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In my research among people who like shota comics, I have talked both to Japanese-speaking shota fans in Japan, and to English-speaking shota fans worldwide. Although I’m interested in both, I decided early on to separate the two in my research. There are two reasons for this:

First of all, good research should be limited in scope: we look at a particular case in depth rather than include as much as we can. “It’s better to say a lot about little than to say little about a lot.”
Second, it turned out that the initial findings in these groups were very different. Shota fans in Japan thought differently about their interest for these comics than the English-speaking people who took my survey.

That’s why my book Impossibly Cute Boys is subtitled The Healing Power of Shota Comics in Japan. Because that’s what it is about: how shota comics are read in Japan.

Now that this book is published, I’ve started to engage more deeply with the material from the global shota fans, which is a related but different project.

A striking aspect of the online English-speaking shota community, judging from the survey responses, is that there is a lot of fear and hate. People who like shota are either bullied into silence by self-righteous vigilantes, or fighting back. One respondent described it as a “war.”

But here’s the interesting thing: one shota fan who took my survey had himself been part of such a hate squad.

In an interview, he told me about how they had planned their online attacks on unsuspecting shota artists, with the goal to have their social media accounts closed down.

Yes, you read that correctly: a shota fan had himself been part of a group who bullied people who like shota. He said he thought there were many of them: people who like shota but who are so ashamed of it that they deal with this interest by hating on others who like shota.

Anyone familiar with sexual politics knows this pattern: the most vocal homophobes are always the ones who eventually are caught with their pants down, enjoying the very gay sex they are publicly denouncing. It’s called overcompensation: by denouncing something loudly, you move the focus away from the same tendency in yourself. Already Shakespeare knew that we should be suspicious when someone “doth protest too much.”

There are many examples of this from the US, and gay media regularly list them under headlines like “11 anti-gay preachers who got caught doing very gay things.”

The cases include both conservative politicians with an anti-gay agenda, and pastors who have preached passionately against homosexuality. In some cases, the anti-gay politician or preacher who enjoyed some gay sex just resigns, career over, but in some cases they come out and switch sides, realizing their former homophobic agitation was just an expression of self-hatred.

In 1955, Peter Wildeblood published a first-hand account of what it was like to be persecuted and imprisoned in England for being homosexual. His book is called Against the Law, since that’s exactly what it was to be gay in England until relatively recently.

The book is an important testimony of the abhorrent breaches of human rights that England committed against gay men.

But what’s interesting here is what Wildeblood writes about the overcompensation among his more homophobic inmates, and what it says about their own desires:

A normally-adjusted man is surprisingly tolerant; the scorn and the denunciations nearly always come from a man with more or less suppressed homosexual desires of his own.

Suck on that one!

Nowadays there is such an awareness that anti-gay crusaders are “protesting too much” that people have stopped doing it, afraid that their homophobic rhetoric will expose their homosexual desires.

But maybe it’s time we ask ourselves what drives the online haters of people who like certain comics?

As my interview with the shota-hater-turned-shota-fan indicates, many of these anti-shota “preachers” also seem to protest too much, violently overcompensating for a desire that scares them.

If you haven’t already, check out my book Impossibly Cute Boys: The Healing Power of Shota Comics in Japan, which will give you a grounding in the genre’s unique history, and let you know how people – women and men, gay and straight – read these comics in Japan.

I just got my own physical copies of the book, and dare I say it is smashing!

Order the book on Amazon through my affiliate links (as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases):