Print by Kitagawa Utamaro c. 1803

Over the recent holiday period I’ve been researching the origins of Bara and Yaoi art, reading a ton of Wikipedia articles and following links to an uncountable number of websites and blogs trying to get a good grasp on the origins,  history and timeline of Bara and Yaoi art.  I’ve gone back in history to the early 1600′s in ancient Japan when woodblock printing, Ukiyo-e, was one of the most sought after forms of art.

Like most almost every art medium in our history, there are always those artists that will use their talents to explore sexuality and Ukiyo-e is no exception.   In Ukiyo-e art, Shunga is the niche that focused on the depictions of erotic scenes.

While most of the Shunga artists focused on female-male sexual relationships there were those that would venture into scene depictions of men having sex with men, women with women (even more rare) and men having sex with younger men, very much similar to what would later become the overriding concept behind Yaoi art.

In this print by Kitagawa Utamaro, a younger man in the role of a temple page has been made available to one of the monks who is pursuing the “Way of the Youth”, in what appears to be a common practice of the day.   This was common not only in temples among monks and their pages, but also among the samurai class of famed warriors.

As I continue to read and follow history back I can’t help but wonder if the Shunga niche within the Ukiyo-e art style was one of the earliest forms of what today we call Yaoi.

What do you think?  Is Shunga one of the earliest forms of Yaoi or does it go back further than this?   I’m researching on to find out more.  If you know of any references to male on male art that predates the 17th century, please let me know in the comments below.

Remember the first time you had any type of gay sexual interaction with another guy? If you are like me, it was something you had been fantasizing about for quite some time, wondering what it would feel like. Wondering what touching another guy was like. Wanting to know what it felt like to have another guy touch your body, to suck your cock. Desiring to feel the heat of your skin touching the body of another man.

And then comes the actual time when you were presented with the opportunity to explore the fantasies you had been having. And maybe like me, you were scared shitless!

This Yaoi set of pinups by one of the contributing artists for SpunkToons members has captured this first time lust and the fear experienced during a first gay sexual experience. I love the look of mischief in the eyes of the gay boy pictured here that is showing his gay sex virgin what it feels like to be touched by another guy. The rest of the first time gay experience set is in our members area, but I thought you would at least enjoy this pinup and perhaps it might bring back some of your own memories of when you lost your gay sex cherry.

Check out the rest of this pinup set in the members area of SpunkToons now.

Yaoi Place offers gay hentai and comics for adults only.  Their tour is colorful, shows all sorts of toon guys having gay sex, insanely large dicks getting stroked, sucked and shoved into tight assholes.  There are hunky studs, horny twinks, bondage, ancient Egyptians and even some shemales – including one with cat ears. The site offers daily updates, downloadable videos includingvids  for mobile, and large resolution pics offered in downloadable zip files.  Sound good?  Then join me as I log in for a look at what the member area has to offer.

The Yaoi Place member home page is easy to use.  There’s navigation links running across the top of the page, and then a gallery (possibly the newest), followed by the latest updates, all dated and showing the number of pics and member rating.  The site has updated every day for almost a month, and there are currently 13 videos and 58 galleries, but here’s where I run into a question. After some searching, I find that the site has been around for over 2 years, yet all the content is dated from the last month.  That means either that the content is being recycled or that the old content was all removed and the site started fresh recently.  Your guess is as good as mine – let’s go check out the toon action!

THe pics here are arranged in galleries.  Some of the galleries are series pics, where others simply have random unrelated pics in the same grouping.  The pics are good quality, and are sized from 568×800 to 1184×1680.  Each gallery can be downloaded in a zip file, or if you prefer something different, as a PDF.  The PDF has all the pics embedded, and reads like an ebook, and I thought this was a cool way of browsing.

Let’s talk about the Yaoi Place videos.  While there aren’t that many of them, the ones I watched were nice and long – from 28 minutes to just under an hour.  On the other hand, I watched several, and only one had any gay sex – these were fully plotted anime movies, but not always porn.  Even the sex I did see wasn’t explicit.  The videos are available in WMV, sized at 640×480 at average quality, in MP4 format a bit smaller, and some are also available in MP4 for mobile devices.  Last, there’s a streaming version for those who prefer not to download.  All the videos are DRM-free, always a plus.

The galleries offer all sorts of action and all sorts of guys.  There are soccer players, college guys, massive muscle men, twinks, super heroes and all sorts of fantasies.  Expect a mix off guys sucking cock, plenty of fucking, kissing and jacking off.  Art styles here are mixed, so expect both western and Asian styles.  If you’re a gay manga porn fan, you will find somewhat less aliens than at some sites, but plenty of big – and often uncut – toon cocks.

Members also get access to 3 toon feeds – Gay Illustrated and Hunky Hentai offer galleries, and Gay Life offers a sexy and campty gay cartoon series in 6 parts that’s well worth watching.

Did the site have any issues?  There’s a pre-checked cross sale on join page.  Also when I clicked the link to the Manga & Comics section, I was disappointed to get a message that there was no content in that section. And last, the Hot Sites section are sites you must join – they’re not included with your membership.

Yaoi Place comes through with 58 hentai pic sets and 13 videos, daily updates plus some gay good toon feeds.  While the update dates show that the site updates every day, sometimes with more than 1 set, all the content shows dates from the last month, yet the site has been around for over a year. Your guess is as good as mine here, however the content delivers, and the videos are nice and long, if not always that sexual. The bottom line – gay anime lovers will find this site is worth a visit.

Visit Yaoi Place now and start collecting all of their gay cartoon pinups.

© 2011 Alex Woolfson Art by Kimi Owens. Yaoi 911

Can a gay man create yaoi stories that both appeal to a gay audience while at the same time still entertaining and maintaining the standards and desire for yaoi art that has been traditionally consumed by women?  Alex Woolfson, a filmmaker, writer, yaoi lover, webmaster and gay man, thinks he can.  This is the driving ambition behind his Yaoi 911 website.

Yaoi’s traditional roots, according to the yaoi wikipedia entry,  is a “female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by female authors” and usually refers to a special area of manga, anime and graphic novels stylized and marketed to a mostly female audience.  Characters in most yaoi stories usually fall into one of two broad catgeories, the agressor and the pursued, which apparantly is appealing to many young girls and even women.  According to Kazuma Kodaka, (a prominent Japanese mangaka)  in an answer given in a question and answer session with Cathy Camper for Giant Robot magazine ( issue #42), (Source: Comics 212), the stories themselves usually evolve around “feelings of pain and longing” which, in her opinion, is the main reason that yaoi mangas appeal so much to women.   Alex, disagrees to the extent that these feelings are reserved just for women, and recalls his own “feelings of pain and longing” growing up as a gay teenager in a world where it wasn’t always so cool to be gay.  The premise that Alex Woolson and his talented artists at Yaoi 911 work from is that with the overriding characteristics in character relationships, development and the feelings the stories around them conjur up…and of course with a few tweaks that only someone with an inside line to the feelings of a gay man can have, there is plenty of reason to think yaoi would also appeal to gay men. 

The Yaoi 911 website exposes its readers to a lot of different and very insightful, interesting articles, written by Alex, exploring the world of yaoi, it’s appeal to women, it’s appeal to gay men, and the exploration of how to marry the two together and create art that appeals to both without offending either.  Since the late 1970′s when yaoi as a subgenre within the manga world was given it’s own definition, it has grown into a world wide phenomenon.  Where formerly yaoi was just restricted to a mostly a female Japanese audience, it now has a worldwide multi-sex appeal, is published in many languages and read by a much larger, and still expanding, audience.  Like with most things, with growth also comes change and necessary adaptation to the demands of the marketplace.  The readers of yaoi are not just Japanese women anymore, and this expansion of the readership is causing the once very traditional Yaoi formula to morph as well.  At Yaoi 911, this growing demand for a different type of yaoi is being explored in depth, through both the articles published in the site as well as the comments from the site’s subscribers.  Reading through the comments on some of the most popular and exploratory posts, “Should Yaoi Be Just For Women” and “Why Is A Gay Man Creating Yaoi” it appears that Alex’s premise that yaoi definately has an appeal to gay men is shared by many, both women and gay men, around the world.

The world is an ever evolving community full of billions of opinions, feelings, and of course sometimes a confluence of these leads to controversy and conflict.  It is how we handle those conflicting times and differences of opinion that define us.  We can choose to embrace change and appreciate it for the positive ways it helps us interact with each other, or we can refuse to accept it and remain sheltered in our own small world living in the past.  Thankfully Alex and the team at Yaoi911 are looking to the future and embracing what yaoi can be, introducing us to the newer, more globally appealing form of yaoi, taking what once was considered an almost micro niche market art genre and expanding it to be a much more inclusive art form that can be appreciated by many more fans around the world.  

Alex summed it up very nicely in this one takeaway phrase from his Yaoi 911 blog “In the end, I don’t think anyone “owns” yaoi. It’s an art-form that by its very nature is about breaking down barriers. Whether appreciating or marketing these books, we should strive to be inclusive — not for the cash prize of appealing to a larger market, but rather, because if there is anything that these “just-for-fun” romantic fantasy romps teach us, it’s just wrong to tell people how, who or what they should love.”

Some of the more popular features of the Yaoi 911 website are of course, it’s free yaoi comics, a gay sci-fi web comic that you can read online, free yaoi computer wallpaper, all designed as an introduction to the Yaoi 911 modern style of yaoi manga.  You can support Alex and the gang at Yaoi 911 by purchasing their yaoi comics in print , Yaoi 911 Tshirts  or visit the Yaoi 911 store on Zazzle and purchase some pretty cool Yaoi 911 products there as well.

A sample of the yaoi comics work published by Yaoi911.com (Image Pencils by Karla Diaz C. Inks and colors by Winona Nelson. ) © 2011 Alex Woolfson Yaoi 911

Many anime fans around the world have fantasized about the nuances of gay love between certain male characters in a variety of anime OVA videos as well as manga comics. At conventions, in private, and in the day of video sharing, they perform them for an audience on sites like YouTube, exploring the stories through their cosplay and many times redefining the outcome to fulfil their own fantasy of what they want the characters to be.

In my opinion, and for a variety of reasons, these cosplay actors always stop short, not really depicting the complete gay relationship between their characters as the physical side of the gay relationship is never consumated. So I have often wondered, what if Anime cosplay included sex? Would it ruin the fantasy or propell it to new heights? Would it strip the characters down to their baser persona possibly removing some of the mystique about who they are or what might be? Perhaps it would strip these characters of their “innocence” and they would then lose all their character appeal? Of course, many of the yaoi cosplay actors are girls and we wouldn’t really want to see them acting out gay sex between two male anime characters…now would we?

I have always been fascintated with the possibility that somewhere, someday, at some anime convention, there would be a special secret theater where cosplay with actual sex would happen. No more wondering if L and Light from “Death Note” are gay, or if Shuichi and Eiri Yuki from “Gravitation” ever get to have a real gay relationship…we would get to see them in a very physical gay romantic scene, thus completing the fantasy.

To explore this part of cosplay, and since I doubt we’ll ever see gay cosplay that includes sex at any conventions in the near or even the not so near future, I have commissioned a few of the artists that draw for the SpunkToons site to create cosplay pinups depicting our favorite anime characters fulfilling the gay fantasies we have about them. We’ll be publishing several gay cosplay pinup sets each month featuring gay sexual relationships between our most fantasized male anime characters.

What do you think? Would gay cosplay featuring sex ruin the fantasy for you? Would gay cosplay with sex remove their innocence or would you love to see pinup sets of L and Light fucking as much as I would?

 

 
One of the most desired yaoi pairings of male anime characters is that of Sasuke Uchiha and Naruto Uzumaki from the Naruto anime series.   Among fan fiction artists these two are likely the most drawn yaoi gay coupling of all the well known male anime characters.   It’s interesting that these two have become such the wellspring of fan interest they have, but it does emphasize the old saying “opposites attract”.    That alone makes me wonder if not only do opposites attract on a personal level, but is the fact that these two characters, created by Masashi Kishimoto as complete opposites, make the perfect paring for yaoi lovers for the same reason?   Are we attracted to the chemistry between them because they were created as rivals…is this the turn-on for us or is it just that they are both cute guys?    By the amount of fan fiction, fan video animations on youtube, and fan art pinups that have been made depicting almost every possible scenario for these two to fall in love, I would conjure that there might be some truth to the premise that we are attracted to them because of their rivalry.   Are you a big fan of SasuNaru?  Do you want them to become lovers?   Do you watch every second of video footage of “Naruto” looking for proof that there is a sub-gay plot behind the relationship of these two characters?  Are you attracted to the love of rivals?

Here is another sampling from the Spunktoons members area, featuring some of our more than 20,000 images of gay art ranging from Anime to Yaoi in style and content.   This pinup set features a bunch of horny yaoi boys, all eager for some cock…either jerking their own, or sucking and getting fucked by someone elses cock.    I love the look of surprise on the first two yaoi boys above… they just got caught making out and getting naked by an unknown character.   Maybe someone wants to join them!     Enjoy these samples from our yaoi boy pinup sets in the members area of spunktoons.    Join spunktoons now to see all of the 20,000 images we have in our archives.

This fan edited AMV of “Ai No Kusabi”, set to the music of Apocalypitca’s “En Vie” is a reminder to me of how powerful yaoi anime videos can be. Many people often dismiss anime as simple, and even more are dismissive of yaoi as it contradicts with their perception of social norms. I suspect that much of the problem comes with a failure to actually watch the anime with an open mind, or perhaps because the story line in the yaoi caused raw feelings or emotions to be exposed that they wish to keep supressed.

The story of “Ai No Kusabi” is a fascinating one. If you haven’t read the original novel by Rieko Yoshihara, or seen the yaoi magazine version Shousetsu June, or even watched the OVA released in 1992, I strongly recommend you do so. This story breaks with many social norms and really pushes the boundries of what we might be able to accept in our present society. Broaching the subject of social engineering with Blondes being the highest social order would for many bring to the surface raw feelings of other social engineering experiments going wrong, but Rieko Yoshihara did so using it as a backdrop to tell a much more powerful story of love and redemption, and the struggle against society and social norms so that it can be realized.

Watch this fan edit. It doesn’t completely explore the entire story, nor it’s many plots and subplots, but it does explore the conflict, the lonliness, the love and in the end, the death and the redemption in the destruction of the world they knew.

Interesting adaptation of a well known Shonen-Ai/YAOI title “Bronze” in that this compliation of edits from the movie are set to a very heart rending and popular christmas theme, “Blue Christmas”.

For those of you that know the story of Koji Nanjo and Izumi Takuto from the original “Zetsuai” (OAV) release, “Bronze” continues the story of their somewhat stormy relationship that seemingly can’t go a single day without some kind of drama.  Even though Koji and Izumi fight almost daily they seem to be building a very intimate loving relationship between them that gives Izumi considerable pause when trying to decide whether to go to Italy to further his soccer career or stay with his Koji. 

The song, “Blue Christmas” as sung by Bright Eyes used as a musical overlay to the edit, is a touching tribute to the love that both Koji and Izumi share, and as you watch the video you can’t help but feeling a little hopeful that they will finally embrace and declare their love.

Aside from getting no presents, or getting coal in your stocking, as many grandmothers tell it, what really happens if you are a bad boy at Christmas?    Check out this yaoi boy pinup set that was just published in the SpunkToons members area.   It appears our bad little yaoi boy is in for a nice Christmas spanking!   Now go out and be bad so you can get your Christmas spanking too!