Saturday mornings during the 1970s. Peak cartoon experiences. Imagine being a queer five-year-old (one who wanted to grow up to be a beautician and who styled the hair of his stuffed animals for fun) exposed to that very pink icon, Snagglepuss. Heavens to Murgatroyd, even! Sass was my first foreign language and I became fluent, overnight.
I continued to watch cartoons, learning about classical music, puns, and the absurdity of violence, throughout most of the decade. With almost perfect timing, a new cartoon arrived arrived just as puberty was raising its—ahem—head.
Battle of the Planets was an American adaptation of a Japanese anime called 科学忍者隊ガッチャマン (kagaku ninjatai gatchaman, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), and it reeled me in tight. First advantage? Two of the male leads, Jason and Mark (the epitome of 1970s gay names, by the way), had a very sexy aura. And then there was Tiny, the chubby bear member of the squad! Representation matters, and seeing an intergalactic space warrior rock his curves was quite the dopamine hit.
I think I was most spellbound by Zoltar. Yes, it was cliché, but an evil mastermind occupying the liminal spaces of queerdom—Zoltar epitomized the fabulousness of genderqueer fluidity—delighted me.
I had already consumed other forms of Japanese visual media. Godzilla was a perennial favorite for the 4:30 movie, as was Gamera (I recall a scene where children ate jelly doughnuts to gain psychic powers and I was HOOKED!). There was also Speed Racer (he’s a demon on wheels!), but a critical element of Japanese manga and anime was missing: the human-powered robot, or mech.
I’m sure there are academic papers out there that connect Japan’s loss in WWII to the concept of a technological skin that both protects the wearer and attacks its enemies, but there’s another, queer, angle I want to explore.
My husband is all about these robots. Gundam, Appleseed (by the incredible Masamune Shirō, whose movie, Memories, I will always recommend), Gaogaigar, Evangelion, Patlabor, the list goes on and on. I admit, I was a resistant fan. Superficially, the plots seemed similar, with a heavy reliance on deus ex machina, or perhaps deus ex mech. And there was always at least one young girl character with a voice that hit me like nails on a chalkboard.
But soon after we began dating, Hiro introduced me to a mech-centered video game, Battle Tech, on a date where I got to meet all his gay friends. It was early 1994, and the video tech was crude, but we all played within our own consoles, complete with joysticks AND foot pedals, fighting each other on low-res landscapes.
The true turning point might have been when the original Ghost in the Shell animated movie (please go away, ScarJo) came out. Although the story is not mech-centered, it was so profound and complex that both of us needed to revisit the theatre to better understand it.
Patlabor, an anime series set in the near future where the Tōkyō Metropolitan Police Force has a mech squadron, really captured my imagination with excellent story-telling and beautiful graphics. And it was around that time that I saw another metaphor for mechs. One that helped to explain their queer fandom—although, don’t get me wrong: mechs have a huge fan base, both in Japan and around the world.
During my years in Japan, people carried their closet everywhere. The concept of being out at home, at work, anywhere, was in its infancy—and thankfully much is improving since my departure in 1998. If your closet felt like a mech, protecting you from others, keeping your most vulnerable parts safe, you’d be a fan of series like Evangelion, too.
I was in the closet at work when Hiro and I first met. But for my next job in Japan, and the job after that, I lowered my defenses and walked out of my mech. I didn’t abandon all of my weapons—I’m still fluent in sass—but having a home in Hiro made me much stronger.