Gaysia by Benjamin Law

Author:Benjamin Law [Law, Benjamin; Allbright, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press

Ayaka Ichinose responded to my interview request pretty quickly. Perhaps she needed any publicity she could get. If Ayaka had a business card, it would have said something like ‘model/actress/writer’ or simply ‘Japan’s first celesbian’. Ayaka was blessed with the kind of looks Japanese women would kill for: soft, long hair and flawless skin, like a teenage boy’s fantasy avatar for a video game. Though she had recently turned thirty, she still looked like a high-school student.

Ayaka had started out as something called a ‘gravure model’, which wasn’t exactly nude modelling, but posing in just enough clothes to give the impression you were naked. She was also smart enough to know that modelling got you only so far in Japan. To be successful, you had to diversify. Lately, Ayaka had been branching out into writing a thirteen-episode manga series called Real Bian, lesbian comics based on her own experiences. She had also produced and starred in SekuMai, a gravure modelling DVD that combined footage of her in skimpy, barely-there gear with a discussion of issues pertinent to lesbians in Japan. In between sequences of Ayaka posing in her underwear, she talked about what it was like to live as a lesbian, recounted the history of the Ni-Chome district and interviewed other queer women. Her work was sexy and educational. Sexucational.

I met Ayaka in a ground-level café in Ni-Chome that was around the corner from the DVD porno shop of horrors. Though I had seen photos in which Ayaka was topless and bent over in a G-string, on this occasion she was dressed conservatively in a beige zip-up dress. Accompanying Ayaka was her manager, Nakazawa-san, whose weathered face made him look like a Japanese Tommy Lee Jones.

‘The majority of lesbians in Japan don’t come out,’ Ayaka explained. ‘So the interviews in my DVD were trying to address those issues. What are lesbians really like? What are they interested in? What do they do in their spare time? What kind of fashion are they into?’ They may as well have been fantastic and mythological creatures, such as hydras or mermaids: mysterious and vaguely heard about, but rarely seen in everyday life.

‘I get the sense that seeing gay men, drag queens and transsexual women is really common here,’ I said. ‘But not lesbians.’

‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,’ Ayaka said. She got this question a lot. ‘It’s true: you don’t really hear about lesbians in Japan, mainly because it’s still a man’s world. In the gay scene here, the majority of the venues – the saunas, the bars – are targeted at men. A lot of females aren’t as interested in that. Or they try to hide it. When I was young, I knew I had feelings for girls, but didn’t actually know I was even a “lesbian”. There was no point in coming out, because I didn’t even know I was one.’ No one spoke about lesbians, so Ayaka hadn’t realised that such a thing existed.

In her twenties, Ayaka worked part-time at a mixed-sex bar in Shinjuku Ni-Chome.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.