Go Hirano (平野剛) sits in the first wave of contemporary gay fetish illustration in Japan. Artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame names him with Go Mishima, Sanshi Funayama, and Tatsuji Okawa as one of that wave’s central figures. Later gay male BDSM drawing and muscle-fetish bara come partly out of that line.
Very little is known about his life. He submitted work anonymously. The drawings are realist. The men are solid, with obvious body hair, not the soft bishōnen type that was popular then. That is the masculine desire he put into mainstream gay print. In the 1960s his pictures appeared in Fuzokukitan, a fetish magazine that mixed gay, straight, and lesbian material. From the 1970s through the 1990s they kept running in Barazoku, Japan’s first commercially circulated gay magazine.
While he was putting hairy, masculine desire into those magazines, leather and SM aesthetics were hardening elsewhere. The images are what remain: a record for anyone looking at homosexuality in Japan, at Go Mishima, and at how early gay fetish drawing sits under later bara and SM illustration. The pictures are erotic images of adult men.
