ABSTRACT
Originally, the idea for this chapter developed from my growing uneasiness about the way in which a number of Japanese and British scholars reacted to my explanations of the research I was conducting on categories that include gay and lesbian people.2 These reactions can be represented by the phrase: ‘So, you are studying the gay community’ (in Japanese, gei konmyuniti). In England, Scotland Yard used this same term when warning ‘homosexuals’ to take care when a series of murders of gay men occurred in the spring of 1993. What the term ‘gay community’ is supposed to mean is, however, not very clear. An article in the Gay Times (Simpson 1994) asked the question whether such a thing exists in England and the majority of those questioned about it reacted by saying that they thought or hoped that it did not exist. This of course depends very much on how the term ‘gay community’ is defined.
