The halls of queer history are filled with art. Sadao Hasegawa is another name in a long list of iconic creators who have shaped and changed their culture. His name most often shows up in lists, tied to two others. First, Tom of Finland remains one of the most well-known figures in queer art history. He is described as the “most influential creator of gay pornographic images.” The other name tied to Sadao’s is Yukio Mashima, an author equally controversial as he was iconic. It is primarily due to Hasegawa’s admiration that his name is linked to Mashima’s, as well as their similar deaths.

Finding queer people to write about for this project is an interesting task. We have gone through online lists, other projects, books, footnotes, and sometimes have just surfed the internet until we found someone interesting. This month I was working on expanding our master list and picked up a book from my shelf: Lesbian Lists: A Look at Lesbian, Culture, History, and Personalities by Dell Richards. In the introduction of the book, I found a sentiment that was extremely interesting considering the current discussions within the queer community around our history.

Discussing Yukio Mishima is a complex mess of sorting fact from fiction, and while in our last article of Elagabalus we found ourselves faced with similar problems, the reasoning behind this confusion could not be more different. With Elagabalus, it was because we were faced with a cacophony of differing accounts of her life. But Yukio Mishima is a much more modern figure, having only died in 1970, so we still have many first-hand accounts of his life, including videos of him. This is where we find the complexity. It has less to do with others' varied feelings on the life of Mishima, but the contradictions found within the man himself.