I was confused about my sexuality, both about being gay, as well as being into S&M.īy high school, I started to question why I couldn't be honest with myself. In contrast, I was not turned on by love stories where two men make love to each other. I got excited reading any S&M stories, including heterosexual ones, as long as the men in the stories got abused. Later, I found a copy of SABU at a bookstore when I was in middle school. I liked the scene where Charlton Heston was ordered to take his stinky human clothes off in front of the ape's assembly, then dragged by a leather collar. I remember getting excited watching Italian Hercules movies and Hollywood science fiction films like the original Planet of the Apes. Gengoro Tagame: Naked and bound men have excited me since I was in elementary school. VICE: When did you first begin to understand your own sexuality? Both stories affirm that we should be proud of who or what we love no matter how different or extreme it may appear to be. His latest, My Brother's Husband shares the same focus on identity, despite the text being young adult-friendly and safe for work, unlike his most famous work. The epic, three-volume story totals 900 pages-the 1Q84 of niche, queer manga. One of Tagame's most notorious stories is Shirogane no Hana (Silver Flower), a historical drama set at the start of the 20th-century about a spoiled son who's turned into a sex worker before exploring his own passion for S&M. The manga was then collated into a book with the same title, which is now in its fifth printing due to overwhelming popularity. Today, at 51-years-old, the illustrator continues to expand his creative horizons, and recently serialized a queer story called My Brother's Husband in Monthly Action Comics, an otherwise-hetero magazine. Over the next 30 years, he published more than 20 books in four languages in addition to selling hundreds of fine art prints and illustrations. While studying art in college in the 80s, he started publishing queer illustrations under a pen name, and continued writing erotic stories throughout his twenties while supporting himself with a job as a graphic designer. After watching the scene in Planet of the Apes where Charles Heston is dragged by a leather collar, he felt an indescribable sensation inside him, leading the artist into further research about S&M. Tagame realized his own BDSM fetish when he was a child.