Queer Etiquette?: Advice Columns with a Difference

Abstract

This chapter sheds light on how Japanese sexual minorities, mainly lesbians and gays, create community principles through advice given in four magazines: Anise and CarmiUa for lesbians and bisexuals, and Btidi and G-men for gay men. These are post-1990s commercial publications that provide a forum for the sharing of knowledge and experience in navigating sexual identities.1 The four magazines feature sodansfiitsu (advice column) sections of varying scales and quality spaces where readers seek advice for various issues—both sexual and social. Advice columns assume an imagined community where sexual minorities live, interact, exchange, and negotiate their everyday lives By building a sense of community or imagined family* they provide the individual and perhaps isolated) readers a place they could belong to and share. Moreover, the magazines address a gap in the historical trajectory of gay and lesbian media.