Aspirations for 'Japanese gay masculinity'

This article investigates Chinese and Japanese fandom for the Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki (1983–2013), exploring how consumption of Koh’s films impacted fans’ understandings of their sexual desires and identities. I argue that both groups position Koh as a symbol of a ‘Japanese gay masculinity’ that is understood as normatively desirable. Interviews revealed that due to this normative desirability, Koh acted as an aspirational model in the everyday production of their identities as gay men. Furthermore, Japanese gay men utilized Koh’s explicitly Japanese masculinity to position themselves as legitimately masculine within the context of a Japanese mainstream media landscape that constructs same-sex-desiring men as ‘failed men’ due to their supposed effeminacy. For Chinese gay men, Koh was deployed to symbolically construct an ideal of ‘good Japanese guys’ that helped them navigate systems of anti-Chinese xenophobia that circulate throughout Japan’s gay cultural spaces.