Dangerous Drugs of Sex, Sei no Gekiyaku in Japanese, is a boys’ love manga by Yuki Mizuta. It ran in the digital magazine Boys Fan from June 21 to December 20, 2018. The longer serial title was Sei no Gekiyaku: Midara ni Kaihatsu Sareru Karada, usually given in English as Dangerous Drugs of Sex: The Indecently Developed Body. Magazine Magazine later collected it in the Junet Comics Pierce Series. Confinement, sadomasochistic training, and a life handed over as power exchange run through the whole romance. They are not a single spicy chapter. The lead, Makoto Katsuragi, is an adult office worker. This is dark romance between adult men. Boys’ love is the genre name. It is not a story about minors.
Katsuragi starts as an elite salaryman. His parents die suddenly, he is forced to resign, and his girlfriend leaves. Drunk, he decides to kill himself. Before he can jump, a stranger, Ryūji Yoden, stops him and tells Katsuragi to hand that life over. What follows is confinement and sadomasochistic training. Pain and pleasure are pushed until Katsuragi has to admit he is still alive. He falls in love with Yoden and stops wanting to die. Rescue becomes ownership. Training becomes attachment. That is commercial BL’s dark dominance fantasy. The book is fiction, not a consent manual. The consensual non-consent in it is not a script to copy. The love grows inside SM practice, and it starts from a suicide that gets interrupted and a life that is taken by demand.
A live-action film was announced in April 2019. Hideo Jojo wrote and directed it. The leads are Sho Watanabe and Takashi Kitadai. The rest of the cast is Kouhei Nagano, Ruri Shinato, Seiki Chiba, Sousuke Yamamoto, and Fumio Moriya. Jojo said it would be the first boys’ love film with an R18 rating to play in theaters: hard erotic content, not the softer BL that shows up on television. It premiered on February 14, 2020, at Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa, ran privately for two weeks, and opened in theaters across Japan on March 6, 2020. It played the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival on July 11 and July 14, 2020, and was also entered at the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival and Wicked Queer. Netflix Japan added it on July 14, 2020.
Digital sales of the manga hit one million copies by 2019. The gay writer Mochigi reviewed the film positively. He argued that viewers of different sexualities can watch it, and that the characters have a social life beyond the sex. He pointed to scenes of Katsuragi outside the training room. Kee Chang at Anthem said the film asked a lot of its audience. The confinement and training premise is not light entertainment. You have to sit inside that story.
