June (magazine)

June

January 1982 issue of June, with cover artwork by Keiko Takemiya
Frequency	Bimonthly
Circulation	80,000 (peak)
Publisher	Magazine Magazine [ja]
Founder	Toshihiko Sagawa
First issue	October 1978
Final issue Number	November 1995 no. 85
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

June (Japanese: ジュネ, [d͡ʑu͍ ne]) was a Japanese magazine focused on shōnen-ai, a genre of male-male romance fiction aimed at a female audience. It was the first commercially published shōnen-ai magazine, launching in October 1978 under the title Comic Jun and ceasing publication in November 1995. June primarily published manga and prose fiction, but also published articles on films and literature, as well as contributions from readers. The magazine spawned multiple spin-off publications, notably Shōsetsu June ('Novel June') and Comic June.

June targeted a readership of women in their late teens and early twenties, and at its peak had a circulation of approximately 80,000 copies. In addition to publishing established manga artists and writers such as Keiko Takemiya, Azusa Nakajima, Akimi Yoshida, and Fumi Saimon, the magazine launched the careers of artists and novelists such as Masami Tsuda and Marimo Ragawa from submissions curated and edited by Takemiya and Nakajima.

As a nationally distributed commercial magazine, June is credited with disseminating and systemizing shōnen-ai in Japan, a genre which had largely been confined to relatively narrow outlets such as doujinshi conventions (events for the sale of self-published media). The term "June" and the magazine's central editorial concept of tanbi (lit. 'aestheticism') became popular generic terms for works depicting male homosexuality, which influenced the later male-male romance genres of yaoi and boys' love (BL).