on MangaReader (on my iPad to cut down on the pop-up ads), but it’s also here: http://bato.to/comic/_/comics/otouto-no-otto-r17256.

I HIGHLY recommend this title in general, but to GLBT/Q readers specifically.

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You can tell immediately that the  Gengoroh-sensei is mostly known as a ‘bara’ mangaka.   All of his men are barrel-chested, highly muscular, and, in the case of Uncle Mike, hairy as a bear (pun intended).  It took me a little while to get used to this style, but it’s super-worth it to stick with this story, IMHO.  My rec comes with one huge caveat, however.  Keep in mind that seinen slice-of-life is one of my absolute favorite sub-genres.  I would read all the slice-of-life available, but my favorites really are What Did You Eat Yesterday?/Kinou Nani Tabeta? and now this one.

And they’re both ‘kinda gay.’

The set-up for Otouto no Otto/My Brother’s Husband goes like this:

Ten years ago Yaichi’s twin brother moved to Canada and married a man called Mike. A month ago, he died.

Now Mike has arrived in Japan to meet Yaichi and his daughter Kana. Yaichi has to face his own preconceptions and come to terms with who his brother really was.

And, that pretty much sums up the entire story really nicely.  The things I really enjoy about this manga series are that Mike is really very much like a lot of gay men I actually know.  He’s not overly fabulous, but there’s a gentleness and openness to him that feels really queer.  I will say, though, that Mike is my age, clearly.  I have no idea how “real” Mike is going to feel to anyone under the age of, say, thirty-five.  I also suspect that some of Yaichi’s conflicts are probably going to feel very 1980s to younger readers (and by “younger” I mean kind of anyone who isn’t in their late-40s.)

On the other hand, I don’t know anything about how this plays in Japan.  I’ve done only moderate research into the current attitudes towards gay marriage in Japan, etc., but my sense is that this is probably a Very Important manga, if you know what I mean–like, very necessary in terms of educating a more conservative public.  In the version I read, Mike gives little Gay Culture 101 bits at the end of the volumes explaining things that I can only presume are commonplace to American/European/English-speaking audiences, like what is a rainbow flag and why gay people wear pink triangles as a symbol of pride.

But, beyond all this, I found this story utterly adorable. Mike’s explanation to the young daughter, Kana, about “who is the missus?” in their relationship is really quite amazing and wonderful.  (His answer, “We’re both misters.  I was Ryoji’s husband, and Ryoji was my husband.”)  I love this so hard because in a lot of yaoi manga there’s this insistence on the heteronormative sexual/emotional/domestic  roles, which doesn’t reflect the reality of GLBT/Q families at ALL.

I also love the hell out of the fact that after this simple, but profound explanation we spend a lot of time with our straight, cis male hero, Yaichi, as he struggles with his own preconceptions about how gay marriage works and his own worries/fears/etc about his twin brother (and, by reflection, himself.)

Kana, the young daughter, is probably one of my favorites as well because  Gengoroh-sensei really nailed how kids deal with GLBT/Q issues.  When my wife and I were first considering having children we attended a class for lesbians about the how-to’s/what to expects and one of the things we were warned about is how kids do NOT respect “the closet.”  One of the little boys there happily announced to anyone–the clerk at the grocery store, random strangers on the street that “my moms are less-beans.”  I found that both adorable and horrifying.  And that’s a lot how things with Kana play out in this manga.  She does all the cute instant acceptance stuff kids do–with the corresponding part where dad, Yaichi is FREAKING OUT BECAUSE OMG SEX, while Mike is all ‘of course we married because we love each other.’ And then we even hit moments where all the kids are curious/accepting, but the parents of friends of Kana get all weird and restrictive and awkward, like they legit thinks kids can ‘catch the queer.’

Which, sadly, was very much how things were here in the U.S. as little as ten years ago.

So, for me, as an older queer woman this feels SUPER realistic and poignant–because the stupidest stuff made me bawl like a baby.

Therefore my recommendation is several thumbs up with the caveat that milage may vary depending your age.  I can only imagine this whole thing reads as very basic and kind of stupid to ‘the kids these days’ who have (thankfully!) had the luxury of growing up when it wasn’t so scary to come out as gay or lesbian or bi. To those folks reading this manga, I say, “Yes, children, this is what it was like when gramma came out as queer.”