Warning:

Disclaimer 1: For you hard-core wotas who want just the facts related to Rika and Yossie, this isn’t written for you. I don’t think I have anything unique to tell except a tidbit or two, which will come when I get to the actual parts about the convention.

Disclaimer 2: For those of you who are “uninitiated” in the world of Japanese entertainment and Hello Project, I will try my best to explain the basics but you’ll have to Google the rest. I will purposefully write a few references that only hard-core fans will get.

So why am I writing this? I wanted to put down the details for my own reference and memories because, frankly, it was a surprisingly life-changing event for me.

This is the story of how the international fans of two incredible young Japanese women managed to turn a very jaded, semi-retired lesbian activist into a screaming fan girl for an hour on a Saturday night.

Introduction

I officially accepted my lesbianism (a.k.a. “came out of the closet”) in about October of 1987. I was a sophomore in college at University of California at Irvine. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and I was in Orange County, California, which was so known for its conservatism that it’s called the Orange Curtain. 

I honestly believe I would have come out sooner if I had a positive role model in my real life or one that I could identify with in Western pop-culture. But being a person who was raised in a military family, homophobia was an undercurrent.

Being a person who loved the arts and entertainment, I knew the only way I could meet my craving for intellectual and emotional satisfaction was to turn to the media. Since I was also a comic book and animation nerd since I was six years old, I had other options than most people to look for such material.

Now, this was long before Ellen publicly came out of the closet, before “Queer As Folks” or “The L word” were on television, and movies provided a hit or miss on positive material. But there were some bright spots at the time in the form of the movie “Desert Hearts” and comic book series “Camelot 3000”. However, most material proved to be homophobic, or seriously dysfunctional, but it was a case of desperation where you took whatever bit you can get.

Needless to say, the timing of this was also before the Internet became easily assessable.

If you wanted to connect with people or to get information, you had to really work for it. And I was willing to do that.

I found out about the Gay and Lesbian Student Union at UCI and that was the start of my activism, which really just meant to me that if you wanted to get something done, you did it yourself. 

My experiences soon included becoming involved in the greater LGBT community in Orange County by joining and supporting non-profit organizations. I also spoke on gay and lesbian panels at UCI and other colleges, as well as became a regular columnist for the “Orange County Blade Gay and Lesbian Magazine” for a few years.

And all the while, I continued my personal search in western culture and entertainment for good gay and lesbian material, which slowly became more plentiful as the years went on.

Unfortunately, as my level of activism increased over the years, so did my personal standards for material that could really intellectually and emotionally affect me. I no longer had a tolerance for material that is assumed or even labeled as gay and lesbian that had homophobic and sexist elements. This unfortunately meant that material that was personally satisfying was harder and harder to find.

And then I really discovered Japanese anime and manga in about 1999 and everything changed.

Tomorrow:  Part 2:  The World of Hello Project

Tags: hangry & angry, hello project, ishiyoshi