Artists and playwrights churned out endless plays and illustrated queer sex manuals celebrating nanshoku loving, or bi-do “the beautiful way.” One of the really popular subjects was the love of Atsumori and Kumagae, two samurai who go through kinds of trials and tribulations, yet always stayed together (in more ways than one). Atsumori and Kumagae and other queer samurai couples were on paintings and prints were everywhere – either with one femmed up like a geisha or as butch-and-butch couples like Atsumori and Kumagae. In nanshoku pillow books – sex manuals traditionally given to newlyweds – samurai queer loving was depicted as only artists of the time could: with huge cocks, and very eager orifices. Aside from the risk of being executed for any number of social faux pas it was a damned good time to be alive -- and a samurai.

The Tokugawa years were so queer, in fact, that is even spawned male-only onnagirai (“women haters”) cults: groups of samurai so dedicated to male love that they actively excluded women from everything they did and anywhere they lived. Even in supposedly celibate Buddhist monasteries, nanshoku was practiced – with the wonderful logic that celibacy could only be violated with a member of the opposite sex, so screwing around with another monk was perfectly fine.

But this just wasn’t the gay-nineties of Japanese history because nanshoku lasted for hundreds of years – well after Japan was united under one shogunate in the early 1600’s and the need for thousands of samurai vanished practically overnight. Nanshoku was now as much a part of Japanese life as rice and sake. The old samurai ways became sporting events – like kendo and judo – and nanshoku went from being an honorable lifestyle choice to a commodity: in the big cities brothels and red light districts opened where nanshoku love was bought and sold right out in the open.

Nanshoku was so much a part of Japanese life that when Portuguese showed up – everyone remember the book/movie Shogun? – and they tried to convert the ‘heathen’ Japanese to Christianity they only hit one major stumbling block: when they started talking about the awful ‘sin of sodom’. In the early years of trade with the Christian West the traders and missionaries quickly learned to keep their homophobia to themselves – especially when displeasing the Shogun could get your head cut off by samurai -- a very gay, and very pissed-off samurai.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and as Western traders and missionaries – i.e. rich foreign devils – influenced the Japanese more and more, nanshoku began to fade from the scene. The foreigners were rich, powerful, and their missionaries brought the sure-fire sex-killer, the most dangerous weapon in the Christian arsenal: guilt.

So now Japan has a love that dare not speak it’s name. If you look in certain books, in dusty archives, though you can see a different Japan, a Japan where a man could love another man -- openly, lovingly, hotly – and where the best kind of samurai was a very gay samurai.

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