Gengoroh Tagame @ Tom of Finland Foundation - A Discussion of Japanese Gay Art History with Richard Hawkins

Join legendary gay erotic artist Gengoroh Tagame, Massive, and Richard Hawkins at the Tom of Finland Foundation's beautiful home, TOM House, in Echo Park for a discussion of Tagame's work and the history of gay art in Japan! Thursday, May 14th at 7:00pm. A panel discussion, presentation and Q&A on erotic art and artists in Japan as written about in Tagame's non-fiction series, "Gay Erotic Art in Japan." With Gengoroh Tagame, Richard Hawkins, and MASSIVE's Anne Ishii and Graham Kolbeins. Richard Hawkins is an American artist whose works are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Hawkins was in correspondence with Tagame back in the mid-'90s, and they exchanged artwork that introduced Gay manga into the Tom of Finland Foundation archive and Tom of Finland artwork into the pages of G-men magazine. Gengoroh TAGAME, Mangaka, Gay Erotic Artist. Born 1964. The artist now known as Gengoroh Tagame first debuted his comics and illustrations byanother name in gay and BL magazines. After graduating from Tama Art University, Tagame went on to work as an art director/designer, and started using his current pen name in 1986. Under this new alias he would write comics, illustrations and fiction in gay magazines. He became a full­time writer in 1994, and co­founded the gay magazine "G-men" (which he left in 2006). Tagame’s first book,TORMENT, was released in 1994, and represented the first commercially successful gay manga known as such, in Japan. He has been lauded as a singular gay mangaka ever since, and has released a total of 26 books in Japan, the most recently of which was published in April 2015. His master works include the seminal Shirogane no Hana (“The Silver Flower”), “Do You Remember the South Island POW Camp,” “The House of Brutes,” “Virtus” and most recently, “My Brother’s Husband”—the first ever serialized gay manga dealing with gay issues, published in a general interest manga magazine. He has over 15 titles translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish. As the foremost authority and expert on gay Japanese culture, and history of erotic art, he has been edited two volumes of Gay Erotic Art in Japan, which is an exhaustive archival work that delves into the cultural background and publication of gay art. http://www.tomoffinlandfoundation.org http://tagame.org http://massive-goods.com