From Alexander Chee’s cheemobile Instagram page on 12/11/20:
My latest obsession: My Life My Way, a Japanese gay magazine published from 1977 – 1982, with a stunning visual style and illustrated covers all drawn by a single artist, Joji Takeuchi. I love the commitment to the humor and the style.
Insofar as we can tell, the men on the covers are American — natural models for a public gay life not easily available in the Japan of the period — so they are fantasy figures of gay masculinity, not portraits from life. I’ll exhibit four of the covers below.
As for the content of MLMW, I’ve found no sources on how it presented gay life in Japanese to a Japanese audience, or in fact on how issues of the magazine were distributed.
Four covers, from gay jeans in 1980 to a bronzed muscle hunk (for the last issue, in 1982):
(#1) #15 (1980): jeans with package
(#2) #21 (1980): bronzed muscular swimmer’s body, buttocks on display
(#3) #34 (1981): two beautiful clones
(#4) #35 (1982)
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