Sleeping with the Anime Oh, the stigma, the shame! Steven Foster’s been out of the closet for years … that’s no problem. But can he find acceptance for his love of cartoons? by Dylan Otto Krider

Steven Foster sits with his assistant Wade Shemwell bathed in the glow of a computer monitor, hard at work deep in the heart of ADV Films studios located in a multicultural area of southwest Houston. Foster has endured his share of teasing, weird looks, titters, and whispered comments when his back is turned, all because of where he chooses to direct his affections. That’s the price one pays for being who he is. And no, we’re not talking about sexual orientation here–Foster was out of the closet back when he was sleeping with the center of the high school basketball team in small-town Converse, Texas. What the typically self-assured Foster has taken a year to be totally comfortable revealing about himself is a passionate love of cartoons. But not just any cartoons. Foster reserves his amours for anime, the animated films imported from Japan that have been developing a cult following here in the States. It’s Foster’s job to dub these titles into English–either for DVD release, or to be broadcast overseas or on cable channels like Encore.

An actress wearing earphones sits on the other side of the glass from Foster and Shemwell. Hilary Haag plays the voice of Dortin, an androgynous troll in ADV’s popular Orphen series. Foster originally recruited her as the last-minute replacement for another woman who was hired to provide the whimpering noises for one animated creature, but came down with laryngitis. (Foster found the laryngitis woman one night after he happened to overhear her barking in a bar for a parlor trick.) Contrary to the myth, the voice-over actors Foster culls from such local theatrical strongholds as the Alley and Stages are all gorgeous.

"Okay, what’s my angle?" Haag says, but Foster doesn’t like the wording. "That line sucks–that’s my angle," he says. The script Foster receives is often translated literally, and has to be rewritten to sound natural–which frequently raises objections from die-hard fans, who can be as brutal about minutia as Trekkers or any other obsessed facet of science-fiction fandom.

"They never take into account that, in Japanese, you can say a phrase in three flaps [of the mouth]," Foster explains, "and the translation is like, ‘Then Dylan turned his page and then he took his pen out and he was ready to go.’ Now how the f--- can I say that mess in that time?" The more purist fans prefer subtitles, but they draw attention away from the art and carry their own inaccuracies in translation. Often the voices of the American actors turn out better than the Japanese originals.

Foster gives Shemwell a funny look as he hacks at the keyboard. "I just type randomly," Shemwell deadpans as he keys up the next scene.

"I do, too–they call it a script," Foster jokes.

Haag’s next line is "You cut down the first tree you saw," but it’s not working. Foster has her speed up the reading, adds the word "just," changes "saw" to "found." It requires several takes before it’s perfect.

This is the hectic life of a producer for ADV. Part director, part scriptwriter, part techno-acrobat, part magician, he’s got to direct his actors to get the right inflection and emotion in the voice while matching the movement of the character’s lips–not to mention staying as true as possible to the story and translation, a much more difficult task than it might at first appear.

Many if not most anime titles are geared for adult audiences with highly sophisticated story lines that can require numerous screenings to get the finer plot points. Nonetheless, many in the U.S. still view anything animated as kids’ stuff. Anime has been gaining an underground cult following in the U.S.; conventions and fan clubs have been sprouting up around the country, not to mention the success of the Houston-based ADV, which has become one of the leading distributors of anime in North America. Still, there’s a stigma that’s been hard to overcome.

"You know what? I think if you say right now, ‘I think I like anime,’ people would look at you funnier than if you said, ‘I’m gay,’" Foster says. "I think they’d say, ‘Okay, you’re gay, but what’s up with the cartoons and comic books?’"

Foster wasn’t born this way. He started out in advertising and rose quickly in the ranks of Houston’s marketing community until he was running his own firm of one called RocketBoy. A radio spot he did for JR’s became an instant hit. For those who have never heard it, the commercial starts off with the sultry voice of a woman giving the kind of stats you’d find in a personals ad: "I have long blonde hair and am wearing a slick little Donna Karan number with a slit right up to my, well, you know," the woman croons. "Sometimes when I’m looking like this, I feel really sexy, and that makes me feel so hot." At that point, a butch voice-over breaks in: "Drag night at JR’s. Come in and be yourself. Or maybe not."

The spot swept the American Advertising Federation awards in 1998 from the city to the national level, despite what was then a fairly conservative advertising community. "It was so funny seeing all these stuffed shirts in this hotel banquet room in their ghastly dresses and their suits and their black ties, and they’re just screaming," Foster recalls of the moment they played the clip from his ad as he was called up to collect his Addy. "Everybody I took the award from, these 57-year-old businessmen were like, ‘My agency bills 80 billion dollars a year and that little f---er took that?’ It felt good–the underdog got it."

That was when a friend who worked as a production manager at ADV introduced him–recruited, if you will–to the anime lifestyle. "She says, listen, I’m working with this company ADV–can we have lunch about it? You won’t believe [what’s over] here." Sure enough, Foster had no idea what anime was, let alone that one of the major distributors in the United States was smack in the heart of the swamp city. Foster, like most people, only knew the genre through shows like Pokémon or the old Robotech series broadcast in the ’80s (actually a spliced-together compilation of three completely unrelated shows). But at ADV, he soon learned that anime ranged from literary adaptations and sports shows to dark fantasies and romances, dating as far back as 1917. "I fell in love with the genre," Foster says. "I thought the characters were fun. I thought the dialogue was good. I loved the animation, and I was like, yeah." Having already topped out in advertising, he called his clients and told them he was closing up shop to switch careers. "I felt like a virgin who has been turned onto something like God or sex or drugs…. You’re like, oh my God, I had no idea."

He admits he did have some reservations because there was such a "geek thing" about it. "I’m like, no one’s going to know what I’m doing. They’re not going to get this! I mean, it took me six shows to get it, and I was producing."

Despite the reputation the Japanese have for uptightness, their attitudes toward nudity and sexuality are quite freewheeling compared to their stuffy American counterparts. It wasn’t until the influx of Christianity after the war and the resulting censorship laws that it became illegal to show penile penetration. Japanese artists simply worked around this law by depicting penetration via tentacles and space cactuses. (Ouch!)

Though often more concerned with action than sexuality, gay, bisexual, and transsexual characters are not uncommon, and are often treated with respect. An entire website is devoted to the subject (check out www.fortunecity.com/victorian/university/5/josei_ni), with a list of recommended anime titles containing gay characters or themes. "The thing that really struck me about anime as I gradually came to terms about my own bisexuality," the web administrator Josei Ji writes, "is the number of positive images and stories involving homosexuals and bisexuals." There’s even an entire Japanese subgenre of gay animated porn called yaoi geared toward a female audience. Apparently, Japanese women fantasize about two men in much the same way straight men on both sides of the ocean often enjoy seeing two women together. The lesbian version designed for male audiences is called yuri, reportedly due to the number of characters with that name.

Many mainstream titles also depict homosexuals. Orphen, the television series Foster is currently dubbing, has several non-heterosexual characters. One is introduced in early episodes as Stephanie. Viewers find out later Stephanie was once Stephan, until he got wounded in a magical battle. When Stephan used his own powers to heal himself, he apparently made a few other changes as well.

The most obvious homosexual in the series is Flameheart, a textbook case right down to the domineering mother and absentee father. Then there’s the infamous troll of indeterminate gender, Dortin. "When we first looked at it, we all across the board thought it was a girl," Foster says. "Nowhere in the script does it address gender…. To this day I’ve got people coming up to me saying, ‘What’s up with Dortin? Is it a guy, or a girl, or are the little trolls lovers, are they relatives, or are they just cohorts?’ I’m like, you figure it out."

Foster has risen quickly in the ranks of the company, and was chosen to steward Sin, ADV’s first original co-production. He also handles the audio commentary for the DVD versions of the show Farscape, broadcast on the Sci Fi channel. (He was working with the Farscape cast and crew in New York on the eve before the World Trade Center attack. Luckily he was able to nab the last available rental car in midtown Manhattan, which he drove all the way back to Texas.)

In a major recognition of the art form, the always-highbrow Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, hosted the Absolute Anime film festival last year. It meant a lot to Foster to see this major confirmation of what he was doing. Yet when Foster was asked to speak at one of the screenings, his boyfriend of six years was too embarrassed to go.

Foster has two beautiful children from a previous marriage, aged 10 and nine. Though his ex-wife is a born-again Christian (as he is), she never had a problem with his sexuality. (She’s now hitched to their marriage counselor.) Foster says he always preferred men, but is totally over the fence now. "I think women are the superior species," Foster says. "Gay is not a choice, because otherwise there ain’t no way a guy, knowing how f---ed up and selfish and assholish men are, is going to go out with another guy."

Sadly, Foster believes it was his chosen profession that eventually ended his recent six-year relationship. His boyfriend, a prominent straight-laced attorney in town, would want to go out to eat or socialize with friends and couldn’t understand it when Foster said he needed to devote his time to his silly cartoons. When Foster started working on a development deal with Fox and Showtime for a science-fiction television series, things finally came to a head. "He shows up and says, ‘Let’s go to lunch,’" Foster says, "and I’m like working on this TV series, they want to see my script–Hello? Huge opportunity." He couldn’t make his boyfriend understand. So Foster has reluctantly become the latest to join the ranks of Houston’s most eligible bachelors.

"I think anime has a fringe, something like 10 percent," Foster says. "You know the statistic, 10 percent of the population is gay? I think 10 percent of the population has an anime, comic-book thing going. It’s weird. Just as you can say there’s a fringe culture of gay, like 10 percent of that 10 percent–one percent likes leather, one percent likes being a normal guy, one percent likes the other to call me bitch, all these different classifications. In anime there’s also a subculture that’s very divergent." And like the GBLT community, once you’ve clued into the scene, you realize there are a lot more out there than you would ever realize. If all those fans came out of the closet, there probably wouldn’t be any stigma left at all.

Click here for the Orphen characters.

Click here for anime-related tidbits.

Dylan Otto Krider edits the Night & Day section for the Houston Press. His articles, poems, and fiction have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Vol. I, and Kenyon Review. More shameless self-promotion can be found at: www.dylanottokrider.com.