In the last week of July, two incidents involving disruptive Chinese fans of a genre of Asian media triggered something close to a crisis in international relations. Security personnel had forcibly removed a Chinese woman from an event in Bangkok. Patrons of this type of event, known as a “fan meet,” pay considerable sums to see their favorite entertainers in person, hear them being interviewed, and watch them perform song-and-dance routines. Tens of thousands of Chinese went online to accuse the Thais of mistreatment of and discrimination against Chinese fans.
Four days later, a group of what appeared to be largely Chinese fans mobbed two Chinese actors at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. Thailand’s foreign minister was forced to step in, while embassies in both Bangkok and Beijing attempted to calm outraged feelings. Although the controversy was extensively covered by media in Thailand, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, nothing about either incident appeared in mainstream Western outlets.
This lack of attention is especially noteworthy considering that one of the viral media sensations of the past year in Western countries has been the Canadian show Heated Rivalry, a drama about gay hockey players. The show attracted millions of viewers and the online equivalent of a spring snowmelt of posts, reactions, and comments. But in Asia, filmed depictions of erotic attraction and love between two males had in fact been drawing in tens of millions of viewers and making lots of money since well before Heated Rivalry came along; it was shows in this genre that provoked the incidents in Bangkok in July. But few in the Western critical establishment have paid attention to this phenomenon.
The genre in question is known as “Boys Love” or “BL.” It was invented in Japan in the early 1970s by a group of women artists writing manga directed at girls. These artists penned fantasies of impossibly beautiful boys with the hots for each other, and in the process revolutionized shojo manga (comics for girls). The new millennium saw the advent of filmed depictions of BL using live actors. Largely set in offices rather than high schools, colleges, or historical or mythical places, most of these shows starred established actors (none of them openly gay), and did not feature boys even in minor roles.
So why are these shows called Boys Love dramas? Wouldn’t they better be termed “gay” or “LGBTQ” or “queer” programs? The answer lies with the creators and the intended audience. Like the manga and anime in the tradition from which they emerged, the majority of these dramas continued to be conceived by (straight) women for women and girls.
In 2014, the first live BL drama appeared in Thailand. The show in question, Lovesick the Series, exploited the runaway popularity of Japanese BL manga and anime among girls and young women and aimed, in the words of the scholar Thomas Baudinette, to make “the Japanese BL elements legible to a Thai consumer.” Its creators followed the conventions of Thai media, including background songs sung by the actors, extensive use of product placement in lieu of disruptive commercials, and serialization. But for the first time ever on Thai television, it featured a romantic relationship between two males as the central plot pillar.
Lovesick’s success demonstrated to Thai media companies the potential appeal and commercial possibilities of the genre, and over the next five years, nearly a hundred BL dramas appeared on Thai television, a plurality of them produced by GMMTV, a division of Thailand’s largest media empire, with many more financed by investors from China, where streaming of Thai BL dramas became immensely popular.
“GMMTV and its competitors constructed a new business model.”
GMMTV and its competitors constructed a new business model. Live-action Japanese BL dramas had been typically filmed on very tight budgets as a means to boost the sales of the manga on which most of them were based. The shows tended to air on late night television; if the producers and distributors even bothered with overseas audiences, the shows were licensed to streaming platforms such as GagaOOLa or Viki that in turn required viewers to pay for subscriptions.
The Thais, instead, monetized the actors themselves, a practice they adapted from South Korea. Building on the country’s prior success in exporting manufactured goods from automobiles to consumer electronics, Korean entrepreneurs in the 1990s turned their attention to popular culture—in particular, a form in which the Japanese had conspicuously failed to penetrate Western markets: singing and dancing boy bands. They honed in on the talent agency that had dominated Japanese pop music for two generations: Johnny and Associates, whose founder “Johnny” Kitagawa had built an industrial machine for the spotting of attractive boys and their fashioning into “idols” who could and would electrify millions of besotted pubescent girls. Of course this was not the first time in history that handsome young male musicians had filled concert halls, theaters, and stadiums with screaming females, but no one had ever done it on Kitagawa’s scale. Through open auditions and informal scouting, he recruited thousands of pre-teen and teenaged boys into his workshop where they were drilled in singing, dancing, and stagecraft. Those whom Kitagawa deemed most likely to succeed would debut in splashy events backed by the full weight of his publicity machine which already, by the 1970s, was far and above the most formidable in Japan.
Kitagawa was dogged by allegations that he had sexually abused boys under his management. A documentary released after his death brought these claims before a wider audience, raising the uncomfortable possibility that Kitagawa’s nose for star potential was totally wrapped up in his sexuality.
Johnny’s stars never found a fan base in the United States and Europe, despite periodic attempts, but beginning in the 1990s, their Korean counterparts managed to do so. The greater attention to the spit and polish of what was on offer was one reason for the Koreans’ success. But the deliberate and systematic cultivation of global audiences was at least as important. The Japanese had treated the outside world as an afterthought when it came to cultural (as opposed to manufactured) products. Not so the Koreans. One key factor lay in their early grasp of the internet’s potential, something Kitagawa had completely missed. With a mindset locked into the age of television and print media and obsessed with maintaining control of his stars, Kitagawa had deliberately suppressed online distribution of their songs and performances. But in 2007, the Korean boyband Big Bang embraced Youtube; the even more famous BTS would go on to use free online content as a means to build a global fan base.
Perhaps the most fruitful—and certainly the most profitable—result of Thailand’s infatuation with both Japanese and Korean influences lay in the adoption of methods the Koreans had used to globalize K-pop, but applying those methods to actors in BL dramas rather than members of boybands. Between 2015 and 2020, GMMTV perfected the formula for a hit show: two handsome leads falling in love with each other, an open declaration of love by one or both at some point later in the series, a breakup near the end triggered either by external events or internalized self-doubts, followed by a reconciliation and a happy ending. While many of these recurring plot elements had their origins in the Japanese genre, GMMTV modified things in a number of significant ways. The more aggressive macho “top” (seme in Japanese) vs. the more submissive, boyish “bottom” (uke) tended to dissolve into a more egalitarian relationship (egalitarian at least in an erotic sense; class tensions did surface in many shows). Attraction was a matter of romance rather than overt lust. Perhaps most importantly, external homophobia was no longer an issue. Parents, friends, and colleagues were increasingly shown to be supportive and if any stigma was felt, it was an internal feeling that had to be overcome.
In 2020, helped by the arrival of the pandemic that forced people indoors, the Thai Boys Love model reached full fruition with the runaway hit 2gether: The Series. The plot borders on the preposterous, but the show was a massive success thanks largely to the looks and charisma of the two leads. Its reach extended far beyond Thailand: At one point, it generated more posts on Twitter than any other television show anywhere and racked up total viewership in the range of one billion (that’s not a typo).
In the process, GMMTV had hit upon a formula for monetizing the success of these shows: distributing BL dramas on easy-to-access free platforms such as Line TV and YouTube while relying on product placement, celebrity endorsements, and fan meets to generate revenue. That was the Korean boy band model, but with a twist. GMMTV sought to monetize not simply the charisma of the actors, but the idea of what Baudinette calls “homoerotic imagined couples” who, following a successful debut, go on to appear together in live concerts and “fan meets” while continuing to be cast as lovers in new shows with no plot connection to the original drama.
After the success of 2gether: The Series, Thai studios issued dozens of BL shows every year. No matter the theme or plot conceit—or how well or badly made or how much or how little was spent on production—the love interest in every one of these dramas centered on the relationship between two young males. Programs such as Bad Buddy, Gelboys, and ThamePo garnered tens of millions of viewers, with a fan base extending far beyond Thailand’s borders to the whole of southeast Asia, China, and the subcontinent. Most recently, Thai BL dramas have begun to reach Latin America, particularly Brazil and Bolivia where, if GMMTV is to be believed, some of its programs have claimed the number one spot on streaming sites.
Even Japan succumbed. Fans coined the term tai-numa (literally, “Thai swamp”) referring to addictive infatuation with Thai BL dramas and their stars. Annual visits by leading Thai BL stars pack concert halls and stadiums while enterprising travel agencies organize tours by Japanese visitors to sites in Thailand where some of the more popular dramas were filmed. Thailand has thus joined Japan and South Korea in staking out a major claim on the landscape of global popular culture. Hollywood doesn’t yet realize it, or want to realize it, but in the process cultural hegemony continues to leak from Los Angeles and New York to Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, and now Bangkok.
Why does the largely female fan base of Boys Love want to read about or watch boys and young men (or even older men) in lust or in love with each other? That many women enjoy gazing at attractive males is not news. Nor is it a surprise that many women are aroused by depictions of handsome virile males in the grip of uncontrollable passions awakening feelings of love and lust in the object of said passions.
But why in East and Southeast Asia, and now South Asia and Latin America, did male-on-male tales displace stories of male-on-female romance—or if not displace them, come to compete with them on practically equal terms? One common notion among observers attempting to explain the enormous popularity of Asian BL among Asian women is that tales of male-on-male romance and lust feel less threatening. As this account has it, patriarchal culture tells Asian women they aren’t supposed to have strong sexual feelings, but they do anyway; watching an older and a younger guy go at it allows them to explore otherwise taboo thoughts.
But there may be something more subtle at work that helps in understanding the recent global reach of these dramas. Even a well-acted, well-written depiction of heterosexual romance carries implicit expectations of who leads, who yields, how desire is expressed. By contrast, many BLs allow viewers to witness intimacy and vulnerability stripped of expectations of how people are “supposed” to behave.
The open, unembarrassed, sentimentality of Thai BL is another key factor. At the dramatic peaks of many shows, the action ceases while the soundtrack features the lead actor singing of the emotions he is experiencing, often accompanied on screen by a series of flashbacks. (An accomplished singing voice forms a great boon to aspiring BL actors.) Thai BL inherited this dramatic convention from lakhorn (the traditional melodramatic soap operas) but it is hardly unique to Thailand. Opera during the Baroque period functioned in much the same way – action stopped while singers gave voice to their emotions. Kabuki employs something similar—at peak dramatic moments, the stage freezes, the actors strike extravagant poses, and off-stage musicians articulate the emotions being felt.
“This sort of thing also used to happen in Western popular culture.”
This sort of thing also used to happen in Western popular culture. Hollywood musicals once showed actors stopping to sing about what they were feeling. We don’t see that any more but it isn’t because films such as the 1961 West Side Story or the 1965 Sound of Music were box office bombs. Rather, the Anglophone arts establishment seems to have been overtaken by a paralyzing fear of sentiment without a protective wrapping of snark. Well, if Hollywood can’t figure out a way to allow viewers to revel in unabashed displays of sentimentality, Bangkok will step in. Perhaps the pure sweetness goes down more easily because it is being administered by two young men in love with each other; one can watch, cry, thrill, and shake with ecstasy all the while retaining hip “progressive” credentials.
That brings us to the most important matter that the global success of Thai BL raises—and perhaps helps us grasp why the Western critical establishment shies away from confronting what has been happening. The young male Thai stars who pack stadiums from Mexico City to Yokohama to Manila, whose faces seem plastered over all the Skytrain and subway cars in Bangkok and to pop up in every second TV commercial on Thai television, got to where they are not simply because of their looks and their talent, but because they made their reputations on the pretense that they had been romantically and sexually involved with other men and boys. One would have to reach back to Renaissance Florence or Edo-period Japan and the cultural supremacy of the wakashu (alluring youth) or, even farther, to ancient Athens and the worship of the beautiful boy to find something comparable.
A number of scholars have begun to ponder the meaning and significance of seemingly “queer” media attracting large audiences across national and cultural borders, not to mention those of gender and sexual orientation. These scholars argue that Thai BL represents an important new means of “queering” heretofore heteronormative societies.
These theorists can certainly marshal plenty of evidence to support their views, beginning with Thailand’s approval of same-sex marriage in 2025, in which the enormous popularity of BL almost surely played a role. Beyond Thailand, any perusal of social media is enough to demonstrate that legions of “queer” youngsters throughout Southeast Asia to Brazil and India find in these shows affirmation for their feelings.
Yet the majority of BL fans still appear to be straight women and girls. While the genre has moved beyond its women-writing-for-women roots and large numbers of men (many of them openly gay) are involved in the production of the shows in Thailand and elsewhere, there remains a strong female presence among the writers and directors.
Are BL dramas “queer”? Thomas Baudinette explains that he is “inspired by the seminal definition of queer from theorist David Halperin as ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.’” Does BL constitute a threat to the “hierarchical” and the “normative”? In China, the authorities certainly think so: They have censored BL shows and blackballed the actors while fining and imprisoning writers. What seems to bother a Chinese regime reflexively suspicious of any mass movement that it does not control is not so much the content of BL but the way the genre came out of nowhere and proceeded to spawn millions of fans while no one in authority was paying attention.
“Are BL dramas ‘queer’?”
Another factor may be the CCP’s worries about the plummeting Chinese birth rate. A study of Chinese fans of Thai BL by a Taiwanese academic notes that many report that their parasocial relationships with Thai BL actors provide them with whatever intimacy they feel they need, and quotes a Chinese woman saying “I have three husbands and two boyfriends—all in Thailand—I wish I could tell my parents don’t fix me up with anyone.” Meanwhile, a group of conservative men in South Korea have called for the banning of BL because it promotes unrealistic standards among Korean women for male beauty. Yet birthrates had begun to fall in both South Korea and China well before the surging popularity of BL in those two countries, and they have also fallen to comparably low levels in countries such as Italy which have yet to join the global BL boom. As for the idea that growing numbers of gay male fans of these dramas will rush out, marry women, and father children if they are suddenly deprived of the opportunity to watch ripped hunks and fetching youths professing love for each other—well, it is palpably absurd.
More widely, any notion that declining birthrates can be blamed on these dramas runs into the unavoidable reality that a large majority of at least the live-action BL dramas depict loving romance in which genuine affection and concern for the other trumps lust. Long-term commitment is seen as the goal, not short-term sexual release. Cheating and dishonesty are the great no-nos, and family and friends are usually depicted as loving and supportive. Indeed, if it weren’t for the sex of the principals, most live-action Asian BL dramas would seem to champion precisely those values needed to reverse the decline in birth rates. The values in question even include the promotion of family formation with the curtain falling on pairs of lovers whose first act as they build lives together is to adopt children.
That points to the discomfort many progressives feel over the genre: that it caters to “regressive” female hunger for domesticity. Meanwhile, many gay male activists contend that BL is little more than female wish fulfillment. In the typical BL show, a teenaged boy or young man is awakened not to his sexuality but to his love for another young male with whom, after the overcoming of obstacles that make for necessary dramatic tension, he settles down for a life of marital bliss. The notion that this fantasy has anything to do with the actual lives of gay males is clearly a stretch.
But the core of progressive discomfort with the BL genre may lie less with the fantasies on display than the challenge it poses to the notion of immutable sexual identity or orientation. The idea that one is born “straight” or “gay” did not exist in East and Southeast Asia until introduced by Westerners in the nineteenth century. Gregory Pflugfelder began his magisterial book, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950, by noting that there was no single word for “homosexuality” in the Japanese language during the era of the Tokugawa shoguns. The general assumption was a kind of universal bisexuality, to use a term that likewise would not have been easily understood. Men who did not like women or did not like boys were considered somewhat odd.
So the women who invented BL as a genre in the pages of manga for girls in the early 1970s were harking back to an understanding of sexuality that had only recently been superseded by the introduction into Japan of Western notions of homosexuality as a species of either sin or deviance, and the “homosexual” as somehow standing apart from the rest of humanity. The underlying conceit of most Thai, Chinese, and Japanese BL dramas is that lovers do not exist in a separate category of human being. The Asian BL presentation of human sexuality therefore complicates identity-based conceptual frameworks.
What messages does the BL genre tell its audiences that resonate so deeply? Among them is that “affection between men is normal” to quote one of the more perceptive commentaries. Another: people need close friends. Many Thai BLs elevate the friend group to a status equivalent to family, and the working out of the dynamics of the friend group, as opposed to those of the erotic partnership, are at the core of many BL dramas. A third: the essential role of male bonding in a healthy society. That Thai BL openly acknowledges and celebrates the power of male bonding surely accounts for some of its global reach.
Where the power and allure of BL can be seen most clearly lies in the way in which BL places the forging of relationships firmly at the center of its stories. Everything else—especially notions of identity and categorization that have so obsessed the West in recent centuries—is relegated to side issues, given a role to play only when they strengthen (or threaten) love, friendship, and affection between human beings. People are not labels; over and over again, in both subtle and blatant ways, BL dramas preach this message.
The recent series Ticket to Heaven uses the prism of the formative institution of Western civilization, the Catholic Church, to underscore the primacy of relationship formation—that without love, all else is “nothing” to quote Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, referred to several times in the drama. Set in a strict Catholic boys school, the story is predictable enough: a straight laced, faithful honor student being groomed for.the priesthood has his whole persona shaken by the arrival of a defiant “bad boy” transfer student who intuits the “good boy’s” repressed feelings and sets out to tear down his walls. A crisis of faith ensues. The show does not shy away from noting Catholic condemnations of lust, and of homosexual lust in particular. But it juxtaposes these with what is palpably love—devotion to the other, and the drama revolves around the clash between these two seemingly irreconcilable commandments: to eschew all forms of overt homosexual eros and to place love above all else.
To be sure, much of the drama could be construed as LGBT propaganda—among other things, a hateful, homophobic religious fanatic of a father is juxtaposed with an older saintly trans woman—and, in an unusual departure from typical Thai BLs, one of the principals declares his orientation. But the series avoids condemning the Church—just the reverse, in fact. The final scene brings together most of the key characters at an ordination celebrated in an atmosphere of faith, hope, and love, to choose words deliberately. The director, colloquially known as Aof, is by his own account, a practicing Catholic, albeit also married under Thai law to another man.
Perhaps the greatest significance of BL, particularly its Thai variant, lies in its potential to undermine the categorization of human beings by erotic urges. This category-undermining is clearly visible in the recent Thai show Class Crush Crisis (available on Netflix); indeed, it forms its underlying theme. A mother distressed at her son’s lack of devotion to his studies forces him to transfer to an elite girls school that for the first time is accepting a group of boys. Excitement runs high: the girls finally have cute boys right at their proverbial fingertips; the boys, for their part, rejoice that landing a girlfriend will just be a matter of identifying a girl who fits one’s “type” and then going after her. The school is a gossipy place with everyone glued to their screens; rumors fly over who is with whom.
But all the rumors turn out to be false, and in the process, people are hurt. Two of the girls are already in a relationship with each other. Other girls, “educated” by a decade of BLs, start “shipping” two of the boys; while they are right that homoerotic feelings exist among some of the boys, they get the “ships” wrong. The central character, who starts a club for the boys both as a form of self-protection and as a means for the boys to help each other find girlfriends, is blinded by categories and rules—who is whose “type,” people shouldn’t date those close to them—only to find it all blown up by his own feelings and those of his friends not to mention the boy he finally has to admit to himself he loves. He comes to understand that erotic feeling and attraction to another is ultimately a mystery and that efforts to pin it down with labels and categories risk turning people into things to be classified rather than their own human selves.
Class Crush Crisis is a feel-good romance featuring a gaggle of cute teens (the actors are actually teenagers, not people in their twenties pretending to be adolescents.) But the underlying message encapsulates the central values of the BL genre—that people are not labels—and demonstrates its potential as an art form that lies between the “queer” and the heteronormative.