Who Are We?
AniGay is a small group of good friends who love anime and care deeply about the multifaceted, nuanced ways in which it depicts queerness. Over the years, we’ve spent more time than it’s possible to quantify researching, analyzing, and conversing about queerness in anime together, and we’ve become frustrated with the tendency of popular discourse to reduce queerness to binary categories: “representation” (good or bad) and “canon” (yes or no). We think anime is, well, a whole lot gayer than that.
What Is AniGay?
Our mission at AniGay is simple: To let you in on our conversations about queer anime! We have a ton of thoughts, and we want to present them in a slightly more polished form than is possible on Twitter. So AniGay will host our interpretations, analyses, and theories as well as glimpses into our adjacent research, and anything else we feel like writing and publishing, as long as it’s related to queerness in anime.
Most importantly, we intend to go beyond the canon/non-canon binary, questions of whether characters are positive or negative representation, and other discourse tropes that we find limiting. AniGay is our celebration of anime’s queerness as a medium, and that means we’ll be talking unapologetically about queer anime in all its forms — good, bad, and ugly. Sometimes all three at the same time! Queer anime contains multitudes.
And our relationship to queer anime is a constant learning process. Because we’re always expanding our knowledge base and understanding of this topic, our interpretations aren’t static, and it’s very possible that Future AniGay might grow to disagree with Present AniGay. If and when the time comes, we’ll update and add to our posts as needed. We also appreciate feedback and input, especially from native Japanese-speakers and queer people living in Japan. No matter how much we read on the subject, there are certain advantages to lived experience that we simply don’t have, and we will always welcome any opportunity to help fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
All in all, we hope for AniGay to be a positive place where we can share our immense enthusiasm about gay anime in all its forms with anyone who’s interested — especially those of you who long to stray a bit off the beaten path of the usual online queer discourse.
Staff
Rupa Jogani | Editor
Elizabeth Simins | Editor
Rebecca Black | Writer
