Tagame attracted an international audience beginning in the 2000s though the circulation of pirated and scanlated versions of his works. His works began to receive officially-licensed translations in 2005, after French publisher H&O Editions released a translation of his manga series "Gunji"; an exhibition of his works was held in Paris in 2009. In 2012, an English-language translation of Tagame's one-shot manga "Standing Ovations" was published in "Thickness", an erotic comics anthology published by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, marking the first release of an officially-licensed English-langugage translation of Tagame's manga. American publisher PictureBox published "The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame", an English-language anthology of Tagame's manga, in 2013; several of Tagame's works were also translated into English by the now-defunct publishing house Bruno Gmünder Verlag.