19/50: and what i glimpse is love (wayama yama, "let's go to the family restaurant")
On the splash page to chapter 17 of Wayama Yama's "Let's go to the family restaurant," the sequel to her hit "Let's Go Karaoke!", Oka Satomi stares at the reader through a donut, which he holds up to one eye, obscuring half his face. His expression is oddly serious, though with Satomi, you can never really tell. In the margin text on the next page, Wayama (or at least, the authorial voice) asks us, "What do you see through the hole of a donut?"
What do you see when you look at "Famiresu"?
What do you see when you look at Oka Satomi?
I see what I see every week when I write about bl. I see a story about love.
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If I started this post with, "this summer we are finally getting an anime adaptation of one of the best non-bl stories about a boy coming to terms with his queerness," you'd be forgiven for assuming I was talking about the fantastic Cygames adaptation of Mokumokuren's "The Summer Hikaru Died." But I am here to argue that "Famiresu" (and, to some extent, "Karaoke" as its prequel) deserves its laurels too, that Wayama's unique talent in not saying, in guiding her readers and characters through quiet spaces where they can figure out their own stories in their own time, has made it too easy to dismiss Satomi's own "coming out" and journey to acceptance.
Yoshiki is, of course, explicitly queer (in love with his same-sex best friend), but queerness in "The Summer Hikaru Died" does not live and die there. Yoshiki is marked as "different", "abnormal": his family is different, his mother doesn't fit in, his sister doesn't go to school, he likes weird music, he feels restrained by the small town around him, he wants to move to Tokyo. When 'Hikaru' attaches to Yoshiki, with his red eyes and abyssal chest hole, it is only making Yoshiki's queerness visible and concrete. 'Hikaru' is the queerness metaphor as monster-object. Perhaps Yoshiki is able to handle him so well without totally falling apart is because Yoshiki has been training all his life—or at least all his time with Hikaru—for this.
Satomi is also a boy to whom a monster-object has attached, who then must grapple with what it means to love and care for a monster. It's just that in his case, the monster-object is not a mysterious cursed being from the mountains, but rather the yakuza. Kyouji, like Hikaru, hides the visible signifiers of his otherness—his tattoos—when out in public. Kyouji, like Hikaru, behaves in alien, frustrating ways, as if he does not know how to act normally. To protect Satomi, Kyouji must balance the monster part of him—braining another man in an alley with a briefcase, threatening Okada—with the normalized exterior that he has adopted to blend in. But none of those behaviors can truly hide who Kyouji is: a member of the yakuza. He is marginalized, he is dangerous, simply having dinner with him taints by association. His "kind" can only hang out with each other, in a world full of its own rituals and slang and signals, a world that innocent young boys must be kept out of, in case they are assaulted or—worse—converted.
The yakuza have always been a deeply homosocial trope in fiction, but in "Famiresu," Kyouji's status as yakuza so dominates Satomi's anxieties about being with Kyouji that it becomes its own queerness metaphor. Satomi clings to a normal, non-yakuza life like a straight man in a bl clings to heterosexuality, even as he unconsciously twists his life into an abnormal shape for Kyouji. It's not a coincidence that Satomi and Kyouji's meetups have the air of an adulterous tryst; Satomi is married to his normal life and Kyouji to the yakuza. As a result, they cannot text each other too much or meet up too often, and must constantly lie to other people about their relationship. Instead of compulsory heterosexuality, Satomi struggles with compulsory normalcy. When Kyouji asks him about his dreams for the future in chapter 5, Satomi can only come up with the vague notion of becoming a civil servant. He has no real attachment to it as a concept; it's obvious that the real draw is that being a civil servant is the exact opposite of what Kyouji does. All this leads to the great yakiniku breakup of chapter 9, where Satomi tells Kyouji they shouldn’t meet up anymore. Normal people don't hang out with yakuza, just like normal men don't fall in love with other men.
If "The Summer Hikaru Died" begins with Yoshiki's explicit queerness before exploring a queerness metaphor in 'Hikaru," then volume one of "Famiresu" is the queerness metaphor that becomes an explicit exploration of queerness in the chapters which will likely make up the second (and final?) volume. In Chapter 10, Satomi has one of soon-to-be-many gay mental breakdowns and then spends the rest of the chapter asking anyone who will give him the time of day, including Yahoo! Answers, whether it's gay for a man to hug another man (answer: definitely yes in Satomi's case). Finally the issue with Kyouji is not that he is a yakuza, but that he is a man.
This being Wayama, however, it isn't an issue for long. "Famiresu" is not a romance, even if Satomi and Kyouji like each other, any more than queerness is defined simply by one man being in love with another man. There are so many kinds of love and affection in "Famiresu," none of which are normal, but all of which are real. Masanori's friendship with Kyouji is hardly normal, and his relationship with his father definitely is not. Satomi's coworker Morita appears to be in the habit of hugging men often and suggests that Satomi was simply grateful for the grub, while Satomi's classmates Mana and Maruyama seem unfazed and oblivious by Satomi's wild man-hugging hypotheticals. "No one cares if you like or don't like someone," scolds the anonymous answer at the end of chapter 10, embodying the entirety of the Wayama-verse worldview. Instead of worrying about liking or not liking, normal or abnormal, stop wasting time. Wake up early, study, eat breakfast, vote, shit, sleep. Text your 43-year-old situationship. Ask him to bring you 20 pork buns and two cheesecakes.
In other words, live your life.
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What do you see when you look through a donut? Or put another way, is a donut a wholeness through which a hole is punched, or is the donut only whole because of the hole? Do you see the hole as an absence, a missing thing, a lack, or is the hole instead a defining characteristic, without which the donut would not be complete?
Is there something wrong with Satomi and Kyouji? Or is that wrongness something that defines them, without which they would not be themselves?
Do you see the hole? Or do you see the donut?
A horrible thing once happened to Oka Satomi. He went to hell to look for a monster. Once there, he was able to do what Orpheus was not and brought a man back from the dead. Like the little mermaid, he gave up his voice to save a man. It felt like love; it was probably something very close to love.
Chapter 17 doesn't frame love with loss; it frames love through loss. For Satomi to get to "I like Kyouji," he had to finally admit what has been haunting him this whole time, the coffee stain on the painting of Satomi's heart that he has been trying to rub out since the beginning of "Famiresu." He had to finally revisit being fourteen again, the heart-pounding terror he felt when he thought Kyouji was dead, and the terrible heart-pounding he felt when Kyouji told him, "I'm not gonna die and leave you behind." A "normal" person would not have crashed a yakuza karaoke competition to mourn a not-quite-friend. A "normal" person would have walked away and gone to his choir festival. A "normal" person does not need to experience love and death as two sides of the same coin to understand something about himself.
But what use is clinging to "normal" now? Hadn't Satomi already made that choice for himself four years ago, when he walked into Karaoke Heaven with Kyouji?
It is hard to say what Satomi and Kyouji have. The only thing we can say about it is that it is not "normal." When Satomi asks Yahoo! Answers, he does not get useful answers. When he searches on the internet for an explanation, he comes up empty. When he is approached by Okada with photographic evidence, he cannot explain. When he hugs Kyouji on the street, no one even registers what is happening. Strangers walk past them, uncomprehending.
In the end, love is nobody's business but your own. It is a thing and only a thing between two people, who must set their own definitions and walk their own paths. In this way, all love is abnormal. There is no normal love. In the end, the only way Satomi can arrive at an answer is by talking to Kyouji. It is only through Kyouji asking him, what do you want us to be? that Satomi can face his own feelings and arrive at an answer.
"I like him." That's all we have.
That's enough. That's everything.
You can buy "Let's Go Karaoke!" from Yen Press. Its sequel is licensed only in my dreams, but you can buy the Japanese digital release of volume one here and follow the Comics Beam releases here.
had a dream i found a tape labelled “sex tape” and when i played it in a vcr it was just two fully clothed guys beating the shit out of each other with metal bats
[Caption: a series of tweets by twitter user @teamarimo. It reads:
the debate on who can use the terms “butch/femme” keeps coming up so i did a ton of research & i’d like to weigh in on the issue. i’ll post sources at the end
too many people credit anne lister (a historical lesbian) with coining femme in her journals but she was speaking french and “femme” has been a french word forever
going in chronological order of gay words in the english-speaking world, “lesbian” began as a synonym for tribade. “tribadism” = scissoring; both words meant women who slept with women & the sexual act itself. this was long before IDpolitics
so lesbian/tribade was something you did, not something you IDd as, bc they were labeled by their sexual activity since IDpol hadn’t come around yet. there was no concept of who was or wasn’t exclusively attracted to women. that’s why bi women are closer to lesbians than bi men
tribade dominated the 17th-mid 19th centuries until sapphic & lesbian took prominence. it wasn’t until 1892 that a neurologist used bisexual to describe sexuality. from then until the 1960s, bi was used only in academic contexts. it still wasn’t an identity yet
bi women have always been here but shared community with & organized under “lesbian” until (and even into) the 60s. before then, any text or study that said “lesbian” meant gay & bi women unless it (on the rare occasion) specifies otherwise, so context matters
butch/femme began in gay bars in the 40s-60s. women-only gay bars were frequented by lesbian & bi women. so for the first decades of butch/femme history, “lesbian” includes bi women bc there was no bi or “women-exclusive” yet & they were at the bars, participating in the culture
in the 70s, lesbian separatism begins with 12 white cis lesbians, the furies. They suggest that women engage “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege… as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will…
at some point have to betray their sisters, especially lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits.” demon TERF sheila jeffreys says “our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men.” this marks the split between bi & lesbian women
lesbian separatism others bi women who shared space, identity & oppression with lesbians centuries prior. it deems trans women as inextricable from male privilege they (don’t) have. it others lgbt woc who share oppression with men & therefore can’t exclude men from their politics
tldr it’s bad lol. with events like stonewall (1969) & increasing anti-gay violence in the 70s, anyone with proximity to heterosexuality in gay spaces was viewed as a threat & shunned. so bi groups begin to pop up, since they had no place in straight or gay communities anymore
in the 80s, 2nd-wave bi organizing was feminist bi orgs forming bc lesbians posited bisexuality as anti-feminist. by 1988, LGB officially separates lesbian & bi. now lesbians are invested in specific lesbian history & everything before the 60s says “lesbian.” see the problem here
texts with the word “lesbian” before the 60s are also referring to bi women but modern meanings of old words are applied to them, & consequently, bi women are denied a massive chunk of our history, including butch/femme culture
in the 60s, ball culture emerges in houses created as safe spaces for black & latinx queer youth. the genders are butch queen, femme queen, butch & women. here, butch & femme embody: the intersections of race, gender & sexuality; the freedom of it; and the resulting persecution
in the 70s, lesbian separatists say any form of masculinity harms women, materializing against butch & trans women. femmes are framed as wanting to reap benefits of heterosexuality while still toying with women (this is heavily wrapped in biphobic rhetoric too, if you can’t tell)
butch/femme is framed as heteronormative, anti-lesbian & anti-feminist. so androgyny is proposed as the lesbian ideal. now lesbian feminism is centered on white, middle class, androgynous lesbians at the expense of working class + nonwhite lesbians, bi women, and butches & femmes
butch/femme fall out of popular use, only kept alive by the same working class & nonwhite women who are ousted by white lesbians. butch/femme usage among queer youth of color includes lesbians & nonlesbians as it had since 60s ball culture & since 40s gay bars with gay & bi women
it’s interesting that people say butch/femme is for lesbians only when the beginning of lesbian as an exclusively-woman attracted identity & the downfall of butch/femme go hand-in-hand. it was queer youth of color who kept that culture alive, lesbian or not
white lesbian TERFs who demonized the culture embraced it again when genderfluidity became trendy in the late 80s. they claimed it as theirs, and stripped it of its history with bi women, trans women & queer youth of color that they wanted no association with
so that history was lost among many, and now well-meaning lesbians who definitely are not TERFs don’t even know butch/femme’s roots in race, trans/gnc identity, & class struggle, or its origins among gay & bi women as one group
tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian women’s history is inextricable, and bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed. historically, “lesbian” encompassed a set of behaviors & became an identity later
Sources:
gay & bi women going to the same clubs: Source 1, Source 2
bisexual etymology: Source
lesbian separatism: Source
tribade: Source
butch/femme: Source
more on butch/femme; Source
origins of bi movements: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3
lady with history & women’s studies + LGBT studies degrees: Source
ball culture: Source
hi here’s a trans lesbian (homojabi@tumblr) saying exactly what I just said from a trans perspective for the “everyone’s trying to steal from lesbians” crowd. I’m going back to sleep
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