The term was subsequently adopted by non-Japanese users of these websites, who believed that bara was the proper designation for the images and artwork being posted on these forums. The term was revived as a pejorative in the late 1990s concurrent with the rise of internet message boards and chat rooms, where heterosexual administrators designated the gay sections of their websites as 'bara boards' or 'bara chat'. īy the late 1980s, as LGBT political movements in Japan began to form, the term fell out of use, with gei ( ゲイ) becoming the preferred nomenclature for people who experience same-sex attraction. Bara-eiga ('rose film') was additionally used in the 1980s to describe gay cinema. 'rose tribe') in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. Beginning in the 1960s, the term was reappropriated by Japanese gay media: notably with the 1961 anthology Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses, a collection of semi-nude photographs of gay writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe, and later with Barazoku ( 薔薇族, lit. The term bara ( 薔薇), which translates literally to ' rose' in Japanese, has historically been used in Japan as a pejorative for gay men, roughly equivalent to the English language term ' pansy'. The term bara translates literally to ' rose' in Japanese, and has historically been used as a pejorative for gay men roughly equivalent to the English language term ' pansy'. Bara is distinct from yaoi, a genre of Japanese media focusing on homoerotic relationships between male characters that historically has been created by and for women. In non-Japanese contexts, bara is used to describe a wide breadth of Japanese and Japanese-inspired gay erotic media, including illustrations published in early Japanese gay men's magazines, western fan art, and gay pornography featuring human actors. The use of bara as an umbrella term to describe gay Japanese comic art is largely a non-Japanese phenomenon, and its use is not universally accepted by creators of gay manga. While bara is typically pornographic, the genre has also depicted romantic and autobiographical subject material, as it acknowledges the varied reactions to homosexuality in modern Japan.

Bara can vary in visual style and plot, but typically features masculine men with varying degrees of muscle, body fat, and body hair, akin to bear or bodybuilding culture. The genre focuses on male same-sex love, as created primarily by gay men for a gay male audience. ' rose') is a colloquialism for a genre of Japanese art and media known within Japan as gay manga ( ゲイ漫画) or gei komi ( ゲイコミ, 'gay comics').

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