ABSTRACT
The homo būmu wasn’t just a tabloid phenomenon even if the phrase itself was coined in its pages. Nor can it simply be equated with some sort of manufactured homo panic cynically whipped up to sell more copy to a shocked, if titillated, heterosexual readership. Indeed, the appearance of Barazoku in August 1971 heralded what to some really seemed to be a new era, one which might see homo men across Japan uniting to step out of the shadows to live according to their desires, free of the fear of homo-phobic persecution. Over the next few years, optimism ran high. Barazoku went from strength to strength and the more overtly activist magazines of Minami Teishirō – The Adonis Boy and Adon – appeared on the scene to develop and propel an increasingly political homo agenda. By the mid-1970s, it seemed that a new period was about to emerge; a time when ‘the many homo who have been hiding can emancipate themselves’ (Fujita 1986: 304), a momentous occasion of what Minami identified in grand historical fashion as ‘epochal change’ (Minami 1991: 130).
