My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

Recent years and exposure to media has fortunately led to the voices of those who are actually in the LGBT+ community to speak for themselves and even make content that isn’t strictly pornographic or fetishizing. What made me choose to seek this out, aside from the recommendations from my friends in the past, is that it was by an Asian creator who was actually a lesbian. Asian experience with LGBT+ is… from my experience harsher than the homophobia in the US at times. However, I’m not going to get into that since this is about a gay woman in Japan and not where my family is from in the Philippines. While My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness had sexual content and themes, it was in no way fetishcized. 

Anime and manga have unfortunately contributed a lot to the fetishization of gay people and comes with many harmful stereotypes (predatory gays, rape, pedophilia, etc…) that straight women will find enjoyable. Actual gay people don’t seem to be the target audience and I could go on and on about how problematic it is for straight people to jokingly refer to their gay content consuming as “sin”. I’ve actually had someone ask me if I stopped being homophobic because I liked a relationship between two fictional characters who were both men and “thought they were hot” (her words, not mine) and that was very appalling and harmful thinking. I dealt with internal homophobia and confusion growing up and for someone I considered a friend to disregard that and assume that I stopped being homophobic by liking a fictional gay relationship was a true “what the fuck” moment. It was gross thinking on her part to assume that, as I had been identifying as LGBT+ for years (basically out everywhere except to family/relatives and people I'm not close to)and ended my homophobia in my freshman year of high school. 

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness had a very simple style to it, and it was a good decision, along with the pink palette. The simple and cute style made it easier for others to relate to some of Nagata’s experiences or even see similarities if they were also an LGBT+ woman. It was a very raw and vulnerable view that I really appreciated seeing and I applaud Nagata for making the comic and opening her experiences to the world. "Maybe the reason I'd been so bad at dealing with people in person, had been how hard I was always trying to make them like me." is a particularly striking and relatable line that I found. Sexuality was very much an important part of it, but other things such as mental health were given attention. It was refreshing to see the take on mental health and how it was even addressed in the first place, since Asian countries tend to frown at mental health and choose to ignore it. There is a large misconception about mental illnesses, and it’s only worse in Asian cultures in my experiences. It’s hard for them to fathom and even today my parents do not understand my mental illnesses and are confused on why I still have them.