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:
- The Untamed (see in IMDb, watch
on Netflix)
- Cherry Magic (see in IMDb)
- I
Told Sunset About You (see
in IMDb)
- Word
Of Honor (see in IMDb, watch
on Youtube)
- A
Tale of Thousand Stars (see
in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
- HIStory
3: Make Our Days Count
(see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
- Manner
Of Death (see in IMDb, watch
on WeTV/Youtube)
- Together
With Me (see in IMDb)
- HIStory
3: Trapped (see in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
- I
Promised You The Moon, ITSAY - Season 2 (see in IMDb)
- HIStory4:
Close to You (see in IMDb, watch on Dramacool)
- A
Man Who Defies the World of BL (see
in IMDb, watch on Dailymotion)
- Together
with Me: The Next Chapter (see
in IMDb, watch on Dramacool)
- Tonhon
Chonlatee (see in IMDb, watch
on Youtube)
- Like
In the Movies (see in IMDb, watch
on Youtube)
- Kieta
Hatsukoi (see in IMDb, watch
on DailyMotion)
- 2gether
(see in IMDb, watch
on Netflix, watch on Youtube)
- SOTUS
(see in IMDb, watch
on Youtube)
- Fish
Upon The Sky (see in IMDb, watch
on Youtube)
- My
Engineer: The Series (see
in IMDb, watch on Youtube)
- Your
Name Engraved Herein (see
in IMDb, watch on Netflix)
- Gameboys (see in IMDb, watch on Netflix)
See more
LGBTI+ films and series from Asia and beyond on GagaOOLala,
GMMTV, LineTV,
WeTV.