“rose tribe”) in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia.
Bara-eiga (“rose film”) was additionally used in the 1980s to describe gay cinema.īy the late 1980s, as LGBT political movements in Japan began to form, the term fell out of use, with gei becoming the preferred nomenclature for people who experience same-sex attraction. 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”. 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. Since the 2000s, bara has been used by this non-Japanese audience as an umbrella term to describe a wide variety of Japanese and non-Japanese gay media featuring masculine men, including western fan art, gay pornography, furry artwork, and numerous other categories.