My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness/LGBT in anime

I remember reading My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Kabi Nagata when it initially got big in the west (2 years ago, I believe?), and feeling incredibly excited by the idea that manga dealing with more realistic depictions of LGBT life were beginning to become mainstream!

Growing up as a queer girl with an interest in anime was a very lonely experience for me, but in an entirely different way. I found that most of my friends who did know about anime were super deep into Yaoi content- and I just really couldn't get into it (and now, I understand that its because those girls were straight- a lot of Yaoi content is obviously geared toward this exact demographic!!). With that, I also tried looking into Yuri content, but without much luck- because that genre is, of course, geared towards straight men!

So, I gave up looking for quality LGBT anime content for a very long time! That is, until I read My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, which was such an honest breath of fresh air for me. While I didn't necessarily relate to the author of this autobiographical manga so much, I found it interesting to get a glimpse into how truly isolating it must feel to be queer in Japan. Seeing how big this manga has gotten, I really hope that this boosts Kabi Nagata's career and helps her out on her journey to better herself and her situation (and it seems like it has, since she now has been making more autobiographical manga recently, now titled "My Solo Exchange Diary", which I hope to read sometime in the future!).

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