A Guide to Boys Love: The Romantic Gay Stories of Asia

Borislav Gerasimov and Christian Boychevsky

(Originally published in Bulgarian on Proud.bg, 12 December 2021)

If you’re looking for something to warm your soul and sweeten your life in the cold and dark winter days, we recommend you try to latest trend engulfing Asia and the world. No, we’re not talking about a new type of tea with milk or tapioca bubbles. We’re talking about the Boys Love movies and series, which tell the love stories of young gay men.

Their popularity has been growing for years but the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, which glued us to our TVs and computers, made them even more popular. But what is the BL genre and the movies and series based on it?

BL or Boys Love (sometimes spelt as Boy Love or Boys’ Love) has its beginnings in the Japanese manga culture of the 1970s when women from the so-called Year 24 Group created the first shōnen-ai (boys love) manga, which later became also known as yaoi. Shōnen-ai was the result of women’s frustration with the manga created at the time, primarily by men, in which women were only represented in their socially acceptable roles in the patriarchal Japanese society. Shōnen-ai, which depicted love stories between two men, allowed for a broader and deeper development of the main characters – like what the women longed to see but could not find in the love stories between men and women. “They wanted to convey that gender is not something essential, even in a single person, both femininity and masculinity can coexist. They wanted to rebel against the binary understanding [of gender]”, says Suzuki Kazuko, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University to Nikkei Asia.

For many years, BL remained primarily as manga, anime, and novels. We don’t know when it first appeared on the TV screen, but the 2014 Thai series Love Sick is among the first. Romantic love between men had been shown in Thai cinema before but in Love Sick for the first time it was the main storyline. Since then, BL’s popularly in Thailand has exploded. Kanop Supamanop from LINE TV, a free streaming service that since 2016 has been showing BL, says to TimeOut that “Boys Love is no longer a sub-genre. It’s gone mainstream” and by mid-2020, the platform contained more than 33 BL series. Aam Anusorn, a Thai BL director, hopes that they will become “soft power” for the country.

Taiwan is another major producer of BL and, since recently, the Philippines too. South Korea, which is significantly more conservative towards LGBT people, also released two short series in 2020.

In China, due to the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party, danmei (boys love) series can only hint at, but not show, the love between the characters; fans call this forbidden romance “socialist brotherhood”.

For example, in The Untamed, the relationship between the main characters is disguised as “brotherly love” (which is far from the contents of the original material, the book The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu). However, according to the countless fans of the series, the skilful depictions help to underscore the men’s deep relationship and tell the story of their unconditional love.

In Word of Honour there is a scene where one man’s sleeve catches fire and the other man cuts it. This is a reference to a popular ancient Chinese story about Emperor Ai whose beloved Dong Xiang once fell asleep on his sleeve. The Emperor had to get up but didn’t want to wake up his love so he cut his sleeve (you can read more about this story here). Since then, a cut sleeve in China is seen as a metaphor for gay love. This is just one of the hidden ways in which BL tries to depict gay relationships in China while evading the CCP censorship. Fans enjoy this ambiguity and play detective, trying to find clues for the characters’ love.

Most BL novels, films, and series are written by and for straight women. Aam tells Vice that straight women like BL because men there have a “sensitive side” – unlike the men in their environment. According to others, the genre is undeniably linked to Asia’s feminist awakening. “When I was small, I had a dream, what if I was born as a man? I could have more freedom and more opportunities. […] BL is our desire for transformation, our desire for change”, says Kazumi Nagaike, a cultural studies professor at Oita University to Nikkei Asia.

As BL continues its spreads, it is becoming popular among queer people too. For them, in Asia and beyond, BL is an opportunity to experience gay love without negative consequences. In a detailed material on Refinery29, K-Ci Williams points out that BL series are more progressive than Western LGBT shows because they depict gay characters’ intimate moments “without their entire existence revolving around being gay. Watch a BL episode and you might find a steamy sex scene followed by a run-of-the-mill visit to the grocery store for milk.”

Many aspects of BL series are related to Asian culture where people place significant emphasis on social harmony, respect for the elderly, and care for each other. Viewers will notice how characters often ask each other “how are you? Did you sleep well? Have you eaten?”, bring each other food and if one is sick or has hurt himself, the other one takes care of him or tends to his wounds. BL is full of such small gestures that we rarely see in European and American romantic stories – both gay and straight.

For the curious western viewer, BL is also an opportunity to learn more about a distant part of the world, its customs and traditions, while also enjoying queer love stories set against the background of the chaotic megapolises or tropical islands of Southeast and East Asia.

Most BL series follow certain common tropes. For example, the main characters start off as enemies but become lovers, for example, in I Told Sunset About You, Dark Blue Kiss, TharnType, SOTUS, HIStory 3: Make Our Days Count, HIStory 3: Trapped. This is probably the most common storyline. At the beginning of the story, the boys usually resent each other due to rivalry or something else. However, with time, their chemistry becomes undeniable and they profess their feelings for each other. In others, like The Untamed, Word of Honour or Color Rush, the two are presented as soulmates who were born to be together. For example, in Until We Meet Again, the main characters were together in a past life and were buried with a red thread around their wrists, which allows for their souls to reconnect in death and find a way towards each other again after reincarnation. In other storylines, the main characters start off as friends and then become lovers. We follow their story as it unfolds and remain in suspense about whether they would admit their feelings for each other and get together and if that would ruin their friendship. Of course, these types of stories happen between straight people too but as all LGBT people know, they’re more complicated for us.

BL has problematic sides too. In many stories, the main characters are stereotyped as seme and uke, words from the Japanese LGBT slang for “top” and “bottom”. Seme is usually tall, strong, and “masculine” and chases uke, who is “feminine”, short, and shy. Although in recent years we see more diverse characters, this heteronormative stereotype creates harmful impressions about queer people and relationships. Seme is also sometimes presented as straight, saying things like “I don’t like guys, I only like you”, which seems like an attempt to soften the “gay vibe” of the series and make it more acceptable for wider audiences.

Another problematic aspect is the depiction of scenes of non-consensual sex acts where usually seme takes advantage of a drunk or asleep uke. Such scenes are glossed over and often used in the storyline to demonstrate that uke is unaware of his feelings towards seme and this event helps him realise his love.

Women’s representation is another weak point. In most BL, there are no significant female characters or they are the main character’s jealous and confrontational ex-girlfriend who is constantly scheming to separate him from his true love. Another typical role for women is of fujoshi (fan girls) who basically have no other goal in life but to bring the two guys together – they are constantly chasing the guys, screaming, taking photos, creating websites…

For these reasons, in Thailand, for example, some LGBT organisations distance themselves from BL culture because they think it doesn’t reflect LGBT people’s real life and the problems we deal with, such as inequality or HIV. Aam says that “[People in Thailand] don’t really accept LGBTQ+ people. [Some of] the fans do not support same sex marriage. They don’t even care about the rights of LGBTQ+ people, they just care about the couple on TV, and that’s it.”

Still, BL has undoubtedly had a positive impact and contributed to the normalisation of gay love and relationships, especially in more conservative societies. Fujimoto Yukari, a professor in Meiji University in Japan, writes in Nippon that BL is the “missing link” between TV dramas and real gay people. She says that if more people watch TV stories where the main characters are a regular gay couple, this will lead to more social acceptance. She adds that BL can also change traditional conceptions of masculinity and points to the Japanese series Kinō nani tabeta? (What did you eat last night?) where the lawyer Shirō prepares meals at home every day. In the US, BL fans Ashley, Alex and Bianca tell Vice that BL has helped them discover themselves and feel accepted.

In the end, BL is a form of entertainment that helps us to relax after a long day at work or school and for a moment find ourselves in a different, romantic world. It reminds us that we all deserve love and that love and happy endings are not just for straight people but also for us.

Here are our 22 favourite BL dramas: 

1. The Untamed (see in IMDb, watch on Netflix)
2. Cherry Magic (see in IMDb)
3. I Told Sunset About You (see in IMDb)
4. Word Of Honor (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
5. A Tale of Thousand Stars (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
6. HIStory 3: Make Our Days Count (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
7. Manner Of Death (see in IMDb, watch on WeTV/Youtube)
8. Together With Me (see in IMDb)
9. HIStory 3: Trapped (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
10. I Promised You The Moon, ITSAY - Season 2 (see in IMDb)
11. HIStory4: Close to You (see in IMDb, watch on Dramacool)
12. A Man Who Defies the World of BL (see in IMDb, watch on Dailymotion)
13. Together with Me: The Next Chapter (see in IMDb, watch on Dramacool)
14. Tonhon Chonlatee (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
15. Like In the Movies (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
16. Kieta Hatsukoi (see in IMDb, watch on DailyMotion)
17. 2gether (see in IMDb, watch on Netflix, watch on Youtube)
18. SOTUS (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
19. Fish Upon The Sky (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
20. My Engineer: The Series (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
21. Your Name Engraved Herein (see in IMDb, watch on Netflix)
22. Gameboys (see in IMDb, watch on Netflix)

 

See more LGBTI+ films and series from Asia and beyond on GagaOOLala, GMMTV, LineTV, WeTV.