Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture 9781350330641, 1350330647

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes on Language
Introduction
Chapter 1 A History of Boys Love Media and Fandom in Thailand
Chapter 2 Adapting Japanese BL: Constructing Thai Fans, Mainstreaming Queer Romance
Chapter 3 The Boys Love Machine: Producing Queer Idol Celebrity at GMM
Chapter 4 Sharing Intimacies: Social Media, GMM Fan Events, and BL Idol Fandom
Chapter 5 Thai BL Goes Global: The Queer Potentials of Chinese and Philippine Fandoms
Chapter 6 Japan’s Thai BL Boom: A New Center for Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture
Concluding Remarks: Whither Thai BL?
Appendix
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

BOYS LOVE MEDIA IN THAILAND

Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies Asia arguably has the world’s most vibrant star, celebrity and fandom cultures, due in part to its globalized entertainment media and cultural industries and its large population base, and yet there is little sustained scholarship on this highly significant cultural and economic arena. The Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies Series aims to meet this research gap, promoting new and innovative scholarship in Asian media and cultural studies, and screen studies, by concentrating on the most salient issues surrounding Asian stardom, celebrity and fandom. The Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies Series is devoted to the publication of scholarly books that critically examine star, celebrity and fandom cultures in specific Asian countries, in trans-Asian or trans-national contexts, and among Asian diasporas. The series publishes monographs, co-authored books, and edited collections. All proposals and manuscripts are subject to rigorous peer review. Forthcoming titles: Beyond the Male Idol Factory: The Construction of Gender and National Ideologies in Japan through Johnny’s Jimusho by Yunuen Ysela Mandujano-Salazar Livestreaming China: An Ethnography of Vulgar Boredom by Dino Ge Zhang Series Editors: Jian Xu and Sean Redmond

BOYS LOVE MEDIA IN THAILAND

Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture

Thomas Baudinette

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Thomas Baudinette, 2024 Thomas Baudinette has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Ben Anslow Cover image: SOTUS, from left: Prachaya Ruangroj, Perawat Sangpotirat, 2016– ph: © Netflix / courtesy Everett Collection via Alamy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baudinette, Thomas, author. Title: Boys love media in Thailand : celebrity, fans, and transnational Asian queer popular culture / Thomas Baudinette. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. | Series: Asian celebrity and fandom studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023025271 (print) | LCCN 2023025272 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350330641 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350330658 (epub) | ISBN 9781350330665 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350330672 Subjects: LCSH: Sexual minorities in popular culture–Thailand. | Gays in popular culture–Thailand. | Gay men in mass media. | Sex in popular culture–Thailand. | Sexual minorities in popular culture–Asia. | Gays in popular culture–Asia. | Sex in popular culture–Asia. | Sex in popular culture–Economic aspects–Asia. Classification: LCC HQ73.3 .B383 2023 (print) | LCC HQ73.3 (ebook) | DDC 306.76095–dc23/eng/20230615 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025271 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025272 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-3064-1 ePDF: 978-1-3503-3066-5 eBook: 978-1-3503-3065-8 Series: Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Figures vi Acknowledgmentsvii Notes on Language viii INTRODUCTION

1

Chapter 1 A HISTORY OF BOYS LOVE MEDIA AND FANDOM IN THAILAND

27

Chapter 2 ADAPTING JAPANESE BL: CONSTRUCTING THAI FANS, MAINSTREAMING QUEER ROMANCE

55

Chapter 3 THE BOYS LOVE MACHINE: PRODUCING QUEER IDOL CELEBRITY AT GMM

83

Chapter 4 SHARING INTIMACIES: SOCIAL MEDIA, GMM FAN EVENTS, AND BL IDOL FANDOM

109

Chapter 5 THAI BL GOES GLOBAL: THE QUEER POTENTIALS OF CHINESE AND PHILIPPINE FANDOMS

133

Chapter 6 JAPAN’S THAI BL BOOM: A NEW CENTER FOR TRANSNATIONAL ASIAN QUEER POPULAR CULTURE

157

CONCLUDING REMARKS: WHITHER THAI BL?

179

Appendix184 Notes188 References211 Index223

FIGURES 1

Setting up for XOXO Cosmetic’s launch event starring Saint Suppapong in Siam Center, July 2019. Photo by Thomas Baudinette 3 2 The final climactic kiss scene between Kao (left) and Pete (right) in Dark Blue Kiss. Photo credit GMM 28 3 BL novels on sale in the B2S Bookstore in Bangkok’s Central World mall, July 2019. Photo by Thomas Baudinette 33 4 Pete (left) caged in by Ae (right) in Episode 7 of Love By Chance. Photo credit Studio Wabi Sabi 56 5 Pete (left) and Ae (right) make out in Episode 7 of Love By Chance. Photo credit Studio Wabi Sabi 56 6 Filmic schema that positions Pang and audience together as sao wai67 7 Two screenshots of Shin’s rape in The Effect (2019). Photo credit JakJai Productions 78 8 Editing in TayNew Meal Date heightens the sense of homoerotic intimacy implicit in the interactions between the show’s stars. Photo credit GMM 99 9 Hirahira aesthetics deployed in BrightWin Inbox to tie fin from the couple to product placement. Photo credit GMM 101 10 A “VVIP” selfie with PavelDome of 2Moons2 at the 6 Moons in Manila event. Photo credit Thomas Baudinette 134 11 Pinoy BL series Gaya Sa Pelikula’s homage to Thai BL series Dark Blue Kiss (2019). Picture credits to Globe Studios and GMM 155 12 Header and profile biography for the Tai BL ni Koi Shitai Twitter account167

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I thank the many fans who have shared their passion for Thai Boys Love with me over the years. I have been truly blessed by the many colleagues around the world who provided insight, mentorship, and support throughout the duration of this research project and the writing of this book. My colleagues in Thai cultural studies—including Peter Jackson, Poowin Bunyavejchewin, Kwannie Krairit, Asawin Nedpogaeo, and my dear friend Chavalin Svetanant—receive my special thanks. Likewise, I acknowledge the critical advice of fellow scholars of Japanese Boys Love manga, including Fujimoto Yukari, Ogi Fusami, Hori Akiko, Ishida Hitoshi, Maekawa Naoya, Nagaike Kazumi, Mizoguchi Akiko, and James Welker who have all indulged my passion for Thai popular culture. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, especially my close friends Kristine Michelle Santos and Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua for their exhaustive support. Much of the fieldwork in Manila and this book’s conceptualization was completed while a Visiting Scholar at this brilliant institution. Likewise, the finishing touches of this book were completed while I was a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for East Asian Studies at Thammasat University in Bangkok. I must also thank my colleagues in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University for their ongoing support. Special thanks go to my friends Wes Robertson and Consuelo Martínez Reyes who probably now know more about Thai media than they ever wanted to know! I also extend my gratitude to the staff at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney for providing me a space to work on this book at one of their fantastic writing retreats. Likewise, I thank my virtual writing group organized through the auspices of the Society for Ethnomusicology comprising of Stephanie Choi, Anaar Desai-Stephens, and Shannon Garland who helped me workshop Chapter 4. I also thank the series editors of Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies, Jian Xu and Sean Redmond, for including my book within the series as its launch title. My thanks to my editor at Bloomsbury, David Avital, for his support throughout the publication process. The book has also benefited tremendously from the insights provided by three anonymous reviewers. Fieldwork in Bangkok and Manila for this book was facilitated by a Macquarie University Faculty Research Travel Grant and by the Japan Foundation. Some of Chapter 2 was previously published within South East Asia Research as “Lovesick, The Series: adapting Japanese ‘Boys Love’ to Thailand and the creation of a new genre of queer media” (2019). My thanks to the editors for their kind permission to republish portions of this article. Finally, I dedicate this book to TayNew and my fellow Polca fans. Once Polca, always Polca!

NOTES ON LANGUAGE The Thai language is notoriously difficult to render in the Roman alphabet, with most transliteration systems lacking recognition of tonal variation and only approximating Thai’s complex system of vowels and diphthongs. In this book I have used the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) propagated by the Royal Institute of Thailand. My decision to use this system is pragmatic, as it is accessible for a non-Thai literate audience. I use the RTGS for all Thai-language terms except the names of idol celebrities and certain Thai publications (such as magazines and websites) where I instead use the transliterations deployed by their agencies or publishers, most of which do not conform to RTGS, as these are more recognizable to fans and mainstream viewers alike. Translations from Thai to English are my own unless otherwise acknowledged. Thai naming conventions are similarly complex. Thai people typically have a personal and family name derived from Pali or Sanskrit and a shorter “nickname” or chue len by which they are known among friends and family. In the text, after introducing their full names, I refer to idol celebrities by their nicknames, sometimes followed by their personal names, as is common among fans and within Thai mainstream media. I thus mostly refer to the idol Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, for example, as “Saint” or “Saint Suppapong.” Likewise, when discussing the imagined celebrity couples active within the BL industry throughout this book, I follow fan convention by combining the two nicknames of the celebrities together to create a couple or “ship” name. For instance: KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin. Although Thai-language publications typically cite scholars by their first name, I follow English-language convention by citing them by surname to maintain consistency across a manuscript replete with citations to scholars from a variety of national contexts with their own citational practices. For Japanese-language terms and names, unless the word has entered common English-language parlance or is the name of a place with an official English transliteration (such as Tokyo), I use the Hepburn system of transliteration. Macrons are used to indicate long vowels. I present all Japanese names in the traditional order of family name first and personal name second except in instances where the Japanese person has indicated a preference for personal name first, such as in English-language publishing. All translations from Japanese to English are my own unless otherwise acknowledged.

I N T R O DU C T IO N

Over the past several years, the popular culture landscape of Thailand has radically changed as spaces that celebrate queer representation have opened within a media industry that had previously maligned sexual minority communities.1 As little as a decade ago, the kingdom’s cinema and television screens were dominated by romantic and erotic stories featuring upwardly mobile young women from the provinces and the wealthy, urban men who fell in love with them.2 Further, both popular magazines aimed at young women such as Praew and Sudsapda and the online discussion boards Pantip and Dek-D were awash with gossip concerning the potential romances between young women and men working within Thailand’s burgeoning entertainment industry. Thailand’s popular culture landscape—similar to others within the broader Asian region such as Indonesia,3 South Korea,4 and Mainland China5—overtly celebrated highly heteronormative representations of romance through a privileging of conservative narratives that centered marriage, parenthood, and patriarchal authority. The popular media of Thailand and its related celebrity culture emphasized male dominance and female submission as part of a broader fantasy of socioeconomic development, suggesting to consumers that participation within the heteronormative life course and the acceptance of avowedly conservative gender ideologies was the key to one’s own future happiness and fulfilment.6 When I visited Bangkok in July 2019, however, I found that Thai consumer culture had transformed into a space where the celebration of romances that challenge such heteronormative narratives had become increasingly mainstream. Passing through immigration at Suvarnabhumi Airport, for instance, I was greeted by numerous posters for the cosmetics company Cathy Doll, which were covered in handsome young men staring at each other longingly, their faces and lips posed perilously close together in homoerotically charged advertising. Rather than exclusively focusing on the relationships between heterosexual urbanites, Thailand’s popular culture industries are now increasingly investing into explicitly same-sex desiring romances and homoerotic entertainment content.7 Over the past several years, Thai television series centering the blossoming love between handsome young men have become common, giving birth to a new genre of popular culture known as either “Boys Love (hereafter, BL) series” or “series Y (wai).” In Thailand, “series Y (wai)” is the most common name for this new media

2

Boys Love Media in Thailand

genre, with the “Y” referring to the Japanese popular culture form from which it derives. On the other hand, “Thai BL” is more commonly used by fans outside Thailand, except in China where it is known as tài dānmĕi.8 Due to the popularity of these BL series, the magazines and online discussion forums that sit at the heart of Thailand’s celebrity culture have also transformed into spaces that celebrate the young men whose popularity has grown as a result of their staged performances of homoeroticism both on the screen and during meetings with fans. In fact, BL media is buoyed by a new celebrity system of “idols” that explicitly draws upon the traditions of celebrity management, which developed in Japan and South Korea and that have become influential within talent management agencies across East and Southeast Asia.9 The emergence of Thailand’s BL series also owes much to the popularity of Japanese and Korean popular culture in Thailand, revealing how the development of this new media genre is representative of broader shifts within Asian popular culture industries. Thai BL media ultimately represents an explicit response to the popularity of Japan’s tradition of homoerotic BL manga comics and South Korea’s K-pop idols among young middle-class consumers within the broader Southeast Asian region. The emergence of BL media in Thailand is significant not only because it represents an important shift in the representation of queer sexuality within Thailand’s heretofore conservative media landscape, but also due to its substantial impacts on Thai consumer culture through the mobilization of middle-class fans. These impacts are especially clear when considering the culture of BL celebrity that has developed in recent years and that I had the chance to experience firsthand during my visit to Bangkok in 2019. One hot, summer day in early July, I joined a crowd of young men and women at an event organized by XOXO Cosmetics to launch their new make-up line in Siam Center (pictured in Figure 1), one of the larger department stores in the glamorous and upmarket Siam Square district.10 We had all gathered there to see the young idol Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana who had become famous due to playing the role of Pete in the BL series Love By Chance (2018, titled Bang-oen Rak, “Accidental Love” in Thai). While the crowd was overwhelmingly comprised of young Thai women, I also met gay Thai men as well as both male and female fans who had traveled to Bangkok from China and the Philippines, revealing that Thai BL fandom was not only transnational, but also drawing in consumers from sexual minority communities. In the late afternoon, Saint finally appeared on stage after his fans and I had been waiting for approximately three hours, sampling XOXO Cosmetic’s new products and chatting about our shared loved of this charismatic and handsome young star. Throughout the event, Saint sang songs from Love By Chance and endorsed the new make-up to the fans who had traveled to Siam Center to see him, acting as a brand ambassador and image character who connected the world of BL to the corporate world of XOXO Cosmetics. It was during this fan meeting that I came to understand just how thoroughly BL media and its fandom had become intertwined with Thailand’s consumer culture. Within the pages of Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture, I draw upon seven years of traditional

Introduction

3

Figure 1  Setting up for XOXO Cosmetic’s launch event starring Saint Suppapong in Siam Center, July 2019. Photo by Thomas Baudinette.

and digital ethnographic research into this revolutionary form of media to trace both BL’s significant impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai popular culture and its simultaneous transformation of this culture through the development of new forms of celebrity and fandom. One of the chief aims of this book is to identify and theorize the changing representational politics of gender

4

Boys Love Media in Thailand

and sexuality across Thailand’s popular culture landscape, which have occurred as a result of the mainstreaming of BL media. I build this theorization through a filmic analysis of various seminal Thai BL series—as well as related fan events and practices—that is strongly influenced by the qualitative and explorative methodologies of cultural studies and ethnographic enquiry. Through my analyses, I demonstrate that BL media possess important queer potentials, which challenge heteronormative assumptions within Thai society concerning the naturalness of heterosexuality and the concomitant privileging of heterosexual romance as representative of both personal and national development. My argumentation takes seriously the theoretical claim that queerness represents more than just an epistemological subject position or representational strategy but is instead a critical hermeneutic that is both anti-identarian and anti-normative.11 In viewing queerness as a process that is always a “becoming,”12 I expose how Thailand’s BL media destabilizes hetero-patriarchal social structures, which position same-sex desire as a potential threat to Thai culture. I thus engage in a “reparative reading” of this new genre of media as queer popular culture.13 I do, however, acknowledge instances throughout the following chapters where the queer potentials of BL are stymied by the Thai media landscape and its systems of control, censorship, and capitalist accumulation. In tracing the development of BL series and their related fandom and celebrity cultures, I also demonstrate through this book that BL media did not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, BL emerged within a highly specific historical moment when Thailand had just experienced a “boom” in queer cultural production that owed much to the convergence of the Thai media landscape with consumer cultures across the Asia-Pacific region. As Peter Jackson has argued in the introduction to his seminal edited collection Queer Bangkok, “the first years of the [twenty-first] century have marked a significant transition moment for all of Thailand’s LGBT cultures, with a multidimensional expansion in the … media presence, economic importance, political impact, social standing, and cultural relevance of Thai queer communities.”14 These transformations have occurred, Jackson argues, due to the emergence of an “East-Southeast Asian regional network of queer cultures” that has “meant a relative decline in the significance of influences from the West.”15 In fact, Jackson persuasively argues throughout his broader scholarship that both commercial print media and consumer culture married to nightlife districts have played a crucial role in the production of a robust, local gay male culture.16 Within Boys Love Media in Thailand, I likewise argue that television series and their online fandoms also participate in the production of queer culture in Thailand. For Jackson, it is especially important for theorists to acknowledge that the West has become a less important referent in Thai queer cultural production due to the economic rise of Asia, which in turn signals shifts in the political economy underpinning theories of global queering. Contrary to Dennis Altman, whose influential theory of global queering suggested that the expansion of liberal democracy and North American consumer culture across Asia would lead to the adoption and adaptation of Western queer cultures,17 Jackson posits that capitalist expansion may instead foster local knowledges that then enter into dialogue with

Introduction

5

Western queer cultures rather than being subsumed by them.18 Forming part of the Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies series, this book brings a fan studiesinformed analysis to these broader scholarly discussions. Through a recognition of the highly reflexive and critical consumption of fan audiences, this book also provides an emic conceptualization of the formation of Thai queer culture that is often lacking within previous scholarship on the kingdom’s consumer culture. Importantly, the development of BL media in Thailand speaks to the growing integration of cosmopolitan, market-oriented queer consumer cultures across Asia, with BL series emerging within a context where the popular culture of Japan has played an especially prominent role in the formulation of knowledge concerning sexuality across the Asia-Pacific.19 Responding to Peter Jackson’s previous work, I situate my own analysis of Thai BL within the critical methodology of “Asia as method.” I reveal how Thai BL ultimately forms part of a broader transnationalization of a genre of young women’s media from Japan also known as Boys Love (bōizu rabu) but that is often called yaoi outside Japan, including in Thailand.20 As a genre of popular culture, Japanese BL focuses on the romantic and sexual relationships between beautiful male youths known as bishōnen and hence possesses narrative tropes and specific patterns of characterization born out of Japanese conceptualizations of gender and sexuality.21 Although ostensibly a form of popular culture for heterosexual women rather than members of sexual minority communities, I reveal throughout this book that Japanese BL possesses a queer potential, which is unlocked via its transnationalization.22 Following cultural historian Kristine Michelle Santos,23 I emphasize how the reading practices that have emerged out of this young women’s popular culture allow consumers to queer the structures of heteronormative romance central to traditional Thai media and therefore open spaces for the celebration of same-sex desire. In making this argument, Boys Love Media in Thailand thus contributes to the growing body of literature that investigates the impacts of East Asian popular culture on conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in Thailand.24 I thus problematize simplistic accounts of global queering, which continue to center the West as both an inevitable and an ideal source of knowledge about queer sexuality and the experiences of those who are attracted to the same sex. The vignette briefly presented above concerning my experiences in Bangkok in 2019 reveals that the emergence of BL media has done more than change the Thai mediascape’s representational politics of gender and sexuality. The mainstreaming of BL also provides an opportunity to explore the evolution of contemporary Thai consumer culture and the development of new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. A second significant aim of this book, then, is to investigate how Thailand’s consumer culture is responding to broader regional shifts in the AsiaPacific, whereby the economic potential of young female and queer consumers is becoming increasingly mobilized as a result of the neoliberalization of Asian popular culture markets.25 As Jungmin Kwon has insightfully noted, the popular culture industries of both South Korea and Japan have strategically deployed homoeroticism as one of many methods to expand and diversify their markets, absorbing what was once an underground subculture into the mainstream in order

6

Boys Love Media in Thailand

to boost profits.26 This has meant that these two markets’ idol celebrity cultures, which traditionally focused upon “highly produced and promoted singers, models, and media personalities” who act as postmodern “image characters,”27 have increasingly centered performances of staged homoeroticism as one method of appealing to young female consumers. This targeting of young women was motivated by the recognition that their economic clout had greatly expanded in the latter years of the twentieth century.28 Within this book, I reveal that similar processes are occurring in contemporary Thailand, with the Thai culture industries not just mimicking these management and production practices from Japan and South Korea, but innovating and expanding them to respond to the particularities of the Thai media marketplace. But the development of BL media in Thailand and its new forms of celebrity and fandom culture does not just simply represent a narrative concerning the reception and adaptation of Japanese popular culture to the kingdom’s media landscape. The ethnographic research which drives the arguments in this book occurred during one of the most disruptive moments in recent history—the COVID-19 pandemic and the expansion of stay-at-home orders across the globe. Surprisingly, as I will detail more thoroughly throughout later chapters, COVID-19 did not stymy the development of Thai BL media but instead unleashed new waves of potential as the Thai cultural industries were forced to embrace digitalization more fully in order to reach their target markets.29 This push toward greater digital accessibility and more sophisticated engagement with social media as a method of interacting with fans had the unintended consequence of exposing consumers around the world to the wonders of Thai BL series.30 Including international fan markets that had already begun to mature in the early years of Thai BL fandom, such as Mainland China and the Philippines, 2020 saw Thai BL series—most notably, the massively popular 2gether, The Series (2020, Phror Rao Khu Kan, “Because We’re a Couple” in Thai)31—experience a large positive reception among Japanese consumers.32 Thai BL dramas’ explosion in popularity and the passion of Japanese fans who consistently trended topics on social media tied to handsome Thai actors eventually caught the attention of not only Thai cultural producers but also Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, leading both to shift their attention to Japan as an important new market for Thai media.33 Thai BL media celebrity and fandom is therefore no longer just responding to Japanese media culture, but it is also influencing Japanese consumers and thereby transforming into an important transnational and transcultural media phenomenon itself. This book’s aim, then, is to argue that the center of queer cultural production within the Asia-Pacific has shifted from Japan—long considered the most influential producer of queer media in Asia34—to Thailand. To support this claim, I explore both the growing international fandom of Thailand’s BL media and the important influence of international investment into the development of these media. I particularly choose to focus on the specific case studies of Thai BL fandom in Mainland China, the Philippines, and Japan to explore how this popular culture form enters into dialogue with each of these national contexts’ queer cultures.

Introduction

7

Through this transnational investigation, I reveal that the queer potentials of Thai BL have unlocked particular affective fantasies among international fans that intervene into situations of homophobia, which exist across the Asia-Pacific region. The unexpected result of this transnationalization is that Thailand has emerged as an imaginary space through which consumers across these national contexts explore their identities as not only queer individuals, but also national subjects embedded within the broader Asia-Pacific cultural sphere. In producing a new celebrity and fan culture that queers the heteronormative nature of the Thai media landscape, BL series have also radically transformed the media cultures of the broader Asia-Pacific. In so doing, Thai BL media has thus produced new knowledge concerning gender and sexuality which both Thai and international consumers view as not only transformative, but also as specifically Asian.

Sexuality in Thailand: Evolving Understandings of Same-Sex Desire in the Twenty-first Century There is a pervasive global belief that Thai culture is extremely sexually open and liberal, with scholars such as Alex Au and Yohsin Wang particularly noting that Thailand has emerged as a symbol of queer liberation for many same-sex desiring men and women throughout Asia.35 Likewise, in the West there is a common discourse within gay male communities that the prevalence of foreignfacing sex entertainment districts in cities such as Bangkok and Pattaya speaks to Thailand’s positioning as a “gay paradise” that is supposedly more tolerant than North America and Western Europe.36 Lastly, the image of the kathoey or “ladyboy” has emerged within global media as a marker of Thailand’s apparent status as a nation with a conceptualization of gender and sexuality that is radically different from the dimorphic model common in the West where a gender binary comprising the categories of “man” and “woman” has been traditionally dominant.37 It should be noted that this is a narrative that agencies within the Thai governmental bureaucracy have occasionally promoted as part of an attempt to mobilize the pink dollar among foreign tourists, with a notable example being the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s 2019 campaign entitled “GoThaiBeFree,” which positioned the country as a space for LGBTQ+ tourists to “find themselves” within the kingdom. At first glance the Thai concept of phet, defined by Jackson as a “master concept” which incorporates sex, gender, and sexuality within “legal, academic, and popular discourses,”38 does appear more expansive than the traditional Western sex/gender binary. As presented in Table 1, phet contains within it a plethora of both heteronormative and non-normative (from a Western perspective) sexual and gendered subjectivities, each considered to be separate and contained.39 It must be noted that the phet categories presented in Table 1 have undergone further refinement in the twenty-first century and this list is not meant to be considered exhaustive. Importantly, English-language terminology has been incorporated into the local system of phet, a phenomenon I unpack further below.

Boys Love Media in Thailand

8

Table 1  A selection of phet categories in contemporary Thailand.40 BIRTH SEX Male Gender Expression Cisgender Phu-chai Bi Undefined Intermediate Transgender Kathoey-les Attracted to:

Females

Both Sexes

Gay Les; Dee Chai-rak-chai Ying-rak-ying Tut Kathoey; Sao-praphet-sorng; Phu-ying-kham-phet Males Females

Female Bi

Phu-ying Tom Phu-chaikham-phet

Both Males Sexes

The superficial sexual plurality presented within this table and the fantasy of sexual liberalism that has widely circulated around the globe belie the remarkably conservative and heteronormative reality that typifies contemporary Thai society. Reflecting on the sexual norms of twenty-first-century Bangkok, Jackson notes that Thailand remains a society where expressions of sexuality which deviate from heterosexual norms are often explicitly censored, particularly within literature and film.41 Underlying the pluralistic notion of phet is a strong ideological commitment to heteronormative conceptualizations of sexuality which privilege the sexual and romantic relationships between the cisgendered and heterosexual phu-chai (men) and phu-ying (women).42 Thus, while phet categories for queer gender expressions and sexual desires such as kathoey (ladyboy), tut (sissy), and tom (butch) certainly exist, mainstream Thai society often positions them as dangerous or deviant due to the potentially un-reproductive nature of their sexual acts.43 Indeed, terms such as tut have a decidedly pejorative nuance in mainstream Thai communication (somewhat akin to English “faggot”), despite having been recuperated among sexual minority communities in recent years. Within his history of the representation of men and women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Thai cultural production, Scott Barmé exposes how Thai modernity was founded in remarkably patriarchal ideologies which privileged heterosexual relationships and the concomitant subjugation of women and same-sex desiring individuals.44 The Thai media landscape plays an important role in naturalizing the privileging of the heteronormative phu-chai and phu-ying. Nowhere is this more apparent than within the television soap operas known as lakhorn from which the Thai BL series examined within this book have somewhat paradoxically emerged. Originally referring to a genre of classical theatrical performance, the term lakhorn is now also used to describe melodramatic soap operas screened on free-to-air TV channels that typically consist of hundreds of episodes.45 According to media theorist Brett Farmer, lakhorn represent “national popular culture” that forms part of a “space of common cultural exchange,” which strongly influences understandings of society—including gender ideologies—among Thai consumers.46 As a media form reminiscent of the Western soap opera, lakhorn “focus largely on … the personal

Introduction

9

and domestic spheres of everyday life (kinship, sexuality, generational conflict, marriage, birth, illness, death etc).”47 Media anthropologist Rebecca Townsend notes that lakhorn privilege romances between wealthy men and disadvantaged women, with the narratives almost always concluding with the male and female protagonists—known in Thai as the phra-ek and nang-ek—happily married to each other.48 Townsend argues that the standard formula of lakhorn is not only highly heteronormative, but also disciplines consumers to adopt the gender norms prevalent within Thailand’s heteropatriarchal society. As the narrative goal of these popular soap operas is often marriage, lakhorn valorize and normalize heteronormative sexuality and life courses and thus “reflect Thai historical perspectives of male authority over women’s bodies.”49 Nowhere is this more explicit than in the prevalence of sexual violence and rape in lakhorn. Through an analysis of popular lakhorn, Townsend persuasively argues that rape is commonly deployed as a narrative trope to either punish or discipline an independent young woman until she submits to male control (often, in the process, falling in love with her rapist).50 As I will reveal in Chapter 2, early Thai BL series adapted many of these heteronormative representational strategies before the genre evolved into a more explicit challenge to the Thai media landscape’s ideological status quo. Film scholar Serhat Ünaldi argues within his survey of the “cinematic regime of representations” of gender non-conforming men within Thai cinema that “visual representation of queerness has long been dominated by transgender kathoey characters” who are rarely portrayed sympathetically.51 Further, the figure of the kathoey was often conflated with all same-sex desiring men, leading Thai cinema to typically present queer men as feminized, comparatively low-class compared to heterosexual protagonists, and morally loose.52 While the kathoey has emerged in Western commentary on Thailand as an index for the kingdom’s supposed sexual liberalism, Ünaldi highlights that this phet category is in reality frequently deployed as a mark of deviance, which is contrasted negatively with heteronormative phra-ek and nang-ek.53 As Jackson demonstrates through his analysis of state control of media in late-twentieth-century Thailand, government media regulators commonly positioned both kathoey and gay characters as not only potential threats to supposedly “healthy” reproductive sexual relationships, but even as a threat to the stability of Thai culture itself.54 Indeed, in the past the Thai Ministry of Culture and other government agencies have often acted swiftly and decisively to limit depictions of gay male characters and kathoey as part of broader efforts to protect the moral purity of Thainess (khwam-pen-Thai).55 From the perspective of successive Thai governments, then, Thainess is intimately tied to heteronormativity.56 For this reason, kathoey characters are frequently utilized as comic relief or placed in narrative situations that reinforce rather than destabilize the heteronormative storylines that typically underpin Thai mainstream media. Referring to kathoey characters appearing within 1990s films, Ünaldi provocatively argues that queer characters in mainstream cinema ultimately tend to be reduced to “screaming clowns.”57 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, both independent and mainstream cinema has emerged that seeks to provide alternative and

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empowering accounts of queer subjectivity, which directly challenge depictions of both kathoey and gay men as hyper-effeminate sexual deviants. Ünaldi notes that “the Thai movie scene … has become increasingly dynamic in its depictions of modern gay and kathoey lives … after the emergence of the so-called Thai New Wave cinema in 1997.”58 For instance, Poj Arnon’s 2007 film Bangkok Love Story (titled Phuean … Ku Rak Mueng Wa, “Friend … I Love You” in Thai) was a gay romantic crime drama that focused on “macho” policemen and gangsters who just happened to fall in love, breaking the persistent tendency for same-sex desiring men to be depicted as “sissy” kathoey or tut.59 The same year also saw the release of the blockbuster teen romantic comedy Love of Siam (Rak Haeng Sayam, “The Love[s] of/from Siam” in Thai), directed by Chookiat Sakveerakul, which detailed the blossoming love of two cisgendered high school boys.60 Love of Siam has played a particularly important role in the development of Thai BL, as I will detail in Chapter 1. In recent years, independent and arthouse cinema has also subverted the image of the kathoey to deploy camp humor as a method for critiquing Thailand’s authoritarian governments.61 Likewise, theorist Arnika Fuhrmann has revealed that queer sensibilities have been brought into dialogue with vernacular Buddhism within both mainstream and independent cinema throughout the twenty-first century as a form of “melancholic critique” of Thai modernity, particularly in the work of Thailand’s most internationally renowned director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.62 Despite the emergence of this queer cinema, the Thai mainstream media landscape has however remained largely heteronormative, at least until the advent of Thai BL series. The evolution of this queer independent cinema forms part of a broader cultural shift or “queer boom” in Thailand, whereby “global capitalism, new electronic media, and transnational influences” have impacted understandings of phet, producing a new diversity of identity categories for queer sexualities and gender performances.63 As Jackson has argued within his seminal work on the impact of global queering on Thailand’s sexual minority communities, influence from global gay and lesbian culture has led “Western” identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and transgender to be incorporated into the framework of phet.64 But these identity categories were not imported directly into Thailand without undergoing processes of cultural localization, entering into dialogue with preexisting categories such as kathoey and tut. Therefore, the term gay came to signify a same-sex desiring male who expresses a gender normative masculinity that was contrasted with the supposed femininity of the kathoey. Likewise, the term “lesbian” was contracted to les and is typically used to refer to a “butch” lesbian, as did tom, a shortened form of the English “tomboy.” A same-sex desiring woman who expressed a hyperfeminine identity and entered into relationships with either les or tom came to be known as dee, derived from the English word “lady.” Finally, due to the work of transnational activists within the arena of public health, the concept of transgender was translated into a variety of different Thai-language terms including saopraphet-sorng, phu-ying/phu-chai-khwam-phet, and trans in an attempt to dislodge concepts of transgenderism from the figure of the kathoey.65 The explosion of these

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new phet categories throughout Thailand was facilitated by the increasing visibility of same-sex desiring people across Thai media as well as a boom in businesses catering to domestic (rather than foreign) gay men in Bangkok and other major urban centers such as Chiang Mai, Hat Yai, and Nakhon Ratchasima.66 While the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw the growing influence of Western knowledge concerning sexuality on Thai notions of queerness, the 2010s saw a decline in aspirations for Western modes of queerness in Thailand.67 Instead, Thai sexual minority culture came under the influence of East Asia due to the rising popularity of Japanese and Korean popular culture among young people in Thailand.68 The fashion for all things Japanese and Korean has instilled aspirations for what cultural anthropologist Dredge Byung-chu Kang-Nguyen has termed “Korpanese” (a portmanteau of Korean and Japanese) aesthetics for “White Asians” among middle-class Thai consumers.69 Kang-Nguyen notes that K-pop has especially impacted gay male culture, with this genre of hip-hop- and electronica-inspired idol music more likely to be played in Bangkok’s bustling gay clubs than Western pop hits.70 This, in turn, has led to shifting understandings of certain phet categories, with the pejorative category of tut (sissy) re-emerging as a positive marker for desirable feminine masculinity among some same-sex attracted men due to it having been linked to Korean idols’ supposed soft masculinity and fierce femininity.71 Megan Sinnott has likewise noted that Korean idol fandom has impacted the tom culture of Thailand, with the tom aesthetic evolving from a Western-influenced butch dyke style to a softer form of “female masculinity” that incorporates the aesthetics of male K-pop idols.72 In fact, this broader aesthetic shift has also further refined how phet operates, with categories such as tom gay king (a tom who couples with another tom and takes the active sexual position) and tom gay queen (a tom who couples with another tom and takes the passive sexual position) emerging in twenty-first-century Thailand.73 Simply put, Japan and Korea have become desirable in Thailand and this has strongly contoured representations of queerness across both mainstream and sexual minority media. As I will explore throughout this book, the emergence of Thai BL and its celebrity culture is heavily embedded within this broader Korpanese imaginary.

Boys Love’s Global Journeys: From Japan to the World The emergence of Thailand’s BL media also forms an important part of a broader transnational phenomenon—the spread throughout East and Southeast Asia of the Japanese genre of queer popular culture also known as Boys Love (bōizu rabu)—and it is crucial to understand this history to make sense of the transformative nature of Thai BL. This requires us to briefly consider the history of Japanese BL. To do this, it is first instructive to think through the global expansion of the popular culture of Japan, specifically its comics known as manga and cartoons known as anime. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese cultural industries specifically targeted East and Southeast Asia as priority markets for

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their products as a result of the economic downturn brought about by the collapse of the Japanese postwar economic miracle.74 Spurred by both passionate fans who shared unofficial translations of Japanese manga and anime and the broadcast of Japanese television dramas and idol pop music due to strategic investment by Japanese production companies,75 East and Southeast Asia experienced a Japan Wave in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the consumption of all things Japanese became mainstream among the region’s young people.76 Media scholar Nissim Otmazgin highlights that this trend has continued to the present day under the Japanese government’s Cool Japan scheme, an important soft power initiative designed to increase cultural exports to both address Japan’s flagging economy and develop an attraction to Japan among international consumers to raise national prestige around the globe.77 Within Thailand, the development of BL owes much to this attraction to Japan. In Japan, BL historically emerged in the 1970s from manga for young women, which focused on the romantic and sexual relationships between boys and men.78 At the time, such comics were known as shōnen’ai (the love of young boys) and they became increasingly popular among (mostly) heterosexual female consumers.79 The genre was particularly pioneered by a group of female manga authors that included Takemiya Keiko, Hagio Moto, and Ikeda Riyoko. Inspired by the romantic fiction and films of Europe popular in Japan at the time,80 as well as the queer fiction of author Mori Mari and the Japanese gay magazine Barazoku,81 these women began writing about the often-frustrated loves of boys in fanciful and beautiful European settings. Eventually coming to be known as the Year 24 Group since many of them were born around the twenty-fourth year of Japan’s Showa Era (1949), these women played a crucial role in the wider development of postwar Japanese girl’s culture.82 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many amateur authors and fans also began to produce their own homoerotic and parodic re-imaginings of mainstream anime and manga, which would be self-published in fanzines known as dōjinshi and sold at large fan events such as Comic Market (Komiketto).83 Eventually the works within these fanzines came to be termed yaoi, a humorous contraction of the phrase yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (no climax, no point, no meaning) and at this time yaoi was especially understood as a parodic genre of mainstream works.84 As BL professionalized via dedicated comic magazines in the 1990s, its generic conventions crystallized into a set of widely accepted representational strategies and narrative tropes that remain central to Japanese queer popular culture to this day.85 The professionalization of the genre led to a supposed BL boom, which flooded the Japanese marketplace with anime, television serials, novels, drama CDs, and video games with BL themes and narratives.86 Incidentally it was during the commercialization of the genre that the term “Boys Love” became the preferred name for Japan’s homoerotic comics culture. BL has become big business in recent years, with a domestic market size estimated to be roughly ¥212 billion in 2014.87 Noted manga historian and cultural critic Fujimoto Yukari provides two explanations for the popularity of BL among young heterosexual women in

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Japan. First, within the context of Japan’s heteropatriarchal society where women’s sexual desires are often denied, the gender ambiguity of BL allows women to safely play with sex and explore their fantasies.88 Second, the absence of women within these works creates a non-threatening atmosphere, which unlocks specific affective responses of intrigue and curiosity that empower women as agents who direct their own sexual futures without fear of patriarchal intervention.89 It must be noted that since their inception, BL manga have also been consumed by lesbian women, with both manga critic Mizoguchi Akiko and cultural historian James Welker revealing that this genre of popular culture provided queer women an opportunity to see affirming images of same-sex attraction that were explicitly emancipatory within a social context that lacked lesbian visibility.90 Mizoguchi, reflecting both on her own BL fandom and the realization of her lesbian identity, has stated that the relatively androgynous bodies of the characters in BL allowed lesbian women to reimagine them as female and thus project themselves into the characters, facilitating the expression of same-sex desire and producing new sexualities in 1970s and 1980s Japan.91 On the other hand, BL received a less enthusiastic reception among same-sex desiring men, at least initially. In the 1990s, Japanese BL fandom was dominated by a so-called yaoi dispute between gay activists and heterosexual female fans, with gay activists arguing that BL simplistically appropriates the images of gay men for women’s fantasies and thus does little to destabilize heteronormative understandings of gender and sexuality that underlie homophobic discrimination in Japan.92 That being said, my interviews with young Japanese gay men in the mid-2010s revealed that a minority of same-sex desiring men do indeed read BL and understand it as a legitimate expression of gay desire, although there remains broad distaste for these supposed women’s texts in Japan’s gay culture.93 Tomoko Aoyama has persuasively argued that reading BL requires consumers to possess specific literacies born out of the genre’s history in order to decode the meanings inherent to BL texts.94 Santos likewise notes that these “rotten literacies” produce queer affects, which facilitate women’s deconstruction of heteronormativity through the pleasurable potentials of homoeroticism embedded within Japan’s traditionally homosocial framework for conceptualizing male– male relationships.95 For both Aoyama and Santos, BL is representative of young Japanese women’s culture due to its inherent intertextuality, encouraging readers to link texts together in ways that queer dominant imaginaries of sex and gender.96 In many ways, Aoyama’s and Santos’s theories of BL literacy are similar to those of cultural critic Azuma Hiroki, who argues that Japanese fans of anime and manga possess a sophisticated database of narrative and non-narrative elements, which they draw upon to make sense of the popular culture texts that they consume.97 BL, cultural critic Nishimura Mari attests, also draws upon a database that is structured around a supposed ōdō (noble formula), which stipulates that the narrative must focus on the romantic relationship between two bishōnen and that this narrative must progress in certain predetermined ways.98 An important aspect of the ōdō is the so-called seme–uke rule, whereby one of the characters (typically the protagonist) is presented as an uke who is passively initiated into male–male

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romance by an aggressive seme who subsequently leads their relationship.99 Furthermore, the uke (the receiver) is the partner who is penetrated during sex and is represented as soft and effeminate compared to the seme (the attacker) who, as penetrator, is presented as comparatively harder and more masculine.100 The authors of BL texts consciously use specific tropes from this ōdō in conjunction with the broader database that sits at the heart of Japanese pop culture fandom to signal to readers which character is the uke and which the seme.101 I will discuss the ōdō and its specific literacies in more depth in Chapter 2. Over the years, BL has evolved into an increasingly transnational form of popular culture. For instance, BL fandom emerged in East Asia throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, with significant fan communities developing in both South Korea and the broader Sinosphere.102 Indeed, beginning in Taiwan and then flowing to Hong Kong and Mainland China, BL manga fandom rapidly spread throughout Chinese-speaking regions of Asia, giving birth to a vibrant tradition of text-based amateur fictions that came to be known as danmei.103 At the same time, a large US-centric Anglophone fandom for BL also appeared, which subsequently spread throughout Western Europe and Latin America.104 Interestingly, Anglophone fandom quickly developed their own uses for Japanese fan terminology, with shōnen’ai utilized for works lacking sexual content and yaoi referring to works with explicit sex scenes.105 As BL transnationalized, it was often necessary for the genre to be adapted for local audiences via a process that media theorist Iwabuchi has termed “glocalization” in reference to the mukokuseki (nation-less) branding and development typical of Japanese companies in the 1990s.106 Fan studies scholar Dru Pagliassotti, for example, notes that US publishers adapted Japanese BL to local legal and social frameworks by censuring sex scenes so that it would not be understood as pornographic content (specifically, child pornography).107 The case of BL’s journey into South Korea and its synthesis with the Korean idol industry is particularly important to consider. As I will reveal in subsequent chapters, aspects of BL culture as it was glocalized to the pop culture landscape of Korea have become especially influential to the culture of celebrity that has evolved around BL media in Thailand. Just prior to the moment Korean entertainment companies began producing idol boybands in the 1990s, a fandom for Japanese BL had exploded among young women in South Korea in the late 1980s.108 As young women were enthusiastically supporting and discussing the handsome idols from bands such as H.O.T., Sechs Kies, and Shinhwa on online forums, some were also enthusiastically consuming the fan-translated BL manga from Japan that was available on these sites.109 Unsurprisingly, young women began to “ship” handsome idols from their favorite bands together, practicing “shipping” whereby they imagined idols in homoerotic relationships as a way to express both their fannish devotion and their sexual desires.110 In Anglophone fandom, the term “ship,” deriving from “relationship,” refers to the process of imagining an intimate relationship between two characters or people. In Japan, the preferred term is kappuringu (coupling) and likewise in Korea the term keopeulling is most used. The phrase “to ship” has been borrowed into Thai fandom slang as a direct adoption of the English phrase.

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This speaks to one of the biggest differences between the BL cultures of Japan and Korea. Whereas in Japan fans are more likely to reimagine characters from manga and anime in homoerotic relationships (at least before Japanese fans of K-pop and Thai BL emerged), Korean fans are more likely to imagine two real people together.111 As businesses specifically targeting young female consumers, both the Japanese and the Korean idol industries go to great lengths to manage the star personas of their idols, implementing dating bans and media control to ensure that the male idols remain unattached and thus hypothetically available to their female fans.112 As the K-pop industry matured, Kwon argues, BL was co-opted into the developmental logics of Korea’s idol culture as a “safe” way for female fans to consume their idols without compromising this theoretical availability.113 It has now become routine for K-pop idols to perform “fan service” for their fans, whereby idols perform a variety of actions to satisfy the desires of their fans. This often involves a practice known as “skinship” in which idols touch each other in intimate ways (including hugging and sometimes kissing). These acts, which Kwon refers to as “staged intimacy,” are then subsequently drawn upon by passionate fans in the production of homoerotic fanfiction and fanart.114 Similar practices have become central to Thailand’s BL culture due, in part, from the influence of K-pop fandom in the kingdom, as I discuss in Chapter 3. As I will more fully explore in Chapter 1, the development of BL fandom in Thailand can be traced to the early 1990s when members of the Thai middle class began to regularly consume Japanese manga.115 Most of the Japanese BL comics initially imported, translated, and consumed by fans in Thailand were pirated by clandestine fan networks since established publishing houses feared engaging with this explicitly homoerotic medium due to strict laws against the circulation of pornographic and other supposedly obscene materials.116 These comics became known as “cartoon yaoi” and this term was soon shortened to “cartoon wai” (where “wai” stands for the initial Y in yaoi).117 Since it was often difficult to access translated manga, especially outside Bangkok, a vibrant community of creators flourished online who produced BL fiction that became extremely popular on youth-oriented online portal sites such as Pantip and Dek-D.118 One online BL novel became especially famous—LOVE SICK: Chaotic Young Men in Blue Shorts (LOVE SICK: Chunlamun Num Kang-keng Nam-ngoen), written by an author adopting the pseudonym INDRYTIMES.119 As this novel was particularly famous on the Thai internet, in 2014 it was adapted into a TV series. Lovesick’s broadcast initiated the boom for homoerotic series that subsequently became known as “series wai” or “Thai BL.” That said, I will reveal in Chapter 1 that there were also important precedents to Lovesick. Within these newly emergent Thai BL series inaugurated by Lovesick, however, the tropes of the Japanese ōdō were significantly adapted to the norms of the Thai mediascape. As I detail at length throughout the following chapters, this process of adaptation ultimately produced a new form of queer popular culture which has also spread throughout Asia, mimicking the initial transnationalization of the Japanese BL from which it was initially adapted.

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Notes on Method: Critical Asian Queer Cultural Studies There is a growing concern among scholars of Thailand that the academic study of the kingdom’s culture and society has been typified by a lack of theoretical engagement, with most scholars instead merely seeking to empirically describe Thai society without considering what this may mean in more conceptual terms. In her insightful review of Arnika Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires, literary critic Rachel Harrison states that “Thai cultural studies has struggled … with the question of what to do with ‘theory’,” persuasively arguing that the field has been “marred … by a predilection for rich tapestries of empirical data in preference to forms of analysis commonly deprecated as somehow abstruse.”120 Likewise, Jackson has recently taken (Western) social theorists of Southeast Asia to task for treating the region as a mere laboratory for the testing of Anglo-American theory, failing to take into account the potentials of a critically informed area studies to develop its own theory grounded in local knowledge and experience.121 Jackson notes that the recent critique of area studies in the Western academy fails to consider that the so-called universal theory developed through disciplinary scholarship such as history, literary criticism, and social science is itself heavily embedded within particular Western contexts.122 Thai cultural studies, both Harrison and Jackson attest, has the potential to denaturalize and critique the purported universalism of critical theory’s grand narratives, with a critical Southeast Asian studies turning Thailand into a site for the generation of theory rather than an object for empirical observation. Unfortunately, this potential has not always been realized in previous scholarship. My aim in writing this book is precisely to produce critical theory concerning transnational Asian queer popular culture through my study of Thailand’s BL media and its attendant celebrity and fandom culture. To do this, I draw upon the emerging conceptual approach that has come to be termed “Asia as method” to critically theorize Thai BL as a site through which queerness itself can be understood. Pioneered by historian Kuan-Hsing Chen as a decolonizing method that centers Asia within knowledge production,123 “Asia as method” borrows from the traditions of cultural studies in its interdisciplinary analysis of “lived experiences, social practices and cultural representations … considered in their network-like or intertextual links, from the viewpoints of power, difference and human agency.”124 Fundamentally, “Asia as method … uses the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchor” from which the societies and cultures of Asia can become their own point of reference, mobilizing “the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia … to provide alternative horizons and perspectives.”125 In so doing, “Asia as method” rejects the fixity and universality of Western theory and instead positions Asia as the lens through which new and different understandings of world history and culture can be expressed.126 The study of Southeast Asian queer cultures has been central to the development of the “Asia as method” framework, drawing upon the scholarship of theorists such as Jackson in its skepticism of the universalist logics of Western theories.127 Writing on queer Singapore, performance theorist Eng-Beng Lim has called on

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theorists of queer Southeast Asia to challenge theoretical paradigms founded in a unidirectional understanding of sexual minority culture which assumes the inevitable centrality of Western modes of theorizing gender and sexuality.128 For Lim, [T]he terms of global queering dominated by the global English language, the Euro-American gay lens, and capitalism have to be reassessed not only as a global/local issue but also one that challenges their paradigmatic dominance. The issue is thus not how well non-Westerners adapt these superoriginary gay identities and practices in making their own queer world. Such a politics of representation tends to reinscribe classic binaries in broad strokes of difference that are ultimately cast in a narrative of sameness.129

In this book, I follow Lim’s skepticism of Western theory to develop a critical Asian queer cultural studies that draws upon the case of Thailand to further conceptualize queering as an anti-identarian and deconstructive process of knowledge production which is ultimately emancipatory for sexual minority cultures. My reading of the emergence of Thai BL media is thus committed to the decolonial methodology of “Asia as Method” and my analysis of the television series, fan events, social media practices, and other related fan and celebrity phenomena thus privileges the excavation of inter-Asian influences and local knowledges. As such, I align the theoretical approach and resultant arguments of this book with the emerging interdisciplinary field of research that has broadly come to be termed “queer Asian studies.” Since its inception via the First Conference on Queer Sexualities in Bangkok in 2005, queer Asian studies (also commonly called Asia-Pacific queer studies) has aimed to combat the marginalization of Asia-focused research in queer studies as well as to challenge theories of queer hybridization which simply reinscribe the primacy of Western conceptual frameworks.130 Queer Asian studies research is thus not simply just a theoretical paradigm but, similar to the “Asia as method” approach more broadly, it also represents a political exercise that aims to combat Eurocentrism and decolonize knowledge production through the critical application of Asian knowledge. It is due to my commitment to this emancipatory and decolonial politics that my analytical approach is broadly reparative, focused less on the problematics arising from Thai BL than on its revolutionary potentials to destabilize heteronormativity not only in Thailand, but across East and Southeast Asia more broadly. In line with the interdisciplinary focus of cultural studies, my analysis of Thai BL media, celebrity, and fandom draws upon a diverse range of methodological traditions, including cultural history, film and literary criticism, cinematography, media studies (particularly of social media), and ethnography (including participant observation and interviews with fans in Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan). Taking inspiration from pioneering queer theorist Jack Halberstam, I engage in a “scavenger methodology” that fundamentally deconstructs disciplinary fixity, selecting whatever methods necessary for the production of queer theory which challenges and subverts the conservative status quo.131 While

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I detail the specific methods and case studies upon which this project is based more fully throughout subsequent chapters, below I wish to make some important concessions concerning my own positionality as a researcher and the sources that I have chosen to examine. I have come to the study of Thai BL somewhat serendipitously, having discovered the genre by accident in late 2014 after encountering episodes of Lovesick, The Series on YouTube. Trained as a cultural anthropologist of Japan, my previous work explored Japan’s rich tradition of queer popular culture through a longitudinal ethnographic study of young men living in Tokyo who regularly consume Japanese gay media.132 My scholarly training thus emphasized critical Asian studies, ethnographic methodology, and Japanese language (which I speak fluently). I first understood Thai BL as an expression of Japanese BL and, as a scholar who did not necessarily specialize in Thailand and who initially lacked Thai-language proficiency, my initial understanding of the genre was heavily influenced by my positioning in the interdisciplinary field of Japanese cultural studies. Although I have developed my Thai-language proficiency, I am still hardly fluent. I therefore rely upon the provision of English-language subtitles for Thai BL series as well as the labor of fans who produce English, Chinese, and Japanese translations of Thai celebrities’ social media engagement and who write reports of fan events.133 I draw upon this translated material throughout this book to augment my engagement with Thai-language material, as well as fan-produced content from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand. That being said, I have been fortunate to receive the assistance of various colleagues in Australia (where I am based), Thailand, and Japan who have provided me with the language and cultural support to make sense of the Thai local knowledge necessary to theorize Thai BL.134 Indeed, Kuan-Hsing Chen notes in his conceptualization of “Asia as method” that this methodology is specifically designed to facilitate such collaborative endeavors in order to provincialize the primacy of the Western researcher.135 The theory developed in this book is thus collaborative. I do more than simply “channel” the voices of my Thai-speaking colleagues and instead heavily relied upon their advice and critical insight as I began to trace the inter-Asian flows of queer knowledge that ultimately produced Thai BL. Indeed, in many ways my colleagues in Thailand emerged as key informants in my ethnographic practice, particularly as many of them identified as fans of Thai BL themselves and were thus immersed in the very fandom culture which represented the object of their own study.136 My expertise in the history of Japanese BL and its relationship to Korean popular culture was therefore united with my Thai colleagues’ understandings of the Thai media landscape, often producing ideas and perspectives that I would never have reached on my own. I happily acknowledge that the arguments presented in the following pages were inspired and shaped by numerous conversations with Thai colleagues without whom this book would not have been possible. The sources that I examine are thus constrained by my inability to fully engage with Thai-language material beyond the reading of selected news reports, magazine articles, and social media posts (most of which were translated into English by

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fellow fans or my Thai colleagues). This is a limitation of the current study that I openly admit. The very fact that this new genre of queer popular culture has recently transnationalized to become a regional expression of queerness has, however, made my study possible. The producers of Thai BL series, recognizing the importance of international fans as a potential market,137 now provide official English-, Chinese-, and Japanese-language translations of their series on either YouTube or other streaming services that I have been able to analyze thematically and cinematographically. Likewise, the large overseas fandoms for Thai BL that have developed—and that I explore in subsequent chapters—have led to English emerging as an important lingua franca for diverse communities of fans to discuss their favorite series on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter,138 opening further opportunities for analysis. While I am dedicated to theoretically destabilizing the primacy of English through my commitment to “Asia as method,” I recognize that translation affords a Japan specialist such as myself the chance to deploy my expertise in the academic study of BL to examine the production of this new form of Thai media. Finally, I note that much of the analysis that I present below draws upon ethnographic practice. My examination of Thai BL media, celebrity, and fandom is thus informed by what anthropologist Louisa Schein has referred to as an “ethnotextual approach,” a method which calls for the “close reading” and “situated interpretation” of media, whereby ethnographic research into the production, distribution, and consumption of texts informs discursive analysis.139 I have conducted traditional ethnographic observation of BL fans in Bangkok and Manila, visiting fan events and spaces to interact with and interview fans during research trips in 2019 (Bangkok, Manila), 2020 (Manila), and 2022 (Bangkok).140 These interviews specifically focused on questions concerning motivations for becoming a fan of the genre, how the genre impacted fans’ understandings of gender and sexuality, and how these fans relate Thai BL to Japanese and Korean popular culture. I have also conducted various longitudinal digital ethnographies of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Thai fans between 2015 and 2021. By digital ethnography, I refer to the emerging practice within the social sciences where data is collected online and where the field-site represents a virtual space.141 Over seven years, I observed Thai BL fans’ interactions on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Sina Weibo, taking note of the discussions these fans had about the media which they consumed. As in all good ethnographic projects within which the process of writing the ethnography is itself an important aspect of the analysis, my theorization of Thai BL ultimately relies upon a constant reflexive practice where the development of critical theory is firmly tied to the experiences of those individuals with whom I engaged in the field.142 My interactions with fans therefore play an important part in my deployment of “Asia as method,” with my interdisciplinary “scavenger methodology” strongly informed by my interactions with passionate consumers for whom Thai BL media and its celebrity culture form a central part of their everyday lives. My analysis of Thai BL is grounded in the views and values of such fans that I met—either in person or virtually—across Asia. My theorization

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of the queer potentials of Thai BL is thus contoured by my observations of the emancipatory affects these media have produced for fans not only in Thailand but also throughout the broader Asian region.

Considering What Fan Studies Can Bring to Theories of Thai Queer Media I suggested above that my Thai colleagues, in positioning themselves as fans who both researched the Thai BL phenomenon and engaged in the fandom culture as active and deeply committed participants, emerged as key interlocutors within my ethnographic practice. In this way, my Thai colleagues participated in my study from their position as “academic fans” or “aca-fans” for short. “Academic fandom” represents an authorial subject position that is crucial to the ethnographic and theoretical practices of the inter disciplinary tradition of fandom studies, a field of study that recognizes and celebrates the creative and intellectual agency of fans as a distinct form of media consumers worthy of centering within theories of media reception and circulation.143 Simply put, “aca-fans” represent academics who study the object of their fandom by critically reflecting on their own position as a fan and negotiating the primarily affective and emotional worlds of fannish consumption.144 Further, aca-fans draw upon their affective ties to the object of their studies—whether this be a celebrity, a media franchise, or fan-produced works—to build rapport and navigate fan communities such as the various groups of consumers who passionately consume Thai BL around the world.145 As fan studies theorists Cécile Cristofari and Matthieu J. Guitton note, the aca-fan position and related research practices are analogous to the auto-ethnographic methods which have emerged in anthropological research as a response to the over-privileging of outsider “etic” descriptions of culture within previous methodological approaches.146 As noted earlier in this chapter, my theoretical approach instead seeks to produce an insider’s “emic” description of Thai BL fandom culture and thus the knowledge produced by aca-fans such as my Thai colleagues who marry their fannish knowledge to their academic positions is useful. Within this study, however, more so than the Thai academic fans with whom I interacted during my ethnographic studies, there was one other aca-fan who also deeply impacted the development of this project. Of course, I am referring to myself. Although my interest in Thai BL was, at least initially, primarily driven by an intellectual curiosity born from my prior research into Japanese queer popular culture, over the years and almost without my noticing I was transformed into a fan of Thai BL series and celebrities myself. This provides me an opportunity to critically reflect upon my own development as a fan of Thailand’s BL media and the process through which I learnt the cultural knowledge required to interpret and analyze Thai cultural production. This self-reflection as an aca-fan forms another aspect of the broader “Asia as method” approach, which informs the analysis presented throughout this book, because often it represented a process

Introduction

21

of unlearning the Eurocentric biases that I have unconsciously internalized as a cisgendered, White Australian. Just as I found during my fieldwork in Tokyo for my first book,147 my analysis of Thai BL and its attendant celebrity and transnational fandom cultures often produced moments which challenged my unconscious assumptions concerning the nature of queer sexuality in Asia. These challenges to my preestablished understandings of Asian media culture ultimately generated much of the argument recounted throughout the following pages. As an aca-fan whose theoretical understandings of Thai BL are broadly informed by their own active participation in Thai BL fandom, my analysis in Boys Love Media in Thailand prioritizes the terminology which fans themselves use to discuss Thai BL series and the handsome celebrities who appear within them. In choosing to utilize fandom terminology which may appear unfamiliar to readers seeking to approach Thai BL from other disciplinary perspectives and cultural contexts, I am aligning myself with fan studies’ recognition that fans represent sophisticated media consumers who have developed their own vocabulary and conceptual paradigms to make sense of the media with which they heavily engage.148 The following key theoretical and emic terms from Asian fan studies are central to my analysis: • “Affect”: The preconscious response to media which generates the emotional reaction upon which fan identity is based. There are a variety of emic terms to describe affect within transnational Thai BL discourse, including fin (Thailand), kilig (the Philippines), and moe (Japan). This term is fully theorized in Chapter 1. • “Fan art” and “fanfiction”: Derivative works that fans themselves produce in response to the media which they enjoy, exercising their creativity in the form of drawings, photography, and stories. These terms are fully theorized in Chapter 4. • “Fan club” or “fan tribe”: Formal (club) or informal (tribe) networks of fans focused on supporting and celebrating a particular celebrity, media product, etc. Fans often adopt fan-generated names for their clubs. These networks are particularly active on social media. These terms are fully theorized in Chapter 4. • “Fan service”: The practice of providing fans with content designed to elicit an affective response, with the most notable example being “skinship,” whereby celebrities perform acts of (often homoerotic) intimacy together. This term is fully theorized in Chapter 3. • “Idol”: A form of celebrity common in East and Southeast Asia known for their good looks, expansive performance skills, and their role as “image characters” within advertising culture. This term is fully theorized in Chapter 4. • “Parasocial relationship”: A kin-like relationship that emerges between a fan and a celebrity which provides the fan with emotional support. This term is fully theorized in Chapter 4.

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• Sao wai: Female fans of Thai BL. Analogous to the Japanese term fujoshi, which refers to female fans of BL manga. This term is fully theorized in Chapter 1. • “Shipping”: The fan practice of imagining idols within romantic or sexual couples, often same-sex. The imagined couples produced via shipping are called khu jin in Thai, and “ships” in English. Fans give Thai BL “ships” names by combining the two idols’ personal names together (KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin). This term is fully theorized in both Chapters 1 and 3. Further, as Thai BL emerges from the transnational BL culture that first emerged in Japan, the following key theoretical terms from the field of BL studies (most of which is written in Japanese) also form part of my analysis, although these were not necessarily terms, which my informants themselves utilized: • “Ōdō”: The “noble path” which determines the narrative, thematic, and character conventions upon which BL series are based. Central to these conventions is the “seme-uke” rule. This term is fully theorized in Chapter 2. • “Moe-banashi”: The BL fan practice whereby fans discuss who within an imagined couple is the seme and who is the uke, generating an affective response. This term is fully theorized in Chapter 2. • “Seme–uke rule”: The character archetypes commonly deployed within BL texts. Seme (attacker) refers to the active, normatively masculine, and penetrating partner in a male–male couple. Uke refers to the passive, feminized, and penetrated partner in a male–male couple. The terms are somewhat analogous to “top” and “bottom” in gay English slang, or rup and rak in gay Thai slang. These terms are fully theorized in Chapter 2.

Structure of the Book In this introductory chapter, I have provided a summary of both Thailand’s contemporary heteronormative media landscape and the global circulation of Japanese BL to provide the necessary background to my extended examination of Thai BL media and its related celebrity and fandom cultures. In the pages that follow, I draw upon a cultural studies methodology informed by ethnographic practice to argue that BL media have not only revolutionized understandings of gender and sexuality in Thailand but have produced new transnational celebrity and fandom cultures that have shifted the center of the production of Asian queer popular culture from Japan to Thailand. I now present a brief overview of how I develop my arguments throughout the subsequent chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 specifically focus on the analysis of the BL series that sit at the heart of this new queer popular culture. In Chapter 1, I begin by presenting a history of BL media and fandom in Thailand, orientating the reader to the key TV

Introduction

23

series and celebrities that will form the focus of the rest of the book’s discussion. I begin by tracing the flow of Japanese BL into Thailand, introducing the typical fans of BL in Thailand who are known as sao wai (yaoi girls). I then present a “pre-history” of BL through a discussion of the seminal 2007 homoerotic film Love of Siam (2007), the first mainstream Thai media text to focus on queer romance, which inadvertently appealed to fans of Japanese BL. I then discuss the first ever BL television drama, Lovesick, The Series (2014), and trace the increasing mainstreaming of such shows on Thai TV throughout subsequent years through a focused discussion of series produced by Thailand’s largest producer of BL media content, GMM Grammy. I close the chapter by examining the explosion of BL series which occurred between 2019 and 2021, years which many fans have viewed as the moment when the narratives of Thai BL “matured” from a simple focus on romance to an increased focus on social issues such as rape and homophobia. In Chapter 2, I present my analysis of the BL series Lovesick, The Series (2014), SOTUS (2016), Love By Chance (2018), and The Effect (2019) to explore how the narrative tropes of Japanese BL have been strategically adapted, deployed, and challenged in Thailand. I reveal that Lovesick adapted a “wavering” focus on queerness that sought to dilute the queer content of Japanese BL so the series would make sense within Thailand’s heteronormative media landscape. I also demonstrate, however, that Lovesick sought to educate consumers about Japanese BL tropes in order to socialize viewers into recognizing the potentials of queer romance. I then explore how SOTUS (2016) and Love By Chance (2018) broadly conform to the narrative tropes of Japanese BL and yet importantly inject a local flavor that has facilitated the mainstreaming of BL to the Thai popular culture landscape. I continue the chapter by analyzing The Effect (2019), a short series that explicitly challenges the emerging narrative tropes of Thai BL to nuance and extend the genre’s emerging queer representational politics. To conclude, I focus specifically on how sao wai have transitioned from marginal media consumers to mainstream viewers within Thailand’s media landscape. Chapters 3 and 4 turn the focus away from the analysis of television dramas to investigate the celebrity system that has played an important role in the mainstreaming of Thai BL. Chapter 3 places a specific focus on GMM Grammy, examining how this company has created a “BL Machine,” which produces celebrities tied to BL fandom. I reveal how celebrity BL couples have come to play an important role in GMM Grammy’s continued domination of the Thai mediascape. Through an analysis of variety shows starring the main couples of the BL series produced by GMM Grammy between 2016 and 2020, known as the Four Royal Couples among Anglophone fans, I explore how this production company’s BL Machine marries BL fandom to consumer culture. The variety shows which I analyze are OffGun Fun Night (2018–19), TayNew Meal Date (2018–19), Friend Ship with KristSingto (2019–20), and BrightWin Inbox (2020). I argue that the mainstreaming of BL in Thailand cannot be divorced from commercial concerns and that the BL Machine has become embedded within Thailand’s broader celebrity advertising culture. I conclude by reflecting on how the BL Machine relates to queerbaiting, the practice

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whereby queer representation is deployed in mainstream television in tokenistic ways for the purposes of economic exploitation.149 Chapter 4 continues the analysis of GMM Grammy’s BL Machine to think through how BL celebrity and fandom in Thailand is situated within the broader Asian celebrity culture dominated by idol performers. The main argument of this chapter is that the fandom for Thai BL has been strategically curated by production companies to replicate the fan practices of Korean boybands. As well as analyzing fan practices through ethnographic fieldwork and observation of social media, in this chapter I present an analysis of BL fan events produced by GMM Grammy. I specifically focus on an event held in early 2019, Y I Love You Fan Party, that starred the celebrities central to GMM Grammy’s BL Machine to demonstrate how the performances of these BL celebrities conform to the patterns common in Korean idol culture. Importantly, I then explore 2020’s Global Live Fan Meetings with the Four Royal Couples, which were broadcast via virtual, interactive streaming services to further uncover how the K-pop industry’s digital infrastructure is being utilized to transnationalize the Thai BL industry. Throughout this chapter, I theorize how the adoption of K-pop fandom practices facilitates the sharing of intimacy between fans, investigating the affective entanglements between idols, fans, production companies, and social media, which drive the Thai BL industry. In Chapter 5, my focus shifts from Thailand to explore the transnational impact of Thai BL on fans around the world. I explore two instances of fandom through a mix of social media analysis and ethnography of fan practices. First, I discuss the emergence of Thai BL fandom in China, where Thai BL has developed a following as an important symbolic space to contest government-directed media censorship that bans depictions of homosexuality. Second, I discuss Thai BL fandom in the Philippines via analysis of interviews with fans and ethnographic observation of fan events. I reveal that Filipino fans position Thailand as an important fantasy space where queer sexuality is accepted in comparison to the homophobic Philippines, revealing the affective emancipatory potential of these fans’ consumption practices. Throughout this chapter, I reveal how fans across the Asia-Pacific draw upon Thai BL in the production of regionally grounded, “Asian” queer knowledge that contests and extends queer identity politics in radically affective ways. In so doing, I theorize how Thai BL contributes to a broader queer affective economy that contests the domination of global consumer culture by Western media. In Chapter 6, I argue that the center for the production of queer popular culture in Asia has shifted from Japan—where Boys Love has been produced for approximately forty years—to Thailand. I specifically enter into dialogue with previous scholarship on the spread of BL throughout Asia to argue against the tendency of centering Japan within analysis and suggest a focus on a new regional hub such as Thailand extends our understanding of Asian queer popular culture in new directions. To illustrate this point, I focus on the recent impact of Thai BL in both Japan’s BL culture and within its sexual minority communities through an exploratory investigation of Japanese fans of Thai BL. I demonstrate how Thai BL has ultimately reenergized its own putative point of origin, producing new queer

Introduction

25

affects within Japan. I also highlight how the Thai government has begun to utilize BL series and its celebrities from 2020 onward in its cultural diplomacy to Japan, further demonstrating the importance of Thai BL to transnational circuits of Asian popular culture. In making this argument, I reiterate the queer and transformative potentials of this revolutionary form of queer popular culture and outline a new theoretical approach to the study of BL media in Asia.

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Chapter 1 A H I S T O RY O F B OYS L OV E M E D IA A N D F A N D OM I N T HA I L A N D

In the final rising action of hit 2019 BL series Dark Blue Kiss (Jup Sut-thai Phuea Nai Khon Diao, “A Final Kiss Just for You” in Thai), the handsome young mathematics tutor Kao, played by New Thitipoom Techaapaikhun, rushes to the upmarket De Blué Sports Club to beg the forgiveness of his estranged boyfriend Pete, played by Tay Tawan Vihokratana. After a series of misadventures due to the machinations of the spoilt high school brat Non, played by rookie actor AJ Chayapol Jutamat, Kao and Pete’s three-year relationship sits at a precipice. Pete had come to the sports club to avoid Kao and was in the middle of doing laps in the pool when his boyfriend arrived after receiving a tip-off as to his whereabouts from Pete’s father (who is an unlikely supporter of their relationship). Kao begins to apologize to Pete, who initially rebuffs him due to the lingering hurt caused by both Non’s interference in their relationship and Kao’s fear of coming out as gay to his mother. Kao, increasingly desperate, calls out to Pete in the pool—“I love you!” Pete pretends not to hear, giving Kao no option but to strip off his shirt, jump into the pool, and swim toward his boyfriend. Soon, the boys make amends as they once again profess their eternal love for each other. As they passionately kiss, they both sink below the surface of the pool in a shot reminiscent of the series’ first episode (see Figure 2). In a private theater in downtown Bangkok, screams erupt from the legions of young women and men who have come together to watch this scene unfold along with Tay and New, the high-profile stars of the series.1 These fans have gathered at this theater to participate in a special screening of the final episode of Dark Blue Kiss organized by the producers of the series, GMM Grammy. The fans at the cinema share photos and videos of the screening across their social media so that fans of both TayNew specifically and Thai BL in general from around the world can participate in the growing feeling of excitement produced by the spectacle of two men kissing on screen. As part of this broader process of transnational sharing, fans trend two hashtags on Twitter—#darkbluekissตอนจบ (Dark Blue Kiss final) and #พีทเกา้ (PeteKao)—which quickly became the most trended hashtags in Thailand on the evening when the final episode was broadcast.2 After the episode concluded and as the credits rolled, Tay and New took the stage to

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Boys Love Media in Thailand

Figure 2  The final climactic kiss scene between Kao (left) and Pete (right) in Dark Blue Kiss. Photo credit GMM.3

sing the theme song of Dark Blue Kiss, with their fans quickly joining in as a final celebration of the series.4 This moment, which I observed online via Twitter from my home in Australia through various Thai and Chinese fans’ livestreams, represents the culmination of the development of Thailand’s newly emergent BL series and provides an opportunity to understand the genre’s attendant celebrity and fandom cultures. In this chapter, I trace the relatively recent history of Thai BL, exploring the emergence and evolution of these television series and the media industry which gave birth to the celebrity and fandom culture that produced Dark Blue Kiss, TayNew, and their fans. My aim in this chapter is to discuss how Thailand’s mainstream media industry became aware of the significant fandom for Japanese BL manga that had developed in Thailand in the late twentieth century and began producing shows which targeted this market of young women and queer consumers. Importantly, I reveal how a publishing boom of Thai-language novels facilitated the development of BL television series. In presenting a history of Thai BL series, my interest is in thinking through both the histories of each series’ production and their major narratives and themes. I also trace the emergence of specific Thai celebrities such as TayNew who have become central to Thai BL through a critical history of their celebrity careers, although I defer a detailed examination of the newly emergent BL celebrity culture based in the local adaption of K-pop idol stardom to Chapter 3. I focus on these specific aspects of the developmental history of Thai BL because it is through their study that the truly queer potentials of this increasingly

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transnational genre of Asian popular culture can be appreciated. This chapter thus represents more than a simple list of the BL series which have been produced over the past six years, although I recognize that my archival work does in fact produce an important catalogue of Thai queer popular culture in the 2010s. Instead, I view my history as an example of critical queer excavation which makes visible the deconstructive potentials of BL series within Thailand’s heretofore conservative and hetero-patriarchal media landscape. The queer history that I present here informs the rest of the analysis presented in this book, especially the discussion of the links between Japanese BL manga, K-pop fandom, and Thai BL series found within the following two chapters. Before launching into this historical discussion, a brief note concerning my primary sources is necessary. In this chapter, I draw upon seven years of observing the global fandom of Thai BL as well as discussions with fans and colleagues in Thailand and elsewhere concerning the development of this media genre. I rely upon a diverse range of archival sources, including news reports, social media posts from producers and celebrities, and documentary episodes from certain series (including “making of ” episodes). The history is also informed by my traditional and digital ethnographies, including visits to Bangkok in 2019 and 2022 to observe the growing material culture attached to Thai BL series in the city’s major consumer districts. In many ways, the development of my historical archive draws upon the “scavenger methodology” championed by Jack Halberstam which embraces an “anything goes” approach that queers traditional scholarly methods.5 To historical purists, my archive may seem eclectic, almost as if I am trying to fit my sources to a historical narrative that has a preconceived argument. Following queer theorist Jasbir Puar, however, I recognize that the selection of historical sources is a political act which can destabilize heteronormative accounts of history and that there is thus a theoretical utility in the development of a “queer assemblage” such as the one I produce here.6 Further, both my selection of these sources and the presentation of a particular history tied to specific BL series and the celebrities who appear within them are guided by interviews with fans in Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Japan. These fans represent important keepers of knowledge whose in-depth understanding of the development of BL is tied to specific queer affects that meaningfully intervene in situations of homophobia and patriarchy within their everyday lives (see Chapter 5). The history of Thai BL I present here is thus the history which the fans with whom I have conversed over the years have themselves developed to make sense of the queer potentials of the series which they love. It is thus appropriate that I begin the historical analysis of this chapter not with a discussion of what many fans consider the first ever Thai BL series, Lovesick, The Series (2014). Instead, I begin with a discussion of the earlier development of Japanese BL manga fandom in Thailand and the unexpected hit that was the queer film Love of Siam (2007) to present the precursors to the Thai BL series which fans around the globe have revealed to me are central to their own understandings of the genre’s historical development.

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Boys Love Media in Thailand

Thai Fandom for Japanese BL Manga: Bootleg Comics, Sao Wai, and Feelings of Fin The story of the emergence of a Thai fandom for Japanese BL manga is, in many ways, also the story of the commercial transformation of Bangkok in the final decades of the twentieth century and the beginning decade of the twentyfirst century. In her ethnographic study of the “intimate economies” of the Thai capital, cultural anthropologist Ara Wilson notes that the 1980s and 1990s saw an important shift in the Thai economy, with the previously protectionist policies initially championed by the nationalist postwar government of dictator Plaek Phibunsongkhram giving way to an open market economy geared toward international direct investment.7 Both American and Japanese multinationals took advantage of this opening up to significantly invest into the Thai consumer economy, with Japanese firms especially taking the lead in forming cooperatives with Thai manufacturers to supply new consumer products to a burgeoning middle-class tied to major urban centers, the chief of which was Bangkok.8 By the early 1990s, Japanese electronics and whitegoods had developed associations within the Thai imaginary with high quality and their purchase and use were thus producing fantasies of modernity that many Japanese commentators began to view with some interest.9 There was a particular fascination among Japanese concerning the Thai middle-class’s increasing attempts to “play at being Japanese” through their consumption of Japanese products and food,10 bolstering notions of Japanese prestige at home during a time when the Japanese economy was experiencing significant stagnation as a result of the collapse of the postwar economic miracle.11 At the same time as Japanese consumer goods were beginning to penetrate the Thai market, Japan’s popular culture was making inroads across East and Southeast Asia as part of the internationalization strategy adopted by Japanese entertainment companies discussed in the Introduction. Since the mid-1980s, both Japanese television serials known as “dramas” and anime cartoons were broadcast on Thai television stations, gaining increasing popularity among middle-class Thai high school and university students.12 Media theorist Koichi Iwabuchi particularly notes the impact of the morning drama Oshin—first broadcast in Japan in early April 1983 and which was simulcast on Thai televisions in a Thai-language dub—on Thailand’s popular culture landscape.13 Following a veritable “Oshin Boom” recognized by such cultural agencies as the Japan Foundation,14 Thailand’s media landscape quickly came under the influence of Japan’s entertainment companies, with young people increasingly consuming Japanese pop music, television dramas, anime cartoons, and Japanese food.15 While strategic collaborations between Japanese companies and Thai broadcasters facilitated the introduction of Japanese popular culture into Thailand, soon a market of pirated goods emerged throughout major urban centers which catered to a growing demand for all things Japanese among members of both the lower classes and high school students who lacked disposable incomes.16 Rather than the formal integration of Japan and Thailand’s media industries at this time, a Thai fandom for Japanese BL manga initially emerged out of the informal market produced through fantasies of Japaneseness.

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Thai BL researcher Poowin Bunyavejchewin’s oral history of Japanese BL fandom reveals that unofficial Thai translations of BL manga began circulating in bootleg form during the 1990s, with the Siam Square district of Bangkok quickly emerging as an important hub for the trade in pirated manga.17 As mentioned in the previous chapter, these manga became known in Thailand as “cartoon wai,” with wai standing in for the initial Y in the romanization of the Japanese term yaoi (which, at the time, was a term commonly utilized outside Japan to refer to what is now generally termed BL). The specific emergence of the informal yaoi manga trade in Siam Square is significant. Both anthropologist Ara Wilson and historian Ross King have highlighted that this important commercial center—partially developed through direct investment from Japanese multinationals—has long facilitated the expression of queerness in Thailand by providing sites for sexual minorities to participate in the consumer economy and therefore gain financial independence and access to media with queer themes.18 Unofficially translated BL manga represented one example of these newly emergent queer media tied to Siam Square’s consumer economy. Writing at the tail-end of the initial 1990s boom, investigative journalist Nattha Keenapan noted that informal comic stores located in the backstreets of Siam Square made a brisk trade in Japanese BL works.19 One of Keenapan’s interviewees, who ran one of the larger bootleg manga stores out of a small shopfront, explained that they sold at least 40 or 50 volumes of pirated BL manga each day, mostly to female high school students but also to young gay men.20 This store owner’s testament is important as it reveals that gay men formed part of the initial uptake of Japanese BL manga in Thailand, a point that is neglected within Bunyavejchewin’s writing. Both Bunyavejchewin and Keenapan explain that one of the major reasons that BL manga circulated in pirated form throughout spaces such as Siam Square during this time was because of fears from traditional Thai publishers that works depicting erotic scenes between men would be refused copyright due to strict laws against the selling of obscene material.21 It was only in the early 2010s, just before the advent of Thai BL series, that Thai publishers such as the local subsidiary of Japan’s major publishing house Kodansha began producing officially licensed translations of Japanese BL manga. In order to circumvent obscenity laws, and in response to high-profile cases of public debate about the supposed immorality of BL manga among conservatives fearing adverse influence on children, these manga were (and continue to be) published with a prominent R18+ rating.22 The initial fear on behalf of Thai publishers to obtain copyright and produce official translations of Japanese BL works rendered the fandom for Japanese BL manga a somewhat “closed” world compared to the broader mainstream fandom for Japanese popular culture. The origin of the mainstream Thai BL media, which are the focus of this book was thus a particularly sub cultural fandom space that was not often visible to outsiders, including mainstream Thai fans of Japanese popular culture.23 That being said, during a July 2019 visit to the anime and manga specialist store Animate in Siam Square’s MBK Center, I encountered a whole section specifically dedicated to the sale of officially translated BL manga. Indeed, since approximately 2014 when Japan introduced visa-free travel for Thai citizens,

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Thai consumers subsequently had greater access to Japanese consumer goods and official translations of Japanese manga—including BL titles—began to flood bookstores across the kingdom. Siam Square is located next to, and partially owned by, the prestigious Chulalongkorn University and there are thus many elite high schools tied to the institution located in the neighborhood, firmly linking this central shopping district to Thailand’s economic and cultural elites.24 Bunyavejchewin argues that it was elite young women attending either Chulalongkorn or its affiliated high schools who represented the very first fans of Japanese BL manga in Thailand.25 These mostly upper-middle-class young women subsequently created fan clubs and online spaces which celebrated Japanese BL, spreading the fandom for this Japanese popular culture form across the rest of the kingdom.26 One such club was Echo, an invite-only social club for young women fans of BL manga attending Chulalongkorn that hosted weekly meetings where fans could exchange manga and discuss their passion for all things related to Japanese BL.27 Echo was one of many such clubs which developed among female fans across Thailand, with these clubs either emerging at high schools or universities or on online spaces. These young women fans quickly adopted the name sao wai (“Y girls”) to signify their status as passionate fans of the romantic relationships between men depicted in what they termed, at the time, yaoi manga.28 While this fandom was initially based in the consumption of Japanese popular culture, soon young Thai women with the talent to draw comics or write their own stories began producing their own “yaoi” content, posting much of this work on popular youth websites such as Dek-D. Members of Echo at Chulalongkorn University, for instance, were actively producing their own BL illustrations and short stories in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of which became popular online.29 The development of amateur Thai BL production occurred in response to a decreasing availability of informally distributed translations of Japanese BL manga in the final years of the 1990s. At this time, Japanese publishers began to crackdown on foreign piracy of Japanese manga, thus ultimately leading to the collapse of the informal market for bootleg comics in the first decade of the twenty-first century.30 Because of these changes in Thailand’s informal BL manga market, social clubs like Echo played an increasingly important role in the creation and dissemination of original Thai BL works. In 2007, under the directorship of Korkaew Vanhecke, Echo produced 500 copies of their own original Thai-language BL novel—complete with manga-style illustrations produced by members—which were distributed to fans for a very modest fee (designed to cover the costs of production and not produce profit).31 Korkaew, as well as other members of Echo, eventually founded a professional publishing house named The Reading Room in 2012, which specialized in the publication of Thai BL novels, publishing in physical form the stories written by Thai fans that had become popular across Dek-D, Pantip, and specialty fan websites.32 The Reading Room was one of several businesses to have emerged in the early 2010s, which focused on publishing Thai BL novels that had originally been

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published online, with other prominent Thai BL publishers including Deep Y, NABU, SENSE BOOK, and Ever Y.33 The last of these, Ever Y, is particularly important since it represents a BL-focused division of the larger Jamsai Publishing house, noted for their production of popular, inexpensive romance novels which enjoy remarkable economic success among young Thai women.34 As popular Thai BL author Orawan Vichayawannakul—known to her fans via the pseudonym MAME—notes in her unpublished Masters dissertation, the development of this local BL publishing industry has played a key role in professionalizing and legitimizing BL content in contemporary Thailand, with publishers such as Ever Y nurturing talent that they discover online into economically successful authors.35 Today, the bookstores of Bangkok’s Siam Square are filled with hundreds of original Thai-language BL novels published by these companies, typically marketed rather idiosyncratically as “youth fiction from Thailand” (nawaniyai wairun thai) (see Figure 3). It should be noted that after my ethnographic fieldwork in Bangkok in 2019, some bookstores have begun labeling these sections of their stores as “yaoi fiction” (nawayinai yaoi, with yaoi written in the roman alphabet). For Thai BL researcher Natthanai Prasannam, the emergence of these publishers has contributed to a veritable “yaoi boom” in Thailand.36

Figure 3  BL novels on sale in the B2S Bookstore in Bangkok’s Central World mall, July 2019. Photo by Thomas Baudinette.

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The history of the development of Thai BL novels is, however, not just a story of fandom for Japanese BL manga. As discussed in the Introduction, the growing fandom for Korean popular culture in Thailand in the first decade of the twentyfirst century played an exceptionally influential role on the production of these Thai-language novels due to many sao wai also being fans of male K-pop idol groups such as TVXQ, Super Junior, and Big Bang.37 In an interview with Japanese investigative journalist Mori Mayumi, the influential author of the popular Thai BL series Love By Chance, MAME, explained that her first ever published work was a fanfiction that reimagined the members of Super Junior in romantic and sexual relationships.38 Indeed, Prasannam notes in his research that many authors of original Thai BL novels began by writing K-pop fanfiction which they posted online,39 suggesting that MAME’s experiences are representative. Discussing her motivations for writing homoerotic K-pop fanfiction, MAME explained that “including myself, fans of K-pop boy bands don’t want to see our beloved idols together with female partners. So, I began to imagine idols together in male couples and the first generation of Thai BL novels was born.”40 MAME’s fan narrative mimics the motivations of Korean fans who engage in the practice of “shipping” briefly introduced in the previous chapter, suggesting that sao wai are likewise motivated by a desire to consume male celebrity through the “safety” of a homoerotic fantasy dislocated from female competitors for an idol’s affections.41 As MAME shifted to writing original works set in Thailand featuring local characters rather than Korean idols, she (and other authors) increasingly drew upon male K-pop performers as models for their characters.42 These authors thus merged Japanese BL and K-pop together within the Korpanese imaginary that Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyen argues has become central to contemporary Thai aesthetics.43 These links between Japanese and Korean popular culture only became stronger within Thai BL media as the genre made its way from books to film, as I explore in Chapters 3 and 4. Having established the history of Japanese BL manga fandom in Thailand and its influence on the development of original Thai-language BL novels, it is now necessary to briefly consider why such a fandom emerged among young women and gay men. In his survey of 672 Thai fans of Japanese BL manga, Poowin Bunyavejchewin notes that many fans are motivated to consume BL manga by a dissatisfaction with the typical heteronormative romances which are popular in Thailand and were thus searching for something different.44 In particular, Bunyavejchewin reveals through his survey that gay fans were especially concerned with identifying positive representations of male–male love that they could then draw upon to manage their positioning within Thailand’s heteronormative society.45 On the other hand, Bunyavejchewin’s female respondents suggested that BL manga provided them an opportunity to explore their sexual desires in a society which often denies women the ability to do so,46 thus demonstrating sao wai also possess similar motives to the Japanese female fans of BL manga who were introduced in the previous chapter.47 Perhaps most importantly, Bunyavejchewin reveals that the vast majority of Japanese BL fans in Thailand are motivated to consume homoerotic manga because it evoked a sense of fin, a Thai concept that is difficult to translate into English.48 Initially a slang term used by members of Thailand’s sexual minority communities,

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fin derives from the English word “finish” and refers to the intense feeling of satisfaction one experiences during sexual intercourse. Thai gay men typically used the English term “finish” as a synonym for the Thai language expression set, a slang term meaning to orgasm or ejaculate. Coming to be pronounced as fin-it due to Thai pronunciation conventions, the term was soon shortened to fin as Thai speakers have a tendency toward monosyllabic expressions. Given this broader etymology, fin can perhaps be translated into English as “satisfaction,” “orgasm,” or “climax.” As the fandom for Korean popular culture grew in Thailand throughout the 2000s, fans of K-pop idols—mostly young women—began appropriating the term fin from Thai sexual minority culture to describe their intense affective responses to Korean popular culture within online discourse.49 This use of fin outside of Thai gay male culture speaks to a broader phenomenon witnessed during the late 1990s and early 2000s when gay slang permeated Thai youth speech, particularly due to the prevalence of gay comedians on Thai variety shows who habitually used gay slang as part of building their distinctive celebrity personas.50 Fin is a primarily affective response to media, representing an intense reaction of fascination, adoration, or sexual excitement that is often linked in fan narratives to experiences of madness, delusion, and being overcome with emotion.51 In many ways, fin is very similar to the Japanese concept of moe which has become central to the fandom for anime and manga more broadly,52 and Japanese fandom for BL manga in particular.53 Patrick W. Galbraith, an important theorist of Japanese popular culture fandom who has also written extensively on young Japanese women’s motivations for consuming homoerotic media, defines moe as an “affective response to fictional characters … [that] occurs in interactions and relations with images, objects, and so on, but is not located in that to which one responds.”54 That is, moe represents an intense response when a body is “moved by another body” where the body providing the stimulus which generates affect is a fictional character such as one of the members of a male–male couple in BL manga.55 For Bunyavejchewin’s Thai informants, fin appears to operate similarly to moe.56 As I will reveal throughout the following chapters, and via the history I present below, there is however one important difference between moe and fin. Whereas moe is historically tied to imagination and fictional characters, fin has increasingly become linked to real people, with fans of Thai BL becoming invested not only in the fictional characters appearing within BL series, but also the relationships between the real celebrities playing these roles. In fact, for many contemporary fans of Thai BL, it is precisely the experience of fin generated by real celebrities such as Tay and New introduced above which motivates them to consume this new genre of queer popular culture.

Thai BL’s Pre-History: Love of Siam (2007) and the Recognition of the Sao Wai Market Throughout my conversations with fans of Thai BL from Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan over the past several years, one film has emerged as key to their understandings of the development of this new queer genre of popular culture. That film is Chookiat Sakveerakul’s 2007 romantic comedy Love of Siam, which I

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briefly mentioned in the Introduction. In fact, Bunyavejchewin notes that while this film was released prior to the development of a mainstream awareness of Japanese BL manga in Thai society and the subsequent emergence of Thai BL, it is now retroactively considered a nang-wai or “yaoi (BL) film” by Thai consumers.57 Indeed, during the film’s fourteenth anniversary in late 2021, Thai BL fans’ social media spaces were awash with posts celebrating Love of Siam’s seminal role in paving the way for Thai BL series. Often erroneously referred to as Thailand’s “first gay movie,”58 Love of Siam was both a critical and box office success in 2007 when it dominated domestic and regional film festivals and industry awards,59 eventually grossing approximately US$1.3 million during its theatrical run.60 The film not only launched the career of director Chookiat Sakveerakul but also the careers of handsome young teen stars Mario Maurer and Pchy Witwisit Hiranyawongkul.61 Love of Siam tells the story of how Mew (played by Pchy) and his former neighbor Tong (played by Mario) fall in love. The film’s homoerotic romance between the two handsome high school students is embedded within a broader web of narratives that explores the nature of love (familial, platonic, and unrequited) within the modern capital.62 Mew and Tong had developed a close friendship as children after Tong rescued the slighter Mew from bullies in elementary school, but Tong soon moves away with his family due to the tragic loss of his older sister Tang (who disappeared during a holiday in the northern city of Chiang Mai). The two coincidentally reconnect several years later in Siam Square, where Tong discovers that Mew is the lead singer and lyricist of up-and-coming boyband August. Tong increasingly reaches out to Mew in order to avoid an unhappy home life dominated by his father’s alcoholism and mother’s controlling nature. Mew, in turn, responds to Tong due to deep loneliness brought about by the loss of the grandmother who had raised him. The two eventually fall in love, sharing a kiss at a party hosted by Tong’s family where Mew’s band had premiered their new love song (which Mew had penned in response to his growing feelings for Tong). Tong’s mother had, however, witnessed this kiss and acts quickly to end her son’s burgeoning relationship with Mew, who in turn becomes too depressed to continue with August. After many ups and downs—and a sub plot revolving around the relationship between Tong’s parents—the film concludes with the two reuniting in Siam Square at Christmas time, with Tong expressing his love to Mew but also his inability to become his boyfriend. Throughout the film, the two young male leads also navigate their relationships with young women who wish to date them, including the popular high schooler Donut, who Tong is seeing at the beginning of the film, and Ying, Mew’s new neighbor. The film was controversial upon release, partially because of the disconnect some audiences felt between Love of Siam’s viral marketing campaign and the explicit homoerotic content of the film.63 Posters advertising the film prominently displayed Mario Maurer and Pchy Witwisit lying supine on a bed together with the young actresses who played the relatively minor roles of Donut and Ying, suggesting that the film was a typical youth-oriented romantic comedy focusing on heterosexual relationships between high-school-aged boys and girls.64 Likewise, the pre-release trailer focused its dramatic tensions on minor heterosexual subplots as well as

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the more noteworthy plot concerning the breakdown of Tong’s family after the disappearance of his sister Tang.65 In an interview with The Nation, an Englishlanguage paper published in Bangkok, Sakveerakul admitted that the principal homoerotic narrative was hidden within promotional material as a necessary strategy to appeal to a wider audience.66 While some viewers—The Nation implies that they were mostly male and heterosexual—expressed annoyance or disgust that they had been “tricked” into viewing a supposed “gay film,”67 Love of Siam proved a “cross-over hit” with both critics and the general public.68 Indeed, the film critic of the Bangkok Post lauded the film, stating that “the movie’s carefully observed social nuances make it more than a glassy-eyed puppy-love diary, but a portrait of Bangkok lives at their most realistic … considering the film’s scope and ambition, [Love of Siam] is a Thai (Siamese) grand narrative on many kinds of love.”69 Further, within Thai academia, Love of Siam has consistently been lauded as a landmark queer film which raised the visibility of sexual minorities in Thai society and opened spaces for more nuanced representations of queer sexuality.70 During his aforementioned interview with The Nation, Sakveerakul explained that it was not necessarily his intention to create a “gay film” and that Love of Siam was instead principally a “film about love and family and the struggle of many characters as they go through difficult times.”71 He continued, stating that Love of Siam “is not all about gay characters, we are not focusing on gay issues, we don’t want the film to have a ‘gay’ label.”72 Media theorist Brett Farmer has argued that more so than representing a strategy to position the film within a potentially homophobic market, Sakveerakul’s tactic of “disavowing a Western understanding” of gay identity politics within the film responds to Thai conceptualizations of sexuality.73 In fact, the film ends with an explicit recognition of the love between Tong and Mew which Farmer understands as queer, although the potentiality of a relationship between the two boys is foreclosed by the film’s strong thematic commitment to “Thai familialism.”74 Farmer reads Tong’s decision to not enter a relationship with Mew in the film’s finale as representing the suppression of his personal queer desires for the sake of his family’s greater happiness, arguing that the film is both radically queer and complicit in the production of a conservative “status quo” understanding of Thai society.75 Discussing the production of the film both at the time of its release and during later interviews concerning the film’s historical legacy, Sakveerakul has consistently noted that he was inspired to explore the romance between young men as a method of pushing the boundaries of Thai cinema itself, a mission that the film’s production company enthusiastically supported.76 For Sakveerakul, Love of Siam appeared to be less about queer visibility than it was about explicitly challenging the genre expectations of Thai cinema-goers. Much of the academic writing in English exploring Love of Siam has placed a strong emphasis on gay male viewers of the film, in part due to these studies’ rightful commitment to excavating Love of Siam’s queer potential.77 But the evidence from both informal observations by these same scholars,78 the reported experiences of critics,79 and even Sakveerakul himself suggests that the film found its biggest reception among teenage women who were attracted to the homoerotic

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relationship between the two young stars.80 During interviews that I conducted in 2019 with Thai women who were active consumers of Japanese BL manga in the early 2000s, I uncovered that Love of Siam was indeed a highly popular film among sao wai, having produced intense experiences of fin when these women saw the film in cinemas. The film remains popular with Thai BL fans the world over, with many of my Filipino informants particularly expressing a strong attachment to the film as the first “Thai BL” content that they had ever consumed. The review of Love of Siam published in The Nation also notes that young women became major fans of Pchy and Mario Maurer,81 with my own interviews revealing that many sao wai would actively celebrate the characters they played in the film by writing fanfictions and drawing fan art. In fact, my personal discussions with Sakveerakul also indicated that he was somewhat aware of this market as he began developing the film due to his encounter with pirated BL manga when he was a college student in Chiang Mai.82 While denying my initial suggestion that his film was thematically influenced by Japanese BL manga, Sakveerakul did explain that his awareness of this popular culture form helped him demonstrate to Love of Siam’s production company that the film had a potential market among “women fans of such ‘gay’ comics from Japan.”83 Love of Siam, then, represents an important precursor to the later development of Thai BL series as the enthusiastic reception of the film among young women ultimately exposed that there was a market for romance stories between handsome young men within Thailand. That is, the film paved the way for the television series I introduce below by making Thai production companies more aware of the considerable market of sao wai in the kingdom. In his conversation with me, Sakveerakul noted that his first encounter with Japanese BL manga had shocked him since he had never conceived that there would be Thai consumers who would wish to see gay characters in the media which they consume.84 But, as history now reveals, Sakveerakul’s expectations that a “homophobic society such as Thailand” was not ready for such media content were somewhat unfounded.85 As Sakveerakul expressed in an interview with the Bangkok Post concerning his 2019 film Dew, Let’s Go Together (in Thai, Dew Pai Duay Kan Na)—coincidentally, another film focusing on the romance between men—Love of Siam had instead unexpectedly opened up a space for homoerotic romances within Thailand’s popular culture landscape.86 In many ways, Love of Siam therefore operated similarly to the 2005 South Korean homoerotic romance film The King and the Clown (Wang-ui Namja) which media theorist Jungmin Kwon argues demonstrated the economic clout of BL fans in Korea and subsequently normalized the production of homoerotic “bromance” films within Korea’s cinema industry.87 Just as The King and the Clown revealed that BL fans represented an un-tapped market in South Korea, Love of Siam made the Thai media industries aware of the existence of sao wai. It would be another seven years after the release of Love of Siam, however, before this market was specifically tapped by the most unlikely of media production companies, the state-sponsored broadcaster MCOT.

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A Watershed Moment: Lovesick, the Series (2014) and the Creation of Thai BL Series Roughly around the same time that Love of Siam was dominating the domestic box office, one Thai original BL novel had become especially famous among sao wai. This novel—published on both Dek-D and Pantip—was LOVE SICK: Chaotic Young Men in Blue Shorts by the self-described sao wai INDRYTIMES. Like MAME introduced above, INDRYTIMES (also known as P’Hed or Khun Khwang) was interested in creating a Thai version of Japanese BL.88 The novel grew to legendary status among fans of homoerotic popular culture in Thailand, with historian of Thai BL Kwannie Krairit explaining to me that in the late 2000s there were no serious fans of Japanese BL manga in Thailand who hadn’t read (or at least heard) of INDRYTIME’s novel.89 The novel’s word-of-mouth success online and dedicated fanbase eventually came to the attention of the producers at MCOT, a Thai public broadcaster that is one of the major producers of lakhorn soap operas in the kingdom. While generally considered to be a rather conservative TV station,90 the producers at MCOT made the decision to adapt INDRYTIME’s novel into a television series to capitalize on the growing popularity of both Japanese BL manga and original Thai BL novels among young women,91 the traditional market for lakhorn.92 This decision was also made at a time when the producers of lakhorn had begun diversifying the genre beyond its traditional focus on romances between wealthy urbanites as a strategy to address falling viewership among young people.93 In the words of the (male) director of Lovesick, the Series (hereafter, Lovesick), I came across Lovesick on Facebook, someone had posted it and I decided to read the novel. At first, I didn’t think I was going to finish it. However, as I kept reading, I enjoyed it more and more. I finished the entire novel in one night. So, I felt that if I could finish it in one night, then it must mean that everyone else will like it too. I figured that if I was going to work on something then it should be something I enjoy, to create something that viewers will enjoy as well. So that’s how it all started. I had a conversation with Khun Khwang, the author of the novel, and we tried to find a way to broadcast the series.94

Further, MCOT decided to utilize Lovesick as a vehicle to scout new acting talent, holding a large open casting for young men and women interested in a career in entertainment.95 The casting was particularly motivated to find “ordinary” and “relatable” actors who could be developed into a new breed of celebrity who was familiar and approachable,96 with MCOT eschewing the typical talents that traditionally dominated lakhorn at the time who tended to have Eurasian backgrounds.97 There was a specific focus on casting leads who “would look as if they had stepped out of a Korean drama,”98 revealing how Lovesick was also responding to the growing popularity of Korean popular culture in Thailand at the time. In this sense, Lovesick was produced and marketed to align with the emerging

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Thai television genre known as siri (a Thai-language rendering of “series”) which adhered more to the conventions of Korean TV dramas than lakhorn and which were typically only 8 to 14 episodes in length. Significantly, the choice to give the series a title in English which differs greatly from its Thai-language title forms part of this packaging of Lovesick as a Korean-drama influenced siri and had little do with a formal attempt to market the show internationally. To this day, Thai BL series continue to have both an English-language and a Thai-language title which often differ dramatically, with Thai fans tending to use the English titles in their discourse (with some notable exceptions I discuss below). Broadcast between July and September 2014, the first series of Lovesick contained twelve episodes of 45 minutes each. Interestingly, the final episode not only sets up the plot for the second season, but also contains interviews with the cast and crew concerning their experiences working on this “unconventional” series.99 Starring Captain Kongyingyong Chonlathorn and White Nawat Phumphothingam as the male protagonists Noh and Phun respectively, the series loosely follows INDRYTIME’s original novel to detail the blossoming relationship between these two high school boys. Unlike the novel, however, the series contains a large cast of characters and numerous subplots beyond a focus on the homoerotic relationship between Noh and Phun. Interestingly, many of the young men who were cast in bit roles in Lovesick eventually went on to become popular mainstays in later Thai BL series. This is another indication of just how import this series has been to the development of BL media in Thailand. In adapting the online novel to the screen, attention appears to have been paid to ensuring that Lovesick conformed to the generic and cinematographic conventions of lakhorn. Like Western soap operas, lakhorn privilege the serial form, contain multiple characters and plots, utilize timing that implies action takes place between episodes, deploy abrupt segmentation (often through the cinematographic technique of juxtaposition and montage) between narrative arcs, and place an emphasis on dialogue and conversation as the driving force for narrative progression.100 Lovesick broadly follows these conventions but also deploys production norms specific to the Thai media landscape. For instance, the series’ soundtrack consists mainly of cover versions produced by Lovesick’s young stars of songs popular with Thai youth. In particular, an acapella theme song sung by the whole cast entitled San (SHAKE) is used at significant points of the narrative to signal to viewers that something important has occurred, with this being especially prevalent when romantic scenes occur between Noh and Phun. As is typical of lakhorn,101 Lovesick also deploys ample product placement and key events often taken place either in the Japanese restaurant chain or shopping mall that sponsored the program. The prevalence of product placement and its relationship with Thai BL celebrity—a relationship pioneered by Lovesick—will be explored in more detail in Chapter 3. Finally, like American soap operas, Lovesick deploys closeup shots of characters staring off into the distance as romantic backing music plays in order to heighten dramatic tension and create a sense of intimacy between the audience and the characters appearing on the screen.102 In utilizing these conventions, the producers of Lovesick strategically present this potentially

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disruptive homoerotic series in a generic form that is recognizable to most Thai television viewers. The central narrative of both Lovesick the television series and the novel upon which it is based focuses on an arrangement made between Noh, the head of the music club, and Phun, the charismatic head of the high school student council. Phun is the scion of a wealthy family who is being placed under pressure by his father to abandon his relationship with Aim, the most beautiful student at a female convent school near Phun and Noh’s all-boys academy, and instead marry one of the daughters of his business associate. Phun requests the assistance of his younger sister Pang in convincing his father to allow him to continue dating Aim, but Pang is a very vocal sao wai and only agrees to help her brother if he also enters a relationship with another boy. Meanwhile, Noh (who is being pursued by Yuri, a Japanese-Thai friend of Aim) realizes that he has missed the deadline to submit the music club’s budget to the student council and they thus face being permanently closed. Noh approaches Phun, desperate for help, stating that he would do anything to ensure the continuation of the music club. Phun agrees to help Noh on the condition that they enter a fabricated relationship to convince Pang to intercede on Phun’s behalf with their father. Despite initial disgust, Noh reluctantly agrees to the arrangement and, over time, the two boys find that their play-acting soon blossoms into real feeling. In a narrative that perhaps deliberately parallels Love of Siam, both boys remain conflicted over whether they should continue their respective relationships with Aim and Yuri. Once again mirroring Love of Siam, Lovesick concludes its first series with Noh rejecting Phun at the same time as acknowledging his romantic attachment to him. Unlike Love of Siam, however, Noh’s decision is quickly reversed in the subsequent season. There is no denying the fact that the central narrative that holds the series together is queer, since its affirmative focus on a romantic relationship between two cisgender high school boys disrupts Thailand’s heteronormative media landscape. Yet the first series of Lovesick contains a wavering focus on heterosexual relationships that I will explore in more depth in the following chapter, thus differentiating the series from both the narrative conventions of Japanese BL manga and the original Thai novel on which the series is based. While the relationship between Noh and Phun centers the narrative of Lovesick, the series introduces five heterosexual romantic subplots between characters including the male leads and their respective girlfriends. Between episodes six and nine, there is very little romantic development between Noh and Phun and one could be forgiven for believing that Lovesick instead recounts the tale of Noh and Yuri’s burgeoning romantic relationship. As noted in the Introduction, the narratives of lakhorn tend to focus on heterosexual relationships between a phra-ek and nang-ek and while it is true that Noh represents the series’s phra-ek, the narrative’s wavering focus on Yuri creates the impression that she represents Lovesick’s “logical” nang-ek. For reasons that I explain more fully in Chapter 2, the initial response to the series from the Thai viewing public was somewhat lukewarm. Over time, however, Lovesick gathered a strong fandom, particularly due to a devoted following for the series that emerged across social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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By the end of the first season, Lovesick had become a sleeper hit for MCOT, with the two stars Captain and White becoming massively popular as emergent teen idols.103 Soon, the two were appearing in public at various fan meetings and product endorsement events where both sao wai and gay male fans vigorously celebrated both the PhunNoh couple and WhiteCap imagined couple.104 That is, the fans not only celebrated the homoerotic relationship between the characters the two young stars played in the series, but also extended that homoerotic relationship to the actors themselves. Such practices mirror the “shipping” of K-pop idols,105 which is unsurprising given the influence of K-pop fandom on the emergence of sao wai fans in Thailand. It was within the fandom for Lovesick, then, that the practice of re-imagining celebrities in homoerotic relationships which would soon become an essential element within the fandom for Thai BL media developed, although some fans of Love of Siam also engaged in this practice. I will discuss how such practices function to produce Thai BL celebrity in much more depth in Chapters 3 and 4. The success of the first series of Lovesick led to a second season, which was expanded by MCOT from its initial order for twelve to thirty-six episodes.106 These thirty-six episodes were broadcast throughout 2015, with two episodes a week until October.107 The writing team—including INDRYTIMES—invented several new subplots and characters, introducing more male–male couples to feed the growing desire for homoerotic content among Thai TV viewers.108 Once again, MCOT held an open casting call to audition new talent for Lovesick Season 2, creating a practice that would become central to Thai BL in subsequent years. Soon, appearing within a Thai BL series would become viewed as a pathway to a successful career in the entertainment industry, with aspiring actors looking to follow the success of Captain and White, who eventually signed with the major entertainment companies Nadao Bangkok and GMM Grammy, respectively. Lovesick demonstrated that a market for homoerotic series existed and that such television shows were viable, fulfilling the promise of Love of Siam and ushering in a new age of BL in Thailand. The series also represents a watershed moment in Thai queer cultural production more broadly, with an affirming depiction of romantic love between two cisgendered young men on a mainstream TV channel breaking the tendency discussed in the Introduction for same-sex desiring men to be depicted as transgendered kathoey or sissy tut. The producers of Lovesick had targeted the significant number of sao wai living in Thailand as their audience and their promotional strategies thus specifically focused on a domestic audience. But something unexpected happened during Lovesick’s broadcast. As the series was screened on Thai television and discussed online by avid sao wai fans, the show itself also made its way online in pirated versions with unofficial subtitles produced by English and Chinese-speaking Thai fans. Due to the work of these “fan-subbers,”109 Lovesick was thus serendipitously discovered by overseas fans and soon large fan groups for the show emerged in Mainland China and the Philippines. Indeed, the series’ popularity led to an unofficial English translation of the novel by a Thai fan and, eventually, licensed e-books of the official novel. It was within the new Anglophone fandom for Lovesick,

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dominated by Filipino fan groups on Facebook, that the term “Thai BL” as a handle for this new popular culture emerged.110 Lovesick sparked a hunger for Thai BL series among fans across East and Southeast Asia, producing a transnational fandom almost overnight to which Thailand’s media companies initially appeared ill-equipped to respond. Over the years, however, these overseas fans have played an increasingly important role in the development of Thai BL, becoming another market with which Thai entertainment companies have engaged as BL series moved from a niche position within the Thai popular culture landscape to become significantly more mainstream.

BL Goes Mainstream: SOTUS (2016) and Love By Chance (2018) Between the conclusion of Lovesick’s broadcast in late October 2015 and the end of 2020, almost 100 BL series had been screened on Thai televisions and related online streaming services.111 In fact, 2019 saw nineteen series broadcast, followed in 2020 by a staggering thirty-five series broadcast. Fans from Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan explained to me during online interviews that 2019 and 2020 was the moment when Thai BL “matured” and thus went mainstream, with 2020 particularly highlighted as a revolutionary moment in the development of this new transnational Asian queer popular culture form. The second half of the 2010s can indeed be conceptualized as a historical moment dominated by increased queer popular cultural production in Thailand. Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, Thailand’s major entertainment companies increasingly coupled with local and foreign investors as well as various national and international corporations to produce series targeting the lucrative sao wai market. One company, GMM Grammy, has played a crucial role in this broader mainstreaming of BL throughout the Thai popular culture landscape. Before commencing a discussion of this company, however, it is important to provide some brief background information concerning the Thai televisual landscape, as the structures and affordances of the kingdom’s broadcast ecosystem are significant when considering the mainstreaming of Thai BL. Thailand’s media landscape is composed of the following terrestrial TV stations: Amarin TV, Channel 3 HD, Channel 7 HD, GMM25, MCOT (previously introduced), ONE HD, Thai PBS (a public broadcaster), TV 5 (owned by the military), and the government public relations station NBT Digital. Each of these stations is governed by strict censorship regulations which impact the airing of sexual content,112 with explicit sexual scenes banned from broadcast (particularly when said scenes deviate from heterosexual norms, which broadcasters will often self-censorship).113 Yet, since the introduction of digital broadcast and streaming services into the kingdom in 2014, these terrestrial TV channels have not only launched their own view-ondemand services, they have also partnered with international streaming services such as LINE TV (Japan/Korea, defunct as of early 2022), iQiyi (China), Netflix (US), Viu (Hong Kong), WeTV (China), and even YouTube to make their shows available to audiences after terrestrial broadcast. Due to the international nature

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of these streaming services, it has become common practice for Thai TV stations to release “uncut” versions of their series onto internet TV due to them operating under a significantly more relaxed form of content regulation. As I will reveal below, streaming services have played a crucial role in the growing popularity of BL series both within and outside Thailand. As briefly mentioned in the Introduction, GMM Grammy (hereafter, GMM) represents one of Thailand’s largest entertainment companies, producing pop music, films, and television shows, managing celebrity talent, developing web content, publishing books and magazines, manufacturing merchandise, and staging large concerts.114 Stating that their mission is “to be a leader of fully integrated entertainment business and to engage with consumers through multi channels [sic],”115 GMM monopolizes popular culture production in Thailand with a selfestimated market share of 70 percent, although their focus has traditionally been pop music production and distribution.116 Owning several terrestrial and satellite television stations (which GMM’s subsidiary GMMTV launched in 2014),117 it is unsurprising that GMM quickly jumped on board the growing popularity of BL series among young Thai women and gay men to incorporate such soap operas into their media empire. This was motivated in part by a recognition that young women especially represented the company’s most prominent consumers.118 Their penetration of this market was further enhanced by partnering with Netflix, YouTube, and LINE TV to stream their programming after their market research identified online television as typical for this core demographic.119 From late 2014 through to early 2016, GMM broadcasted several “omnibus” television series including Room Alone (2014, title originally in English), U-Prince (2014–16, title originally in English), and Senior Secret Love (2014–16, Run Phi Secret Love, “The Senior Student’s Secret Love” in Thai), which were designed as romantic comedies through which a new generation of GMM idol talent could be promoted. While these series principally focused on male and female couples, each one also contained a single male–male couple where rising male idols such as Off Jumpol Adulkittiporn, Gun Attaphan Poonsawas, Tay Tawan Vihokratana, and New Thitipoom Techaapaikhun were introduced to audiences as BL celebrities. Indeed, one of the 2016 installments of Senior Secret Love entitled Puppy Honey broke ground by including Off and Gun as the secondary main couple in the series. My interviews with fans about GMM’s early efforts at producing BL revealed that, among most consumers in Thailand and the Philippines, these early shows were viewed to be of particularly poor quality. Yet fans still tuned in just to watch the BL couples, which GMM recognized by giving popular male–male couples increased screen time as the shows aired. Indeed, some of the celebrity couples which formed at this time—principally OffGun and TayNew—would eventually become central to both GMM’s idol industry specifically and the global fandom for Thai BL media in general. Among sao wai, these couples became known as khu jin (imagined couples), with the term jin representing both an abbreviation of the Pali-Thai expression jintanakan (“imagination” or “fantasy”) and a reference to the final sound in the English word “imagine.”120 Soon the OffGun and TayNew khu jin were appearing across Thailand’s advertising landscape to sell both products

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typically consumed by young women and products produced by the corporations that sponsored GMM’s soap operas. I will explore the formation of GMM’s four most influential khu jin—known to Anglophone fans as the “GMM Royal Couples”—in more depth in Chapter 3. After having experimented with including BL couples within their various omnibus series, GMM produced its first full BL series in 2016. This series—which remains a fan favorite in Thailand, and across the world, even several years after its broadcast121—was SOTUS, The Series (Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng, “The Vicious Hazer and the Freshman” in Thai). As has become an increasingly common pattern in Thailand, SOTUS was based on an online novel written by a sao wai author with the pseudonym Bittersweet.122 In this way, GMM was following the same pattern that MCOT had pioneered when adapting Lovesick, but with one core difference. GMM, as part of a broader strategy to identify and then produce material popular among their core demographic of young women entered into a development partnership with Jamsai Publishing and contributed to the foundation of the Ever Y label introduced above.123 For Prasannam, it was GMM’s engagement with original BL novel publishers which revolutionized the broader BL industry in Thailand and directly contributed to the BL boom of the late 2010s.124 Set in a university rather than a high school, SOTUS tells the story of the freshman Kongpob as he undergoes Thailand’s controversial system of university hazing known as SOTUS (an acronym for Seniority, Order, Tradition, Unity, Spirit) in order to be accepted into the ranks of his university’s Engineering Faculty.125 Kongpob soon comes into conflict with the “head hazer” (phi wak), a third year student named Arthit with whom he develops an antagonistic relationship that is filled with erotic tension. The two men eventually learn that they live opposite each other and develop an unlikely friendship off campus that quickly develops into a romantic relationship after Kongpob successfully leads his fellow freshman through the SOTUS system. The series concludes with Kongpob and Arthit sharing a passionate kiss on the Rama VIII Bridge which crosses Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river in a scene that has become iconic among fans of Thai BL.126 As the camera pans away from the two men, the viewer is informed that the series title was not an acronym for university hazing culture, but instead referred to “Story Of True love between US.” Once again, the cast of the series was selected through an open casting process with Krist Perawat Sangpotirat selected to play the role of Arthit and Singto Prachaya Ruangroj selected to play the role of Kongpob. Even before the official broadcast of SOTUS began, both Krist and Singto actively started promoting the series on their personal social media accounts (principally Instagram) where they would frequently upload photos of themselves in increasingly intimate poses.127 Following the footsteps of other GMM idols such as OffGun and TayNew, Krist and Singto became a new khu jin that fans actively imagined together as a couple even before SOTUS was broadcast, thus partially dislocating this fantasy relationship from the characters Krist and Singto played in the series. Dubbed KristSingto by their growing fanbase, at the conclusion of the first season of SOTUS in early 2017

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the two idols had become break-out stars in Thailand and across Asia. Indeed, the two won a string of acting awards. Most notably, SOTUS and its handsome stars became extremely popular in China—where the series developed an active following online due to the work of fansubbers—eventually winning recognition at China’s V Chart Awards, including winning the “Recommended Artist” category designed to identify rising Asian talent.128 Both Krist and Singto have remained extraordinarily popular among sao wai fans, with a survey by LINE Insights of Thai BL consumers conducted in 2020 identifying that Singto was the third most popular actor and Krist was seventh most popular.129 Perhaps most surprising was the fact that Krist and Singto were also nominated for KAZZ Magazine’s “Couple of the Year” award in 2017, a prize traditionally awarded to heterosexual couples (many of whom were real rather than imagined).130 As the KAZZ Awards nominations and prizes are determined via the votes of the magazine’s readers—most of whom are young women—the fact that KristSingto were nominated for the Best Couple award signaled a growing acceptance of malemale couples among mainstream Thai female consumers. That is to say, it is highly unlikely that sao wai fans of Japanese BL manga were the only women voting for the pair as this subculture was too small to influence public opinion. It must also be noted that GMM mobilized their significant traditional and social media presence to encourage fans of SOTUS to vote for the pair, thrusting this khu jin into the mainstream limelight. Furthermore, Krist and Singto were also profiled by the local Thai-language edition of the UK gay magazine Attitude (owned and distributed by GMM), showing that GMM was also interested in promoting SOTUS and its khu jin idols to Thailand’s gay male market.131 My interviews with fans revealed, however, that not only gay men bought this issue of the magazine, with significant numbers of young women also buying what has become known by fans as the “KristSingto gay magazine.” The fact that GMM promoted SOTUS and its BL stars within a gay magazine serves as an important reminder that the entertainment company not only markets these series to sao wai, but also seeks to engage gay male fans who represent a small but important part of Thailand’s BL fandom. As Krist and Singto rose to the ranks of Thailand’s celebrity elite throughout 2017, GMM commissioned a second season of SOTUS. Dubbed SOTUS S, The Series, this second season focused on Arthit’s working life and was broadcast in late 2017 and early 2018. In an interesting example of the evolving interrelationships between Thai BL series producers and book publishers, Bittersweet was involved in the scripting of SOTUS S and wrote a novel adaption of the series’ story that was released by Ever Y after the broadcast of the second season’s first episode.132 SOTUS S became even more popular than the first season,133 with KristSingto ultimately winning more awards, including KAZZ Magazine’s newly created Best Imagined Couple (khu jin) award in 2018 (which they continued to dominate until 2021).134 Further, GMM eventually made both SOTUS and SOTUS S available on YouTube, Netflix, and China’s Bilibili with official subtitles for international fans, making SOTUS and its stars massively popular outside Thailand (particularly in Mainland China, the Philippines, and Japan). Krist and Singto, like other GMM

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khu jin before them, were soon drawn into Thailand’s advertising landscape, selling everything from bottled tea to cosmetics to wireless internet packages.135 Indeed, the Thai cosmetics company Baby Bright collaborated with GMM to produce a short drama film starring Krist and Singto to sell their new line of facial cleansers to young women across Thailand and the rest of Asia.136 Capitalizing on the breakout success of SOTUS S and the popularity of its stars (including not only Krist and Singto, but also Off, New, and a host of other GMM idol talents), GMM mobilized its concert production arm to stage a series of large fan events across Thailand titled SOTUS S Nation Y Fan Meeting (hereafter, SOTUS S Nation). At these large-scale events, thousands of fans of the series and its khu jin stars could interact with a variety of GMM idols, watching them sing and dance while also reliving iconic scenes from the show’s two seasons. A highlight of the show for many Thai fans who I have interviewed about attending the event were the numerous sweet serenades performed by KristSingto where the khu jin’s intense stares at each other evoked strong experiences of fin for my fan informants. Furthermore, the SOTUS S Nation fan meeting prominently included scene reenactments from both SOTUS and SOTUS S designed to cultivate nostalgic affects among the audience. In fact, in his analysis of the staging of SOTUS S Nation, Prasannam argues that nostalgia is a key component of sao wai culture.137 Prasannam suggests through his analysis that Thai production companies conspicuously draw upon fans’ “collective memories” of BL series during fan events to deepen the sense of intimacy between sao wai and khu jin and thus convert fan affects into explicit spending (such as merchandise sales), which drive these companies’ profits.138 Following the massive success of SOTUS S Nation in Thailand, GMM took Krist and Singto on the road, staging twelve fan meetings across Asia, including in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, and the Philippines. These international fan meetings represented an important opportunity for GMM to gain access to the foreign fans of their stars, many of whom were willing to pay very high prices for tickets to these concerts.139 As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, fan meetings and concerts such as SOTUS S Nation have become central to the global fandom of Thai BL, borrowing production techniques from K-pop concerts to appeal to consumers throughout East and Southeast Asia. Ultimately, GMM has created what I term a “BL Machine”—a production system that I explore in more detail in subsequent chapters—through which they promote their emerging idol talent via BL media, strategically targeting the economically influential young female consumers for whom homoerotic romance represents a powerful fantasy.140 In fact, Thai BL researcher Kwannie Krairit explained to me that the linkages between BL production and GMM have become so strong in the mainstream public’s imagination that GMM has itself almost become a synonym for BL.141 The BL Machine has proved lucrative for GMM, launching a new generation of extremely popular idol stars with transnational appeal that has directly led to increased revenue from advertising, concert attendance, and merchandising.142 It is thus unsurprising that a host of other Thai entertainment

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companies have responded to the success of SOTUS and GMM’s BL Machine by producing their own BL series, most of which were adapted from popular novels written by sao wai authors. For example, Motive Village produced a highly popular drama based on author Chiffon_cake’s novel 2Moons (Duean Kiao Duean, “The Moon Courts the Moon” in Thai) that was broadcast in 2017,143 some of the stars of which eventually formed the boyband SBFIVE who remain popular among fans of Thai BL around the globe.144 Likewise, TV Thunder produced Together With Me (Ork-hak Ma Rak Kap Phom, “When You’re Heartbroken, Come Love Me” in Thai) in 2017, a BL series starring rookie actors Tul Pakorn Thanasrivanitchai and Max Nattapol Diloknawarit who became well-known as a khu jin that would perform highly erotic moments of staged intimacy as well as engage with LGBTQ+ issues at their fan events.145 Jinloe Media Works, a Thai production company financed by Chinese investment firms,146 produced What the Duck, The Series (Rak Laen-ding, “Love Touchdown” in Thai) which was broadcast—in different versions focusing on separate stories—in both Thailand and Mainland China in 2018. Mimicking practices that had proved successful for GMM, these smaller companies thus drew upon BL as a vehicle to promote their new talent and access the lucrative fan market for Thai BL both at home and abroad. Jinloe Media Works and its Chinese financing speak to an important phenomenon underlying the mainstreaming of BL series in Thailand. That is, many of the smaller entertainment companies who produce BL media do so not just for a domestic Thai audience (such as was the case with Lovesick, for instance), but also for audiences in Mainland China where government censorship and media regulations make the production of such media virtually impossible.147 As I have briefly revealed in this chapter and will discuss in more depth in Chapter 5, there is a significant fandom for Thai BL in Mainland China. This attraction to Thai BL has emerged out of a broader Chinese fandom for Thai lakhorn, which became popular via various streaming services and strategic collaborations between Thai and Chinese entertainment companies.148 Chinese companies have come to support the production of Thai BL series in order to take advantage of a more liberal media landscape which can create homoerotic content forbidden in China that these companies can then exclusively sell via dedicated Chinese streaming services.149 While Jinloe Media Works’ What The Duck, The Series represented one of the more visible examples of Thai–Chinese collaboration, the series was not enthusiastically received by Thai and international audiences (partly due to off-screen drama between some of its actors). My conversations with fans in Thailand revealed that there was a concern among some Thai fans that the overt Chinese influence on What the Duck was detrimental to BL’s overall development, particularly as there was a perception that the drama’s Chinese producers lacked familiarity with both the genre’s norms and (Thai) fans’ expectations, thus creating a particularly low-quality drama. It was instead another Chinese-backed production—one where the Chinese entertainment company provided financing but was not directly involved in production—that has played an influential role in both the mainstreaming of

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Thai BL and its global spread. This series is Studio Wabi Sabi’s late 2018 hit Love By Chance, adapted from a series of novels written by MAME, who was introduced above. Love By Chance tells the story of four male–male couples, with the narrative centering the growing romance between the wealthy yet shy Pete, played by Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, and the righteous and down-toearth Ae, played by Perth Tanapon Sukumpantanasan. The two boys’ romance blossoms after Ae saves Pete from his former boyfriend, who threatened to send a video of the two boys making love to Pete’s mother unless Pete gave him an exorbitant amount of money. Other couples include the failed romance between the extraordinarily aloof Tin and Can, a wild member of the soccer team; Tum and Tar, two half-brothers; and Kengkla, a tenacious high school student and Techno, the captain of the university football club. Love By Chance became famous both in Thailand and abroad because it contained numerous “NC scenes”—“Not [for] Children” scenes which focus on heavy petting or sex—between these four couples. Unlike Lovesick and SOTUS where the main couple only kissed once during the whole series, almost every episode contained lengthy kissing scenes. One of Love By Chance’s most endearing legacies for the broader mainstreaming of BL, then, was its opening up a space for sex scenes within BL media culture. These NC scenes quickly became sought after by fans excited to see passionate expressions of male–male love similar to the erotic and even pornographic narratives of several popular Thai BL novels (and K-pop fanfictions). Indeed, the depiction of explicit sex between men in certain episodes of Love By Chance led to delays in the series’ broadcast, revealing that while BL may have been becoming increasingly acceptable there was still resistance to its queer content in some quarters. The series was initially scheduled to be broadcast on MCOT, but the new governing board of the public broadcaster refused to screen the show due to its “questionable morals” (a remarkable aboutface from when the broadcaster had produced Lovesick just four years earlier).150 The producers of Love By Chance instead sold the screening rights for the show to GMM, which broadcasted it on its digital TV channel GMM25 and made it available for streaming in Thailand on LINE TV. Studio Wabi Sabi also chose to upload the series onto YouTube with English-language subtitles, making the show immediately available to foreign fans as the series was broadcast. The explicit nature of the series’ romance scenes, facilitated by various forms of online broadcast, and its easy availability on a mainstream streaming service such as YouTube garnered Love By Chance a massive fandom. As a result of this popularity, Studio Wabi Sabi subsequently produced fan events both in Thailand and overseas throughout early 2019, which ultimately further increased the visibility of BL across East and Southeast Asia.151 Saint, the actor who played Pete, became an overnight sensation and, at the time of writing, is perhaps one of Thailand’s biggest young male idol stars who has gained attention due to his reinvention into an important producer with the founding of his own media production house, Idol Factory, in 2020.

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Thai BL Series Mature: The “Year of BL” and the Transnationalization of the Genre By 2019, GMM had perfected its BL Machine and BL series had become a mainstream fixture of Thailand’s popular culture landscape. In this year alone, GMM released two highly popular BL series—Theory of Love (Thritsadi Jip Thoe, “The Theory of Hitting on You” in Thai), starring OffGun, and Dark Blue Kiss, starring TayNew—based on popular novels released by Ever Y. GMM also staged three large fan events in Thailand and twelve overseas fan meetings across East and Southeast Asia for fans of their prominent khu jin KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew. Other production companies followed suit, producing seventeen BL series in total, most of which were broadcast exclusively online. MAME, the author of Love By Chance even self-produced her own TV series—TharnType, The Series (Kliat Nak Ma Pen Thi Rak Kan Sa Di-di, “The More You Hate Me, The More I’ll Make You Love Me” in Thai), set in the same universe as Love By Chance but with a new cast—that won various industry and popularity awards.152 TharnType followed Love By Chance’s footsteps in focusing on NC scenes between the series’ handsome stars Mew Suppasit Jongcheveevat and Gulf Kanawut Traipipattanapong. Further, MAME’s new production company Me Mind Y pioneered a model of broadcast which became normative for most BL series whereby an uncut version of episodes specifically featuring highly explicit NC scenes would be made available to fans after terrestrial broadcast, but only after paying for access to a streaming service dedicated to airing these uncut episodes. Fans in Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan explained to me during interviews that 2019 represented the year when Thai BL thematically “matured,” with series beginning to increasingly respond to debates concerning the rights of sexual minority communities and not, as one gay male fan in the Philippines put it, “just playing girls’ fantasies of pretty boys in love.” For example, the plot of GMM’s Dark Blue Kiss prominently focused on whether or not the character of Kao should come out to his mother, with Pete and Kao often debating what it means to live as a gay couple in a homophobic society. Notably, the couple anxiously discussed the challenges faced by same-sex desiring men who wish to have their relationship accepted within a society where legal mechanisms of recognition such as marriage are denied. As I will discuss in more detail in the following chapter, 2019 also represented a year which saw the production of a handful of BL series which critically reflected on the genre’s historical development and sought to critique its emerging generic tropes. By the end of December 2019, when TayNew’s passionate fans gathered in a theater in downtown Bangkok to celebrate the conclusion of Dark Blue Kiss, Thai BL had become a thoroughly mainstream phenomenon. Further, BL fans had become powerful cultural actors who were actively shaping the production of queer popular culture within Thailand’s heretofore heteronormative media landscape through their fandom. But, as I alluded in the Introduction, if 2019 represents the year in which Thai BL matured, 2020 is the year in which its global popularity exploded to heights that not even the marketing department of GMM had predicted. Announced at

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the end of 2019 as part of GMM’s annual showcase of their forthcoming series,153 2gether, The Series—based on a novel by the tremendously popular author Jittirain, the same author of the source text for Theory of Love—began broadcasting in February 2020. Starring Bright Vachirawit Chiva-aree and the rookie actor Win Metawin Opas-iamkajorn, by April 2, 2020, 2gether was attracting millions of streams on both LINE TV and YouTube due to engagement from fans around Thailand and the world who had stumbled upon the series while at home during COVID lockdown.154 This process of serendipitous discovery was particularly aided by 2gether’s domination of social media, with hashtags relating to the series trending number one worldwide throughout the show’s broadcast.155 At the time of writing, 2gether remains the most streamed Thai BL series in history and its stars Bright and Win represent the two most popular actors active within the genre.156 Indeed, despite only being active in the Thai BL industry for a few short months, BrightWin emerged as a khu jin to rival the popularity of KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew and quickly joined the ranks of GMM’s influential Royal Couples. The couple’s popularity was so great that a sequel to 2gether, entitled Still 2gether, was produced and broadcast in August, only two months after the first series concluded airing. The expanding social media success of 2gether not only consolidated transnational fandoms that had emerged in spaces such as the Philippines and China, but also facilitated Thai BL’s penetration into new media markets. Most notably, the global popularity of 2gether attracted heavy attention in Japan, where Bright and Win launched a veritable Thai BL boom among young women and gay men attracted to these handsome Thai stars. I explore this transnational Thai BL fandom in more depth in Chapters 5 and 6. On the back of the global 2gether boom, GMM embarked on an aggressive transnational expansion policy, signing deals with ABS-CBN in the Philippines and TV Asahi in Japan to facilitate local broadcasts of not only 2gether, but other popular Thai BL series such as SOTUS and Dark Blue Kiss. Further, motivated in part by the fact that large concerts and fan events could not be hosted due to COVID-19 restrictions on global travel and social gatherings, GMM launched a series of virtual fan meetings with their four Royal Couples. These virtual concerts strategically targeted not only fans in Thailand, but also fans in China, Japan, the Philippines, South Asia, and even Latin America and represented the culmination of GMM’s long investment into developing BL content to become a global “leader of fully integrated entertainment business [sic].”157 As the history of Japanese BL manga fandom which opens this chapter reveals, women in Thailand are denied sexual agency through Thai society’s firm commitment to heteropatriarchy. Women are often disenfranchised media consumers, with most Thai popular culture presenting narratives that are complicit in women’s marginalization through the production of plots that reinforce their objectification and disempowerment.158 Both Japanese BL manga and Thai BL series provide women an opportunity to assert their sexual agency, drawing upon fantasies of queer romance as a site to understand and celebrate the beauty of men more broadly and sexual attraction for the khu jin idols that sit at the heart of BL fandom specifically. While there is no denying that Thai entertainment companies

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have begun producing BL series as a method of catering to young women’s desires and hence drawing upon their significant consumption practices for the purposes of economic accumulation, this does not negate the fact that sao wai fans of BL have become empowered. It would be problematic to dismiss these fans as “dupes” who are simply being manipulated by Thai cultural industries as to do so is to also reject their agency. As Kwon argues in relation to female fans of gay romance in South Korea, the very fact that women’s fantasies for homoeroticism have become central to Korean cultural production subverts and destabilizes the social structures that have traditionally excluded women from active participation within the culture industries.159 A clear indication that Thai female fans have increased agency is the fact that the BL series introduced in this chapter are adapted from novels written by the sao wai themselves. Sao wai have thus (perhaps unintentionally) deployed their sexual desires to radically queer Thailand’s popular culture landscape. The history of the emergence of Thai BL is thus also a history of the transformation of young women into the central market for Thai media, with entertainment production companies increasingly responding to the sexual fantasies of women rather than merely producing content that seeks to discipline them into following mainstream heteropatriarchal values,160 as was once the case. The most obvious impact of the development of BL series is that it has normalized the depiction of romance between handsome young men across the Thai media landscape. Whereas a kiss between men was shocking when first depicted in 2007 within the mainstream film Love of Siam, it has now become incredibly commonplace for acts of homoerotic intimacy to be depicted not only in TV series but also within advertising (a topic I discuss in more depth in Chapter 3). Depictions of queer sexuality throughout Thai popular culture no longer exclusively reinforce heteronormative assumptions of same-sex desire as a mark of sexual or gender deviance, with cisgendered male characters representing the norm in BL series. Indeed, one of the biggest queer impacts of the mainstreaming of series such as Lovesick, SOTUS, and Love By Chance has thus been the radical shift in the representational politics of same-sex desiring people across Thai popular media. Representations of queer sexuality are no longer solely restricted to the largely pejorative figures of the kathoey and tut as had been the case throughout the majority of Thailand’s twentieth-century history.161 The emergence of BL series and their khu jin stars has provided queer visibility that many gay male fans I interviewed during my visit to Bangkok in 2019 viewed as positive and affirming. But this positive visibility is not limited to Thailand. Due to the global spread of Thai BL media, same-sex desiring men across East and Southeast Asia are increasingly turning to Thai popular culture as a space to celebrate and affirm male–male romance, as I will reveal in more detail in Chapter 5. While it is certainly the case that GMM’s BL Machine and its imitators specifically sought to draw in a young female audience, Thai BL series have also become important to sexual minority communities. Gay male fans with whom I have conversed about their passionate consumption of BL series have revealed that they feel empowered through their re-appropriation of these young women’s texts, using them as a resource to both learn about same-sex desire and combat their

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social disenfranchisement. Once again paralleling a similar process which Kwon has identified in South Korea162—as well as a phenomenon that I have encountered among young gay men in Japan163—the mainstreaming of homoerotic texts for heterosexual women has allowed gay men access to fantasies of romance that heteronormative societies such as Thailand have historically denied them.164 Although BL media is highly commercialized, this does not negate its queer potentials as a space from which to challenge the heteronormative status quo. This is perhaps most obvious when considering the increasingly influential and publicly prominent role that LGBTQ+ creatives have been playing in the production and directing of Thai BL series since the mainstreaming of the genre in 2019. Whereas series such as Lovesick and SOTUS were mostly developed and directed by heterosexual men and women, Love By Chance was notable for being produced and directed by the openly gay man New Siwaj Sawatmaneekul. Furthermore, GMM’s BL offerings in 2019 Theory of Love and Dark Blue Kiss—both of which conspicuously included reflections on LGBTQ+ politics and spoke to the lived experiences faced by gay men in Thailand—were respectively directed by X Nattaphong Mongkolsawas and Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol, gay male creatives. One of the distinctive features of the Thai BL industry when compared to that of other markets is thus the active role that directors from the LGBTQ+ community play in shaping the adaptions of Thai BL novels predominantly written by heterosexual women into series (as all of the abovementioned directors also received script-writing credits). While most of these transformations have occurred in 2021 and 2022, the series and khu jin stars of which sit outside the scope of this book, BL is increasingly becoming positioned by (some) gay creatives as a space to directly advocate for LGBTQ+ political issues, a cause in which many fans and stars alike passionately engage. I discuss the politicization of Thai BL celebrity and fandom in more depth in Chapter 3. While entertainment industries such as GMM that have helped normalize Thai BL series within the Thai media landscape are most certainly not in the business of producing revolution or queer emancipation, this does not mean their texts cannot be considered radical. Within the Thai context, where affirming depictions of male–male love have been so rare, BL has injected a new representational politics of gender and sexuality that has transformed Thai popular culture. In the following chapter, I explore how this transformative representational politics ultimately derives from the adaption of Japanese BL manga narrative and character tropes to the Thai media landscape.

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Chapter 2 A DA P T I N G J A PA N E SE B L : C O N ST RU C T I N G T HA I F A N S , M A I N ST R E A M I N G Q U E E R R OM A N C E

“What did he do to you … and why did he put his face too close to you like that?” So exclaims the visibly jealous Ae in the seventh episode of 2018’s Love By Chance after he had caught Pete, the object of his confused affections, in a somewhat compromising position with the aloof rich kid Tin. Having dragged Pete into a nearby locker room, Ae aggressively pushes Pete against a wall of lockers and slams his hand next to Pete’s face, caging the slighter boy in with his body, as shown in Figure 4. Ae breaks down with emotion, desperately commanding Pete to “never let anyone get as close to you as I do” before finally asking “will you be my boyfriend?” After sharing a passionate kiss, Ae roughly strips off Pete’s tie and shirt and once again slams him into the wall as the scene ends with the implication that the two boys have sex for the first time (see Figure 5). Screened at the very mid-point of Love By Chance’s broadcast, this locker room scene represents the moment when the sexual tension between Pete and Ae reaches its height and the narrative progresses beyond a “will they or won’t they” scenario to one focused on the two boys’ lives as a committed couple. Unsurprisingly, this is a scene that provoked intense experiences of fin among Thai fans and has become extremely popular within the global fandom for Thai BL media. The scene even won the “Best Kissing Scene” at Thailand’s 2018 LINE TV Awards. The locker room scene depicted in Figures 4 and 5 is, however, not just interesting due to its viral success or its role in propelling the queer narrative of Love By Chance. It is also useful to think through how this scene unfolds cinematographically, as doing so reveals how the representational and narrative tropes of Japanese manga remain fundamental to how Thai BL series depict male– male romance. To the eyes of consumers well-versed in the world of Japan’s shōjo manga (girls’ comics)—including some of the Thai fans I interviewed—the moment when Ae slammed his hand against the lockers to cage in Pete was an obvious deployment of a Japanese visual trope known as kabe-don (literally “slam against the wall”). Defined by Okada Shōhei as a representational strategy “emerging from (women’s) romance manga … designed to produce a feeling of longing (akogare) among girls,” kabe-don is a trope that had become popular in the mid-2010s throughout Japan.1 By the time Love By Chance had begun airing in Thailand, kabe-don had been incorporated into Japanese BL manga and had even become

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Figure 4  Pete (left) caged in by Ae (right) in Episode 7 of Love By Chance. Photo credit Studio Wabi Sabi.2

Figure 5  Pete (left) and Ae (right) make out in Episode 7 of Love By Chance. Photo credit Studio Wabi Sabi.3

popular on the social media service TikTok where male–male Japanese couples playfully performed kabe-don to entice members of Japan’s BL fandom—known as fujoshi (rotten women) in Japanese—to follow their accounts.4 The framing of the scene depicted in Figures 4 and 5 also mimics the typical construction of erotic scenes in Japanese BL manga, where the active seme (“attacker”) dominates the comic frame as they “lead” a passive uke (“receiver”) into a romantic or sexual encounter.5 Within this scene, the sexual tension between Ae and Pete is thus

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expressed via the typical framing utilized in Japanese BL manga. The logics of Japanese BL are therefore deployed to present a male–male romance that is queer within the context of Thailand’s media landscape, subsequently producing fin among the heterosexual women and gay men who represent the typical fans of Thai BL media. This chapter interrogates how Thai BL series adapt, deploy, and even challenge the ōdō or “noble formula” of narrative tropes and stereotypical characterizations that sit at the heart of Japanese BL texts to produce queer romance. While this ōdō was briefly discussed in the Introduction, I provide more detail concerning its particular narrative conventions below. Building upon the historical analyses from Chapter 1, the examination of the adaptation of Japanese BL which I present in this chapter expands prior work within the field of Japanese cultural studies to interrogate how Japanese queer popular culture is “glocalized” via its transnationalization to produce original meanings and generic forms within new cultural contexts.6 In this chapter, I argue that as Thai BL series developed, they increasingly introduced more tropes from Japanese BL manga since Thai audiences gained the necessary literacies required to make sense of them. Further, as BL “matured” from 2019 onwards, I reveal that a small number of series emerged that sought to challenge and critique both the hetero-patriarchal ideologies underpinning Thai popular culture as well as the logics of the Japanese BL ōdō. The historical narrative that I present below thus explores how Thai BL series educate their viewers about how to appreciate homoerotic romance through the adaptation of Japanese BL narratives to the Thai popular culture landscape. Similar to the previous chapter, I place an emphasis on revealing the queer potentials of this developmental history. To do this, I draw upon a close reading of four Thai BL series; Lovesick (2014), SOTUS (2016), Love By Chance (2018), and The Effect (2019). Except for The Effect (The Effect Lok Orn Rai, “The Effects of an Evil World” in Thai), each of these series was introduced in the previous chapter as central to the historical development of Thai BL media. It is for this reason that I have selected them for my analysis. I argue below that Lovesick was instrumental to introducing BL narrative tropes into the Thai media landscape but reveal how the queer potentials of the ōdō were somewhat compromised through the process of its adaptation. That said, I also elucidate how Lovesick educated Thai mainstream viewers about how to appreciate homoeroticism through its innovative cinematography. Following Lovesick, I reveal that subsequent series such as SOTUS and Love By Chance emerged within an environment where mainstream viewers already understood some of the narrative frameworks central to Japanese BL, thus leading to the more sophisticated deployment of specialized elements from the ōdō. I conclude by examining how The Effect challenged BL tropes through both its narrative and its characterization of the principal male–male couple. Throughout, I specifically focus on analyzing these four series’ narratives and cinematographic techniques, recognizing that there is also a need to explore other aspects of these texts, including their dialogue, in subsequent scholarship. Also, when relevant, I draw upon my interviews with Thai BL fans to illustrate how they gained knowledge concerning the ōdō.

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Walking the “Noble Path”: The Seme–Uke Rule and the Narrative Production of Affect Historically emerging from Japan’s shōjo manga—“girls’ comics” marketed to teenage and young adult audiences that are produced to respond to stereotypical understandings of “what young [Japanese] girls want”7—BL manga are, at heart, romance stories which focus on “human relationships” (ningen kankei).8 According to manga critic Nishimura Mari, the standard “default narrative template” or ōdō for BL manga represents a “Cinderella story” wherein a relatively powerless protagonist is “swept off his feet” by a powerful and attractive male lover.9 Nishimura argues persuasively that, as romance fiction for young women, Japan’s BL manga mimic the typical narratives found within the famous Harlequin paperback novels that remain representative of classic Western romance fiction.10 Pamela Regis identifies this classic romance narrative as follows: a heroine and hero meet, they experience a mutual attraction, they identify a “barrier” to their coupling, they express their love to each other, they find a means to overcome the barrier to their relationship, they become betrothed, and then get married.11 These plotlines are highly heteronormative, traditionally centering the romantic longing of heterosexual female protagonists who yearn to fulfill their roles as devoted wives and mothers.12 As sociologist Eva Illouz has famously argued, these heteronormative novels form part of a broader “romanticization of commodities” and “commodification of romance” that has produced a “romantic utopia” within Western society.13 In many ways, Thailand’s lakhorn soap operas introduced in previous chapters have traditionally produced similar heteronormative logics and commodification processes. Where Japanese BL manga differ from classic Western romance fiction and Thai lakhorn is, of course, in their focus on male–male romantic and erotic relationships as well as their often-strong focus on highly explicit (and sometimes even sadistic) sex.14 This is particularly true within the version of the genre which emerged in the late 1990s termed “hard BL” that sociologist Mori Naoko suggests represents “pornography for women.”15 While the ōdō does privilege romantic development and a happy resolution for its male protagonists, this is not usually formalized through structures such as marriage or childbirth like in the heterosexual romance fiction typified by Harlequin romance.16 Despite this, Nishimura suggests it is appropriate to consider the male protagonist of BL manga as representing a “heroine character” (hiroin kyara) and the man with whom they fall in love as an “alpha man hero character” (arufaman hīrō kyara) since they broadly conform to the narrative roles of classic Western romance fiction.17 As I will reveal in more depth below, this narrative gendering of the characters in Japanese BL manga is an important element of the ōdō, speaking to how authors deploy stereotypical character archetypes in the development of their manga. Although BL focuses on romance between men, the relationships which these manga model tend to mirror heterosexual relationships, a point which has been criticized by Japanese gay activists in the past.18 The Japanese BL ōdō focuses specifically on the experiences of a character archetype termed the bishōnen or “beautiful male youth.” It is therefore more

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accurate to define Japanese BL as a genre which depicts the romance between bishōnen, “soft” and somewhat “androgynous” boys who some critics have argued represent a gender-neutral stand-in for the genre’s female readers.19 One of the cornerstones of the ōdō is its highly homosocial world replete with these handsome bishōnen.20 The homosocial focus of the ōdō derives from BL manga’s history, with seminal works written in the 1970s such as Takemiya Keiko’s Kaze to Ki no Uta (A Song of the Wind and Trees) and Hagio Moto’s Tōma no Shinzō (Heart of Thomas) often set in male boarding schools and other such homosocial spaces.21 Within classic BL manga, women are only depicted rarely and often in less than positive ways, with the character of the female antagonist being exceedingly common as a barrier that disrupts the male couple’s burgeoning romance.22 When a female character is depicted positively, they typically play an influential role in supporting the development of the narrative’s central romance.23 In many BL manga, female supporting characters are often depicted as fujoshi fans of BL manga themselves, providing readers a certain level of metatextual humor as well as a recognizable point of reference with whom they can directly identify. The homosocial world of BL manga is crucial to the development of male–male romance, as it is often the absence of women that propels men to enter relationships with each other. Unlike gay romance fiction and erotica—including Japan’s own tradition of comics written for and by gay men24—the male characters in BL manga thus do not typically identify with their same-sex attraction, eschewing identifying as “gay” to instead express a spiritual bond where they love each other despite their gender.25 This is another element of the ōdō that has been critiqued as representative of the genre’s supposed homophobia,26 although recent years have seen the emergence of a number of Japanese BL manga where at least one character explicitly identifies as gay.27 The ōdō strictly applies what is known as the “seme–uke rule” where the male couple are assigned stereotypical character traits and narrative roles,28 with a BL manga author’s ability to manipulate or “play” (asobu) with these two archetypes representing an important source of enjoyment for fans of the genre.29 While romance is important to the ōdō, the seme–uke rule is absolutely fundamental as there can be no narrative if there is no seme–uke pair. The typical Japanese BL narrative contains an uke (receiver) protagonist who falls in love with a handsome and powerful seme (attacker), often against their will. Nishimura argues that the ōdō principally focuses on the power imbalance between the uke protagonist (who represents a “heroine character”) and their seme lover (who represents a typical hero from classic romance fiction).30 This power imbalance is signaled in classic BL manga in fairly set ways and it is rare for BL manga authors to deviate from these narrative and characterization strategies. Firstly, the seme is typically depicted as taller, older, and considerably stronger than the uke, who is likewise presented as shorter, younger, and weaker.31 The seme is also regularly characterized as reserved and stoic in public,32 but with a strong and uncontrollable sexual desire that is awakened by the innocence of the uke behind closed doors.33 Often, the seme is presented as possessing considerably more economic or cultural capital than the uke which is usually conveyed through their occupation.34 Like the “alpha man heroes” of classic romance fiction, seme commonly work as doctors, lawyers,

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teachers, policemen, wealthy tycoons, or may even represent royalty or yakuza bosses.35 On the other hand, uke are normally lacking in economic capital and may even initially enter a relationship with a seme due to their need for economic rather than emotional support.36 At its core, the characterization of the central male couple via the seme–uke rule is about who is active and who is passive, both in narrative terms and in terms of each character’s sexual role.37 While the uke may be the typical protagonist within the ōdō, they are a passive one who often reacts to the seme’s advances rather than actively and consciously pursuing them.38 Likewise, the seme is both active sexually—not only representing the man who takes the penetrating role in sex but also representing the character who initiates sex acts (and not always with the uke’s full consent)39—and active narratively in that most critical moments in a BL manga’s story revolve around the actions of the seme.40 This active–passive dichotomy which sits at the heart of the seme–uke rule also speaks to how Japanese gender and sexual ideologies are mapped onto BL manga.41 Within Japanese society, sexuality is commonly understood as a rigid heteronormative duality where what queer theorist Fushimi Noriaki terms “the male role” is linked to activity and “the female role” is linked to passivity.42 Within this “hetero system,” the seme is understood as an active “male role” replete with desirable masculinity whereas the uke represents a passive “female role” who is cute and effeminate.43 Thus, while both of the men who make up the principal male romantic couple within BL manga represent relatively “soft” bishōnen in aesthetic terms, the seme performs a masculinity that is remarkably hegemonic.44 The seme is therefore positioned within the ōdō as an ideal Japanese man who is stoic, powerful, and sexually voracious, whereas the uke is characterized as emotional, weak, and sexually innocent.45 For this reason, although the ōdō certainly challenges heteronormativity through its focus on romance between men, it has been argued by some Japanese gay activists that Japanese BL texts ideologically resuscitate patriarchal understandings of sexuality tied to Japan’s so-called hetero system.46 The characterization of the uke especially deploys stereotypical and patriarchal understandings of virginal innocence that are common within shōjo manga, a genre where both publishing houses and authors tend to work together to consciously affirm conservative conceptualizations of femininity.47 As I will reveal below, many Thai BL series explicitly maintain these logics from the ōdō because they also match the heteronormative conceptualizations of sexuality that circulate throughout the Thai media landscape and are thus legible to their audiences. But recent years have seen challenges to the ōdō emerge, and many female fans of BL manga in Japan and overseas—including in Thailand—have come to prefer works that push the limits of the ōdō.48 Within these new works which manga theorist Mizoguchi Akiko terms “the evolutionary form” (shinka-kei) of BL, narratives have become more political in their thematic content.49 While the “seme–uke rule” is not abandoned within these new works, the rigid positioning of the seme as hegemonically masculine and the uke as innocent and effeminate has shifted.50 For instance, the introduction of the hetare seme (“shitty attacker”) and the yancha uke (“naughty receiver”) within “evolutionary form” BL flips the power

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imbalance typically found within the classic ōdō.51 Within this new narrative framing, the uke is presented as sexually voracious and “slutty” whereas the seme is often lacking in sexual skill or experience, being brought into the world of male– male romance and sex through the machinations of the yancha uke.52 Although the uke still remains the penetrated partner, their sexual appetite and active role in pushing forward the narrative aligns them more formally with the “male role” in the “hetero system,” challenging the idea that sexual passivity is indicative of effeminacy or sexual innocence.53 Some manga have even emerged that challenge the strict categorization of men into seme and uke, with new Japanese BL works also introducing the archetype of the riba, a man who can switch their sexual position depending on whether they are coupling with a seme or an uke.54 For fans of BL manga in Japan and around the world, the principal pleasure of reading such homoerotic texts derives from their deep familiarity with the literacies central to the ōdō. Literary theorist Aoyama Tomoko suggests that a young woman’s reading of BL manga and their recognition of the ōdo leads them to experience jouissance, a strong sense of emotional satisfaction that borders on the sexual.55 Since the ōdō is highly formulaic, its patterns are easily identifiable by fans of the genre.56 Instances of intimacy depicted between the uke and seme—whether it is a lingering gaze, a loving embrace, a passionate kiss, or even a violent sexual encounter such as rape—produce an affective experience among fans of BL manga known as mōsō (“delusion” or “madness”).57 Patrick Galbraith’s interviews with fujoshi fans of BL manga in Japan revealed that this experience of delusion was fundamental to the pleasures of consuming homoerotic texts, with many women explaining to him that they delight in losing themselves in the supposed “pure fantasy” of male–male romance.58 As part of their passionate fandom for BL manga, these women often participate in moe-banashi, an affective practice where fujoshi fans debate the merits of particular couplings of male characters.59 Moe-banashi is a playful practice that revolves around debating which characters are likely to be uke and seme, based in the affective attachment to fictional characters known as moe introduced in the previous chapter.60 The ōdō ultimately functions to produce the affective experiences of both moe and mōsō, with the reading of BL manga the method through which fans learn to adopt these specific literacy practices. In the following sections, I will detail how Lovesick adapted these logics to the Thai media landscape and created similar affective reading practices among young Thai female fans, producing the emotion of fin introduced in the previous chapter.

Adapting the Ōdō to Thai TV: Lovesick, Wavering Queerness, and Heteronormativity As I discussed in the previous chapter, Lovesick represented the very first series broadcast on Thai television conspicuously adapted from a Thai BL novel and thus played a crucial role in introducing and mainstreaming gay romance to the Thai popular culture landscape. While the love story between Phun and Noh is remarkably queer within the context of Thailand’s heretofore heteropatriarchal

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media landscape, the narrative structures of Lovesick ultimately neglect the homosocial focus of Japanese BL manga and its seme–uke rule to conform to the typical heteronormative narrative conventions of lakhorn. The focus of the narrative, I demonstrate below, “wavers” between a queer romance and numerous heterosexual subplots which compartmentalize Lovesick’s queer intervention within romantic frameworks that are logical to a mainstream Thai audience. I argue below that this narrative “wavering” is central to the glocalization of the ōdō to the Thai mediascape, although I note that the original Thai BL novel on which this series is based was broadly deployed the norms of the ōdō. Further, in presenting a detailed discussion of the two male leads’ characterizations within the series, I reveal how their status as phu-chai (cisgendered men) is reinforced through their juxtaposition with characters aligning to previous representational frameworks of male same-sex desire such as the tut and kathoey. Narratively speaking, it must be acknowledged that Lovesick does challenge some—but not all—of the typical heteronormative narrative structures of lakhorn since its central narrative appears to strongly conform to the homosocial conventions of the ōdō. This is particularly true of episodes 2 through 5, and episodes 10 and 11, which almost exclusively focus on Noh and Phun’s relationship. Indeed, the original Thai BL novel from which the series is adapted is remarkably homosocial, with women only existing within the plot to facilitate the development of the central homoerotic relationship between Noh and Phun as is consistent with the ōdō. Furthermore, the novel specifically explores the relationship via Noh’s firstperson narration, explicitly depicting his growing romantic feelings for Phun via his internal monologue to allow readers access to both his emotional development and blossoming sexual attraction for the other boy. Yet the series differs since its narrative wavers, with episode 1 and episodes 6 through 9 instead predominantly focusing on heterosexual romantic subplots between minor female and male characters unique to the series. One example is the relationship between Jeed, a young transfer student to Aim and Yuri’s convent school, and Khom, a rising star of the swim-team of the all-boys academy attended by Noh and Phun. Furthermore, latter episodes of Lovesick place a strong emphasis on the relationship between Noh and Yuri. While this relationship was also explored within the original novel, the series lacks the source text’s reflections on Noh’s growing affection for Phun and his jealousy over the other boy’s continuing relationship with Aim. The wavering focus of Lovesick and its privileging of the myriad heterosexual subplots throughout the middle of the series’ broadcast seek to make the Japanese BL elements legible to a Thai consumer who is unaware of the generic norms of the ōdō and for whom romance between two men may initially seem strange or discomforting. The addition of the minor heterosexual subplots aligns the first season of Lovesick with the heteronormative expectations of a typical Thai television viewer who expects to see romance between high school boys and girls. This is an explicit example of how Japanese BL has been glocalized to the narrative conventions of lakhorn, adapted to match the cultural expectations of the receiving culture of Thailand.61 Interestingly, this narrative approach also reflects the promotional strategies surrounding the release of Love of Siam in 2007 where

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the film’s trailer and posters also focused on minor heterosexual subplots as a deliberate attempt to reach out to audiences unfamiliar with male–male romance.62 This wavering focus on heterosexual subplots may thus represent a common tactic utilized by production companies interested in depicting gay romance to introduce queer narratives into the Thai mediascape. Of course, this strategy was abandoned after Thai BL became recognizable and mainstreamed subsequent to Lovesick’s broadcast. One of the most conspicuous narrative absences within Lovesick is its explicit lack of the seme–uke rule. While the novel clearly specifies through actual sex scenes that Noh represents the uke, within the televisual adaptation it is not immediately clear which character is intended to be read as seme and which as uke, although one could postulate that Phun’s status as the initiator of the relationship identifies him as a potential seme. The series instead focuses on the two male protagonists’ alignment with the stereotypical conventions of typical phra-ek: authority over women, wealth and style, and commitment to monogamy and familialism.63 The lack of explicit references to sexual intercourse—deriving from MCOT’s alignment with Thai censorship due to its status as a public broadcaster—within the series further complicates which of Lovesick’s male leads is the seme and which the uke, since a character’s sexual role is central to the “seme–uke rule.” In fact, the couple never kiss on screen which makes it hard for a viewer familiar with the ōdō to evaluate who would even initiate a sexual interaction. It is not only the wavering focus of Lovesick’s narrative that glocalizes Japanese BL to the heteronormative narrative conventions of Thai lakhorn soap operas, but it is also the characterization of the two protagonists as phra-ek and normative phu-chai. In many ways, the fact that Noh and Phun are consistently characterized as cisgendered and heterosexual men who happen to fall in love with each other represents a strategic deployment of a narrative norm of the ōdō, since even within Japanese BL manga the protagonists rarely identify as gay.64 This characterization was also present in the original novel on which the series is based, demonstrating that Lovesick’s production team was willing to maintain certain aspects of the source text without adaptation if it was strategic to do so. Noh and Phun’s characterization as phu-chai is achieved through three principal methods; the characters are introduced in episode one via their heterosexual relationships; they are juxtaposed with minor characters who conform to the stereotypes surrounding kathoey and tut; and the cast interviews in the twelfth episode emphasize the actors’ heterosexuality. Watching the very first episode of Lovesick, one might be surprised to later learn that the series’ central narrative will be a romance between Noh and Phun. Episode 1 represents a classic example of the series’ wavering narrative focus since the episode chiefly depicts the events surrounding Aim’s birthday party and specifically focuses on the minor (female) character of Jeed. The first shots of the male protagonists show Phun dancing with Aim and Yuri whispering into Noh’s ear, firmly establishing their heterosexuality as desired by both attractive young women. The scene then jumps to a speech from one young woman congratulating Aim on her birthday, stating that she “hopes Aim and Phun will love each other for

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a very long time … I hope you have tons of kids and grandkids!”65 Phun and Aim thus appear to be introduced similarly to a typical phra-ek and nang-ek, with the heteronormative life-course of their relationship being firmly established.66 After a lengthy interlude concerning the romantic entanglements of Jeed, the episode returns its focus to the affectionate relationships between Phun and Aim and Noh and Yuri. Yuri is specifically depicted as jealous of Aim’s relationship with Phun and attempts to deepen her relationship with Noh. It is only in the episode’s final two minutes, after the financial problems of the music club are introduced, that there is any hint of a queer relationship between the male leads when Phun requests Noh pretend to be his boyfriend. Noh’s response is to disgustedly tell Phun “to go fuck yourself,”67 firmly establishing him as heterosexual. Lovesick’s first episode therefore only obliquely touches on the queer narrative of the series and instead focuses on establishing the two protagonists as phu-chai. Of course, Noh and Phun can only be understood as heteronormative phu-chai if there are other characters within the series who do not embody this subject positioning with whom they can be contrasted. Like many lakhorn, Lovesick also has several kathoey and tut characters who exist for the purposes of comic relief and who, I argue, are also implicitly deployed to further cement the heteronormative characterization of the male leads. Episode 1 briefly introduces the “Angel Gang,” a collective of minor characters who attend Phun and Noh’s all-boys school and who quite conspicuously conform to the stereotypes of kathoey and tut. The boys in the Angel Gang spend most of their screen time gossiping over who is the most attractive boy on campus, applying make-up, practicing to join the cheer squad, and acting as the “screaming clowns” that Serhat Ünaldi identified as the typical representation of queer characters in Thai popular media.68 In episode 3, the Angel Gang viciously gossip about “our Noh” and “our Phun,” identifying their attraction to these two normative phu-chai and dismissing any possibility that they would be together.69 That Lovesick contains such stereotypical depictions of queer sexuality strongly implies that Phun and Noh are meant to be read as similar to the rest of the minor male characters in the series, all of whom are heterosexual phu-chai. Furthermore, juxtaposing the central male–male romantic relationship of Lovesick within the representational norms of Thai popular culture also marks Phun and Noh’s relationship as an exceptional one between two phu-chai, thus potentially mitigating the danger of pleasurably viewing their relationship. The final episode ends with Noh deciding not to continue his fake relationship with Phun, leading to a wistful break-up scene and a promise from the director that the story will continue positively in the following season. After this scene, and a short flashback vignette of Noh and Phun’s relationship, the final twenty minutes of the episode are dedicated to a short documentary entitled “The Journey of Lovesick, The Series” containing interviews with the young cast.70 These final interviews seek to reinforce the heterosexual status of the cast and focus upon the difficulties in filming supposedly scandalous content. The director explicitly acknowledges at the beginning of the short documentary that many of the minor female characters’ storylines were created to ground the series in so-called normal romance. The extended interview with Captain and White, the stars of the series,

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especially emphasize their initial discomfort performing gay roles. For instance, White states that when he attended the open casting he was “afraid of … you know” to which the director/interviewer asks, “afraid of getting [sexually] attacked?” to imply that White was afraid to be considered same-sex attracted.71 This implication is later made explicit when the interviewer teases Captain about his prominent lisp and how it makes him sound girly, asking “so basically you’re 100% straight?” Captain immediately responds “Yes, 100%” while flexing his arms above his head in a stereotypical macho pose, which is followed by White laughing and saying, “you don’t even need to ask me!”72 In emphasizing the heterosexual status of the lead actors, their characters are placed into a realm of fantasy that renders them less threatening to the heteronormative gendered order of Thai society. Ultimately, these interviews compartmentalize Lovesick’s queerness, glocalizing the series to the Thai mediascape. The first season of Lovesick, however, represents only the beginning of the development of Thai BL series. The second season of Lovesick differs greatly from the first, mostly abandoning the wavering narrative focus between queer and heterosexual romance in favor of explicitly and exclusively focusing on relationships between beautiful male youths. The second season of Lovesick scraps many of the heterosexual subplots and introduces four new romantic subplots between male characters to respond to fans’ desires for more male–male couples.73 There is also some attempt to frame the characters via the seme–uke rule, and in one episode a joke is made about Phun and Noh’s sex life that reveals to a savvy viewer that Noh indeed does take the more passive role in the couple’s relationship, aligning with what in a Japanese BL manga context would be termed the uke. The world of Lovesick quickly becomes almost entirely homosocial, mimicking Japanese BL manga by reducing female characters to minor bit parts who only serve to push forward romantic relationships between men. Aim also becomes a remarkably less sympathetic character in season two, acting as a typical nang-rai or “evil woman” who seeks to disrupt Noh and Phun’s relationship. Within the space of one year, Lovesick’s producers were more willing to explicitly deploy the logics of the ōdō, abandoning the tactics utilized in the first season to lessen its queer impacts on Thailand’s heteronormative media landscape. That said, Ying-Kit Chan argues in his analysis of the series that Lovesick’s second season maintains a wavering focus on queerness, noting how Phun and Noh announce their relationship to Phun’s father in the show’s finale in such a way as to leave it ambiguous whether Phun’s father truly understands that the two boys are dating.74

Pang as Sao Wai, Viewer as Sao Wai: Modeling Queer Affective Reading in Lovesick In many ways, the above discussion reveals that Japanese BL manga conventions had been glocalized to such an extent within the first season of Lovesick that the series should not be considered BL, even if its central narrative is remarkably queer and it is based on an original Thai novel that is faithful to the ōdō. This is especially

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the case since the lack of the seme–uke rule makes the story basically incompatible with the ōdō, a problem remedied in the series’ second season. Yet Lovesick, while working to uphold the primacy of heteronormativity in the Thai mediascape through its wavering narrative focus and heteronormative characterizations, must also be understood as a pedagogical tool designed to introduce Thai mainstream audiences to BL and educate them about the specific queer affective reading practices that are central to the ōdō. While sao wai fans of the original novel and other Thai BL novels would possess this literacy, the vast majority of Thai consumers would not. The introduction of BL reading practices is chiefly achieved in Lovesick through the character of Pang, Phun’s younger sister who drives the homoerotic narrative via her status as a sao wai fan of Japanese BL manga and her request that Phun enter a male–male relationship to receive her assistance. Throughout the series, Pang is introduced at crucial moments in the narrative to indirectly educate viewers about sao wai practices, commonly depicted squealing in pleasure over Phun’s interactions with Noh, or over the interactions between two boys named Pop and Shay who attend after-school dance lessons together with her. Pang particularly engages in moe-banashi with her friends, and it is via her cinematographic framing within these scenes—depicted most prominently in episodes 2 through 5—that viewers are intended to learn to also position themselves as sao wai. Pang is first introduced in episode 2 and her status as a sao wai is crucial to her characterization right from the beginning. Introduced via flashback as Phun explains to Noh why he requires the other boy to enter a fake relationship with him, Pang is depicted as a passionate fan of Japanese BL manga, established via a shot of her bedroom and its massive collection of manga and BL posters on the wall. Phun explains to Noh that Pang “has totally changed since the 8th grade” due to her fannish consumption of BL manga, with the next shot showing Pang screaming uncontrollably as she watches an episode of a lakhorn starring two handsome men together with Phun.75 Later in the episode, when Noh is finally introduced to Pang as Phun’s new boyfriend, the young girl replicates her excited squealing due to the BL relationship unfolding before her eyes between her brother and Noh. Throughout the rest of the episode, as well as episode 3, Pang continues to squeal over Noh and Phun as they provide her and the viewers a homoerotic performance explicitly modeled on those depicted in Japanese BL manga. Pang’s delighted squeals act as a cue to the audience, who are presumed to be similar in age to Pang, on how to react to the central queer romantic narrative of Lovesick. Indeed, Pang appears to be entering the state of mōsō which Galbraith notes is central to the queer affective engagement Japanese fans have with BL texts.76 Right from her introduction, then, Pang acts to educate viewers about the “correct” affective reading of the homoerotic relationship which will in Lovesick. In simple terms, viewers consistently watch as Pang is overwhelmed by the intense feelings of fin introduced in the previous chapter while she watches her brother and his putative boyfriend engage in homoerotic acts such as feeding each other fruit, washing each other’s faces, and climb into bed together to cuddle. Pang is thus modeling the expected reactions of a sao wai watching the series, showing the audience how they too can experience the queer affect of fin through Phun and

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Noh’s homoerotic interactions. That is, viewers are invited to engage in an affective response together with Pang that is triggered by homoerotic performances which explicitly queer Thai mainstream media in its celebration of the romantic potentials of male homosociality. An analysis of the filmic framing of these scenes reveals that Pang ultimately operates as a stand-in for the viewer. All the scenes in which Pang observes Phun and Noh perform homoeroticism are framed via a filmic schema presented in Figure 6. Firstly, a close-up of Pang looking directly into the camera is presented

Figure 6  Filmic schema that positions Pang and audience together as sao wai.

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to the viewer. This is followed immediately by a medium shot of Phun and Noh interacting, with the juxtaposition of these two shots indicating that the viewer is observing the two boys as Pang. Next, a second close-up of Pang is presented in which the young girl continues to stare directly into the camera, often with her mouth dropping open. This second close-up is designed to reinforce the positioning of the viewer as Pang, setting the stage for the positioning of the viewers as sao wai themselves in later shots. The second close-up is then followed by another medium shot of Phun and Noh, who now explicitly perform a scene that mimics a homoerotic interaction from a Japanese BL manga. For instance, in episode 2 Phun feeds Noh a piece of fruit in one scene and places his hand gently on Noh’s cheeks in another. This second medium shot also incorporates softer lighting and is accompanied by the acapella theme song San (Shake), which identifies all key scenes in the series. Finally, there is a third close-up of Pang squealing as she enters her state of mōso. This final close-up explicitly ties Pang and the viewer together as sao wai who pleasurably consume homoerotic interactions between young men. This framing technique also serves to introduce a developing “sao wai gaze” which is continually reinforced as this filmic sequence is utilized again and again throughout the series. In fact, this filmic framing has become common in subsequent Thai BL series and is often incorporated into promotional material, such as in the promotional video for DoMunDi’s 2020 series Why R U, The Series (Phror Rak Chai Pao?, “Because It’s Love, Isn’t It?” in Thai).77 This sequence of close-up and medium shots ultimately produces an intimate relationship between the characters on the screen and the audience viewing Lovesick. Indeed, such a cinematographic framing of Pang is representative of televisual media’s broader emphasis on building a sense of intersubjective “closeness” between an audience and the characters that represent the objects of their gaze.78 As cultural studies scholar John Fiske demonstrates through an analysis of audience identification with the characters in police procedural Cagney & Lacey, close-ups play a particularly important role in allowing viewers to emotionally identify with onscreen characters.79 Furthermore, as film theorist Victor Fan reveals via a narrative and cinematographic analysis of the Twilight film franchise, sequences of close-ups and medium shots such as those detailed above construct a supposed “poetics of addiction” which produces a “feminized spectatorship” based in repeated viewing and the hyper-consumption of handsome male star personas (or male–male couplings).80 The production of this feminized spectatorship in turn allows viewers to identify with and hence embody the desires of female characters such as Bella Swan in Twilight or Pang in Lovesick.81 Audiences thus mimic the desiring gaze of the characters with which they have been encouraged to identify both narratively and cinematographically.82 Through the repeated use of this filmic schema, Pang comes to embody the ideal female viewer of Lovesick. Throughout the rest of the series, the audience is trained to focus on male–male relationships and learn how to understand homosocial interactions as potential indexes of a BL relationship via Pang’s reactions to various characters. The schematic framing of Pang introduced above occurs in later episodes with another male–male couple, perhaps to reinforce this reading

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practice to viewers. This may be necessary since later episodes (especially episodes 10 and 11) depict Noh and Phun’s relationship without framing it via Pang’s gaze. I view this cinematographic technique as a particularly affective educational process that mimics the typical development of the fan literacies among fans of BL in Japan.83 The use of this schema thus demonstrates how Lovesick is conspicuously encouraging a form of reading that derives from young Japanese women’s culture. Further, by influencing consumers to identify with Pang and share in her affective response to male–male romance, Lovesick transforms mainstream viewers of Thai lakhorn into fans of BL who become adept at the queer affective reading practices which produce fin. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the concluding minutes of episode 3 and opening scenes of episode 5, where Pang and her friends engage in moe-banashi concerning the minor male characters of Pop and Shay. In episode 3, Pop and Shay are required by their dance teacher to act out a romance scene for the rest of the class, producing the requisite squeals of pleasure from Pang and her sao wai friends. As would be expected, this scene is framed through the pattern of closeups and medium shots introduced in Figure 6. After this scene, the narrative cuts to a café in which Pang and her friends spend considerable time debating the two boys’ performance and then decide that they will “ship” them, specifically using the language of the sao wai subculture in the series for the first time to imagine the boys in a romantic relationship.84 In episode 5, Pang and her friends buy Pop and Shay drinks to congratulate them on their previous performance, and once again enter a state of mōsō when the two boys choose to share a single cup and drink through intertwined straws. Pang and her friends then have a brief conversation concerning who would “lead” the relationship which they christen PopShay as if the boys represented a khu jin celebrity couple. The girls specifically engage in the moe-banashi practice of determining who is seme and who is uke that is central to the pleasures of reading BL manga, although they do not use these Japaneselanguage terms. Through these scenes, viewers learn that the sao wai reading that Pang applies to Noh and Phun can be applied to any male–male couple, signaling that this kind of engagement is possible for any pairing between two boys. The introduction of the practice of moe-banashi and the viewers’ positioning as sao wai via their conflation with Pang represents the clearest example of Lovesick’s queer intervention into the Thai mediascape, paving the way for new viewing patterns that would subsequently become central to the fandom of Thai BL the world over. Lovesick’s specific education of its audience, especially young heterosexual women, to read male–male relationships in series differently by rejecting the heteronormative focus on phra-ek and nang-ek and instead seeking romantic interactions between two phra-ek, represents a queering of the normative representations of sex and gender within lakhorn. Therefore, although Lovesick does not fully challenge heteronormativity through its wavering narrative focus, it does introduce a deconstructive and pleasurable tradition of reading from the sao wai subculture into the Thai mainstream that is explicitly queer in its antinormative practice. Via Pang, consumers of the series are also encouraged to engage in moe-banashi and enter a state of mōsō and thus experience a queer affect

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deriving from the celebration of Lovesick’s queer romance. Simply put, viewers of Lovesick receive an introductory education in becoming sao wai that underscores the series’ cinematographic framing of its sao wai characters and audience.

SOTUS and Love By Chance: Using the Noble Formula within the Thai Context As a result of Lovesick’s introduction of sao wai viewing practices, TV audiences across Thailand have gradually become accustomed to decoding and enjoying homoerotic interactions between men, leading to the mainstreaming of queer romance within Thai popular culture. My interviews with fans in Thailand—as well as my conversations with Thai BL researchers Poowin Bunyavejchewin and Kwannie Krairit85—uncovered that most regular consumers of Thai BL series possessed sophisticated literacies that mirrored those of Japanese fans. That is, fans of BL series are able to recognize moments of romantic potential between a series’ male couple and subsequently “read” who will “top” (ruk, literally “attack”) and who will “bottom” (rap, literally “receive”). These terms, originating from Muay Thai boxing and ultimately deriving from slang circulating among Thai gay men for several decades to denote the “top” and the “bottom” in male–male sexual relationships, have been borrowed by sao wai fans into their moe-banashi alongside the Japanese terms seme and uke.86 Furthermore, some fans and BL industry insiders have also come to utilize the terms phra-ek and the neologism nai-ek—with nai representing a formal term of address roughly equivalent to Mr—to refer to the relationship dynamics between BL pairings. Within this context, phra-ek refers to the character who aligns with the Japanese term seme and the nai-ek refers to the character who aligns with the Japanese term uke. While a plethora of local terms have emerged to discuss BL among Thai fans, I deploy the Japanese terms seme and uke throughout the rest of this chapter to highlight the transnational nature of these BL literacies, noting that many sao wai also continue to use these Japanese terms in their everyday discourse. As a result of these growing BL literacies among fans, series released after Lovesick have more explicitly adopted aspects of the ōdō, strictly following its representational and narrative logics by eschewing the wavering queerness of Lovesick’s first season. Thai media producers now consciously mimic Japanese BL manga in order to produce experiences of fin among young women and gay men who devotedly consume all things BL in Thailand. This increasing felicity to the ōdō is also the result of the close collaborative relationships between television series producers and the publishers of original Thai BL novels—as well as the tacit decision to focus on transforming sao wai readers of novels into TV consumers—that was discussed in the previous chapter. As Thai BL researcher Natthanai Prasannam notes, these novels and their readers were already well acquainted with the ōdō and increasingly expected to encounter it within the adaptions of BL novels into television series, which were released subsequent to Lovesick’s broadcast.87

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As I revealed in the previous chapter, two media companies—GMM and Studio Wabi Sabi—have developed a reputation for producing high-quality BL series starring handsome khu jin idols. Within this section I unpack how two wildly successful series produced by these companies, SOTUS (2016) and Love By Chance (2018), deploy the logics of the ōdō, merging the representational and narrative strategies of Japanese BL and lakhorn together to create Thai BL. Whereas the first episode of Lovesick contained a wavering focus on queerness, the first episode of SOTUS makes it clear from the outset that the story will focus on the romantic and sexual tension between two male leads. The world of SOTUS, as dictated by the logics of the ōdō, is exceptionally homosocial due to the nature of the series being set in an engineering faculty at a prestigious university. Most of the regular characters, whether they represent the “freshies” led by protagonist Kongpob (Singto) or the “hazers” led by his romantic interest Arthit (Krist), are men. There are only three female recurring characters, all playing supporting roles as is consistent with classic BL manga and only one of them, May, is given a romantic subplot with Kongpob’s friend Aim (played by New Thitipoom). As the series progresses, viewers learn that another of these female characters, Praepalin, is a lesbian which thus forecloses any potential romantic relationship with the other minor male characters.88 The series is structured around themes of male friendship and the system of university hazing is deployed to explore what it means for young Thai men to navigate social hierarchies. These themes are dramatized through numerous “senior–junior” relationships known as phinorng in Thai that emerge among the “freshy-hazer” male couples, the focus being the growing relationship between Kongpob and Arthit. While only Kongpob and Arthit’s relationship eventually becomes romantic by the end of the series, my conversations with Thai and Philippine fans of SOTUS revealed many imagined these other couples in homoerotic relationships as much as they did Kongpob and Arthit. As this discussion makes clear, SOTUS is a homosocial world that is full of queer potential, mimicking how classic BL manga frame and produce male–male romance. Right from the outset, Kongpob and Arthit’s relationship is obviously more than just a mere rivalry and the narrative follows a common trope within both BL manga and K-pop idol fanfictions known as “enemies to lovers.”89 Upon their first meeting, Arthit singles out Kongpob for specific abuse in order to demonstrate his authority to the other freshies and the hazing narrative of SOTUS thus allows for numerous scenes in which the two boys struggle for power that are also awash with queer romantic potential. But this is not to say that Arthit has all the power. As the narrative makes abundantly clear right from episode 1 during a confrontation between the boys that sparks their intense rivalry and eventual romance, Kongpob is not completely disenfranchised despite his positioning as a freshy. During an orientation activity in which Arthit describes how the hazing system works, he menacingly explains to the fearful freshies that only he has the power to bestow upon them the gear pendant which signifies acceptance into the university’s engineering faculty as well as the respect of their seniors. Kongpob,

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having become increasingly angered by Arthit’s unreasonable demands but also intrigued by the handsome senior, stands up to fight back against the head hazer. The following conversation then ensues: Kongpob: If you don’t give the gears to us, we can just snatch them from you. Arthit: How exactly do you plan to do that? Kongpob: I just make you my wife.90 They say what belongs to your lover is also yours. If I can make you my wife, your gear badge is also mine. Arthit: You are really brave, Mr. Kongpob! That’s good! But let’s see if you can do like you say!91 For viewers of the series equipped with BL literacies gained through watching previous series such as Lovesick, reading Japanese BL manga, or reading Thai BL novels (including the novel on which this series is based), Kongpob’s threat is a moment of homoerotic tension that foreshadows the romantic outcome of the series. Moreover, the moment when Arthit grabs Kongpob’s collar also represents an instance of potential homoerotic intimacy, with the boys’ proximity coupling with the preceding dialogue from Kongpob about making Arthit his “wife” producing fin among viewers conditioned to affectively read male–male interactions as replete with queer romantic potential. The phrase which Kongpob uses (“make you my wife,” tham mia) is a common idiom in Thai slang which can either literally mean for a man to take a woman as his wife or for a man to treat another man as if he were a wife, with the latter meaning thus similar to the English phrase “make you my bitch.”92 Throughout the first half of SOTUS, the two boys have many such fiery exchanges until Kongpob does indeed succeed in gaining hold of Arthit’s gear in episode 7 and, by the conclusion of the series, his heart. In a classic deployment of the ōdō, the romantic narrative of the series is thus driven by the power imbalance between the protagonist Kongpob and his love interest Arthit. What is especially interesting about SOTUS is how it draws upon the logics of Japanese BL manga to transform a cultural tradition such as university hazing that would be immediately recognizable to Thai viewers into an opportunity to produce homoerotic romance. This queer transformation in turn induces experiences of fin among sao wai and other fannish viewers, leading to the mainstreaming of queer romance as consumers find such queer representational strategies increasingly recognizable and pleasurable. In some ways, SOTUS even represents a queering of the phi-norng relationship fundamental to Thai sociality more broadly.93 Like Lovesick, however, it is initially somewhat difficult to determine who is the seme and who is the uke within the central male relationship of SOTUS. Both Singto and Krist, the actors who play Kongpob and Arthit respectively, possess similar body shapes and heights and there are therefore no clear visual clues as to who should be seme and who uke such as would be the case in a typical Japanese BL manga. The series also does not feature explicit sexual scenes, as is consistent with

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Thai media regulations, meaning it is not possible to directly determine who takes the penetrative role in sex and would thus be the seme. Further, unlike in the classic ōdō where the protagonist is most often characterized as an uke and the narrative is driven by their seme love interest, it is in fact Kongpob who pushes forward the narrative in SOTUS. Kongpob consistently takes the initiative in the developing relationship between the boys, befriending Arthit in later episodes before chasing after him romantically. In episode 10, after Arthit stays the night in Kongpob’s dorm room when his own apartment is flooded, Kongpob sleepily admits that he has feelings for his senior as they lie (chastely) together in bed.94 This causes Arthit to panic and avoid seeing Kongpob the next day as he struggles to accept his own attraction to his male junior.95 But in what may be a surprising narrative move to some, it is eventually Arthit who initiates the couple’s famous first kiss on Rama VII Bridge in episode 13, but not without admitting he is tired of running from Kongpob and acknowledging his desire to learn more about this junior who has stolen his heart.96 It is only in 2017 during the sequel series SOTUS S that viewers definitively learn that Kongpob is indeed the seme in the relationship. Rather than arguing that SOTUS imperfectly adapts the ōdō, I wish to instead suggest that the series is aligned with the “evolutionary form” of BL that has emerged in Japan in recent years that plays with the seme–uke rule in order to produce new and exciting affective experiences among fans. In fact, “hot and cold” characters such as Arthit are common within these newer BL manga and have even become trendy within Japanese popular culture more broadly where they produce moe affects among fans.97 Known as tsundere in Japanese, a contraction of tsuntsun referring to an aloof attitude and deredere referring to a caring person, seme and uke who put up a fight but eventually submit to their partner are an important character archetype in “evolutionary form” BL.98 Arthit’s characterization as a stand-offish young man and, as is revealed in SOTUS S, loving-yet-shy uke thus speaks to how SOTUS has adapted the new character trope of the tsundere to the world of Thai BL. Throughout the sequel SOTUS S, fin is produced for fans of the central couple—as well as the KristSingto khu jin—by juxtaposing Kongpob’s aggressive advances with Arthit’s tsuntsun behavior. This is dramatized at the end of every episode of SOTUS S during a short section entitled the “special scene” that sits outside the main narrative and acts as “fan service” for fans of the actors Singto and Krist. Within both seasons of SOTUS, Japanese narrative conventions from both the classic and “evolutionary form” of the ōdō are thus conspicuously deployed in the creation of Thai BL and the mainstreaming of gay romance within the Thai media landscape. Perhaps even more so than SOTUS, 2018’s Love By Chance explicitly utilizes aspects of the classic ōdō in the production of queer romantic narratives between its four male couples. In the two years between the broadcast of SOTUS and Love By Chance, Thai consumers had become even more adept at recognizing and decoding the literacies inherent to the ōdō, thus allowing Studio Wabi Sabi to deploy its logics with very little adaptation to the Thai media market. Love By Chance therefore appears more indebted to the representational strategies of BL manga than the Thai BL series which preceded it, paving the way for more BL series

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to be produced in subsequent years. This even includes series which challenge and critique the ōdō, as I discuss further below. One Thai fan explained to me that this may be the case because the author of the original online novel upon which Love By Chance is based, MAME, was a prominent fan of both Japanese BL manga and the practice of K-pop idol shipping.99 For this fan, MAME was a “masterful” manipulator of the ōdō who was more aware of its narrative conventions than other Thai BL authors and this mastery of the ōdō thus filtered into Studio Wabi Sabi’s production. Like SOTUS, the world of Love By Chance is aligned with the logics of BL manga as it is almost entirely homosocial, with the only minor female recurring characters representing either obstacles to male romance or parental figures and sao wai who support the central couples. The most conspicuous deployment of the ōdō in Love By Chance is, however, the series’ explicit use of the seme–uke rule, which is utilized without changing its representational and narrative strategies. For each of the series’ four male couples there is an obvious seme and uke and it is the insatiable and uncontrollable desires of the character who aligns with the seme archetype that drives the series’ narrative progression. Further, each of the eight main male cast members match the aesthetic logics of manga, with the stars all representing examples of the Korpanese talent who have recently become popular in Thailand as well as the bishōnen characters of a typical BL manga.100 The four uke characters are all portrayed by young actors who possess slim builds and comparatively softer features, whereas the four seme characters are considerably buffer. Love By Chance’s casting thus appears to have prioritized the visual cues that derive from the ōdō where the seme is expected to appear more hegemonically masculine than the uke and which fans draw upon as part of their pleasurable consumption of queer romance. Within the queer romantic narrative of Pete and Ae that centers the series, Pete is clearly meant to be understood by viewers as an innocent uke who is somewhat passively swept into a relationship due to Ae’s uncontrollable desires for him. The kabe-don scene discussed above represents a perfect example of the seme–uke rule’s narrative logics, with the two boys’ dialogue as well as Ae’s physical actions appearing almost to have been lifted out of the pages of a Japanese BL manga. The following dialogue unfolds after the instance of kabe-don depicted in Figure 4: Ae: Will you be my boyfriend? Please don’t let me wait any longer.

Pete: Hold on Ae! Ae: No. Ae: Don’t look at me like that. You are driving me crazy! 101 Ae is clearly in charge of this interaction as seme, acknowledging that his desire for Pete drives him crazy. While superficially resisting Ae through his dialogue calling for restraint, Pete also appears perfectly happy to be passively swept up into the

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action as a typical uke, staring with undisguised want at Ae with what one of my Philippine informants termed “his bedroom eyes.” Throughout the rest of the series, most decisions concerning the boys’ growing romance and life together as a couple are made by Ae, who as the manly hero who rescued Pete from his abusive ex-boyfriend in the first and second episodes of Love by Chance is consistently presented to viewers as a decisive man of action. The other male couples follow this classic pattern of seme-initiated romance and sex, whether it be the aloof and wealthy tsundere Tin pursuing the wild Can (a yancha uke), Tum making romantic overtures to his younger half-brother Tar, or the precocious Kengkla tricking Techno into sleeping with him. In fact, because Love by Chance has many explicit scenes which depict sexual acts, there is never any doubt for the viewer who is seme and who is uke in each of the couples. Audiences know from the narrative itself that Ae is the seme, for instance, since we see the two boys negotiate their first sexual encounter in episode 9 where Ae’s initial reluctance to sexually penetrate Pete forms a significant narrative moment.102 Pete’s status as an uke is also reinforced in this episode as viewers clearly see that Pete is unable to explicitly express his desire to have sex with Ae and instead passively waits for Ae to initiate their first true sexual encounter. This explicit framing of the characters as seme and uke in Love By Chance contrasts with Lovesick and SOTUS, where viewers are required to decode subtle clues using their BL literacies to determine the sexual roles of the characters. Love By Chance, responding to their sao wai viewers’ BL literacies, instead produces fin through explicit characterization deriving from the ōdō, demonstrating how the logics of the ōdō had become mainstream by the time this series was broadcast in late 2018. Finally, both SOTUS and Love By Chance deploy an aspect of the ōdo that was also used for strategic effect within Lovesick to mitigate the queer impacts of BL on Thailand’s heteronormative media landscape; the tendency introduced above for the male romantic couples in classic BL manga not to explicitly identify as gay men. In SOTUS, for example, when Kongpob and Arthit reveal their new relationship to their friends at a party, Kongpob responds to the surprise of his friend Aim who asked why he had never revealed his samesex attraction by stating “I don’t like men … I like phi Arthit.”103 Likewise, throughout Love By Chance all of the seme characters mention at one stage that they are neither “gay” nor attracted to men but have instead become unreasonably attached to their respective uke partners. Within these series, the characters thus proclaim that they are experiencing a spiritual love directed at a specific individual regardless of their gender. Only Pete, the uke of the main couple in Love By Chance, identifies as gay and this may be due to the fact that his characterization as a soft and shy young boy aligns with stereotypical understandings of same-sex attracted men in Thailand more broadly.104 The other three uke characters, on the other hand, still appear heteronormative even if they are slighter or comparatively less masculine than their respective seme. But from 2019 onwards, as BL series became more mature, even this element of the ōdō has been challenged, most notably by GMM’s Dark Blue Kiss as I discussed in the previous chapter.

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Challenging the Ōdō: The Effect (2019) and De-romanticizing Sexual Violence One of the most important elements of the ōdō is the uncontrollable nature of the seme’s intense sexual attraction to his uke, who is usually characterized as an innocent and sexually inexperienced young man who is swept up into a romantic relationship by the seme’s actions. Within Love By Chance, the evolving relationship between the high school student Kengkla and the university football club captain Techno—incidentally, the couple who receive the least screen time— typifies such a narrative scenario and its attendant characterization techniques. The couple’s relationship centers on Kengkla’s increasingly manipulative attempts to gain access to Techno through his younger brother, whom he bribes with various favors in order to be given Techno’s contact details. Played predominantly for laughs, Kengkla’s obsessive pursuit of Techno culminates with the high school boy getting Techno drunk in the final episode and then having sex with him (as seme) so he can blackmail the older boy into being “an honorable man” and dating him.105 As mentioned in the Introduction, the lakhorn soap operas that dominate Thai television frequently contain similar scenes grounded in sexual assault and rape—often played for comedic effect—and thus their appearance in Thai BL series is unsurprising. For many of the fans of Thai BL I have interviewed in Thailand and the Philippines, this humorous bed scene represented a moment of intense fin when the couple finally consummate their relationship, which fans pleasurably consumed as just another instance of queer romance. Kengkla’s aggressive tactics were described to me as “so very seme even though he has a cute face” by one Philippine fan via email, with the bed scene representing “a funny joke about a seme too frustrated to wait for his uke any longer.” But for a significant minority of fans to whom I have spoken, mainly outside Thailand, this scene is highly problematic since Techno is sexually penetrated without his consent. The frustration which led to Kengkla’s bed trick that represented a moment of fin for certain consumers was instead interpreted by others as a moment of horror or disgust. For some fans, this supposedly humorous scene is tantamount to sexual assault since they perceive Kengkla to have raped Techno, taking advantage of the older man’s inability to resist due to his extreme inebriation. The fact that what one Filipino Australian fan termed a “rape scene” is presented comedically represents for many a significant lapse in moral judgment on behalf of Studio Wabi Sabi. For such consumers, Love By Chance’s flippant treatment of sexual assault tarnishes not only the series but also the broader genre of Thai BL. In fact, debates concerning Thai BL series’ common depiction of sexual harassment and assault have emerged as a popular topic among Anglophone fans, often dominating social media spaces. In her historical study of the development of Japanese BL manga, Mizoguchi notes that rape represents a common trope within classic BL and became especially prominent within the early 1990s106—the same period when Japanese BL manga became popular among young women in Thailand. Mizoguchi highlights that the prevalence of rape in BL follows the narrative logics of the ōdō, representing the

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ultimate expression of the uncontrollable and wild sexual desires of seme characters who are deliberately constructed to be dominant and hyper-masculine.107 Rape, Mizoguchi reveals, came to represent an important fantasy within Japanese BL manga that triggered experiences of moe tied to seme characters among fans, with many Japanese fans dismissing violent sexual acts and coercion as a simple narrative expression of the “seme nature” (semerashisa) to which they were affectively orientated.108 Within her study of pornography for women in Japan, Mori argues that rape is deliberately “beautified” (bika sareta) within BL manga to produce sexual fantasies tied to “unbelievable worlds” (arienai sekai) where women can encounter particularly visceral affects that they cannot directly experience in their everyday lives.109 Importantly, Mizoguchi demonstrates that the classic ōdō promotes a common narrative wherein rape is necessary for the development of love, with the seme’s act of raping the uke ultimately unlocking this typically passive character’s romantic responses at the same time as providing a violent education to the adult world of sexual relations.110 Rebecca Townsend’s analysis of lakhorn revealed that rape is also commonly romanticized within Thailand’s heteropatriarchal media where it is deployed as a narrative trope to discipline “evil women” until they fall in love with their abusers.111 Given the prevalence of rape within both classic Japanese BL manga and typical lakhorn, it is unsurprising that many Thai BL series such as Love By Chance present rape as an unproblematic sexual fantasy to be consumed by sao wai viewers seeking extreme experiences of fin. One series released in 2019 explicitly challenges the tendency for BL series and other homoerotic works targeting to female consumers such as Japanese BL manga to romanticize rape. This series was JakJai Production’s The Effect, a threepart series broadcast exclusively online via LINE TV that was based on an online novel written by Sweetsky. While not garnering as large an audience as the other Thai BL mentioned in this chapter—in fact, the series was a commercial failure and plans for a sequel were abandoned—The Effect represents an important series that deliberately challenged the emerging narrative tropes of Thai BL through its stark and uncomfortable depictions of the impacts of online bullying, rape, and suicide. The Effect tells the story of the socially awkward university freshman Shin (James Prapatthorn Chakkhuchan), who is revealed to have been bullied during his primary and secondary school education and continues to be bullied at university. Through coincidence, Shin befriends the handsome and popular senior Keng (Oat Chakrit Boonsing), who also happens to be the university’s current brand ambassador or “face” as well as a popular “cute boy” with an active social media following among his fellow students. Shin and Keng begin to spend time together, with Shin viewing the relationship as a simple friendship with a senior whom he had always admired. Keng, on the other hand, is revealed to be a closeted gay man who faces immense pressure from his strict parents. At the end of the second episode, Keng confesses his love to Shin only to be rebuffed as Shin reports that he is unable to love a man.112 In a typical narrative move from the ōdō, Keng then violently rapes Shin in order to make the younger man love him. Unlike in a typical BL manga, however, the third episode of The Effect focuses on Shin’s emotional trauma and intense depression which results in a suicide attempt and

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the series does not end with the two falling in love and living happily ever after. In fact, The Effect concludes ambiguously, with audiences left guessing whether both Shin and Keng die in a traffic accident many years later during a traumatic chance encounter on the day of Shin’s graduation. Right from the outset, JakJai Production was keen to engage with and critique the logics of the ōdō and its beautification of sexual violence. In promotional material for the last episode shared on Twitter, for instance, an image depicting the aftermath of Shin’s abuse is overlaid with the words “How can forcing love become real love?” so as to promote a discussion about this common emerging trope in Thai BL series.113 Cinematographically, the rape scene is framed in ways that emphasize the terror of Shin and his powerlessness when faced with his violent domination by Keng (see Figure 7). The first shot depicted in Figure 7 almost represents an inversion of the kabe-don trope that was deployed with romantic effect in Love

Figure 7  Two screenshots of Shin’s rape in The Effect (2019). Photo credit JakJai Productions.114

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By Chance. In The Effect, Shin is pinned down to the floor as Keng yells angrily at him with the typical abuser’s reframe of “this is what you want, right?”115 In the second shot, Shin’s violent penetration is depicted via a close-up of Keng pinning Shin’s hand down as he begins to disassociate from the abuse he is experiencing. In both of these scenes, the framing refuses to allow rape to be beautified as it typically would be in a BL manga,116 nor is it framed as humorous such as in Love By Chance. Within The Effect, the act of rape is instead pared down to its most elemental form, a violent and carnal act of domination in which a seme denies an uke his liberty through the exercise of his power. This cinematographic framing is a clear critique of the ōdō’s narrative logics. For fans of Thai BL with whom I have discussed this series, the rape of Shin did not produce experiences of fin. In fact, for the Filipino Australian fan mentioned above, the episode was so traumatizing that even discussing the series could trigger feelings of panic and anxiety.117 The most explicit critique of the tendency for rape to be romanticized in Thai BL appears in a dialogue between Shin’s only two friends, Bright and Pramote, and Keng. The altercation between the three boys occurs after Shin’s first suicide attempt in the final episode and unfolds as follows: Bright: . You almost killed Shin! Keng: What do you mean? Bright: Yesterday he tried to commit suicide and it’s all your fault. Keng: Is Shin okay? Pramote: That isn’t important. Keng: What are you talking about? Pramote: I think it would be best … if you please leave Shin alone. Keng: No, I will not! We love each other and I don’t believe he doesn’t want to see me. Bright: Love? You call what you did “love”? If you really think that way, then you are completely out of your mind. Keng: You can say whatever you like … but I will go and find Shin. I will do anything to make him forgive me. Pramote: I don’t think you can. What you believe would happen in a drama [lakhorn] … in real life, it’s not that easy. Keng: I will fix everything. I will do it. I will not lose Shin. .118 Keng is positioned as uncontrollable and out-of-touch with reality throughout the above scene, with his statement that he and Shin “love each other” derided by Bright through language which mimics the series’ promotional material in denying rape as a pathway to true love. Keng’s statements align with the typical characterization of a seme in classic Japanese BL manga in that he has become irrationally attracted to his uke. His overwhelming desire for Shin and his framing of his emotions as love are, however, immediately refuted by Bright’s calling into question the sanity of his actions and beliefs. But the most striking critique of the ōdō is Pramote’s warning to Keng that the narrative logics of a lakhorn do not often hold true in the real world. Admonishing Keng for pursuing Shin despite the

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other’s clear disinterest (and fear), Pramote reminds the sao wai viewers of Thai BL that the queer romances which they consume are built in fantasy and do not reflect the lived reality of same-sex-attracted men. Importantly, the above scene challenges the ōdō’s principal romantic narrative thrust—the seme’s uncontrollable desire for his uke—and thus subsequently calls into question the genre of BL itself. The critiques appearing within The Effect are only effective, I believe, since the logics of the ōdō have become mainstream within the Thai media landscape. Pramote’s indirect criticisms of viewers’ reading of rape as a potential trigger for fin tied to queer romance only make sense within a media environment where audiences have become significantly aware of the logics of BL and would thus read rape as an expression of a seme’s romantic attraction such as in Love By Chance. Such a sophisticated narrative critique of the ōdō would be unthinkable in the early years of Thai BL media due to mainstream viewers’ lack of familiarity with the affective potentials of queer romance. Whereas Lovesick conspicuously sought to educate its viewers how to consume queer romance as a sao wai, and SOTUS and Love By Chance were developed to respond to the growing sophistication of BL viewing practices, The Effect directly challenges the legitimacy of such a gaze. Situated within a year in which series such as GMM’s Dark Blue Kiss were also challenging aspects of the ōdō as I discussed in the previous chapter, I would argue that one of the reasons many fans have suggested 2019 was a year in which the genre matured was due to the prevalence of series which call the sao wai gaze into question. This critique was achieved through a conscious break with the classical narrative logics of the Japanese BL manga on which these series—and the Thai original BL novels from which they derive—were initially adapted. It is for this reason that I would suggest that The Effect represents a queer intervention into the ongoing mainstreaming of Thai BL since it deconstructs and challenges the emergent logics of this new media genre. The series specifically encourages its viewers to confront their pleasurable viewing of sexual violence and challenges them to think about queer romance in ways that move beyond the simple experience of fin. That is, this series’ intense investigation of the beautification of rape encourages BL fans to further question the queer affective reading practices tied to fin that have become normative in the contemporary Thai media landscape. The Effect thus represents the culmination of the glocalization of Japanese BL to Thailand which has formed the focus of this chapter. As I have revealed throughout, the development of Thai BL is ultimately a history of the introduction, adaptation, and critique of the ōdō that sits at the heart of classic Japanese BL manga. By the time of The Effect’s broadcast in 2019, queer romance and sao wai fandom had become so mainstream in Thailand that it had been transformed into a “norm” open to queer critique. Importantly, The Effect continues the education of Thai consumers that Lovesick inaugurated through its careful adaption of the queer affective reading practices central to the fandom for BL manga. It is my hope that, as Thai BL media continues to develop, the queering evident within The Effect will be taken further and this newly emergent genre can continue to challenge and expand the representational logics of Thailand’s popular culture

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landscape through its affective education of mainstream TV viewers. Indeed, at the time of writing in 2021, a series called Lovely Writer (Nub Sip Ja Jup, “Count to Ten and I’ll Kiss You” in Thai) that was broadcast on Thailand’s Channel 3 also explored issues of consent and harassment through a story about Gene, a young gay (yet closeted) Thai BL novelist negotiating the transformation of his popular novel into a new BL series. Importantly, not only did Gene consistently call out instances where his novel was transformed in ways that beautified sexual harassment, he also negotiated consent in his own growing relationship with Nubsib, the handsome male star of the series. Another topic that Lovely Writer directly tackled through its meta-narrative was the new culture of khu jin celebrity couples that has become central to the mainstreaming of Thai BL media. These new forms of celebrity represent the focus of the following two chapters, where I continue to think through the queer affective politics of fin as it has emerged in Thailand’s new BL celebrity culture and its attendant fandom.

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Chapter 3 T H E B OYS L OV E M AC H I N E : P R O D U C I N G Q U E E R I D O L C E L E B R I T Y AT G M M

On December 10, 2019, fans of popular GMM idols Off and Gun—stars of the hit Thai BL series Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (Season 1: 2016; Season 2: 2017) and Theory of Love (2019)—were in for a special treat. To celebrate the phenomenal success of their variety show OffGun Fun Night, Off and Gun were hosting a livestreamed episode via both Facebook and YouTube.1 Over the first ten minutes of the broadcast, as Off and Gun bantered with the host and played around together on the large bed that represented the setting for their variety show, the famous khu jin continued to tease their audience that they had a surprise for them when 10,000 people logged into the stream. When this number of viewers was reached, Off and Gun then happily revealed the surprise. The two idols were going to read a fanfiction written about the two of them. Gun explained to the audience that “ever since we became a khu jin, people started to write fics about us,” admitting that he would occasionally read fanfictions if he was tagged in them on Twitter. Off, on the other hand, candidly disclosed that he was unfamiliar with fanfictions, finding them “kind of weird.” He then asked Gun what they were like. Gun replied with visible glee as he began to tease Off (a notable aspect of their dynamic) that the authors seem like they “are from GMM” since they “know us and everyone so well.” The two idols had chosen to read a fanfiction set within a university context where Gun was Off ’s “senior” (phi).2 The specific fic which had been selected took the form of an imaginary conversation between Off and Gun via the LINE instant messenger app,3 which Off and Gun would read out live for their fans. With excitement, Gun announced that the fanfiction had gathered a massive 200 million views online and was titled, the khu jin noted with much laughter, “Hitting on the Head Hazer.” After showing the script to the fans watching the livestream, Off and Gun then launched into a spirited performance of the fanfiction, the beginning of which I extract below.4 Gun: What’s wrong? Why are you not talking to me? Off: Nothing. Gun: Are you mad, Mr. (nai)?

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Gun: Are you mad? Off: No. Gun: [Sweetly] Then talk to me. Off: [Sarcastically] I am talking to you now!

Gun: Respond to me when I call you! Off: I’m too lazy for that. Gun: Hey, Fatty!

Gun: Fatty, why are you so hard on me? Off: Then just stop. Gun: Why are you mad? What did I do? Off: Because I’m jealous! [Host screams in excitement. Off and Gun stare at each other and cringe].

Off and Gun’s celebratory livestream and their performance of a fanfiction in which the two idols are depicted as a freshman and hazer—notably evoking the famous story of SOTUS, a series starring their fellow GMM idols Krist and Singto—reveal how Thai celebrity culture has evolved in response to the development of BL media. Throughout the fanfiction and the couple’s performance there are notable moments designed to provoke fin, such as when Off expresses his jealousy to Gun in the extract presented above that caused the host to scream in glee, modeling sao wai behavior in similar ways to Pang did in Lovesick. The difference between Off and Gun’s performance and the scenes of homoerotic tension depicted in the BL series which I analyzed in the previous chapter is, of course, that fin is no longer being produced from the romantic interactions between fictional characters depicted in a queer television show. Rather, fin is being produced here through not only a fanfiction about idol actors who appeared as a couple in several BL series, but it is also being produced through the interactions between Off and Gun as they react to the fanfiction live during this episode of OffGun Fun Night. Through this example, the differences between the Thai BL affect of fin and the Japanese BL affect of moe become evident. As noted in the previous chapter, moe is an affective response generated by fictional characters,6 but clearly fin is generated by both fictional characters in Thai BL series and interactions between real people. This episode of OffGun Fun Night represents just one of many GMM variety shows starring khu jin imagined couples that demonstrate how Thai BL media has penetrated celebrity culture itself to produce affects that

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are fundamentally queer in their celebration of staged homoeroticism between young idol actors. Within this chapter, I specifically explore GMM’s four most popular khu jin at the time of writing in 2021—the “Royal Couples” KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin—to investigate how Thai BL has led to the development of what I term “queer idol celebrity.”7 I define queer idol celebrity through an expansion of Patrick Galbraith and Jason Karlin’s influential definition of Asian idol celebrities as “highly produced and promoted singers, models, and media personalities” embedded as “image characters” in postmodern consumer culture to focus on those celebrities whose appeal is grounded in explicitly homoerotic performance both on and off the screen.8 These idols are queer, I argue, not because these actors are members of the sexual minority community, but because their staged homoerotic performances and the affective response generated by them among fans challenge the traditionally heteronormative nature of Thailand’s celebrity culture. That is, paraphrasing David Halperin’s classic definition of queerness, khu jin represent idols who deviate from the dominant heteronormative depictions of celebrity romance in Thailand.9 Through paying particular attention to the promotion and management of the handsome young male actors who appear within GMM’s BL series, I demonstrate that the affect of fin which emerges from watching the queer content of Thai BL series is transposed onto the actors themselves through a specific mechanism of idol production which I call the “Boys Love Machine.” While Thai BL researcher Natthanai Prasannam has noted in his previous study of SOTUS fan events that the emergence of khu jin in Thailand represents a “bottom-up” flow of fan culture into GMM’s production practices,10 I wish to present an alternative perspective informed by the critical literature on idol celebrity management in Asia. Acknowledging the preexistence of sao wai fans and fandom practices that formed the focus of my analysis in Chapter 1, I instead argue that GMM’s BL Machine represents a form of “top-down” engagement with consumers that coopts and influences fan practices through the deployment of celebrity management strategies developed in the East Asian idol industries. Rather than responding to fans’ preestablished practices of imagining idols in homoerotic relationships, I reveal how GMM’s BL Machine specifically creates khu jin couples that are explicitly designed to be “shipped” by consumers and thus transform mainstream viewers of lakhorn into BL fans. In this chapter, I therefore suggest that GMM’s BL Machine seeks to strategically manage both idols and their fans, arguing that GMM is not simply responding to fan practices as Prasannam suggests,11 but is instead actively shaping and producing these practices. To develop this argument, I draw upon my digital ethnography of both GMM’s social and traditional media and the practices of Thai fans on social media responding to GMM’s promotional messaging and events. Further, I also present critical readings of four variety shows produced by GMM that feature their most popular khu jin celebrities; OffGun Fun Night (2018–19), TayNew Meal Date (2018–19), Friend Ship with KristSingto (2019–20), and BrightWin Inbox (2020). Central to this chapter’s discussion is how GMM’s BL Machine marries fans’ investment into fantasies of queer romance to the commercial imperatives of one

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of Thailand’s larger media conglomerates. This thus opens a space to reflect on the role BL media broadly and khu jin celebrities specifically play in the evolution of Thailand’s consumer culture, especially since celebrity has become intimately tied to the twin worlds of advertising and consumerism in the kingdom since the late 1980s.12 As anthropologist Ara Wilson notes in her ethnography of consumer spaces in Siam Square, Thai advertising increasingly focused on celebrity endorsement throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with displays in malls featuring images of Hollywood stars, Japanese idols, or homegrown Thai talent.13 In fact, celebrity endorsement is a typical feature of the advertising landscapes of East and Southeast Asia, with one of the chief functions of idol celebrity being their role as the aforementioned “image characters” for brands which entangle fan affects with the desire to consume.14 After the penetration of the Thai market by Japanese popular culture in the late 1980s and South Korean popular culture in the early 2000s, recounted in Chapter 1, such celebrity-focused advertising campaigns became even more ubiquitous, spreading from physical spaces such as the streets of downtown Bangkok to the virtual worlds of social media. GMM’s four main khu jin actively participate within various forms of celebrity endorsement and I reveal below that the BL Machine thus also implicates the queer affect of fin within the late capitalist logics that drive Thailand’s burgeoning middle-class consumer culture. Wilson especially noted in her ethnography how “visual displays in malls, in objects, or in advertising are increasingly explicitly erotic” since the early 1990s, often featuring “photographs of male–female couples locked in passionate embrace.”15 Notably, such images commonly depict Thai or foreign celebrities engaging with products such as cosmetics, lifestyle goods, and travel to promote a narrative of domestic, heteronormative bliss.16 As Scott Barmé notes in his history of the Thai media landscape, since the 1920s male–female couples have been used throughout Thailand’s popular culture to produce a regime of representation that strongly centers heterosexual romance and sexualized images of the female body as indexes for a happy and developed, “civilized” life.17 In this way, Thailand’s media is responding to broader twentieth-century trends in representations of monogamous, heteronormative love that sociologist Eva Illouz has famously termed “the romanticization of commodities” and the “commoditization of romance.”18 Illouz argues that late capitalist society glorifies romantic love as “a supreme value,” with love being equated with happiness.19 For Illouz, the domain of the market economy has come to represent the only space within which consumers are led to believe love is achievable, thus drawing individuals living within late capitalist societies to engage in the postmodern search for meaning via consumption.20 Noting that the theme of romantic love has penetrated mass culture through its domination of advertising, film, and television,21 Illouz suggests that celebrity is mobilized in the increasing “visibilization of romantic love” to both “further glamorize the romantic couple” and “provide ready-made stereotypes that permeate and saturate people’s cognitions.”22 While Illouz is specifically writing about the US context, her arguments regarding the commoditization of romance resonate with contemporary Thailand, with one core difference. The emergence

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of khu jin celebrity and the BL Machine has injected queer affects into the “romanticization of commodities” and my discussion of GMM’s idol management thus seeks to critically interrogate just what this means in the context of Thai celebrity culture.

GMM’s BL Machine: Scouting, Producing, Promoting, and Shipping Khu Jin Celebrities In previous chapters, I have briefly discussed the phenomenon of “shipping” whereby fans of male idols reimagine their favorite celebrities in homoerotic relationships and noted how khu jin are central to these practices within the Thai context. Before systematically introducing GMM’s BL Machine as a method of producing khu jin designed to be “shipped” by consumers, I must first further explain how shipping operates in the East Asian idol industries. In so doing, I reveal below how GMM is not only borrowing management strategies from Japanese and South Korean idol production but is in fact innovating them. I will then introduce the six stages which form the BL Machine through a close investigation of the careers of GMM’s massively popular khu jin KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin.23 Engaging with male idols via shipping has become almost axiomatic within the young women’s consumer cultures of Japan, South Korea, and even Mainland China.24 Indeed, the transnational spread of idol shipping reveals the increasingly sophisticated relationships between queer representation, fan affect, and celebrity management across East Asian media culture.25 The practice of shipping idols is triggered by fans’ intense investment in the relationships between the members of J-pop and K-pop groups, speaking to the fact that East Asian male idols are specifically produced so that they are celebrated by fans in the context of their contribution to their group’s broader relationship dynamics.26 As Kazumi Nagaike argues concerning male idols produced by Japan’s largest male celebrity management agency, Johnny and Associates, relationality is a fundamental feature of the idol as a postmodern phenomenon, whether this be the members of an idol group’s relationships with their fans or with each other.27 Within both the Japanese and Korean idol systems, idols are specifically produced and promoted to facilitate the development of parasocial relationships with fans that ultimately mimic kinship structures.28 It is therefore not surprising that fan consumers who have been influenced by the industry to focus on relationality and develop parasocial kinship networks would subsequently extend these fantasies to pairings between the idols themselves. Through their consumption of idol culture, fans in Japan and South Korea are thus primed to closely analyze the interactions between idols as well as to observe and interrogate their interpersonal relationships.29 As idol fandom has spread beyond East Asia, particularly through the Korean Wave, these practices have emerged in other fandom contexts such as Thailand to produce a phenomenon that fan studies scholars Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto argue is fundamentally transcultural in its affective structures.30

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As I explained in the Introduction, idol shippers draw upon their close analysis of idol interactions to produce a wealth of fan works, including fanfictions such as the one between OffGun presented above, fan art, video compilations of homoerotic interactions, and often-heated social media debates.31 Importantly, there are strong synergies between these fan productions and the narrative logics of Japanese BL manga which were introduced in Chapter 2. This is unsurprising given that both male idols and BL manga emerged from young women’s consumer culture in the Japanese context and then spread to South Korea in the late 1980s. Following the Japanese BL ōdō, shipping fan works often engage in the seme–uke rule, particularly in homoerotic fanfictions that feature explicit sexual scenes.32 Likewise, idol fans who practice shipping also often engage in conversations akin to the moe-banashi of Japanese BL manga fans, debating which members of a pairing would be seme and which would be uke, drawing upon their in-depth, encyclopedic knowledge of the idols and their relationships to fuel their descent into fantasy.33 A vibrant scholarly tradition has emerged to try and understand just why young women in East and Southeast Asia practice idol shipping. In many ways, the literature on idol shippers’ motivations to celebrate the queer potentials of interactions between male idols mirrors the literature investigating why women consume BL manga. For media theorist Jungmin Kwon, for instance, idol shipping among South Korean fans represents a fundamentally feminist act whereby young female consumers who have been denied sexual agency by the hetero-patriarchal logics of Korean society can safely explore and express their sexual attraction to handsome male celebrities.34 Lucy Glasspool, writing on the Japanese context and specifically focusing on female fans who ship members of popular J-pop group Arashi, notes how shipping has emerged among Japanese women as a non-threatening way to revel in affection for male idols without destabilizing the “fantasy of availability” which is central to the construction of parasocial relationships in idol culture.35 That is, within an industry where idols are discouraged from engaging in romantic relationships so as not to frustrate fans’ fantasies of potentially dating the idol objects of their devotions,36 shipping has become a site where women can play out their fantasies of dating idols through homoerotic substitution.37 Developing a similar argument, Nagaike adds that shipping within the Japanese context also represents a site where female fans can articulate their strong affective attachment to idols, with fan work ultimately conceptualized by fans as a way of showing support to their favorite member(s) of an idol group.38 Overall, it is evident that shipping represents an affective outlet for fans with diverse motivations, centered on their attraction to handsome male stars. As Kristine Santos argues, these affects surrounding shipping resonate with the fundamentally queer affects produced by Japanese BL manga, reveling in the disruptive potentials of the performance of staged homoeroticism.39 In the Japanese and South Korean contexts, shipping emerged organically with very little explicit direction or input from idol production companies. In this sense, idol shipping in the J-pop and K-pop industries truly is “bottomup,” since fans initiated the obsessive search for interactions between celebrities awash with queer potential. But as both Glasspool and Kwon have revealed

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through their investigations of the impacts of female fans’ shipping practices on the J-pop and K-pop industries, producers have begun implicitly catering to shippers as one method of boosting engagement (and hence spending) among fans.40 In response to fans’ shipping practices, both Japanese and Korean idol producers have been increasingly including staged homoeroticism and acts of skinship into performances to strengthen the circulation of affective intensities between fans and idols.41 There have also been notable instances where J-pop and K-pop production companies have explicitly tapped into fan practices to actively encourage shipping and thus normalize this once-underground subculture. For instance, SM Entertainment invited fans of their K-pop group TVXQ to participate in an officially sanctioned fanfiction contest focused on imagining members of the band in romantic relationships (sexually explicit fictions were, however, strictly banned).42 In Japan, a vibrant informal economy of semi-professional magazines featuring screenshots of skinship between Johnnys idols as well as pornographic fan-produced comics featuring idol ships has also emerged.43 In the Thai context, where K-pop idol shipping is very popular,44 GMM has explicitly borrowed these idol management and promotion practices as part of the development of their own, home-grown idol industry. In so doing, GMM seeks to create khu jin to compete with the massive popularity of K-pop idols and shipping among their target market of middle-class young women.45 Below, I detail exactly how GMM’s BL Machine explicitly manages khu jin idol production and thus shapes fans’ shipping practices to achieve this goal.46 Stage One: Scouting Talent After acquiring an original Thai BL novel—typically from Jamsai Publishing’s Ever Y imprint47—to transform it into a series, the first stage of GMM’s BL Machine is to identify handsome young male actors who can play the lead roles and thus perform the male–male queer romance central to the narrative. Early in the BL Machine’s history, this meant uncovering rookie talent, as was the case with Krist and Singto in SOTUS. In later years, however, this practice shifted to scouting talent who already had some experience in the entertainment industry. An example would be 2gether’s lead Bright, who had previous acting experience and had participated in Channel 3’s teen variety show Strawberry Krubcake (2013) as well as several GMM variety shows.48 To ensure that these new idols will appeal to young female viewers and hence develop a large fanbase, care is taken by GMM’s scouting arm to identify potential talents who align with the “Korpanese” aesthetic which has emerged as desirable in contemporary Thailand.49 Recruitment is thus focused on young men, often in their late teens or early twenties, whose styling and comportment matches that of K-pop idols. In the early years of BL series production in Thailand, talent was chiefly recruited from social media accounts, with GMM signing handsome young men who had amassed large followings on either Facebook or Instagram (the most popular social media services in Thailand). Importantly, GMM would scout talent from the various “Cute Boy” fan pages formed at prestigious universities in Bangkok which have recently penetrated Thailand’s youth culture and become an

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important site for the development of micro-celebrity influencers and YouTubers.50 For instance, Tay was scouted to join GMM after gaining popularity in his role as a cheerleader who was frequently featured on the “Chula Cute Boy” Facebook page while he was a student at Chulalongkorn University.51 Singto was likewise cast in SOTUS after the producers found images and videos of him performing his role as head hazer at Kasetsart University circulating online.52 Other talent, such as Off, New, and Win, were scouted through more regular means by participating either in GMM’s broader audition cycle or in talent competitions designed to recruit new idols. Likewise, Krist was recruited after appearing at a specific, targeted audition to find the central cast of SOTUS, which he attended due to receiving an invitation from Singto, his senior at university.53 Finally, as recounted above, stars such as Bright and Gun were recruited into GMM after first developing experience at other entertainment companies. Throughout this recruitment process, attention is paid to acquiring stars who are already famous among Thai consumers, which ultimately draws their preestablished support bases into the BL Machine. Stage Two: Training Talent Once a rookie idol has been recruited into GMM, the company begins training them in the various skills necessary to star in their BL series. Mimicking idol training methods that represent a hallmark of the K-pop production industry,54 GMM’s new male idols participate in acting workshops where not only the fundamentals of acting are taught and key scenes in dramas rehearsed, but the idols learn the specific skills required to perform staged homoeroticism.55 Care is taken to overcome these putatively heterosexual young men’s awkwardness in engaging in intimate acts with other men, with a focus placed on learning how to kiss and hug each other.56 Importantly, unlike K-pop training practices which are usually conducted behind closed doors, GMM typically broadcasts the acting workshops across their traditional and social media channels as part of the initial promotion cycle for their BL series. The new idols, under the direction of their managers at GMM, also tease videos and photos on their personal social media accounts to showcase the central couple of the new BL series. The idols will also frequently share various updates of outings together for meals, shopping, and even vacations. The main aim of this practice is, of course, to begin fostering a sense of fin among consumers, teasing fans with what will come in the actual series. The use of social media is strategic since these forms of media encourage fans to recirculate images and videos,57 thus extending GMM’s penetration of the Thai mediascape. Further, these social media practices are central to producing the narratives of friendship and intimacy between the khu jin that are fundamental to shipping,58 with GMM explicitly producing content that will trigger affective responses of fin among fans. Indeed, these initial moments of homoerotic interaction continue to be circulated by fans themselves on social media well after a series’ broadcast ends. For example, one Thai woman who was a BrightWin fan explained during an online interview that images and videos from the beginning stage of a khu

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jin’s relationship during training are often deployed by fans to generate further nostalgic fin for the initial sense of excitement produced by an imagined celebrity couple early in their career. The BL Machine’s promotion process continues during the filming and production cycle of the series itself, with media commentators particularly noting that it was Krist and Singto’s consistent social media use throughout the production of SOTUS that built hype for the dramatization of Bittersweet’s popular novel and eventually led to the series becoming a smash hit.59 In this deliberate promotion of homoerotic interaction, GMM extends what tends to be implicit in K-pop production, signaling to fans that a couple has been “ready-made” for their consumption as shippers. In fact, since 2019, GMM openly refers to their idol couples as khu jin, a term that was once restricted to fans’ discourse. By labeling their idols as khu jin, GMM encourages fans to ship them without fear of censure. At this stage of the BL Machine, then, a khu jin has been explicitly produced by GMM itself, rather than emerging organically through fans’ practices. I discuss the specifics of the relationships between the BL Machine, khu jin¸ and fans’ use of social media in more detail in the next chapter. Stage Three: Debuting Talent While the BL Machine is technically initialized after GMM has acquired a novel and announced its series through various social and traditional media channels, it is only by stage three that the newly recruited and trained idol celebrities are fully integrated into the world of Thai BL media. Stage three represents the moment when a BL series is broadcast on one of GMM’s terrestrial television stations (either GMM25 or ONE 31) and then made available for streaming on LINE TV (for Thai consumers prior to 2022) or on YouTube (for most international fans). Typically, series are launched during the final moments of stage two of the BL Machine, although acting workshops can continue right up until broadcast, which was the case for SOTUS and the initial installments of the Kiss Me series starring TayNew.60 In the early years of the history of GMM’s BL series, promotion would often take the form of a modest press release such as with the two 2016 series SOTUS and Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey. But as GMM’s series in general, and its BL series in particular, became increasingly popular among Thai and international viewers, GMM shifted to staging large press events at the end of the year to announce with much fanfare their series line-up for the following year. It was at the GMM New and Next 2020 event, livestreamed across Facebook, YouTube, and LINE TV for excited fans, that 2gether was announced and BrightWin were introduced as a new khu jin.61 Importantly, these press conferences showcase extended teasers for the series which foreground the new imagined couple’s skills in staged homoeroticism, generating anticipatory fin for the khu jin’s performance in the show and creating buzz online. Throughout a BL series’ broadcast—typically lasting roughly 3 months—GMM works together with the Thai magazine publishing industry and various famous YouTubers renowned for interviewing popular celebrities to boost their new khu

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jin’s visibility across the Thai youth media landscape. In fact, GMM’s four “Royal Couples” have come to dominate Thai young women’s magazines, notably gracing the cover of the forty-first anniversary edition of Amarin Publishing’s highly popular woman’s magazine Praew in September 2020. GMM also invests significant time and effort into curating their social media accounts in ways that will further encourage fan interaction with their new khu jin stars, notably coordinating the trending of hashtags for both the shows themselves and the characters appearing within them. In its strategic management of fans’ relationships with their idol celebrities online, GMM is explicitly encouraging practices that have organically emerged within K-pop idol fandom to deliberately promote shipping as a method of engaging their viewer base. There have been two prominent examples of this phenomenon throughout the BL Machine’s history, although I note that this is a common practice for all GMM’s BL series. In late 2018, on the back of the popularity of the male–male couple Pete and Kao in Kiss Me Again (performed by TayNew), fans engaged with GMMTV’s account to trend the hashtags #PeteKao and #TayNew in Thailand,62 dramatically raising these stars’ public profiles and the mainstream visibility of GMM’s BL series.63 More notably, fans of BrightWin were particularly active in boosting the visibility of 2gether online to the point that the #2gether and #BrightWin hashtags trended at number one worldwide on Twitter, transforming BrightWin into global stars overnight.64 Importantly, it is in this stage of the BL Machine that the fin being produced among viewers of the drama is transferred onto the actors themselves, with a male Thai fan of KristSingto suggesting to me during an email exchange that “the walls between the couple in the series and [the actors] breaks down.” It is also at this moment when attraction to the khu jin begins to produce queer affects among fans which act to subvert heteronormativity and, as I discuss below, allow fans to challenge the notion that queer romance is somehow problematic. Stage Four: Product Placement As the BL series are broadcast and viewers are becoming lost in the affective worlds of fin produced by both the queer romance between the central characters and the newly emergent khu jin who play them, GMM turns the attention of the BL Machine to its economic imperatives. As noted in Chapter 1, to gather the capital required to produce a series, GMM enters a variety of sponsorship relationships which eventuate in a notable amount of product placement within their series. Advertising researchers Amy Rungpaka Hackley and Chris Hackley reveal that product placement represents a highly normative practice in Thai visual media, arguing that it tends to be effective in the Thai context even if placement is particularly unsubtle.65 Within GMM BL series, product placement is seamlessly integrated into scenes of homoerotic intensity designed to tie fin to the sponsors’ newest products. One product has become a particularly notorious sponsor of GMM’s BL series, Oishi brand flavored teas. For instance, in 2gether the character of Tine (played by Win) finally agrees to date Sarawat (played by Bright) by passing

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him a bottle of Oishi containing a post-it note admitting his feelings for the other boy.66 Oishi has become tied to GMM’s Royal Couples to such an extent that numerous fans I interviewed noted with much amusement that drinking Oishi in either a series or in real life was like a code for a male–male couple. Importantly, some even suggested that drinking Oishi teas had itself come to produce fin, as consuming the product prompts both memories of their favorite khu jin and a sense of satisfaction through their perception that buying Oishi drinks supports the careers of GMM’s idols.67 Further, GMM’s khu jin participate in various events designed to attract audiences to products, mobilizing their star power and the fin produced through their homoerotic interactions both on and off the screen to attract consumers to sponsors’ goods and services. At these events, KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin continue to perform acts of staged homoeroticism, sometimes tied to their characters in the show and sometimes not. An example of this would be the Oishi Summer Trip event in 2019, where fans gathered with KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew to enjoy a series of skits and singing performances from the idol couples as well as experience Oishi’s newly released flavored teas. Notably, the Oishi Summer Trip also screened clips from the khu jin’s various series where the couples are depicted enjoying Oishi drinks, allowing fans to engage in fin while the khu jin react to the performances live (often repeating them on the stage for their fans’ further enjoyment).68 In this way, GMM’s BL Machine transforms khu jin into “image characters” for their sponsors’ products, engaging in the practices of celebrity endorsement first pioneered by the Japanese idol industry to tie fannish affect to consumerism.69 This tying of fin to the world of consumerism is in fact so integral to GMM’s BL Machine that I discuss it in much more depth in the following section. Stage Five: Fan Events Upon the conclusion of a BL series, GMM’s BL Machine begins to enter its later stages by consolidating the newly created fandom for their khu jin idols. It is during the fifth stage of the BL Machine that GMM turns to the production of the fan events which I briefly introduced in Chapter 1. As Prasannam notes in relation to the Y I Love You concerts held annually between 2017 and 2019, these BL fan events represent an important moment when fans of khu jin can be brought together at large concert venues so that GMM and their sponsors can sell various merchandise and tie-in products and hence generate significant revenue.70 Within J-pop and K-pop idol culture, fan meets such as this represent important spaces where parasocial relationships between fans and celebrities are produced and reinforced.71 GMM is thus extending models developed in the East Asian idol industries, producing events explicitly centered on the shipping practices that typically remain only a minor part of a J-pop or K-pop fan event or concert.72 The staging of BL fan events, then, represents a moment when the BL Machine draws upon the company’s broader expertise, integrating all aspects of GMM’s business (music, concert, and television production) within the development of the queer

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affect of fin. GMM has produced 35 BL fan events between 2017 and 2021. While on the surface these fan events purportedly represent a venue for fans to engage in nostalgic memories of their favorite moments from BL series,73 they also serve a more important purpose within the broader BL Machine. Although it is certainly the case that GMM fan events include nostalgic reenactments by their four Royal Couples of scenes from hit BL series, as Prasannam emphasized in previous work,74 it must be noted that the khu jin also perform homoerotic skits and songs that are completely unrelated to the series which made them famous. These staged homoerotic performances—as well as question and answer segments, and interactions with fans—respond to fans’ desires to learn more about the idols, creating a space where fin is generated through the relationships between the khu jin themselves instead of the characters they play within BL series. In fact, at later fan events, performances that do not directly pay homage to GMM’s BL series tend to outnumber those designed to provoke nostalgia among fans. At Y I Love You 2019, for instance, TayNew sang a cover of Nicole Theriault’s hit 1999 song “Mai chai mai chai” (No Way), the lyrics of which explicitly reference the fact that TayNew were famous among fans for constantly bickering with each other and had nothing to do with the characters they played in the Kiss Me series. Likewise, OffGun performed an energetic stage of Lilli Chuealaem’s viral luk thung hit “Loek Khui Thang Amphoe Thoe Khon Diao” (I’ll Stop Flirting Around the District Just for You) at their 2019 Funtastic Babii fan concert, tapping into a ribald song that had become popular among Thai youth on the TikTok social media app. Naturally, both performances also include ample skinship to which the audience responds with the predictable sao wai reaction of loud screaming as they are overwhelmed by fin. I suggest that in this later stage of the BL Machine, GMM is importantly refocusing fin on the interactions between the actors themselves. The BL Machine is thus explicitly encouraging fans to continue shipping GMM’s idol stars as a new form of queer idol celebrity grounded in staged homoerotic performance outside of the context of their BL series. That is, GMM is consciously divorcing the khu jin from the BL series that initiated the BL Machine and which, up until this moment, represented a crucial anchor and reference point for fans’ experiences of fin. In many ways, the khu jin are “set free” from the characters they depicted in BL series to be shipped together as real individuals by fans. Due to the decoupling of khu jin from their originating series achieved in this fifth stage of the BL Machine, GMM’s male idols begin to circulate throughout the Thai mediascape as imagined couples whose appeal derives from the queer potentials inherent to their (performed) intimate relationships. It is at this moment when the khu jin performances challenge the heteronormative nature of traditional Thai celebrity culture and they transform into queer idol celebrities. According to one young Thai woman who passionately consumed everything related to GMM’s BL series and who had attended every single fan event organized by GMM at the time I met her in Bangkok in 2019, concerts unlock new opportunities for fans to enjoy interactions between idol celebrities laden with fin. Importantly, she insisted that the fin produced live between khu jin on the stage is more intense than the fin

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produced by a series, demonstrating how fans’ affective responses become more heavily invested in the khu jin themselves as their careers develop post-series. Interestingly, she also explained to me that these BL fan events transform GMM’s khu jin into “real idols … who we ship like in K-pop.” I explore this notion in more detail in Chapter 4. Stage Six: Variety Shows In the final stage of the BL Machine, the separation of khu jin celebrities from the BL series which initially produced them is completed, opening GMM’s male idols to a world of new opportunities as postmodern idol “image characters” tied to queer affects. The sixth and final stage of GMM’s BL Machine is the creation of variety show programs featuring khu jin couples that putatively provide fans access to the supposedly “real” relationships between the two idol actors. These shows are, of course, the aforementioned OffGun Fun Night, TayNew Meal Date, Friend Ship with KristSingto, and BrightWin Inbox. Importantly, these variety shows are broadcast through GMM’s dedicated online platforms, whether this be the LINE TV streaming service for domestic consumers or the GMMTV YouTube channel for international fans (since 2021, Thai consumers have been able to access the YouTube channel as well). By emphasizing online availability and engagement, these khu jin variety shows align with the aims outlined in GMM Grammy’s 2018 Annual Report indicating the corporation’s increased investment into streaming services and the strategic integration of its traditional and social media production.75 The shows are quite noticeably focused on shipping—signaled, in fact, by the particularly unsubtle title of KristSingto’s program which plays on the English word “friendship”—and while there are some tie-ins with their BL series, the focus tends to instead be on outings or challenges that the couples undertake. Notably, these variety shows once again represent sites for GMM to direct the fin produced by their queer idol celebrities toward the fulfillment of the company’s commercial imperatives. In the following section, I present my analysis of these four BL variety shows to investigate the intersections of the BL Machine and the development of the “romanticization of commodities” and the “commoditization of romance” in contemporary Thailand.

BL Variety Shows: Commoditizing Romance through Queer Idol Celebrity Together with Chavalin Svetanant, a critical theorist of Thai advertising culture, I have previously written about the explosion of BL advertising in Thailand which has emerged in response to the gradual mainstreaming of homoerotic celebrity shipping among young Thai consumers.76 Since 2016, when cosmetics company KA Lipcare released a series of explicitly homoerotic commercials for its newest lip balm which drew upon the tropes of the emerging genre of Thai BL,77 advertising texts which depict queer romances between handsome young men have become

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a common feature of contemporary Thailand’s media landscape.78 In featuring moments of intimacy between men—many of whom are popular social media stars or celebrity idols—BL has become an important strategy which targets middle-class young women to market everything from cosmetics, to candies, snacks, and even MAMA noodles, Thailand’s most popular brand of instant ramen.79 Within their report on the state of the Thai BL economy, specifically written for Thai industries interested in engaging with BL fans, Line Insights empirically demonstrates how synergistic relationships between BL actors, fans, and the mainstream public have boosted the brand recognition and sales of companies utilizing BL advertising.80 Line Insights particularly reports that endorsements from BL celebrities have been especially successful for products traditionally aligned with young women’s consumer culture, singling out cosmetics as one industry where BL advertising has great potential.81 GMM’s BL Machine contributes to this broader advertising practice and, in many ways, the company’s four most popular khu jin have played an influential role in both normalizing BL advertising and injecting the queer affect of fin into marketing practices. Indeed, Thailand’s advertising landscape is especially wellsuited for campaigns which rely on the manipulation of affective responses such as fin since advertising which targets consumers through discourses laden with pathos represent the norm.82 Feelings of fin evoked either by the excitement a BL fan feels watching male–male intimacy or by their specific attachment to khu jin stars are thus being deployed in contemporary Thai marketing as a form of emotional advertising that mobilizes fan affect.83 There are notable instances of GMM’s khu jin appearing in advertising campaigns that explicitly deploy fin. KristSingto have been particularly prominent in Thai advertising culture, most notably appearing in a series of short BL-themed dramas for the cosmetics company Baby Bright as well as an advertising campaign for Min Min gel candies that playfully evokes famous scenes from SOTUS.84 Furthermore, KristSingto have also appeared in several events and campaigns for Lactasoy soy milk which target the Mainland Chinese market, speaking to the imagined couple’s transnational appeal.85 On the back of the massive global success of 2gether, BrightWin have also appeared in a variety of advertising campaigns. One example was a tie-in promotion with Dunkin’ Donuts to celebrate the launch of Still 2gether (Phror Rao Yang Khu Kan, “Because We are Still a Couple” in Thai), the sequel to their smash hit series.86 In June 2021, Bright and Win were also featured in a prominent global social media advertising campaign for fashion house Dior’s 2022 summer men’s collection.87 As part of the final stages of the BL Machine, GMM strategically divorced their four most popular khu jin from the series in which they starred to facilitate the integration of their queer idol celebrities into the newly emergent realm of BL advertising in Thailand. Central to this process was the launch of the variety shows OffGun Fun Night, TayNew Meal Date, Friend Ship with KristSingto, and BrightWin Inbox. While each of these variety shows focuses on very different scenarios, they are united by an emphasis on the relationships between the khu jin and thus represent an important vehicle for GMM to engage with the fandoms for these eight highly popular young idol celebrities. Mimicking the Japanese

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genre of the “wide show” where idols and comedians engage in a variety of fun activities while discussing recent news and endorsing new products,88 GMM’s four BL variety shows draw upon the charismatic presence of the idols to marry the world of entertainment to the world of advertising. Importantly, just as Japanese idol talents implicitly respond to fans’ preconceived expectations of their reactions to situations and products in Japanese wide shows,89 BL variety shows provide an opportunity to showcase the interactions between GMM’s khu jin to deepen fans’ preestablished understandings of the stars’ personal relationships. That is, the performances by KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin in these shows conform to fans’ expectations concerning how the pairs will interact with each other, whether it be TayNew’s constant bickering or Krist’s incessant teasing of the older Singto. Naturally, this relationship-building between the khu jin produces fin that is tied to the products and experiences being featured in the variety shows. In other words, an imagined couple’s (performed) intimate relationship is linked to products and services in a complicated form of affective advertising. The first BL variety show to be developed and broadcast by GMM was OffGun Fun Night which purportedly gave fans access to Off and Gun’s private apartment and explored their relationship living together. Importantly, Off and Gun were frequently visited by fellow GMM talents and other khu jin, with OffGun Fun Night functioning as an interview program where OffGun would introduce upand-coming actors and series (this is especially the case in season 2). TayNew Meal Date, on the other hand, does not focus on a domestic setting and instead features TayNew going on various outings throughout Bangkok and surrounding areas to visit malls and restaurants for lavish meals. Further, the show highlights New’s attempts to get the sugar-hating Tay to partake of desserts with him, all while the two constantly bicker with each other in ways that numerous Polca fans around the world explained to me during interviews evoked fin. Friend Ship with KristSingto likewise focuses on travel, but this time the emphasis is on joining KristSingto on trips away from Bangkok to resorts throughout Thailand as well as one episode in which the khu jin travel to Busan, South Korea. Notably, each episode of the show features KristSingto cooking together and writing their reflections of the trip in a special “Friend Ship” journal that GMM subsequently transformed into a photobook for sale to fans of the pair. The newer variety show, BrightWin Inbox, focuses on the completion of challenges by Bright and Win, with fans explicitly invited to submit suggestions for activities the couple must complete together (often in the company of other GMM talents). BrightWin Inbox introduces a competitive aspect, pitting Bright and Win against each other to see who can successfully master each episode’s featured activity. On the surface, these scenarios appear similar to East Asian reality television and, if one was unfamiliar with the culture surrounding khu jin, they do not necessarily represent BL content at all. Yet my analysis of the programs reveals that the shows focus explicitly on the practice of shipping and thus align with the broader generic tropes that have emerged around Thai BL series introduced in Chapter 2. First, and foremost, the situations into which the idol couples are placed in these shows—namely, travel or the intimate, domestic sphere—reflect environments

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that are common to dating culture in developed, late capitalist societies such as Thailand.90 Whether this be the intimate spaces of the bedroom in OffGun Fun Night or the automobile in TayNew Meal Date,91 the khu jin are placed in situations that are already coded as potentially romantic, triggering the expectations of viewers who are familiar with the couples and preparing them for moments of staged homoeroticism. Indeed, the shows are structured very similar to dates—as indicated by the title of TayNew’s program—or romantic trips. Structurally, the shows also emphasize activities which the couples must do together, whether these be the challenges to be completed in BrightWin Inbox or the adventurous outings undertaken in Friend Ship with KristSingto, thus increasing the likelihood of the intimate, interpersonal moments upon which shipping culture is built.92 Lastly, the variety shows’ dialogue is explicitly geared toward highlighting moments replete with homoerotic potential, such as in the following dialogue concerning a trip to Phuket in the final episode of OffGun Fun Night’s first season when TayNew joined OffGun on a camping trip. Off: [To TayNew] Let me ask you this … why did you go there just the two of you? Tay: We were free! Off: And it happened to be just you and [New] that were free? New: [Flustered] No, we already asked but no one could go [Intertitle: Why don’t you look at Tay’s eyes while talking?] Off: [Smacks Tay] Why didn’t you ask me!? No one asked me! Tay: You had to work! Off: You knew I had to work, right? Tay: Yeah, I had your schedule. Gun: [Butting in] I saw the photo where you were in the water together. Tay: What water? Gun: I didn’t know what you were doing. I had a video call with you and saw you and [New] together. Tay: We took turns! Gun: [Confused, head surrounded by question marks] No, I saw you both in the same bathtub. [Intertitle: Same bathtub!?] TayNew: [Together] Really? Gun: Yes! New: [Flustered] Different bathtub! Gun: [Doubtfully] Really? [To Off, with feigned annoyance] Why don’t they seem to talk much about Phuket? What was going on that day!?93 As OffGun and TayNew continue to banter, Gun implies that the other couple shared many intimate moments during their trip to Phuket with the implication underlying the conversation being that TayNew had escaped on a romantic getaway. Naturally, TayNew return the favor by calling OffGun out on similarly intimate moments, ensuring that fans of both khu jin are satisfied by the episode. But it is not just the dialogue itself, which could simply be understood as playful

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banter between male friends, that responds to fans’ desires for fin and creates opportunities for shipping. The editing of the variety shows also heightens the homoerotic potential underlying the dialogues and situations, such as the intertitles presented on the screen in the extract above that call attention to New’s shyness and the intimate act of bathing together, ultimately creating a romantic subtext for TayNew’s trip to Phuket. Further, throughout all GMM’s BL variety shows, several paralinguistic features are deployed during moments of closeness and explicit skinship between the khu jin to highlight to viewers when interactions that produce fin for shippers occur. For instance, in episode 3 of TayNew Meal Date, the screen is tinted pink and surrounded by love hearts after New grabs Tay’s hand to stop him from touching a decorative cactus in the chic dessert café which the two are visiting (see  Figure  8).94 Furthermore, an intertitle exclaiming “New = smooth move” appears at the top left-hand corner of the screen to imply that New was simply using this opportunity to be intimate with the other man, as well as demonstrating his care for Tay. As well as hearts, the BL variety shows also commonly deploy sparkles, pink tinting, slow-motion replays of intimate touches, and closeups of shy facial expressions (sometimes with the idols’ heads being comically enlarged). These editing techniques draw upon an aesthetic which Japanese manga critic Honda Masuko terms hirahira (“fluttering,” alluding to lace, flowers, and ribbons) that is a typical design feature of Japanese shōjo manga deployed to increase emotionality,95 especially in romantic contexts. As Santos argues, shōjo manga aesthetics also represent a key element of the affective strategies utilized in Japanese BL manga to visibilize the intimate homoerotic tension between malemale couples and thus produce queer affects.96 GMM’s use of hirahira techniques

Figure 8  Editing in TayNew Meal Date heightens the sense of homoerotic intimacy implicit in the interactions between the show’s stars. Photo credit GMM.97

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in their BL variety shows thus constructs the interactions between the khu jin as homoerotic, explicitly producing moments of fin for fans. These aesthetic tactics are not just used, however, to heighten fin produced by the khu jin for fans’ enjoyment. They also serve a central function in transforming GMM’s BL variety shows into opportunities for advertising through a process that Illouz terms the romanticization of commodities. For Illouz, advertising in late capitalist societies strategically and conspicuously entangles marketing with the depiction and pursuit of romance by positioning consumer goods such as food and beverages and, of course, cosmetics as mediators of intense passion.98 Importantly, celebrity couples are commonly utilized in this process to link their star personas to scenes of overwhelming romantic attachment that are realized through explicit consumption.99 Throughout the four BL variety shows which GMM produces, the moments of queer affective potential that engage shippers are also almost always the moments in which product placement or some other form of commercial activity occurs. In the instance from TayNew Meal Date depicted in Figure 8, for example, the fact that homoerotic intimacy occurred between the khu jin at the very moment that they have entered a café to be featured on the program is significant since it ties fin to the commercial sphere. This is especially the case since TayNew’s homoerotic interaction has occurred immediately after the café has been introduced to viewers as a potential date spot via a preceding infographic. That the homoerotic scene between TayNew is then followed by the khu jin happily eating (and even feeding each other) popular items from the café’s menu, all while prices appear on screen, further reveals how intimacy between the couple is being used for advertising. Viewers watching the two idols interact while on their “meal date” are thus being encouraged to also visit this dessert café and enjoy not only the sweet menu items themselves, but also the sweet intimate moments modeled by TayNew as fin is married to the commodity form being promoted. In this way the queer romance being performed by the khu jin is utilized to romanticize the featured commodity (in this instance, both the food at the café and the act of visiting the café itself). Likewise, in the final episode of BrightWin Inbox, Bright and Win are joined by a famous host from GMM named P’Godji to go ice-skating at a newly opened rink in a mall in downtown Bangkok.100 Like the example of TayNew above, the episode is specifically focused on selling the experience of ice-skating as a potential date idea for viewers and BrightWin’s experiences on the rink—where P’Godji enthusiastically screams like a sao wai whenever the two hold hands to support each other as they skate—produce fin. But this episode also contains product placement, for the episode is directly sponsored by a brand of snacks called Shinmai Pops. In fact, before the khu jin even reach the skating rink, the episode begins with Bright and Win meeting P’Godji in front of a convenience store to buy some snacks for their so-called date in the same mall where they will soon go skating. Naturally, the snacks the khu jin choose to buy are bags of Shinmai Pops, which Bright and Win enthusiastically praise to the audience. As BrightWin begin eating the snacks, Bright thoughtfully opens Win’s bag for him after observing the younger man struggling. He then passes Win the open bag

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Figure 9  Hirahira aesthetics deployed in BrightWin Inbox to tie fin from the couple to product placement. Photo credit GMM.101

of snacks while love hearts appear between the two and P’Godji praises Bright for being “such a gentleman” for caring for Win (see Figure 9). In this way, a sponsor’s product is entangled in the homoerotic interactions between the khu jin, representing another instance where a commodity is romanticized through the editing of a GMM BL variety show. In this manner, the four BL variety shows participate in the celebrity endorsement practices which typify the Thai media landscape, except that they deploy homoerotic imagined couples where heterosexual couples have traditionally been used in the past.102 The romanticization of commodities is, however, only the first step in GMM’s utilization of its four Royal Couples in the development of queer affective advertising. As Illouz notes, the romanticization of commodities is only the first step toward the broader creation of a “romantic utopia” in which romance itself has become commoditized.103 In OffGun Fun Night, TayNew Meal Date, Friend Ship with KristSingto, and BrightWin Inbox, queer romance performed by khu jin is also commoditized, with GMM transforming the fan affect of fin into a powerful marketing tool. In late capitalist, developed economies with robust consumer spheres such as Thailand (especially Bangkok), Illouz argues that romance has increasingly been “enclosed within temporal, spatial, and artifactual boundaries defined by … forms of leisure offered by increasingly powerful industries.”104 Tourism and travel, as well as the consumption of other forms of entertainment such as restaurant dates, cinema visits, and other intensely exciting activities are central to the broader commoditization of romance.105 For Illouz, the very meaning of romance changed as a result of the rise of late capitalism and its postmodern positioning of consumption as the basis for individual and collective meaning-making. Through

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analysis of American consumer culture, Illouz suggests that romance has come to refer “more and more to an atmosphere and a type of setting conducive to certain feelings,” with romantic potential now defined by “the correct, external mise-en-scene: theatres, dance-halls, restaurants … settings seen in movies and advertising images.”106 As should be clear, the commoditization of romance in late capitalist society thus relies on particular “social symbols” which “rest on a configuration of social relations that makes them relevant to the social order.”107 That is, sites such as restaurants and other commercial entertainment spaces became symbols of romantic interaction, producing a longing among consumers for the all-consuming passion which popular culture celebrates in its production of a romantic utopia.108 This symbolism specifically develops, Illouz argues, through an “encounter between the swelling consumer markets of leisure and evolving definitions of … intimacy and sexuality” and is subsequently played out in the world of advertising.109 As sophisticated advertising texts, GMM’s four BL variety shows explicitly engage with the industries of leisure so that fin is produced through performed queer romantic interactions that are tied to the commercial activities indicative of commoditized romance. These programs, in following TayNew on putative dates to eat delicious food, joining KristSingto or BrightWin on exciting or relaxing getaways, or showing OffGun chat with their friends at home while sharing the newest snacks and beverages, link fin to leisure activities which fans are themselves encouraged to imitate. In this way, GMM is borrowing stereotypical representations of romance that form part of Thailand’s heteronormative media landscape and transforming them into spaces to not only satisfy the desires of fans seeking intimate moments between queer idol celebrities, but they are also manipulating fin to advertise a particular romantic lifestyle based in consumerism. BL fans’ desires for homoerotic interaction between khu jin and their investment into fantasies of queer romance are therefore transformed into consumerist impulses through their encounters with stereotypical sites in which romantic passion is performed. This marketing tactic has ultimately succeeded in influencing fans’ consumption behaviors, with Line Insights noting in their report that fans willingly visit locations featured in BL programming to experience a sense of intimacy with their idols.110 GMM’s variety shows are thus engaged in a much more subtle form of emotional advertising than simply injecting products or entertainment experiences into moments of staged homoerotic intimacy between khu jin. Rather, this staged homoeroticism becomes embedded within a particular romantic lifestyle politics that mobilizes the queer affect of fin as part of a broader postmodern practice of collective meaning-making through consumption. That is, these BL variety programs produce an affective economy of romance that positions middle-class consumer behaviors as indicative of true passion between couples,111 substituting khu jin for the heterosexual celebrity couples that were used in Thai advertising in the past. Forming part of the BL Machine, GMM’s variety shows consequently function as sites where khu jin are used to manipulate fans’ fantasies of both the couples themselves and the romantic interactions which they are performing, even

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if this romance is queer from the perspective of Thailand’s heteronormative society. KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin ultimately transform into symbols or “image characters” for romantic consumer practices which fans are expected to mimic and, in so doing, these fans will bolster the profits of not only GMM itself, but also the various industries with which GMM collaborates to produce entertainment content focused on queer romance.

The Problem of Queerbaiting: Thinking through the Ethics of the BL Machine The past several decades have witnessed remarkable increases in entertainment content depicting queer romance, whether it be in North America or in East and Southeast Asia. Thai BL media naturally forms part of this broader expansion of queer representation in mainstream popular culture around the globe. While initially celebrated by activists as a significant gain from the perspective of visibility politics, recent years have seen a growing concern among cultural critics—particularly in Western societies—surrounding the potentially exploitative representational politics of sexual minorities in mainstream culture.112 Further, several commentators and queer fans alike have begun questioning the motives underlying the mainstream cultural industries’ increased inclusion of sexual minority characters and queer romance within their film and televisual productions.113 A growing concern has emerged in North America, for instance, that entertainment companies have visibilized queer sexuality simply as a cynical attempt to cash in on the so-called pink dollar as advertising agencies became aware of the market potentials of sexual minority communities.114 This has led to vibrant and at times highly charged debates over the phenomenon of “queerbaiting,” defined by media and fan studies theorist Joseph Brennan as the practice whereby queer representation is deployed in mainstream media in tokenistic ways for the purposes of economic exploitation.115 Naturally, as a media production system designed to utilize staged homoeroticism to generate revenue, GMM’s BL Machine is not immune from questions surrounding queerbaiting and my digital ethnography has revealed that this is a common concern among fans, particularly in Anglophone fandom spaces. In the Introduction, I briefly introduced the “yaoi dispute” which occurred in 1990s Japan where gay activists critiqued BL manga and its heterosexual female fans for promoting heteronormative conceptualizations of male–male romance. Another important criticism emerging from the yaoi dispute, however, relates to the phenomenon that would now be termed queerbaiting and resonates with criticisms of Thai BL I have seen among some fans throughout my ethnography. Several Japanese gay men argued within a feminist coterie magazine during the yaoi dispute that BL manga appropriated gay romance for the satisfaction of young women’s desires without engaging with political questions of discrimination against sexual minority communities.116 That is, representations of queer romance were being used to satisfy heterosexual women’s desires and were driving a

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profitable publishing industry with neither this industry nor the fans paying attention to the systems of oppression that impacted members of Japanese sexual minority communities. Sociologist Ishida Hitoshi terms this phenomenon the “appropriation of representation,” arguing that the Japanese BL industry promotes fantastic narratives through the BL ōdō’s typical elision of explicit queer identity politics.117 In many ways, GMM’s BL Machine also engages in the appropriation of representation, using homoerotic interactions between khu jin to feed female fans’ fantasies and thus sell them products and services, whether it be via product placement in BL series or the sophisticated forms of affective advertising typical to BL variety shows. The marriage of queer representation and advertising culture has also been critiqued by sociologist Alexandra Chasin, who notes that a neoliberal politics has emerged around queer representation in North American media as an unexpected result of the expansion of rights-based models of queer experience.118 Importantly, Chasin argues that sexual minority communities are increasingly positioned in US media—whether it be sitcoms, films, or advertising texts—via heteronormative frameworks which uphold White, middle-class values so that queer consumers can be better integrated into the mainstream market for the purposes of economic exploitation.119 In many ways, Chasin is critiquing how the romantic utopia investigated by Illouz has expanded to incorporate queer romance, which is significant when considering that GMM’s BL Machine is producing a similar expansion of the romantic utopia in the Thai context. While not specifically concerned with the notion of queerbaiting per se, Chasin is skeptical of mainstream media’s engagement with the pink economy due to its watering down of radical queer political messaging.120 Thai BL media can also be critiqued from this perspective, since the queer romantic content which emerges within both series and advertising alike is tied to a commoditized romance that is principally deployed to encourage fans of khu jin to participate in consumer culture. In fact, GMM’s business model has rested on the mainstreaming of queer romance due to a recognition of the market potential of sao wai rather than a commitment to queer representation. That being said, works such as 2019’s Dark Blue Kiss have begun engaging with political questions, as discussed in Chapter 1. Underlying these concerns around queer visibility politics in mainstream media is an anxiety over the relationships between consumer capitalism and queer representation, as well as related questions about the politics of authenticity. Debates surrounding queerbaiting typically focus on the fact that the mainstream media’s turn toward queer romance is mostly driven by auteurs and producers who do not necessarily possess direct experiences of homophobic discrimination, nor do they belong to sexual minority communities themselves.121 This is certainly the case when it comes to Thai BL series and the advertising culture starring khu jin which has emerged around it. Yet, as I have stated throughout this book, my analysis of BL media and queer idol celebrities in Thailand does not just seek to produce a fully “paranoid reading” that only criticizes systems of oppression, although I acknowledge that the concerns over queerbaiting in Thai BL which I encountered among fans during my ethnography are important. I do not seek

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to suggest that the BL Machine as it has emerged in recent years is not engaging in some form of queerbaiting, as it is clear that GMM has somewhat cynically adopted BL as a means to fulfill its economic imperatives. That being said, my analysis is also strongly motivated by a desire to engage in reparative analytical practices that reveal how queerness as a radical process of deconstructing normative understandings of the world provides support to queer subjects. This commitment to reparative analysis is why I consider khu jin to represent specifically queer idol celebrities even though they may not themselves identify as members of Thailand’s sexual minority communities. From my reparative perspective, khu jin’s homoerotic performances in both BL series and BL advertisements fundamentally disrupt the heteronormativity of the Thai media landscape, rendering them queer in their deconstructive potential. My broader theoretical interest thus lies in moving beyond debates over queerbaiting to instead think more carefully about the implications of Thai BL’s ongoing transformations of the consumer landscape for queer liberation. In order to do this, I wish to consider the broader political role of the fan affect of fin as it has emerged through the BL Machine as a specifically queer affect that both supports marginalized queer subjects in Thailand and mainstreams positive queer representation within Thai media. Several gay Thai BL fans have recounted to me via digital interviews, for instance, that GMM’s khu jin have provided them with resources to make sense of their queer sexualities and their positioning in Thailand’s heteronormative society.122 One gay fan of KristSingto noted, for example, that he was excited to see advertising featuring the pair because it demonstrated that mainstream advertisers had come to recognize that “love between men is just as common as love between men and women.” He viewed the expansion of Thai BL advertising as a positive development and happily bought Baby Bright cosmetics due to the emancipatory feelings generated through his fandom for KristSingto, an imagined couple that he recognized were “not actually gay like me.” Likewise, a gay fan of TayNew suggested that TayNew Meal Date showed that “gay couples should not be afraid to have sweet moments in restaurants” and he took his boyfriend to one of the cafés the khu jin frequented because the program gave him the courage to do so. For this fan of TayNew, BL variety shows and the commoditized queer romance which they depict could potentially change attitudes toward male–male intimacy in public settings by providing positive representations of gay dating practices that he could replicate with his long-term partner. While tied to two men’s individual experiences of consumption that may not be generalizable,123 these fans’ narratives provide insight into how BL advertising in Thailand offers affective measures grounded in aspirations for a more emancipatory, queer world. BL advertising, while unashamedly commercialized, also provides gay fans the mental strength to live their lives openly and to publicly engage in the queer romance that these advertisements—and khu jin such as GMM’s Royal Couples—model. Simply put, these two gay fans found BL advertising empowering and did not feel exploited by participating in the broader consumer culture which the BL Machine promotes. The queer potentials of these aspirational modes of consumption are also important for fans outside Thailand, as I reveal in Chapter 5.

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The concept of queerbaiting has emerged from criticism of North American media and is therefore a theoretical tool which is useful when exploring the representational politics of mainstream media produced in societies such as the United States within which legal rights and recognition of sexual minority communities are now well-established. The “Asia as method” approach which guides my analysis of Thai BL media, however, is skeptical of simply applying a theoretical tool developed through the analysis of Western media without first considering whether the social conditions to which this tool responds exist within the Asian cultural setting under investigation.124 It is therefore significant to recognize that legal frameworks concerning sexual minorities in Thailand differ considerably to the Western contexts within which debates over queerbaiting have emerged. Thailand lacks sophisticated legal protections and related anti-discrimination laws that specifically uphold the rights of sexual minorities and it is important to remember that Thailand does not represent the queer paradise that it is commonly depicted to be in international media.125 As I discussed in the Introduction, the Thai state has also traditionally managed media production through a variety of formal censorship mechanisms to limit depictions of queer sexuality as part of a broader strategy to maintain the supposed heteronormative integrity of Thai culture.126 That is, until the recent explosion of BL series transformed the Thai media landscape into a space where positive depictions of queer romance abound, censorship mechanisms in Thailand explicitly and deliberately reinforced negative depictions of sexual minorities as deviating from conservative notions of Thainess.127 While the production of BL series may be motivated by economic imperatives, their queer impact on the mediascape in contemporary Thailand cannot and must not be denied. Further, as Kwon argues in relation to the South Korean context—which is remarkably similar to contemporary Thailand—visibility remains an important strategy to change public opinion concerning queer romance in societies which lack legal protections for sexual minorities.128 That is, Kwon suggests BL content can shift broader homophobic conceptualizations which may dominate understandings of queer sexuality by injecting positive representations of queer romance into public media culture.129 This is the case even if the queer visibility is commoditized and tied to late capitalist practices,130 such is the case with Thai BL. This position was one with which the two gay BL fans I interviewed agreed, with both suggesting that positive representations of queer romance between imagined couples play an important role in raising awareness among mainstream viewers of just how common male–male love truly is in Thai society. The TayNew fan specifically noted that advertising, as a form of mass media visible to the general public via television commercials or billboards across Bangkok, had a potential to spread positive images of queer romance beyond the “closed” fandom for khu jin idols. It also made the queer affective world of Thai BL media immensely open to other consumer subjects. As Santos notes with reference to Japanese BL manga, the queer affects produced by homoeroticism in young women’s media culture in Japan have transformed many heterosexual young women into champions of queer rights.131 The same potential exists within Thailand due to the transformation

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of consumer culture into a space replete with positive and normalized images of queer romance that young women and gay men alike view as not just exciting, but also empowering and sexually liberating. While classic arguments concerning queerbaiting would dismiss these fans’ willing engagement with consumerism as representing an instance where they had been duped by the neoliberal logics driving queerbaiting practice,132 such a criticism fails to consider the specifics of the Thai context. As both Wilson and Jackson have separately argued in their work on the expansion of queer representation in Thai society since the 1990s, consumer culture represents an important space where marginalized queer people can gain the economic ability to participate fully in society and gain mainstream acceptance.133 In fact, Jackson has routinely critiqued the assumption that capitalism inherently disadvantages sexual minority communities, suggesting that such a belief emerges from particularly Western epistemological frameworks that do not resonate with an illiberal Asian state such as Thailand.134 Importantly, I note that BL media has emerged concurrently to the erosion of democratic freedoms in Thailand, with Lovesick gaining popularity in 2014, the same year that a military junta enacted a coup and suspended the democratic constitution. In this complicated political context within which personal, political expression among youths is becoming increasingly censored, especially online,135 the commercial realm of BL provides an important space to visibilize debates surrounding queer representation. This is a topic I also briefly take up in this book’s conclusion. Within an environment where political expression has become increasingly censured by an authoritarian state such as Thailand, commercialized BL media and its attendant fandom become an important space which facilitates the full participation of minoritized subjects in civil society.136 Further, the queer affects produced by BL media fandom via the shipping of khu jin idols represents an important space of fantasy and play which challenges the remarkably heteronormative culture that Thailand’s authoritarian state seeks to implement. Coincidentally, I wrote this chapter in June 2021 during a time when individuals and corporations on social media around the globe participated in the celebration of Pride Month, particularly utilizing the hashtag #Pride2021 to signal support of sexual minority rights and culture. Interestingly, Thai celebrities as well as several of the entertainment companies involved in the production of BL series frequently engaged with this social media movement. This is unsurprising, since both 2020 and 2021 had seen a rise in social media activism among young people and celebrities in Thailand as a part of broader protests against the government, the military, and the monarchy.137 Notably, rising GMM idol Mix Sahaphap Wongratch—member of the newly emergent khu jin EarthMix from the 2021 BL series 1000 Stars (Nithan Pan Dao, “A Tale of a Thousand Stars” in Thai)—shared several tweets on his personal account to encourage fans of his BL series to involve themselves in the struggle for queer liberation and the enactment of legal protections for sexual minorities.138 Tul Pakorn, star of TV Thunder’s BL series Together With Me who is a noted supporter of sexual minority communities, likewise shared a post on

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his Instagram account in which he appeared with rainbow make-up and the word “Pride” painted on his face. Importantly, he stated in his post (in English): I am glad to be a part of the BL series industry. I personally hope that the increasing number of BL series in the market will in one way or another help people better understand the nature of same-sex relationships so that one day everyone will finally perceive them as normal (because THEY ARE!).139

Finally, the official Twitter account of production and celebrity management company Nadao Bangkok—an independent subsidiary of GMM that launched its first BL series, I Told Sunset About You (Plae Rak Chan Duay-jai Thoe, “I’ll Convey My Love to You with My Heart” in Thai), in 2020—shared a series of tweets featuring their popular khu jin Billkin Putthipong Assaratanakul and PP Krit Amnuaydechkorn which explicitly called for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Thailand.140 As should be evident, the BL industry and its queer idol celebrities are beginning to explicitly involve themselves in questions of queer liberatory politics, with Tul Pakorn noting in his Instagram post that as a member of a popular khu jin he had a responsibility to use his platform to fight for equality.141 Reading this social media activism reparatively, I would once again argue that these practices move beyond simple queerbaiting as they neither seek to appease critics of BL media nor manufacture authenticity. Rather, these celebrities’ participation in Pride 2021 represents another moment where young idol celebrities involved in the BL industry engaged in queer practices, challenging societal heteronormativity. Overall, this chapter has revealed that a new form of queer idol celebrity has emerged in Thailand which responds to BL fans’ desires to engage with staged homoerotic performances. Through their performances in BL series and BL advertising campaigns, these celebrities are increasing the visibility of queer romance in Thai society even though they may not necessarily belong to the sexual minority community themselves. Importantly, my analysis of GMM’s BL Machine has demonstrated that imagined celebrity couples perform staged homoeroticism to produce fin that can then be utilized in affective advertising. Khu jin such as KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, BrightWin, and a host of other idol pairings at GMM and its competitors participate in a transformation of Thai consumer culture that I suggest is gradually queering notions of romance in Thailand, broader questions of queerbaiting notwithstanding. At the heart of this transformation are the affective entanglements between khu jin celebrity couples and their fans, mediated through the queer affect of fin. Within the following chapter, I turn my attention more fully to the celebrity-fan relationships within Thai BL fandom, considering how shared intimacies shape the BL Machine through the case studies of social media fan practices and GMM’s physical and virtual fan events.

Chapter 4 S HA R I N G I N T I M AC I E S : S O C IA L M E D IA , G M M F A N E V E N T S , A N D B L I D O L F A N D OM

Logging into Naver Corporation’s V-Live livestreaming application on Saturday June 20, 2020, I found myself entering a vibrant fan community eagerly awaiting the beginning of a GMM Global Live Fan Meeting. Along with several fans of GMM’s BL series, for the past month I had been joining these virtual concert events as both a viewer of and, at times, direct participant in the activities being beamed into my laptop from Bangkok. Alternating between the V-Live screen and my Twitter feed, I was anxiously anticipating the appearance of the two idols who I had paid a significant amount of money to watch: the tremendously popular khu jin and stars of the smash hit BL series 2gether, BrightWin. This final fan meeting with GMM’s newest imagined couple represented the culmination of a month of global fan meetings on the V-Live app for the company’s four Royal Couples. My observations of social media discourse prior to the event revealed that excitement among Thai BL fans was high, with many curious to see whether BrightWin would live up to the expectations set by the more established khu jin of KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew. At exactly 1:00 p.m. Thailand time, the chat box to the right of the V-Live screen exploded with comments as the fan meeting began, with BrightWin taking the virtual stage to sing the first of many songs that they would perform for their fans during the event. Joining in the fans’ transnational experiences of fin for the homoerotic performances unfolding live before me, I was soon immersed in a world of intimate connection, enjoying the performed homoerotic intimacy of BrightWin, the mediated intimacy between the idols and their fans, and the shared intimacy produced by fans’ excited discussions on social media. In the previous chapter, I explored how GMM had developed a BL Machine to manage both the production of queer idol celebrities and the ways with which fans engage them to maximize the commercial potentials of the fan affect of fin. My focus thus far has been on interrogating the homoerotic intimacy performed by khu jin within the context of both BL series and tie-in advertising campaigns. Within this chapter, I turn my attention to fan practices and idol performances on the stage to investigate the development of various forms of shared intimacy within the fandom for Thai BL. That is, I draw upon my ethnographic experiences engaging with sao wai and queer fans of GMM’s khu jin to understand what kinds

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of fan practices have emerged around BL celebrity in Thailand to theorize how the development of intimacy between fans and khu jin can extend understandings of the ongoing mainstreaming of queer representation in Thai media culture. Through this discussion, I reveal that the experiences of shared intimacy that I witnessed emerging during the virtual Global Live Fan Meeting with BrightWin are broadly representative of Thai BL fandom. In particular, I expose the centrality of both social media and virtual connection in the evolving fandom for both Thai BL series and the khu jin celebrities whose massive popularity derives from them. Within postmodern contexts where consumerism has become integrally linked to individual and collective meaning-making,1 fandom has emerged as an important space through which individuals affectively interpret the world via consumer practices.2 Fans are highly engaged consumers who actively reflect on their consumption and draw upon their affective engagement with media to create new imaginaries to interpret the world and their positioning within it.3 At heart, fandom is essentially centered on the creation of powerful imaginations, fantasies, and hopes tied to a search for meaning and connection, either with the object of fandom or between fans themselves.4 Fans also possess high levels of agency and media literacy evidenced by their propensity to form intense communities of practice around their affective attachments to specific media forms, speaking to the significance of finding intimate connection within fandom spaces where passion and knowledge can be shared with others to produce a participatory media culture.5 Acknowledging the power which fandom plays in everyday people’s lives, as well as recognizing that passionate consumption is neither an uncommon nor pathological practice,6 culture industries under late capitalism have increasingly sought to actively produce and manage their fans.7 Fandom is, therefore, a space geared toward the creation of various forms of intimacy, often explicitly directed by media producers, and Thai BL fandom is certainly no exception. Questions of intimacy are especially important when considering the forms of idol celebrity that have emerged in East and Southeast Asia. As Patrick Galbraith and Jason Karlin elucidate with respect to Japanese idol fandom, the development of parasocial relationships between fans and idols such as the massively popular girl group AKB48 relies on a fantasy of intimacy grounded in the supposed accessibility of idols.8 The Japanese idol industry thus transforms fans’ economic support of a group by purchasing idol music and merchandise into opportunities for consumers to feel a sense of closeness to their idols,9 producing intimate connections between the fan and their favorite celebrities through the satisfaction of fans’ desires to care for idols and nurture their careers.10 Under the direction of one of Japan’s most successful idol producers, Akimoto Yasushi, AKB48 radically transformed the fan–idol relationship by providing fans who diligently supported them the chance to directly interact with their favorite members as well as to participate in a “general election” where fans vote for which members would feature in upcoming promotions.11 By both transforming the idol–fan interaction into a physical one, as well as providing fans the putative ability to direct promotional activities, Akimoto injected a sense of authenticity into the shared intimacy central to idol fandom in Japan.12 Indeed, AKB48 were promoted

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as “idols that you can meet” and became famous precisely because of their daily performances at the AKB theatre in Akihabara and their regular handshake events where lucky fans could directly touch and speak with an idol for a few minutes.13 This focus on fostering a sense of intimacy between fans and idols is also central to the K-pop industry, with sociologist Joanna Elfving-Hwang noting that fantasies of intimate connection sit at the heart of the parasocial relationships, which companies actively produce among fans of their idol groups.14 Unlike the J-pop industry’s focus on physical meet-and-greets and fan concerts, however, the K-pop industry has updated the delivery of intimate moments by developing several virtual mechanisms to facilitate idol and fan interactions.15 For instance, the aforementioned livestreaming application V-Live was developed by Naver Corporation as a space for K-pop idols to host livestreams, commonly termed “real-life contents” by industry professionals.16 While music videos, concerts, and other performances are often broadcast on V-Live, livestreams on the platform tend to privilege content depicting idols either going about their daily lives or answering questions from fans in real time.17 These real-life contents generate what fan studies theorist Henry Jenkins terms “co-presence,” a sense of intimacy between a fan and a celebrity which is produced through shared spatiality and contemporaneous, direct interaction.18 Traditionally, co-presence was produced when fans and celebrities came together in the same physical location,19 such as the handshake events or concerts hosted by AKB48, but within K-pop fandom co-presence is increasingly produced in virtual contact zones like the V-Live app. The fact that K-pop fans around the globe experience an intimate connection which they regard as authentic when engaging with idols through virtual, online methods is unsurprising given that the history of the fandom is itself intimately tied to the use of social media technology.20 In exploring the shared intimacies developed within Thai BL fandom and investigating the role of social media and concerts—both physical and virtual—in shaping these intimacies, this chapter specifically explores how GMM’s BL Machine deploys practices from the K-pop idol industry to promote their khu jin and produce celebrity fandoms which complement fandom for their BL series. The chapter thus aims to empirically demonstrate how inter-Asian media ecologies have led to the mainstreaming of queer romance in Thai media culture, with a focus on teasing apart how K-pop production strategies have been utilized by GMM to engage fans who are already well-versed in the practices of K-pop idol fandom.21 Importantly, in exploring how shared intimacies are generated among fans and idols alike, I reveal that the BL Machine has borrowed more than just the tradition of staged homoeroticism and the fan practice of idol shipping from J-pop and K-pop idol culture to produce a new generation of Thai celebrity fandom. I therefore uncover how staged homoeroticism and shipping sit within the broader “glocalization” of K-pop fandom practices to the Thai industry context. Before commencing this discussion, however, a few notes on method are essential to establish the empirical validity of my argumentation. As mentioned previously, I practiced longitudinal ethnographic observation and participation in digital spaces and, between 2014 and 2021, I have actively engaged in Thai BL

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fandom spaces daily on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.22 I am also highly familiar with K-pop fandom as both a scholar and fan of male K-pop idols. I have therefore had ample opportunity over the years to observe and understand how these two fandoms interact with each other in the Thai context. To provide further validity to my arguments, the discussions of fan practices presented below draw upon data gathered from Twitter and Facebook at the time of writing between May and July 2021, although my theorization is broadly informed by six years of prior ethnographic practice. My argument also incorporates the voices of fans who I have interviewed during my ethnographic fieldwork in Bangkok in July 2019, as well as online in 2020 and 2021, to provide insights into fan motivations and understandings of Thai BL celebrity. Regrettably, I was unable to attend physical concerts hosted by GMM until 2022 and have instead relied on analyzing a DVD recording of a specific fan event, Y I Love You Fan Party 2019, in conjunction with interviews with fans who attended the event to develop my arguments. On the other hand, I had the opportunity to not only watch but also actively participate in the four Global Live Fan Meetings with KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin which GMM staged virtually on V-Live in 2020. My theorization of these events is primarily auto-ethnographic, allowing me to critically reflect on my own experiences as a viewer (KristSingto, OffGun, BrightWin) and a “lucky fan” who directly interacted with the celebrities (TayNew). This auto-ethnographic observation and analysis is important to the theorization of intimacy in Thai BL fandom since affective experiences such as fin are highly personal and also represent a moment when my critical positioning as an “aca-fan” which was discussed in the Introduction becomes most useful for my analysis. By experiencing fin myself as a fan through my own personal participation in these four virtual fan meetings, I was better able to understand and interpret the reported experiences of my various interlocutors and therefore triangulate my analyses of both fan practices on social media and the physical concerts I was unable to attend. Overall, the analysis presented in this chapter presents a digital ethnographic introduction to Thai BL fandom, extending the historical discussions from previous chapters to explore what fans of GMM’s khu jin do in their daily search for intimate connection with queer idol celebrities.

Producing Intimacies Online: BL Fandoms across the Thai Social Media Landscape Throughout previous chapters, I have often discussed the importance of social media when considering the historical development and expansion of Thai BL fandom. Whether it be the passionate Polca fans of TayNew sharing content with international consumers on Twitter who I discussed in Chapter 1, or GMM’s strategic management of hashtags to engage consumers as part of the broader BL Machine introduced in the previous chapter, Thai BL fan practices routinely unfold online. As a fandom culture emerging from viewers of soap operas, passionate fans of Thai BL media and celebrities come together on online spaces to both share

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their enjoyment of their favorite series and debate the merits of particular stars’ performances,23 all while creating shared intimacies based in the fin produced by queer romance on the screen. For Thai fans of BL series and idols, the social media services of choice are Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which all represent online platforms that became popular among Thai youth concurrent to the development of K-pop fandom in the kingdom during the late 2000s to mid-2010s.24 Viewers of Thai BL series who were immersed in social media contexts awash with K-pop fandom practices therefore came to deploy these same practices when expressing their support online for khu jin idols. Many theorists of transnational K-pop fandom position social media as integral to the successful global expansion of Korean popular culture, noting that K-pop production companies swiftly recognized the potentials of online networking platforms as spaces to engage diverse and passionate audiences around the world.25 Media scholar Dal Yong Jin notes, for instance, that Korean content industries decided to invest into social media as a distribution method to bypass local intermediaries and thus directly engage international consumers.26 Likewise, the phenomenal success of the K-pop boyband BTS has been attributed to the strategic ways the band’s management agency BigHit Entertainment (now HYBE) produced real-life contents that were specifically designed to encourage social media engagement among consumers.27 Jin notes that this strategy has allowed Korean content industries to directly shape, manage, and direct fan engagement through social media manipulation, consolidating their control over not just their products, but also the global reception of their contents.28 On the back of such a model of direct online engagement with consumers, BTS has emerged as a global powerhouse in pop cultural production, with the band winning the Billboard Music Award Top Social Artist prize every year since 2017.29 BTS’s domination of social media has become so notorious among cultural critics that their fandom is commonly viewed as the posterchild for social media engagement, with mainstream media in North America especially noting how BTS fans strategically and explicitly manipulated social media to raise the visibility of their idols in Western markets.30 Further, K-pop fans in a number of global contexts, including Thailand, report that engaging with other fans online responds to their desire to find safe spaces where they can express their love for a media form which is either misunderstood by mainstream society, or even openly derided.31 For media theorists WoongJo Chang and Shin-Eui Park, BTS is representative of the broader digital tribalism that has driven the Korean Wave since its inception.32 In calling K-pop fans digital tribes, Chang and Park highlight the centrality of online communication between fans, as well as fans’ engagement with artists’ formal social media channels, in the formation of their collective identity.33 Chang and Park’s work evokes the earlier theories of “media tribalism” developed by cultural critic Toshiya Ueno. Reflecting on the postmodern turn in Japanese consumer practices, Ueno notes that Japanese youth gain a sense of individual and communal identity through the use of media itself, with media consumption thus becoming a unifying practice which develops collective habitus.34 For fans active on social media, their practices thus consolidate a sense of collective identity

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produced by their affective entanglements with not just the media content they consume, but the very media platforms on which they form their connections with both idols and each other.35 As I reveal below, this sophisticated model of social media practice has appealed to both GMM and the company’s fans, with online fandom likewise contributing to Thai BL media’s domestic and international success. In fact, just as BigHit Entertainment has facilitated the production of a K-pop media tribe focused on BTS, I argue that GMM has similarly produced a BL media tribe (or, more accurately, tribes) who passionately consume contents starring the company’s popular khu jin idols. As members of this BL media tribe, however, Thai fans do not borrow K-pop fan practices as outsiders passively observing the success of social media fandoms for groups such as BTS. Rather, as has been established in previous chapters, fans of Thai BL are also commonly K-pop fans themselves who are already actively engaging in social media fan practices when celebrating their favorite Korean idols online. Indeed, as Line Insight notes in its report on the development of the Thai BL economy, 92 percent of BL fans surveyed also regularly engaged with K-pop and K-drama fandom.36 The report also suggests that K-pop fandom represents an important entry point to fandom for Thai BL series, particularly of handsome khu jin stars, which is unsurprising given the fact that this new genre of queer popular culture has arisen in direct response to K-pop idol shipping.37 Of the 8 percent of Thai BL fans who reported in Line Insight’s survey that they did not engage with K-pop fandom, it is noticeable that these individuals explained that they became interested in Thai BL series after having seen them trend on social media, presumably by the other, much larger group of fans involved in online K-pop fandom.38 Line Insight’s report importantly reveals that Thai BL fandom has an almost symbiotic relationship with K-pop fandom.39 It is for this reason that the typical fan practices which have emerged around the celebration and promotion of khu jin online deploy strategies that have become normalized among fans of K-pop, producing a media tribe tied to imagined couples engaged in homoerotic performance. My own ethnographic experiences in Bangkok have also revealed the interrelations between Thai BL and K-pop fandoms. One young woman I serendipitously observed walking through Central World mall in June 2019, for instance, had several fan-made buttons on her backpack depicting GMM’s khu jin KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew alongside other buttons featuring members of the K-pop boy groups EXO and GOT7. This backpack, where K-pop and Thai BL idols blended together in a mess of fin, is a perfect representation of the close relationship between these two fandoms in Thailand. Further, when I attended the  XOXO Cosmetics event featuring Saint Suppapong of Love By Chance fame—briefly discussed in the Introduction—many of the people milling in the space waiting for Saint’s appearance approached me to strike up conversations. At the time, I was sporting a backpack to which I had attached a plush toy accessory from the BT21 line designed by a member of BTS. I was also frequently writing in my research journal, which had a painting of BTS member V on the back. The Thai BL fans approached me not because they recognized that I was a fan of Saint, but

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because they wanted to chat with me since they were surprised to have encountered a White, Australian man in the middle of a Bangkok department store who was also quite openly a K-pop fan like themselves. After discussing BTS together, these fans became even more surprised to learn that I was also a big fan (and scholar) of Thai BL media and that I was familiar with Saint’s career. I learnt from a group of three young women and one slightly older man who approached me at this event that it was fairly normal for Thai BL fans to also be K-pop fans and they pointed out other people at this event who, like myself, were openly displaying K-pop merchandise on their persons. While attending fan events such as this XOXO Cosmetics showcase is certainly an important practice for Thai BL fans, most fan activity occurs online. The most conspicuous activity which fans of Thai BL practice online is the circulation of screen captures, photos, fan art, and fanfiction across social media. Social media is also a primary site where shipping occurs, with fans uploading material specifically geared toward the distribution of fin produced from watching and creating content featuring staged homoeroticism between khu jin. Naturally, some of this content represents posts and photos which the idols themselves share, as well as videos uploaded onto GMM’s official accounts, with following GMM and its stars’ social media also representing a significant practice which facilitates other online fan activities. Fans frequently utilize Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as spaces to come together virtually to react to the activities of their favorite BL idols while simultaneously forming friendships with each other grounded in shared experiences of fin. The formation of digitally mediated connections speaks to how fans form sophisticated virtual communities designed to produce intimate connections not just between themselves and the objects of their affection, but with each other.40 But these virtual practices become especially interesting and significant because Thai BL fans couple their online activities with various mechanisms built into social media platforms designed to manipulate algorithms and raise the profile of their favorite khu jin. In this way, fans produce a media tribe centered not only on celebrating idols, but also on actively promoting them to the general public. Principally, this is achieved on Twitter and Instagram through the coupling of posts and discussions with strategic hashtags (this is less common on Facebook), where hashtags both archive posts for the purposes of browsing and drive trends across the platform to potentially expose content to new audiences. Sometimes, these hashtags would be organically produced by the fans themselves—especially when fans engage in so-called projects designed to increase their fandom’s visibility—but at other times fans utilize hashtags produced by production companies or advertisers as part of a broader social media campaign. Such practices respond to the growth of the so-called attention economy, whereby corporations mobilize digital tools to visibilize their products and thus capture the attention of consumers living in a world of overstimulation driven by the fast-paced flow of information typical of contemporary social media.41 Drawing upon an informal, yet sophisticated, understanding of algorithmic trending, fans of khu jin therefore engage in a practice which media anthropologist Crystal Abidin terms subversive

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frivolity where their communal play together disrupts the flow of information and injects fan affect into the social media marketplace.42 In mobilizing hashtags developed by advertising stakeholders, fans thus actively participate in a central mechanism of the BL Machine which is designed to facilitate the transformation of GMM’s khu jin into important “image characters” within the Thai consumer marketplace, as discussed in the previous chapter. While writing this chapter, I witnessed numerous examples of both kinds of hashtags among fans. In early July 2021, for instance, fans of KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew strategically trended both the idols’ personal Twitter accounts and hashtags of their couple names (#kristsingto, etc.) to celebrate the first anniversary of the series I’m Tee, Me Too (2020, Khon-la Thi Diao-kan, “The Different Tees are Identical” in Thai). This anthology show starring three of the four GMM Royal Couples was not explicitly a BL series but did cater to consumers seeking opportunities to ship the khu jin together and was thus popular online among Thai BL fans across the globe. Fans in Thailand strategically trended these hashtags, one Thai woman who was a fan of TayNew explained to me over Twitter DM, not only to celebrate the show but also to protest a supposed lack of investment into content for KristSingto, OffGun, and especially TayNew by GMM in 2021. On the same days which fans of KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew were trending hashtags related to I’m Tee, Me Too, fans of BrightWin were also avidly trending the hashtag #BrightWinWash to demonstrate their support for the newer khu jin’s promotional campaign for Pao WinWash laundry detergent from Lion Corporation. This hashtag, however, was not spontaneously developed by fans themselves but was instead created by both GMM and Lion Corporation to encourage fans to engage in some free social media advertising for the Pao WinWash product. In an interesting example of the BL Machine’s engagement with advertising practices, GMM launched a livestream event with Bright (although not Win) coupled with the #BrightWinWash hashtag that trended not only in Thailand, but across many Southeast Asian consumer markets, at the time of the livestream’s broadcast. Thai BL fans’ broader participation in the strategic manipulation of hashtags online responds to precedents established among K-pop fans who similarly utilize hashtags and other forms of social media metrics to boost the recognition of their favorite idols among the general public.43 Ethnomusicologist Stephanie Choi considers this form of social media practice as an essential form of “intimate labor” on behalf of K-pop fans who seek to perform “good fandom” online by strategically using social media to show support for idol groups.44 Notably, K-pop fans are motivated to engage in social media trending as part of what Choi terms transactional intimacy, with fans engaging in social media trending to pay back the idols.45 That is, social media trending is a way for fans to visibilize their appreciation of idols with whom they have developed significant parasocial relationships to compensate idols for the time and energy expended providing support to fans, with intimacy thus representing a form of currency in this reciprocal, transactional economy.46 K-pop corporations encourage this behavior as part of a broader algorithmic turn in contemporary pop music promotion, recognizing that fans’ intimate labor produces a consolidated consumer group for

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the purposes of targeted marketing and economic exploitation.47 As Chang and Park also note with reference to BTS fans, these social media trending practices have been central to uniting disparate consumers around the world into a digital tribe which K-pop production companies can subsequently nurture and manage for the purposes of global expansion.48 GMM has likewise encouraged fans to engage in intimate labor, and my interviews with fans reveal that they are willing participants in social media trending because of their passionate desire to promote KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin in gratitude for the support which the khu jin had provided them. In fact, one OffGun fan I interviewed over Twitter DM explained that they knew fan labor was being exploited for GMM’s economic gain, but that they did not care as long as they could “show everyone [online] how much these two mean to me.” Furthermore, another young female fan of several of GMM’s khu jin noted to me during fieldwork in Bangkok that while she was aware of the marketing purposes to which GMM put her fan labor, she participated in social media trending because of the sense of togetherness she felt with other fans in celebrating the handsome male idols who “make up our whole world.” For these two fans, as well as many others with whom I have conversed, social media is thus an important space to connect with fans and idols, with the intimate transactions which they perform representing just one of several acts key to their role as a “good fan” within a specific online community of practice. The act of engaging with each other online thus produces an intimate community grounded in affective entanglements with not just khu jin, but among fans, with fans uniting to deploy their intimate labor to facilitate the successful careers of this new generation of queer idol celebrities in contemporary Thailand. In so doing, fans willingly join the media tribes which GMM is specifically producing through the BL Machine to build recognition of their idol talents among the public and subsequently boost their profits. Strategically observing, facilitating, and managing fans’ collective use of social media also resonates with another key aspect of the K-pop production process which GMM has specifically adapted into the BL Machine. This is the formation of formal fan clubs for idol celebrities and their use in consumer outreach, which is another important mechanism through which media tribes are developed by K-pop production companies.49 Within the history of K-pop, fan clubs emerged well before the rise of social media, with fans of first-generation idol groups such as H.O.T, Shinhwa, and Sechs Kies organizing themselves into media tribes who utilized colored balloons and clothing to visibly identify themselves as supporters. In contemporary K-pop production, however, the announcement of a formal fandom for a debut group is a significant event that is managed by the company and is often streamed over V-Live or other social media platforms. In these events, members of the idol group communicate the name of the fandom to fans, rather than fans themselves creating a name organically,50 although there are instances where K-pop production companies hold fan surveys to help select a fandom name. For instance, the fandom name of global superstars BTS is ARMY, a name BigHit Entertainment chose as part of promotional activities. It is therefore not a term which the digital tribe themselves selected even if they utilize it willingly.51

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In creating formal fandoms through this performative process of naming, K-pop production companies directly manufacture a digital tribe which is then integrated into their formal promotion mechanisms through online fan spaces known as fan cafés which fans join after paying a membership fee and passing a fan quiz.52 As part of the intimate transactions which structure K-pop fandom, joining these fan cafés is viewed as integral to the exchange of intimacy between idols and their fans since it is within these spaces that fans can directly interact with the members of their favorite groups as well as support them economically.53 While GMM has yet to institute formal and exclusive online fan spaces, they do utilize the K-pop discourse of the consolidated fandom within their promotional materials. For the first three Royal Couples of KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew, fans had already developed their own fandom names with which to identify their communities—Peraya, Babii, and Polca, respectively—as part of their online practices. These terms all emerged organically among fans as part of their social media discourse, and it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moments when each fandom adopted these terms to identify themselves formally, although it is likely strongly influenced by their embeddedness within K-pop fandom spaces where such terms are common. The fandom name Peraya derives from a portmanteau of Krist and Singto’s first names (Perawat + Prachaya = Peraya), whereas Babii was initially a term of endearment that Gun used when speaking to Off during the broadcast of Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey that fans quickly repurposed. The genealogy of Polca for TayNew’s fans derives from a portmanteau of “polar bear” and “orca,” animals which fans believed resembled New and Tay respectively. GMM quickly began including these terms within their promotional activities, creating merchandise for fans of the khu jin branded with these fandom names. As part of their production of the BrightWin khu jin in 2020, on the other hand, GMM staged the announcement of the couple’s fandom name as part of their international outreach. During a livestream interview hosted on the social media channels of Philippine streaming service iWant to promote the localization of 2gether to the Philippine market, the couple announced their somewhat unimaginative fandom name of “BrightWin” to viewers around the world.54 The choice of this simple name was likely strategic, since the hashtag #BrightWin had already developed significant impact across social media networks and transforming the khu jin’s couple name into a fandom name would allow for continuity of these trends into the future for the purposes of market research and promotion. Nevertheless, fans of the couple enthusiastically adopted the title, with one female fan expressing her happiness to me when I asked her to reflect on this moment as “a time when we all felt recognized … we finally had a name, we were finally made real like the other couples [KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew].” This fan’s reaction to the formal formation of the BrightWin fandom reveals how desires for legitimacy sit at the heart of the sharing of intimacy between khu jin and fans, with the young woman also suggesting that “from that time until now, BrightWin can see us … [and] talk to us easily. It’s just great, now we are all one family.”

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Across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, so-called official fan clubs for each of the four GMM Royal Couples have emerged as important sites for the distribution of information and the planning of various fan projects, including hashtag trending parties, viewing parties, food support,55 and even donations to charities undertaken in a khu jin’s name. For instance, an official collective of fans to support KristSingto entitled Peraya Official has emerged for Thai fans, and there are also other fan clubs active in other contexts such as KristSingto China, KristSingto Japan, and Peraya Official Philippines. Peraya Official, the Thai club, maintains presence across all three of the major social networking services that BL fans utilize to engage each other. While Peraya Official labels itself as the legitimate, “official” fan club, it must be noted that these collectives are run by fans and are not created by GMM, although the personal accounts of the BL idols often interact with them. Rather, the positioning of these fan clubs as official relates to their role in bringing fans together into a shared community centered on the careers of the khu jin as well as to the organization of fan labor. As one KristSingto fan explained to me over email, the administrators of the Peraya Official account on Twitter function as “guides to all Peraya.” Importantly, this fan highlighted how accounts such as this functioned akin to “fan sites” within the context of K-pop fandom, an Anglophone fandom term for accounts run by extremely dedicated fans of idol groups who share updates on activities while also uploading high-quality photos and videos of specific members.56 The formation of these official Thai BL fandom accounts, then, once again borrows practices from transnational K-pop fandom to facilitate the creation of shared spaces of intimacy. Just as social media engagement has played a crucial role in spreading the popular culture of South Korea into global markets,57 the online activities of Thai BL fans have also allowed GMM’s BL series to reach new audiences across East and Southeast Asia. As I discussed in Chapter 1, it was the fact that #BrightWin trended at number 1 globally on Twitter in 2020 that led consumers around the world looking for content to ease the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic to discover Thai BL series. That being said, even before 2gether’s explosion in popularity, Thai fans literate in English, Chinese, and Japanese have been actively translating the social media accounts of both GMM and their idols out of a desire to connect international fans of Thai BL to fans in Thailand. As one large translation account for the OffGun fandom explained to me during a discussion on Twitter, they were motivated to share the excitement which they experienced from OffGun with people all over the world. This translator likened her fan labor to the work of K-pop fan translators who had been similarly influential in spreading Korean content into Thailand,58 explaining that she was motivated not by a desire to “raise OffGun’s global popularity” but to “help [international fans] who can’t speak Thai enjoy along with us together.” This fan translator’s motivations therefore relate to the culture of shared intimacy which sits at the heart of Thai BL fandom, as evidenced by her consistent use of the first-person plural “we” to include both Thai and international fans as a consolidated fandom united by their affection for OffGun.

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Through these highly visible and performative online practices, fans of GMM’s four most prominent khu jin therefore represent media tribes whose sense of identity emerges through their affective use of social media to form intimate connections with each other. Throughout my ethnographic investigation of Thai BL fandom, I was consistently struck by the close friendships that have emerged around the fandom for KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin. Circulating throughout these friendship networks is the affective experience of fin, produced first and foremost through fans’ collective enjoyment of homoerotic performances and investment into the practice of shipping, but which is also produced in reaction to the idols themselves as a result of the development of parasocial relationships. Just as K-pop fans unite into digital tribes to share in a collective culture of affect and to participate in fan labor, Thai BL fans likewise work together online to form intimate connections among themselves and thus produce strong, vibrant communities.

Creating Intimate Connections between Fans and Idols at Y I Love You Fan Party 2019 One instance where the fin produced by queer romance unites with affective attachments to idol celebrities are the concerts which GMM has regularly produced since 2016 to provide fans an opportunity to witness homoeroticism performed live on the stage by their favorite khu jin. The Y I Love You Fan Party 2019 (henceforth, Y I Love You 2019) concert held across two afternoons in late January 2019 is a representative example of fan events where GMM’s idol couples sing and dance on the stage for the amusement of their dedicated fandoms. Held in the Thunder Dome in the north of metropolitan Bangkok and headlined by KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, FrankDrake,59 and several other khu jin who had become popular in 2018, Y I Love You 2019 was the largest BL fan event that GMM had staged at the time. Several thousands of fans attended the event over two days, flocking to a venue famous for hosting K-pop concerts. This link between BL fan events and K-pop concerts is significant, since Y I Love You 2019 explicitly mimicked the structure of a typical K-pop concert, including having queer idol celebrities who were more famous for their acting perform various songs along with complicated choreographies and exciting staging. As one young woman whose impressions of GMM fan events I briefly introduced in the previous chapter explained, seeing the khu jin live and working hard to sing and dance for fans rendered them “like K-pop idols.” In fact, the principal function of fan events such as Y I Love You 2019 is to entangle the various intimacies between khu jin and their fans together into an affective assemblage central to the mechanisms of GMM’s BL Machine. Fans I have interviewed both in person and online who attended the event were unanimous in praising both GMM’s staging and the creation of an intimate space where they felt that their fan identities as idol shippers were recognized. Fans acknowledged during interviews that the khu jin’s singing and dancing skills were

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not as developed as a typical K-pop idol, but most explained that they had attended the event since they wanted to watch staged homoeroticism along with fellow fans. Coming together well before the concert began, one male fan of TayNew noted, was also an important opportunity to meet online friends face-to-face as well as soak up the sense of excitement circulating among the thousands of passionate fans outside the arena. Some fans also explained that they had organized a number of fan projects for distribution among concert-goers before the show, including the dissemination of fan-produced images and banners to be kept as souvenirs. As one Peraya fan involved in organizing fan projects noted via email, her friends were motivated to produce a KristSingto banner as they had received similar freebies when they had attended a K-pop concert and felt that Thai BL fans would enjoy receiving fan-produced content as well. In this way, the fan labor I discussed in the previous section was also a significant part of fan activity at Y I Love You 2019, with projects mostly focused on heightening the enjoyment of other fans. Another young woman who identified as a “crazy GMM shipper” in her Twitter profile explained that there was an important sense of connection evident within the venue itself since fans of the four khu jin headlining the event were positioned together in the stands surrounding the stage and they were thus able to further mingle among each other. Since the young woman I interviewed over Twitter “did not have many real life friends interested in shipping” at the time, Y I Love You 2019 was also an opportunity to “meet new friends who shared my hobby” and thus facilitate her full entry into BL idol fandom. Mimicking a typical K-pop performance where a group’s fans sit together with banners and “light sticks” to produce a sea of multicolored lights,60 GMM funneled Peraya, Babii, Polca, and fans of FrankDrake into specific sites in the Thunder Dome and provided them with colored glowsticks and neon signs to wave during the show to visibilize their excitement. Importantly, by placing fans together, GMM not only helped produce intimate connections between the fans themselves, but the company also made it easier for the idol talents on stage to identify where their most avid supporters were located in the audience. This facilitated the idols’ direct engagement with their fanbases, allowing them to speak to them and call on their support as they performed difficult choreographies on the stage. As one female KristSingto fan recalled to me during a conversation at the XOXO Cosmetics event in July 2019, where she had some merchandise from Y I Love You 2019 hanging off her backpack, sitting together with other Peraya meant she had been guaranteed interactions from her favorite idols. This heightened her sense of enjoyment and deepened the feeling of closeness she had always experienced with KristSingto as their fan since SOTUS was first broadcast in 2016. Furthermore, by consolidating official fan clubs in the stands, this visibilized the fans’ intimate labor of supporting the idols through cheering, waving banners, and answering questions posed by the khu jin. Fan and idol intimacies were therefore reinforced through the material environment of the event itself. The theme of Y I Love You 2019 was a simple one, providing fans access to an imaginary world where they could lose themselves in the experience of fin produced

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by the khu jin throughout the show’s three-hour duration. Fans represented visitors to an island called “Y Island” (Ha-Y(wai), a pun on Hawai’i) and GMM’s idols played the roles of natives whose job it was to welcome visitors. Further, as “savior couples” who were “destined” to meet these visitors to their “island full of fin” (as made clear during the concert’s opening VCR), the khu jin were putting on the show so that fans could enjoy themselves while on a celebratory holiday that was chiefly about thanking them for their support of GMM’s BL series. The show followed the typical structure of a K-pop concert in that it began with group songs performed by the idols together, followed by an introductory “ment,”61 then couple songs and ments, a game in the middle of the show to directly engage the audience, some final couple songs, and then a group finale with emotional ending ments. As Thai BL researcher Natthanai Prasannam notes in his analysis of Y I Love You 2019, the songs performed by the khu jin were all covers of popular hits from GMM artists and represented love songs which allowed the idol couples to serenade each other.62 Interestingly, one Thai fan explained over Facebook Messenger that the romantic song lyrics at GMM fan events were commonly changed to make it clear that the khu jin were addressing each other rather than an imaginary interlocutor. The sense of romance between the khu jin was also reinforced through the staging where idols would look at each other rather than the audience while singing. Y I Love You 2019 therefore chiefly functioned as a site to satisfy fans’ desires for homoerotic performances and was explicitly concerned with the production of fin. Throughout the show, the couples were explicitly introduced to fans as khu jin by various VCR segments before their performances, with KristSingto announced, for instance, as a couple “whose chemistry is just too real to handle … we all ship them hard! We can’t stop looking at these precious babies. This khu jin has a hold on our hearts.” Likewise, TayNew’s first couple songs were preceded by a VCR cartoon featuring an orca and a polar bear playing together, visibilizing not only the relationship between the couple who are said to resemble these animals, but also referencing the khu jin’s Polca fans (named by merging the terms polar bear and orca). Unlike in K-pop concerts where shipping tends to be implicit and fan service fleeting, Y I Love You 2019 was replete with skinship and queer romantic performance that the concert directly centered through its orientation materials for fans. During all songs, khu jin constantly hugged, held hands, and stroked each other’s bodies. Likewise, during ments, couples playfully bantered with each other and would slyly acknowledge fan desires for them to perform skinship. In response to such moments of fan service, the audience would scream in joy as they experienced fin, with their cheering ostensibly encouraging the khu jin to perform increasingly intimate moments of staged homoeroticism. For example, at the culmination of their final couple song “Ngan Ten-ram Nai Khuen Phra-jan Tem Duang” (A Dance on the Night of the Full Moon)— during which they had danced together cheek-to-cheek and performed aerial acrobatics—KristSingto were hoisted into the air one final time while hugging each other tightly. Krist then addressed Singto, stating “No matter how many fears I have to face, if I have you by my side, I won’t be afraid … Thank you” before kissing the older man as the lights dimmed to some of the loudest screams of

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excitement from the audience yet. As the final couple song before all the idols returned to the stage for a group finale, KristSingto’s explicit performance of queer romance was a personal highlight for many of the fans who attended the concert since most were shocked that the couple actually kissed. One young woman mentioned to me via Twitter DM that she had been so overwhelmed by fin when Krist surprisingly kissed Singto that she started to cry with joy, explaining that she was “thankful to GMM for giving Peraya this precious gift.” What is important to note here is, of course, that the homoerotic performances at Y I Love You 2019 were never presented during the show as reenacted homoerotic scenes from prior BL series such as was the case at the events analyzed in Prasannam’s prior work.63 Instead, the intimacy performed by khu jin was always framed as between the idols themselves. This was why fans of KristSingto were so shocked to see the khu jin kiss on stage because, while they expected homoerotic performances, such an explicit moment of fan service between the two men was well outside what fans I have interviewed anticipated based on their prior experience with GMM’s events. For many young women and men with whom I have conversed about attending GMM’s BL fan events, the fin which is generated at these live concerts is particularly visceral, felt through the body as an intense and overwhelming experience of satisfaction in response to homoerotic interactions between khu jin. As one male fan of TayNew put it over Twitter DM, “seeing them touching on stage before my eyes … it’s like I’m in their private moment. It feels too sweet to handle.” Interestingly, many committed shippers of GMM’s khu jin also highlighted that they believed watching the homoerotic intimacy between the imagined couples at fan events was much more enjoyable than watching the depictions of queer romance found within BL series. One OffGun fan explained that the television shows merely represented a way for fans to get to know the idols. For this woman, the “real shipping” occurs between the khu jin in “real-life moments” such as a fan concert like Y I Love You 2019 where idols work solely to perform for their official fandoms. These narratives of intense fin experienced at live concerts speak to how co-presence between fans and idols in purportedly “real-life” settings shapes consumption of staged homoeroticism, reinforces fans’ desires for intimate interactions between khu jin idols, and ultimately consolidates the development of the parasocial relationships central to GMM’s BL Machine. This OffGun fan likened her growing desire to watch her favorite imagined couple banter and perform skinship live on stage as similar to a “drug addict looking for a strong dose” since she was motivated to directly witness ever “stronger” moments of intimacy between the two handsome men. Importantly, the fan events strengthened her commitment—and the commitment of other fans I have interviewed—to the GMM BL fandom and motivated her to invest more of her time and money into supporting the careers of the company’s khu jin. In this way, triangular intimate connections develop between the khu jin and the fans who observe them awaiting moments of fin. While the idol couple performs homoerotic intimacy that ostensibly visibilizes their close personal connections as friends and colleagues, they are also knowingly staging this intimacy for the gratification of viewing fans. That is, the homoerotic intimacy is realized before

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the fans’ collective gaze, transforming it into a consumable commodity for the fans as part of the broader BL Machine. The strategic performance of intimacy between idol couples thus entangles fans within the homoerotic moment and draws them into the relationship between the khu jin. For many fans, their direct participation in the relationship between the two idols as active viewers driving the performance represents the principal difference between their enjoyment of queer romance depicted in a BL series and staged homoeroticism performed live at a concert like Y I Love You 2019. Although fans do enjoy watching queer romance on screen and acknowledge that it is their viewing of BL series which introduced them to the khu jin in the first place, many noted during interviews that their active participation in the performance of queer romance at fan events increased the potential for fin. Simply put, fin is more intense at BL fan events not just because it is performed live, but because the performance explicitly engages the audience in the production of intimate connections. Within her study of K-pop fandom, Choi notes that it is not only fans but the idols themselves who invest significant amounts of labor into the intimate economy which structures the K-pop industry.64 Idols’ performances are thus positioned as a kind of labor which fulfills an informal contract with fans grounded in intimate transactions.65 Concerts are one of the chief venues in which idols fulfill their supposed obligations under the parasocial relationship to provide fans with a sense of intimacy, with the ments the idols perform throughout the show designed to explicitly remind fans of how essential they are to the K-pop group’s broader success.66 Importantly, moments of homoerotic skinship performed by K-pop idols at these concerts also represent a labor practice that idols undertake to comply with their obligations to satisfy fan desires.67 Likewise, the skinship which occurs between khu jin at fan events like Y I Love You 2019 also represents an opportunity when idols fulfill similar obligations for their fans. After all, media tribes such as Peraya, Babii, and Polca have emerged precisely as coordinated communities dedicated to shipping KristSingto, OffGun, and TayNew and members of these groups therefore attend concerts with the expectation that they will see staged homoeroticism. The homoerotic performances on the stage at Y I Love You 2019 were thus an important form of intimate labor on behalf of the khu jin, and it is this intimate labor that drives the success of GMM’s BL Machine. Importantly, by satisfying fan desires for intense fin and encouraging shipping of khu jin through such fan events, GMM transforms the triangular intimate connections between the fans and their idols into a mechanism to achieve their economic objectives. Further, just like at a typical K-pop concert, it is chiefly through ments at GMM’s fan events where idols acknowledge the role fans have played in supporting their careers. This serves the important function of encouraging fans to continue investing time and money into GMM’s BL industry, since it is implied that only through participating as consumers in the BL Machine will fans be able to expand their parasocial relationships and thus experience more fin. Unlike K-pop concerts, however, the acknowledgment of fans’ importance to the khu jin’s careers is typically entangled with the performance of staged homoeroticism at GMM’s BL fan events. The following excerpt of a ment between OffGun and their Babii fans at

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Y I Love You 2019, which occurred after the khu jin had finished singing romantic ballads in the first third of the show, is representative. Off: [To Gun] How long have we known each other? Gun: Four years? Off: Since that company merit ceremony that year, we have become closer and closer. Gun: [Playfully, to audience] But he didn’t like me! Off: [Outraged, to audience] Only on the first day I met him. Audience: [Begin to yell something out indistinctly]. Off: [Leans in closer to Babiis in audience] What? Gun: [With visible confusion] What is it? Audience: [Coordinated yelling, indistinct]. Gun: Oh … [Turns to Off to ask audience’s question]. “Do you like me now?” [Laughs as fans scream loudly. OffGun collapse into a hug, prompting even louder screams and applause from audience]. Off: Those two romantic songs told all about my feelings [for Gun]! [Audience screams even louder, waving their light sticks].

Off: We can’t be here if it wasn’t for our Babiis and everyone in this hall. Thank you very much for supporting us since Puppy Honey. You guys have been with us every single day and our family has grown bigger and bigger. Thank you so much! We too will also be with you all the way, so don’t be afraid we will go anywhere. We will stay the same like day one until the end. Within their ment, OffGun not only reflect on the development of their close relationship, but they also directly respond to fan desires for a more intimate performance between the couple. In answering the fans’ collective question, Off strategically positions the romantic songs the khu jin have just concluded singing as representing his feelings for Gun, with this moment of homoerotic intimacy between the two directly produced to further satisfy fans’ desires. Importantly, throughout this ment, OffGun continually look to the audience for guidance and only stage skinship after the audience has specifically called for it through their passionate cheers and the waving of their glowsticks. After satisfying fans’ desires for fin, Off then pivots the conversation to thanking fans for their support. Notably, his discourse positions the fans and the khu jin together as a family, explicitly highlighting the triangular intimate relationships between fans and idols that is produced at BL fan events. The narrative of family, and Off ’s statement that the couple will continue to be together with fans into the future, reveals how collective intimacy is produced through the intimate labor of fans and idols alike. Gun also expresses his thanks to fans during his contribution to the ment, echoing Off ’s discourse, before commencing a discussion of the khu jin’s upcoming series Theory of Love, which was due to begin broadcast a few months after Y I Love You 2019. Once again, Gun reinforces the idea that the khu jin work hard to satisfy

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fans, noting that Theory of Love was produced as a gift for the Babii fandom in recognition of their desires for more OffGun content. In this way, the intimate connections developed between the idols and fans are used to figuratively “reset” the BL Machine, preparing fans for a new BL series starring the khu jin, which will drive GMM’s promotional activities in the year to come. As I discussed in the previous chapter, fan events such as this are central to decoupling the khu jin from the series which begat them in order for the idols to be either reformulated into new couples or, in the case of OffGun in early 2019, to have a preexisting couple injected into a forthcoming series. It is the reinforcement of parasocial relationships through intimate connections between idols and fans at fan events, which facilitates this important process in GMM’s BL Machine, since concerts such as Y I Love You 2019 represent moments to direct fans to new products and opportunities to consume. Unlike Prasannam, who views GMM fan events, as chiefly responding to fans’ nostalgia for previously broadcast BL series,68 my analysis demonstrates how the circulation of intimacy at fan events instead serves an anticipatory function, tying fin further to the idol couples and thus facilitating the expansion of GMM’s BL production. Indeed, a close reading of Y I Love You 2019 reveals that the BL Machine’s success lies on the intimate connections produced between khu jin and fans, uncovering the centrality of directly managing fandom through the manipulation of fin to GMM’s business model.

Revolutionizing Fin through Virtual Intimacy: GMM’s Global Live Fan Meetings The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with various public health orders which restricted the hosting of large-scale concerts, led to a serendipitous transformation in how GMM staged its fan events, with a pivot away from physical events such as Y I Love You 2019 to virtual fan meetings. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, GMM launched a series of online concerts known as Global Live Fan Meetings on the V-Live application in mid-2020 to provide fans of KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin an opportunity to virtually connect with these popular queer idol celebrities. Significantly, fans were able to apply to be featured in the concert, with 200 “Lucky Fans” receiving access to a Zoom virtual meeting that not only allowed them to watch the concert, but also beamed their video screens onto the background of the stage so they could directly interact with the khu jin as part of the event itself. Ten lucky fans at each concert also received the opportunity to speak directly with the idol couples, posing them a question which the khu jin would answer. These Global Live Fan Meetings thus merged the online intimacies which have emerged among fans on social media to the sense of connection developed at physical fan events to produce new experiences of fin, intensifying yet again the parasocial relationships which are key to GMM’s BL Machine. The decision to focus on virtual fan meetings as a response to the changed media landscape created by the pandemic subsequently allowed GMM

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to not only further revolutionize its BL Machine but to also globalize its audience. Once again, this expansion of GMM’s BL Machine was achieved through the adaption of preexisting K-pop production practices which emphasize virtual copresence via the delivery of “real-life contents” on live-streaming applications.69 Indeed, in launching these virtual fan meetings, GMM was also following in the footsteps of the K-pop companies SM Entertainment and BigHit, both of which successfully pivoted to staging highly profitable online concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic.70 Structurally, the Global Live Fan Meetings were very similar to the typical BL fan events, which GMM had been staging for several years. After an orientation VCR, which welcomed viewers to the show and recapped precious moments between the couple, the fan meetings all began with a prerecorded song by the khu jin and then continued on to ments, more prerecorded and live songs, and then focused on an interactive game between the lucky fans and the idols. The event would then conclude with a short video presentation celebrating the passion and dedication of the featured couple’s fandom, with photos of previous in-person events displayed on the screen as the idols stood to the side and watched (often with tears in their eyes). Naturally, the song and dance performances at the Global Live Fan Meetings continued the tradition of presenting moments of staged homoeroticism, but the skinship and fanservice at these virtual concerts were much less explicit than what was staged at Y I Love You 2019. For instance, there were certainly no kissing scenes and physical touch was kept to a minimum, possibly due to concerns over the transmission of COVID-19. That said, the songs which were performed tended to be romantic, although there was also an emphasis placed on performing songs appearing within the khu jin’s recent series to evoke fan nostalgia.71 Likewise, VCRs highlighting the BL series in which the idols starred were consistently included in all four shows—especially BrightWin’s fan meeting—possibly because this was the first fan meeting that global fans could easily attend and there would thus be a strong desire among them for content from the BL series which had recently trended online. One further addition to the typical GMM fan event formula evident in these four virtual concerts was the introduction of MC hosts, with GMM talents P’Godji and P’Wave acting as both guides to the performance for fans watching the livestream on V-Live and judges in the various games which the idols and their lucky fans played together. Thus, rather than having the khu jin emcee the fan event themselves as was the case at Y I Love You 2019, the Global Live Fan Meetings provided formal hosting from GMM talents who had a strong flair for audience engagement. Further, the hosts also took charge of eliciting conversations between the khu jin and P’Godji would often react to homoerotic interactions between the couples with excited screaming, just as she had done in the episode of BrightWin Inbox discussed in Chapter 3. P’Godji and P’Wave therefore acted as intermediaries who helped connect the virtual audiences to the idol couples to ensure that the fan–idol intimacies central to GMM’s fan events were not lost. P’Godji also served the vital function of calling attention to subtle moments of fin, her excited screams standing in for the audience’s cheers because the lucky fans’ videos were muted and their excitement over staged homoeroticism was thus unfortunately silenced.

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Another important role that these two MCs played was simultaneous interpretation. Since the Global Live Fan Meetings were deliberately structured as an opportunity to bring diverse fans of KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin from around the world together in celebration of these four khu jin’s careers, there was a need for language support for fans who were not fluent in Thai. While P’Godji chiefly spoke in Thai throughout the event (although she occasionally assisted with the English interpreting in later concerts), P’Wave’s primary function was to provide Chinese and English interpreting. That said, during the first event for KristSingto, he noticeably provided more Chineselanguage support than English, leading to some backlash among fans that I observed on Twitter during and after the event. V-Live also has a simultaneous subtitling function which was developed within the context of the app’s central role in spreading K-pop content to international audiences.72 GMM utilized this function to upload live English subtitles for viewers watching the show on the app. Once again, however, both social media responses and fan reactions in the V-Live chat itself to this automated subtitling were mostly negative since the subtitles were often delayed and judged to be of low quality. In the latter two fan events for TayNew and BrightWin, P’Wave seemed to provide much more simultaneous interpreting in English to satisfy global fans’ desires to understand the khu jin’s ments and respond to fans’ dissatisfaction with the live subtitling. In this way, the Global Live Fan Meetings borrowed the technological affordances of an application central to the transnational success of K-pop fandom, further augmenting it with live interpreting from the hosts, to truly globalize the fan meeting even if there were slight bumps along the way. The events were staged at GMM’s newly minted “Creative Space,” which is a virtual performance space that facilitates the integration of VCR backgrounds, live performances, and broadcasts of fans’ live videos through the Zoom webconferencing software. The use of this virtual reality space thus responded to GMM’s stated desire in their 2018 annual report to become “leaders of fully integrated entertainment business” who “engage with consumers through multi channels [sic].”73 While songs were typically presented with virtual backgrounds (for instance, TayNew performed in a funfair and OffGun performed in a medieval castle)—and were mostly prerecorded rather than performed live74— the interactions between fans occurred in a virtual environment where the fans’ videos themselves represented the background. These sections were always broadcast live, with the idols consistently waving to and watching their fans who would return affection to the idols by holding up signs and glowsticks as if they were in the audience at a physical concert such as Y I Love You 2019. Fans who were watching the stream on the V-Live application were not neglected, since the live chat from the app was also often cast onto the virtual background so that the hosts could regularly read the feedback from fans out loud to the khu jin in real time. As is evident, the Global Live Fan Meetings placed an emphasis on creating intimate connections with the audience just as previous physical fan meetings had done. GMM thus ensured that the viewers watching the shows from their homes could also participate in the event.

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Interspersed throughout the song and dance numbers that structured the Global Live Fan Meetings were the conversations between the khu jin and the ten lucky fans who had been selected by GMM to ask questions of the idol couples. These interactions were spotlighted as highlights of the fan meeting, with the hosts positioning the ten lucky fans and their desires for connection as representative of the broader viewing audiences. Upon paying for access to the V-Live stream, all virtual concert goers were invited to subsequently register their interest in appearing as a lucky fan during the live broadcast. Importantly, this registration procedure entailed writing down the question fans wished to ask in advance, most likely so GMM could vet them when selecting the 200 lucky fans. The successful applicants were notified one week before the concert was broadcast and invited to a pre-concert Zoom orientation meeting the day before the Global Live Fan Meeting commenced. I applied to be a lucky fan at each of the four virtual concerts and, much to my surprise, I was fortuitously selected as one of the 200 attendees for the fan meeting with TayNew. Furthermore, thirty minutes before the Global Live Fan Meeting with TayNew was scheduled to start, I was notified via a private message in the Zoom meeting through which lucky fans would watch the show that I had also been selected as one of the ten individuals who would ask the khu jin a question. While overwhelmed with joy that I would finally have the opportunity to speak with the two idols whose careers I had been avidly following since 2016, I also conveyed my consent to follow the strict rules GMM imposed on lucky fans. Most notably, GMM management firmly stated through private message that I could not deviate from my pre-submitted question, which was to ask TayNew what advice they had for fans around the world struggling during difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the first hour of the show, I experienced a growing sense of both excitement and nervousness as I enjoyed the prerecorded songs and opening ments by TayNew. My anticipation was high for my upcoming interaction with the couple and, as a scholar who often writes on fans’ affective engagements with idol celebrities, I increasingly came to recognize that my growing feeling of excitement resonated with the reported experiences of the many fans of Thai BL I had interviewed over the years. Soon, it was my turn to speak directly to TayNew and I felt a strong warmth grow in my chest as the khu jin smiled to me and waved, welcoming me to the concert and congratulating me on being selected as a lucky fan. I was especially moved when both P’Wave and Tay greeted me with a “G’day” after I told them I was Australian. This warm feeling continued as the two idols seriously responded to my question and I listened along with my intermediate Thai (I was grateful that P’Wave interpreted what Tay and New said almost immediately afterward). At the end of our brief conversation of no more than seven minutes, I thanked the pair in Thai, eliciting a surprised and pleasurable reaction from TayNew, before turning my attention to my Twitter account where fans all around the globe were connecting with me to join together in this moment of intense fin. Reflecting back on my conversation with TayNew as I write this book, I still feel the same sense of warmth and connection as a lucky fan who got to directly interact with the khu jin. In fact, it is this memory of the intimacy I shared with

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TayNew that has motivated me to continue supporting their careers, to consume their content, and conduct this research project. Furthermore, the greatest feeling of satisfaction I experienced on that day stemmed from the fact that I was finally recognizable to the khu jin with whom I had developed a significant parasocial relationship as a fan. Once again, this led me to reflect on the responses of the various interlocutors I have met throughout my ethnographic fieldwork who spoke about the importance of connecting with Thai BL idols to their fan identities. The fin I experienced—and that I believe other lucky fans may have experienced during the Global Live Fan Meetings— thus had little to do with staged homoeroticism and everything to do with the visibilization of our status as fans before GMM’s idol celebrities. My satisfaction that TayNew knew who I was and recognized my positioning as their dedicated fan was reinforced later in the event, during the game which all the lucky fans would play with the khu jin in the middle of the fan meetings. For the Global Live Fan Meeting with TayNew, fans were required to act out a number of emotions introduced to us by P’Godji while the idol couple looked at our screens and tried to guess which emotion we were conveying. My video screen was coincidentally placed in the middle of the background at eye level, and the couple announced after the first round that they were specifically watching me since they knew who I was after our conversation. Indeed, Tay even castigated me for incorrectly performing one emotion and leading him to lose against New. After this unexpected interaction, I doubled my efforts to perform, leading to Tay correctly guessing his first answer. Tay then ran towards my screen and gave me a virtual hug while happily exclaiming “thank you so much Thomas!” Unsurprisingly, this interaction led me to experience even greater fin as I felt Tay and I had connected quite strongly. In her studies of how the K-pop industry has deployed technological innovation to re-define notions of liveness, performance studies scholar SukYoung Kim particularly highlights how interactions between fans and idols through livestreaming technology have consolidated global K-pop fandom.75 Moving beyond a focus on social media, Kim explores how livestreaming has been incorporated into traditional media such as television shows and concerts to authenticate the connection fans experience when consuming K-pop and interacting with idols.76 Through the technological affordances of livestreaming technology, Kim argues, affective entanglements similar to those I elucidate with respect to the GMM Global Live Fan Meetings are produced within K-pop fandom.77 One particularly salient example which Kim explores is the integration of livestreamed interactions between fans and K-pop groups on Arirang TV’s program After School Club. This show, which specifically targets international fans of K-pop and is broadcast in English with live subtitles, represents an interview program where hosts, K-pop groups, and fans interact and answer a number of questions as well as play games.78 As should be evident, the structure of After School Club is extremely similar to GMM’s virtual concerts. Kim highlights that the livestreamed video calls from fans, hosted on Google Hangouts, have created a transnational sense of intimacy between K-pop idols in Seoul and fans around the

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globe, strengthening parasocial relationships and expanding the reach of K-pop production companies into new, international markets.79 As I mentioned above, fans from around the globe began interacting with me on Twitter soon after my appearance during the virtual concert to share their own congratulations that I had been selected as a lucky fan. Likewise, many of the 200 lucky fans shared their excitement whenever one of us was selected in the Zoom meeting chat where we were watching the show, although there were also a minority of individuals who expressed disappointment or jealousy that they were not selected. On social media, fans were avidly tracking down the ten individuals who received an opportunity to speak to TayNew so as to share in their happy moments of fin. The connections developed between lucky fans such as myself and idol celebrities were thus drawn into the social media discourse produced by the four khu jin’s dedicated fandoms, once again allowing fans to develop shared intimacy with each other. In fact, the final moments of the four Global Live Fan Meetings were, like Y I Love You 2019, focused on celebrating the fandoms themselves through VCRs of prior fan events. The online shows all concluded with emotional ments where KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin thanked their dedicated fans for their support and urged them to continue moving forward into the future with them as an intimate collective. GMM’s decision to finish each virtual fan meeting with strong messages of gratitude for the four khu jin’s fandoms displayed upon the screen—“Peraya as one,” “Babii, you’re our whole world,” “Once Polca, always Polca,” and “Your love keeps us going. Let’s keep growing together ~ BrightWin”—was a masterstroke in building collective intimacy. Through these messages, the company urged fans to continue their active participation in its BL Machine, strengthening parasocial relationships and building excitement for future projects featuring the four Royal Couples who had become the drivers of GMM’s economic success. Throughout this chapter, I have revealed through my ethnographic fieldwork how intimate connections between fans and khu jin are central to the continued success of GMM’s BL Machine. In particular, I have demonstrated how social media activity among fans of KristSingto, OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin as well as the staging of both physical and virtual fan events consolidates consumers of BL series into a media tribe which GMM strategically manages through mechanisms adapted from the global K-pop industry. By encouraging various forms of fan and idol labor, GMM thus facilitates intimate transactions which transform fin into more than just an enjoyment of staged homoerotic content. Rather, fin becomes the central mechanism which consolidates fans’ parasocial relationships with GMM’s idol talents, with events such as the Global Live Fan Meetings primed to transform BL fans into consumers of GMM’s media content more broadly. Importantly, my analysis of this virtual fan meeting also reveals that the BL Machine is no longer simply targeting a domestic, Thai audience. Fandom for Thai BL has, similar to K-pop and principally through the same mechanisms, become a transnational phenomenon. Indeed, the lucky fans featured at the four Global Live Fan Meetings who interacted with the idols came from Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines,

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Romania, South Korea, and the United States. As is evident, this is a diverse range of national contexts and GMM’s selection of lucky fans from around the world was likely a strategic move to present their khu jin as globally popular celebrities similar in stature to K-pop idols like BTS. In the following chapter, I turn my attention to exploring the experiences of global consumers of Thai BL to think through the roles queer idol celebrities and Thai BL series have played in providing international fans access to discourses which affirm queer sexuality. That is, I consider how Thai BL media have transformed into a transnational form of Asian queer popular culture. Importantly, this discussion allows me to theorize the role of queer popular culture in the newly emergent “Thai Wind” which is sweeping across the globe as more and more consumers in East and Southeast Asia turn away from Japanese and South Korean media to enthusiastically consume TV series and pop music from Thailand.

Chapter 5 T HA I B L G O E S G L O BA L : T H E Q U E E R P O T E N T IA L S O F C H I N E SE A N D P H I L I P P I N E F A N D OM S

One late January afternoon in 2020, after a long, hot, and dusty walk through downtown Makati, an affluent district in central Manila, I found myself exhausted yet exhilarated as I joined hundreds of fans eagerly awaiting the beginning of the 6 Moons in Manila Thai BL fan meeting at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium.1 Striking up a friendship with a group of Philippine fans, some heterosexual women, others gay men, I eagerly discussed our passionate fandom for the six handsome actors who had starred in the recent Thai BL series 2Moons2 (2019, Duean Kiao Duean 2, “The Moon Courts the Moon 2” in Thai). As we exchanged photocards and other fan-made merchandise emblazoned with the three khu jin from this series—JoongNine, PavelDome, and BenEarth—I introduced myself as a researcher of Thai BL culture who had been observing the Philippine fandom of these queer TV series since 2015. The fans I met in the lobby of the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium were quick to share with me their impressions of the important role that Thai BL had played for them as young men and women living within the hetero-patriarchal, Catholic-majority Philippines. One young bisexual woman who had travelled to Manila from Cebu Province in the Central Visayas Region explained, for instance, how Thai BL filled a gap in positive representations of queer romance in Philippine media, an opinion I had encountered many times over the years I had been conducting virtual ethnographic observations of Thai BL fandom among Filipinos.2 Like many Thai fans, these young Philippine consumers also highlighted the importance of the celebrity khu jin couples central to Thai BL in providing them both a personal and fannish identity and in facilitating the creation of a shared sense of intimacy with others in the Philippine fan community for Thai BL. Entering the auditorium several hours later, I joined fans who had paid extra for a VIP experience that allowed one to take photos with the whole cast or, if one had paid for an exclusive “VVIP experience,” a portrait with one of the khu jin couples (see Figure 10). The fan meeting then began in earnest, with the six stars of 2Moons2 spending three hours on stage performing songs, reenacting popular moments of staged homoeroticism from the series, and even celebrating the birthday of Ben whose family had travelled to Manila to be with his fans on his special day. Throughout the performances, which mirrored those pioneered

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Figure 10  A “VVIP” selfie with PavelDome of 2Moons2 at the 6 Moons in Manila event. Photo credit Thomas Baudinette.

by GMM that I introduced in the previous chapter, the Philippine fans screamed and cried with a level of joy that went beyond anything I had yet experienced at other fan events I had previously attended. My newfound Philippine friends explained, during breaks in the programming, that such energy was typical of fan communities in the Philippines. “We are taken away by kilig,” one gay male fan explained, “a feeling of love and joy that cannot be controlled.” The audience’s expressions of kilig, which many Philippine fans have described to me over the years as a specifically romantic response akin to the quickening of the heartbeat when one falls in love for the first time, was almost orgasmic. The fans’ cries of joy as the Thai BL actors engaged them throughout the fan meeting were thus overlaid with a strong jouissance, releasing pent up emotions, and therefore conveying intense feelings of pleasure and satisfaction similar to those experienced by fujoshi fans of Japanese BL manga.3 To help me understand just how satisfied the fans had been during the fan meeting, one of my friends from the audience noted to me over breakfast the day after the concert that “it’s so rare to see these boys in the flesh … so we are letting out our love so strongly.” The bisexual fan from Cebu put it even more bluntly during the event itself, stating that “Filipinos want to be known as the biggest fans of Thai BL on earth!” More so than the screams of joy and the passion of the Philippine audience for the stars of 2Moons2, however, I was intrigued by the audience’s very specific reaction to the performance of staged homoeroticism between the khu jin, since it differed to the reactions that I had observed among Thai fans. As JoongNine, PavelDome, and BenEarth embraced on the stage, held hands, and even kissed each other, the Philippine audience cried out in unison, “sana all, sana all!” This Taglish slang term, combining the Tagalog word sana meaning “hope” and the English “all,” has emerged online among young Filipinos as a common reaction

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to kilig-inducing interactions between celebrities and can be loosely translated as “I hope everyone (including me) can experience this moment/feeling.” As Marlon Pontillas and his colleagues note, the Taglish expression sana all is specifically utilized by Filipino youth in situations when they wish to express their desire for an experience or thing which they have, up until then, not possessed.4 As Philippine fans of Thai BL watched staged homoeroticism at the 6 Moons in Manila fan meeting, their responses thus went beyond simply vocalizing the shared intimacy produced via fin discussed in the previous chapter. Rather, they were expressing their fervent wish to directly experience the queer romance that was unfolding before them on the stage. Indeed, numerous same-sex desiring Philippine fans have explained to me how cries of sana all have less to do with wishing for others to share in the moment of kilig. Instead, screaming sana all at a concert, or posting the phrase as a reaction to content on social media, signaled an explicit desire to personally experience a queer romance like the ones staged for them by Thai khu jin. That is, the audience’s cries of sana all that so intrigued me during this Thai BL fan meeting in downtown Manila were ultimately expressing a fannish desire for the actualization of queer romance in everyday Philippine life. As I reveal throughout this chapter, Thai media has extensively transnationalized, with fandom for Thai BL series and their khu jin stars particularly spreading across East and Southeast Asia in the latter years of the 2010s. I have already documented the history of this transnational spread throughout the previous chapters, noting how the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant global trending of the GMM series 2gether starring BrightWin bolstered a preexisting fandom for Thai BL series that emerged simultaneously to the mainstreaming of these series on Thai televisions. This chapter’s principal aim, then, is to move beyond recounting this history to explore the reception of Thai BL series and khu jin celebrities among consumers across East and Southeast Asia through the ethnographic investigation of fans from Mainland China and the Philippines. More than simply representing case studies of convenience, my digital ethnographic observations of Thai BL fandom on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter uncovered that, along with Japanese consumers who I discuss in the following chapter, Chinese and Philippine fans have become high profile targets of Thai production companies’ international engagement strategies. In fact, the prevalence of Chinese consumers in Thai BL’s transnational fandom is also evident from my traditional ethnographic observations, as I encountered several Chinese fans at events in Bangkok as well as at the 6 Moons in Manila concert introduced above. Further, as I discuss below and briefly elucidated in Chapter 1, Chinese companies provide an important source of investment capital for Thai production companies, facilitating the very creation of BL series. Likewise, Manila has emerged as an important hub for global Thai BL fan events in recognition of the centrality of Philippine fandom in influencing Anglophone engagement with Thai popular culture in recent years.5 In turning my focus to the transnationalization of Thai BL fandom in this chapter, I also refocus my theoretical attention on how this newly emergent media genre represents a form of specifically queer Asian popular culture. As discussed in the introduction to this book, I am inspired by the seminal definition of queer from

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theorist David Halperin as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” to consider queering a process that is anti-hierarchical and antinormative.6 Rather than a representational strategy or an identity category, queering thus represents a “becoming,” a deconstructive force that consumers bring into being through their practices as they try to make sense of gender and sexuality in a remarkably heteronormative world.7 Drawing upon the narratives of Chinese and Philippine fans and considering their motivations for passionately engaging with Thai BL series and khu jin celebrities, I argue that any account of the growing transnational fandom for Thai popular culture must attend to the queer affective work this media performs for consumers. Importantly, theoretically situating the growing transnationalization of Thai TV series centering queer romance and their khu jin stars within the context of inter-Asian media ecologies exposes how fans in China and the Philippines understand the queerness of this media as “Asian.” As such, this chapter deploys the “Asia as method” approach to nuance discussions of queer emancipation across East and Southeast Asia by re-centering the focus on “inter-Asian referencing” rather than Asian consumer culture’s purported responses to the global media landscape’s Western hegemony.8 Ultimately, in this chapter I extend the arguments concerning Thai BL’s queer potentials presented in previous chapters by considering how Chinese and Philippine fans utilize Thai popular culture as resources to deconstruct and challenge local systems of heteronormativity.

Riding the Thai Wind: The Transnationalization of Thai Popular Culture through BL Although early cultural work on media globalization posited that the dominance of the United States in the late capitalist consumer culture of the post-Cold War world would lead to a so-called McDonaldization whereby global media would become increasingly homogenous,9 both East and Southeast Asian media ecologies have instead become increasingly interdependent.10 Throughout the postwar era, the televisual, filmic, and musical cultures of Asia have been remarkably robust, even as US neocolonial imperialism throughout the region—chiefly via the US military presence in Japan, South Korea, and throughout Indochina— exposed local consumers to US popular culture and instilled desires for the privileged lifestyles depicted within it.11 Rather than replacing local TV, film, and music scenes, however, artists across East and Southeast Asia responded to US popular culture by producing a variety of local expressions through the process of adaption, introduced previously, known as glocalization.12 Further, by virtue of its own developed postwar economic boom and the global expansion of its consumer goods, Japan also rose to prominence to provide an alternative model of modernity to consumers in East and Southeast Asia that challenged US hegemony and similarly inspired local media adaptions.13 Indeed, as I recounted in Chapter 1, Thai BL is a direct result of the spread of Japanese media into Thailand in the late 1980s and early 1990s, revealing just one of many examples of how Asian media

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ecologies consistently respond to each other and how sophisticated networks of East and Southeast Asian media circulation facilitate the growth of transnational fandoms for Asian popular culture. For theorists working out of the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies (IACS) cluster at the National University of Singapore, these transnational networks of Asian media fandom speak not only to the development of interrelated consumer cultures across Asia, but also signaled cultural shifts in the region whereby “interAsian referencing” became increasingly central to how consumers engage with transnational media.14 Driven by formal relationships between media producers in the so-called mature markets of Japan and South Korea and local content distributors across East and Southeast Asia, as well as fan collectives engaging in informal, pirated distribution, Asia’s media landscape represents a bricolage of transnational and local contents which reflexively respond to each other through complex systems of cultural referencing.15 Far from homogenizing Asian consumer culture, however, what members of IACS term “inter-Asian referencing” provides consumers from East and Southeast Asia a repertoire of transnational cultural signs that can be decoded by fans across the region to make sense of their lived experiences within varied local contexts.16 For instance, seminal theorists Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi posit that the transnational consumption of South Korean media provides consumers in East Asian societies like Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as in Southeast Asian nations such as Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines, with opportunities to reflect on questions concerning unequal experiences of modernization across Asia.17 Likewise, Japanese fans of Hong Kong cinema purportedly also engage with these media due to a nostalgic longing for a “traditional” past that has apparently been lost as a result of Japan’s rapid postwar economic recovery.18 Such accounts of the transnational fandom for East and Southeast Asian media have come to be termed the “cultural thesis,” a theory I discuss more fully and problematize below. At the heart of the mechanisms of inter-Asian referencing that have driven Asian consumer culture in the postwar period sit several popular culture waves that have in turn produced sophisticated, transnational fan cultures. Beginning with fandom for Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s throughout Chinese-speaking regions, Japan, and their related spheres of influence, young people across Asia turned to transnational media to make sense of themselves as specifically Asian consumer subjects.19 While Hong Kong cinema (and related media products such as Cantopop) represented a minor wave with a small-yet-significant fandom,20 it was the “J-Wave” of the 1990s and the transnational obsession for Japanese music, television dramas, anime, manga, and video games that truly built the system of inter-Asian referencing that typifies contemporary East and Southeast Asia’s media ecologies and consumer cultures.21 This J-Wave was quickly eclipsed, however, by the Korean Wave in the twenty-first century, leading to a boom in K-pop, K-Drama, and all things “K” across Asia, including—as extensively discussed in previous chapters—Thailand.22 Although the Korean Wave was particularly driven by the digital media tribes introduced in Chapter 4, it is also important to note that Korean popular culture’s transnational spread was also the result of promotional

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interventions by the South Korean government coupled by the recognition of the necessity of engaging international markets by K-pop production companies.23 As cultural anthropologist Amporn Jirattikorn notes, the models provided by both “J-pop … and K-pop … [have] paved the way for other N-pop (any national popular culture) to enter into [the] Asian marketplace. It has made countries in Asia easily receptive to try other national pop culture[s].”24 Through her recent longitudinal study of the transnational spread of Thai media across East and Southeast Asia,25 Jirattikorn argues that a “Thai Wind” (or “T-Wind”) has emerged in response to, and in competition with, the Korean Wave. Thai BL has, I argue, been central to the success of this newly emergent Thai Wind. While Thai popular culture content—including TV series and, to a lesser extent, pop music—have benefited from formal distribution mechanisms into markets such as Cambodia and Laos since the late 1980s, and Thai film has had wide releases across East and Southeast Asia, the T-Wind developed primarily through informal channels.26 Jirattikorn identifies one important space where Thai TV series first developed a large transnational fandom as the Shan state in Northeast Burma, bordering Northwestern Thailand and Western Laos. From the 1990s onwards, Thai lakhorn were informally dubbed and distributed to consumers by local entrepreneurs in this region where Shan peoples, who are ethnically and linguistically related to the Thai people and whose language is suppressed by the Burmese state, developed an attraction to Thailand’s comparative modernity.27 As minor players within transregional media markets, the Shan fans of Thai pop culture may not have directly encouraged other consumers across Asia to engage in Thai media fandom, yet Jirattikorn highlights their significance to broader patterns of informal distribution to the Thai Wind.28 Indeed, in subsequent emerging fandom spaces for Thai TV series in Vietnam and China, Jirattikorn positions the Thai Wind as driven by piracy and the work of fansubbers who spread Thai content to those looking for something different to Korean popular media.29 The Thai Wind is therefore a “bottom-up” media fandom akin to previous “N-pop” waves that have shaken East and Southeast Asian media landscapes, although Jirattikorn acknowledges that formal distribution mechanisms via online streaming services also played a significant role in spreading Thai popular culture into China.30 My virtual ethnographic observations of Philippine BL fandom, as well as interviews with fans I met during fieldwork in Manila, similarly revealed that informal distribution mechanisms played a significant role in introducing international fans to Thai BL. A constant theme of my conversations with Filipino fans was how discovering Thai BL series and their khu jin stars was a highly serendipitous occurrence, neither planned nor even anticipated. “I had no knowledge or interest in Thai things,” one gay man I interviewed in Manila explained. “I didn’t even know Thailand had series like this,” he continued, explaining he was instead only familiar with Korean dramas and stumbled upon the Thai BL series SOTUS “one day [when] I was bored online and browsing.” In fact, clicking the link to watch this seminal BL series starring KristSingto with very little interest beyond wanting “to kill some time before I went out to meet my [classmates],” this young man recounted to me that he “was surprised that it was

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Thai, I actually expected it to be Korean because the stars looked kinda Korean to me.” He continued to watch the series due to finding both Krist and Singto “extremely sexy” and, as a gay man, being drawn into the series’ central queer romance that was “nothing like what I’d ever seen here in the Philippines or in K-drama.” This random moment of discovering Thai BL subsequently transformed a mildly curious consumer of Thai pop culture into a committed Peraya who was highly active in transnational KristSingto fan spaces. “Every day I am so happy I stumbled on SOTUS and got to know Thai things through KristSingto,” this gay Philippine fan gushed, “that random day of bored scrolling on the net literally changed my life.” Many of my other Philippine fan interlocutors explained that they had similarly come across Thai BL series such as Lovesick, SOTUS, or Love By Chance due to it appearing in the recommendations on their YouTube accounts, a result of the social media service’s algorithms transforming these individuals’ regular patterns of video consumption—typically focused on K-dramas or queer media content— into a portal to the broader Thai Wind. Others noted how the posts of friends on Facebook or Twitter drew them into Thai BL, with one young bisexual woman I met in the lobby of the 6 Moons in Manila fan event noting how she only got into Thai BL series because the friends she had made in K-pop fandom had suddenly began posting about series like 2Moons2 on their Facebook walls. Famously, Philippine consumers (as well as Japanese, Indian, and a host of nationalities) collectively discovered the existence of Thai BL due to the massive popularity of 2gether and BrightWin during the COVID-19 pandemic pushing the series to the top of global Twitter trends, leading many around the world to enter Thai media fandom by chance. This is, indeed, an instance of the Thai Wind following the precedents established by the earlier Korean Wave, where social media trends draw consumers into the exciting world of idol fandom.31 As I have written elsewhere, vibrant social media fan pages for Thai BL on Facebook played a key role in consolidating a transnational Anglophone fandom for Thai media, with Filipinos leading the charge.32 To make sense of the recent emergence of the Thai Wind, Jirattikorn draws upon the cultural thesis developed by IACS theorists to argue that Thai TV series provide consumers across Asia with an exotic sense of “difference” that fans contrast with their own local experiences.33 For instance, Jirattikorn notes how Vietnamese consumers of the Thai adaption of the K-Drama Full House contrast the Korean original with the Thai remake and, in so doing, reflect on the supposed Thai cultural elements that they believe are encoded into the text.34 Through interviews with fans of Thai media in China, Jirattikorn specifically argues that fans participating in the Thai Wind are attracted to the Thai culture encoded within Thai TV series.35 While rejecting the axiomatic position developed by IACS theorists that Asian media fandom has developed in the twenty-first century because of the “cultural proximity” of the consumer cultures of East and Southeast Asia (purportedly based on “Asian values” and Confucianist worldviews), Jirattikorn still falls into the trap of assuming that the Thai Wind is driven by a desire for Thainess among transnational consumers. That is, Jirattikorn replicates what many contemporary

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theorists of East and Southeast Asian media fandom view as the increasingly problematic theoretical assertion within the IACS cultural thesis that media texts are imbued with monolithic, “national” cultures.36 Indeed, responding to the work of Iwabuchi on the role of Japanese “cultural fragrance” in driving the J-Wave of the 1990s, Jirattikorn posits that the Thai Wind is similarly driven by fans’ attraction to a supposed Thai cultural fragrance found within lakhorn.37 Jirattikorn’s arguments concerning desires for Thainess are convincing in the sense that they provide insight into why many fans engaging in the Thai Wind continue to passionately consume Thai television series, whether they be heteronormative lakhorn or queer media like Thai BL. The issue is, however, that Jirattikorn fails to consider that these transnational fans are projecting desires for constructed Thainess—often based on stereotypes which circulate throughout East and Southeast Asia—on to the media which they consume as self-identified Thai culture fanatics. My ethnographic observations of Philippine fans of Thai BL point to other motivations for their continued fandom which speak less to investment into so-called Thai cultural fragrance—although I admit that for some of my fan interlocutors, fantasies of Thailand were important, as I discuss further below—and more to the affective affordances of this queer genre of media. Fans I have interviewed in Manila, as well as observed on Chinese-language and Englishlanguage social media, instead center the queerness of Thai BL as the principal reason for their engagement in the Thai Wind. That is, rather than contrasting supposedly Thai cultural elements found within these media with their local cultural experiences, many fans are invested in the positive depictions of queer romance found within Thai BL series and which are central to the shipping culture surrounding khu jin stars. “I don’t really care that it’s Thai to be honest,” one Philippine man explained, echoing a narrative I frequently encountered in response to my questions concerning motivations for becoming a Thai media fan, “but seeing two handsome men kiss on screen? That sparks my attention.” Other informants argued that they would not consume Thai BL if there were similar expressions of queerness available to them in their local media landscape, with many stressing that Thai BL simply “filled a gap” in queer representation at home. Such responses may appear surprising, but they reveal how affective investment into media is often more significant to transnational fandom than the supposed cultural fragrance privileged by the cultural thesis of the IACS school.38 For fans, the Thai Wind was therefore a significant fandom space not because of its Thainess per se, but due to the queer potentials embedded within it and the affective fantasy work that engaging with Thai BL series and khu jin idol celebrities afforded them. For many like the passionate fans attending the 6 Moons in Manila fan meeting introduced above, Thai BL fandom provided a space to express their intense desires for the actualization of queerness in everyday life. In other words, Thai BL fandom provided fans in heteropatriarchal societies across East and Southeast Asia with an affective hermeneutics or “knowledge gained through feeling” tied to queer expressions absent in local media that they could then use to enunciate their own queer desires and subject positions.39 Their Thai popular culture fandom was thus ultimately driven by affective media entanglements

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grounded in desires for content that challenged heteronormativity due to their affirming representations of queer romance. At the heart of these entanglements were hopes for a future where same-sex desire and what one Philippine fan termed “love without gender” existed at home, in “real life,” rather than performed on the screen by Thai celebrities. Of course, for some of my interlocutors, the queerness of the Thai Wind was framed as intrinsically Thai in the sense that they believed only Thailand would provide a fertile ground for the development of this new form of Asian queer popular culture. Such opinions were not expressed as a desire for Thainess, however, but were instead framed as an attempt to justify why this queer media had emerged in Thailand rather than their home countries, with some fans often drawing upon problematic stereotypes of Thailand as a sexually progressive nation to justify their personal narrativizations of Thai BL’s complex history. Rather than expressing desires for Thainess, then, these fans were engaged in a process which I have elsewhere termed “creative misreading” whereby queer fans construct personal histories of global media flows based on willful misunderstandings of the history of transnationalization to produce queer affects that provide support in everyday experiences of heteronormative oppression.40 For many fans I have interviewed over the years, the Thai Wind was ultimately a “queer wind” that was sweeping across Asia and emancipating marginalized sexual minority consumers and heterosexual women alike, even if it was not always romanticized as fundamentally Thai by all consumers. Jirattikorn limits her investigation of the Thai Wind to heteronormative lakhorn and only mentions BL in passing,41 but my ethnographic observations suggest that Thai BL series and their khu jin celebrities are central to this new transnational media fandom in East and Southeast Asia. Several Chinese, Philippine, and Japanese fans I interviewed had come to engage with other forms of Thai popular culture such as films, lakhorn, and popular music only due to their intense fandom for BL series and khu jin celebrities. For example, Philippine fans of the BL series 2Moons which was broadcast in 2017 were also often supporters of SBFIVE, a boyband formed from the 2Moons cast. Still other fans expressed a broader interest in “T-Pop,” that is, “Thai pop,” that had emerged because of their engagement with khu jin on social media, many of whom were actively releasing music as part of their emerging careers as idol performers. Further, khu jin stars frequently top lists of Thai celebrities popular among foreign consumers, bested only by Thai members of globally popular K-pop groups such as Lisa of Blackpink or BamBam of GOT7.42 Some fans I interviewed in Manila even expressed that their passion for Thai media had become so strong due to their fandom for BL that they had completely turned away from Korean or Japanese media fandom. “After all,” one gay man noted to me in 2019, “K-dramas rarely feature gay love and hot guys kissing. Only Thai shows can really make me kilig now.” The rising popularity of the Thai Wind, increasingly grounded in fans’ affective engagements with queer romance through their passion for Thai BL, has therefore begun to reshape the media ecologies of Asia. In so doing, the Thai Wind thus presents one final and unexpected instance of queering. Thai BL fans such as those

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in Mainland China and in the Philippines whose experiences I present below are explicitly challenging the domination of Asia’s media landscapes by East Asian popular culture. By turning to Thailand for new media content that satisfies their desires for both affirming depictions of same-sex romance that are specifically Asian and queer emancipation more broadly, Thai BL fans are unintentionally repositioning the “minor player” of Thailand as central to contemporary Asia’s transnational consumer culture(s). The Thai Wind is therefore exceptionally radical in that its growth and success is explicitly tied to the rising normalization of desires for queer romance among consumers, many of whom belong to sexual minority communities, across Asia.

Chinese Money and the Circulation of Queer Affect: Thai BL Fans in Mainland China In her writings on the Thai Wind, Jirattikorn notes that China has quickly emerged as one of the most important markets for the formal export and digital distribution of Thai television series.43 Significantly, Jirattikorn notes that a Chinese-owned media company based in Thailand named Han Media Culture Co., Ltd. played a key role in selling the broadcast rights of lakhorn to Chinese satellite television stations in the early 2000s, creating a market for Thai content.44 Chinese broadcasters at the turn of the century bought up Thai series to fill their schedules primarily due to their low cost and the fact that they recognized that audiences in China—particularly young women—desired foreign, exotic content.45 Furthermore, as nationalistic backlash grew against the Korean Wave in China because of government policies specifically aimed at lessening the impact of South Korean popular culture on young consumers, more and more Chinese youth turned to the melodramas of Thailand as a source of entertainment.46 This new generation of Thai Wind fans in China quickly came to the attention of both media conglomerates such as GMM in Thailand and Chinese investment firms looking for new media markets to exploit. As part of their stated goals to become a transnational company, GMM especially focused their early global engagement strategies on the Chinese market throughout the mid-2010s, coupling with various Chinese media distribution companies to make their products formally available for consumers in the heavily regulated Chinese marketplace.47 Throughout the years I have been conducting my virtual ethnographic observations of GMM’s social media and fan events, I was always particularly struck by the privileging of Chinese-language advertising and outreach until late 2020, when the company pivoted to English and Japaneselanguage outreach for reasons that I spell out more fully in the following chapter. China has quickly become a lucrative market for Thai popular culture, particularly BL series and their khu jin celebrities. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the very creation and mainstreaming of Thai BL series was made possible due to formal business relationships between Thai production companies and Chinese investment firms. Both the moderately successful Thai BL series What the Duck and the transnational hit Love By Chance

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were primarily financed through Chinese capital and their transnational spread was partly the result of eager Chinese fans promoting the series on social media services such as Sina Weibo and Twitter. As Thai BL series further mainstreamed during 2019 and 2020, almost every Thai BL series’ promotional launch that I observed during my digital ethnography would gesture toward the Chinese market in some way. For instance, the press conference and worship ceremony for early 2021’s hit Lovely Writer, which was held in late 2020, prominently featured representatives from ArtPop, a Chinese-backed company that collaborated with the Thai media company DeeHup House in the production of this new Thai BL series. Notably, the representatives of ArtPop addressed the livestreamed press conference that I watched on Facebook (but which was also streamed via YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo) in both Thai and Chinese, speaking directly to potential BL fans in China rather than the Thai fans gathered live at the conference venue. Through my conversations with BL researcher Kwannie Krairit, who has been observing the economic landscape of Thai media production as it relates to the mainstreaming of BL, I learnt that contemporary Thai BL series could not be produced without Chinese money. To produce high quality series designed for international consumption, she argued, significant capital beyond the means of most Thai media production companies is required, as well as the expertise of those in a more developed market such as China.48 For this reason, Thai production companies have turned to Chinese firms and have subsequently cultivated Thai BL fandom in the region through the staging of fan meetings in major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.49 While Jirattikorn only refers to BL series in passing within her writing on Chinese participants in the Thai Wind,50 recent exploratory work by Junqi Zhang and Kongkiat Limpongsatorn reveal the extent to which fandom for BL is driving Chinese engagement with transnational Thai popular culture.51 Both scholars note that Thai BL series and their khu jin stars amass significant attention on Sina Weibo, frequently trending, and that the social media fan clubs for Thai celebrities central to BL culture routinely boast tens of thousands of members.52 Further, Limpongsatorn notes the dominance of Chinese fans in fan projects such as food support and public advertising (such as billboards celebrating khu jin on the GMM building and its surroundings), contributing significant money to events run by Thai fan clubs.53 Zhang and Limpongsatorn identify that Chinese fans of Thai BL tend to be heterosexual women who have migrated to the genre from earlier participation in either K-pop shipping fandom or fandom for the Chinese queer romance fiction known as danmei.54 In many ways, then, Chinese fans mirror fans in Thailand who are attracted to BL series and khu jin couples due to their previous investment into shipping practices tied to East Asian media fandom. Both Zhang and Limpongsatorn also note that fans from sexual minority communities in China—especially gay men, but also same-sex desiring women— have become a significant minor force within Chinese fandom for Thai BL.55 Unsurprisingly, these queer fans of Thai BL series in China have emerged due to their enjoyment of Thai media’s mainstreaming of queer romance within its televisual and celebrity culture.

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In late 2019, I was fortunate to have met a gay Chinese man in his mid-twenties living in Australia who was a big fan of both Thai BL series and the TayNew khu jin. This Chinese fan, who graciously agreed to be interviewed for this book project under the pseudonym Cookie, also connected me with three other gay men living in China who were massive fans of TayNew, all of whom likewise consented to (email) interviews. I share an extended extract from my conversation with Cookie below which presents a narrative common to the other Chinese interlocutors concerning what Thai BL meant for gay men navigating China’s sexually conservative and heteronormative society. Notably, this extended extract also reflects themes reported in the prior research of Zhang and Limpongsatorn. Growing up as a gay man in China … well, it’s really very hard because society is not open to that kind of thing. Actually, I am lucky that my mom is a little understanding, but I can’t let my dad know. Even my mom still expects me to get married and have kids … so it’s not like she accepts that her only son is gay (laughs) … Thai series are like a lifeline to me recently, because I have so much stress from my family, even though I am overseas! Watching handsome Thai guys kissing … seeing Pete and Kao [TayNew’s characters in Dark Blue Kiss, introduced in Chapter 1] falling in love and having their parents accept them … that is literally my dream come true. China … we will never have something so beautiful in our series, that’s why I started to watch Thai [BL] shows. In China, we have so much censorship … the government always cracks down on gay things, especially danmei … actually, they made it illegal a few years ago (laughs) … we have no choice but to look overseas, even if doing it is illegal … My friends and I love Thai content because it is a stress release, but it’s also very gay. I know, like, it makes me feel good, like I am somehow okay, that how I feel is not wrong. Yeah, Thai BL is important to many Chinese gay guys like me and my friends because we can get around censorship, I guess? But also … you know, it’s just fun because the series are also very silly, very romantic! Nothing sad or impossible like some Hollywood movies … like Brokeback [Mountain], just good times and hot boys (laughs). I’m not surprised TayNew are a hot item with lots of Chinese gay men and danmei girls now, it’s really only natural because China is so closed to this kind of thing (laughs) … that’s why we turn to Thailand and Boys Love (laughs).

Cookie not only highlights that BL series—especially Dark Blue Kiss with its focus on Pete and Kao’s need to navigate societal heteronormativity and seek parental acceptance of their long-term relationship—provide models of positive queer representation, but also how Thai content operates as an affective resource to manage the pressures of living in a society replete with heteronormative expectations. The Chinese Polca who I interviewed over email expressed similar sentiments, with one noting “Thai BL is fun and sexy and just watching it let’s me forget sometimes that being gay is not accepted here [in China].” Another of these gay Chinese fans of Thai BL noted how “chatting about TayNew [in the Chinese fan club] with other fans … other gay men … that’s not just fun, it’s really life-saving for

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someone who is hiding their gay parts like me.” The sense of enjoyment deriving from investment into the queer romances and related shipping culture central to Thai BL celebrity thus facilitates these four Chinese gay men’s negotiations with the everyday pressures of heteronormativity, with all stressing that their engagement was not just ludic, but political. For Cookie, who had experienced harassment over his supposed effeminacy from a male cousin also living in Australia who “was a typical Chinese … very conservative, very closed, and very homophobic,” watching Thai BL series allowed him to “enjoy a world where it’s totally okay to be gay, completely separate from my family and old-fashioned Chinese values.” That this politics of transnational media consumption was entangled with sexual attraction to Thai celebrities further reveals the queer affects underlying Thai BL fandom in China, especially for same-sex desiring men. All four of my gay Chinese interlocutors quite candidly admitted that they found both Tay and New extremely desirable and handsome, with Cookie noting how he viewed them “not just as celebrities … but they’d be great boyfriends … I’d even maybe have a one-night stand with P’Tay, he’s stupidly hot (laughs).” Not only was Thai BL injecting affirmative representations of queer romance into these four men’s everyday media consumption practices, it was also providing them a safe space to openly express and celebrate their own queer desires for other men. In coming together with Chinese Polca on social media services such as Weibo and WeChat and engaging both gay and heterosexual female fans in discussions of all things TayNew, these four fans had found a space where it was safe to openly talk about same-sex attraction without fear of homophobic backlash. Further, participating in the broader transnational fandom for Thai BL on Twitter introduced in the previous chapter likewise put Chinese gay fans such as Cookie and his friends in contact with other Polca all over the globe who all celebrated and accepted the normality of queer desire. Gay Chinese fans were thus brought into contact with the transnationally circulating affective hermeneutics of Thai BL fandom through their sexual attraction to khu jin celebrities such as Tay and New. Interestingly, Cookie and his friends all mentioned that one of the motivating factors behind their fandom for Thai BL and thus their participation in the transnational Thai Wind was the fact that Chinese government censorship had in many ways driven them to engage with Thailand. Once again, these fans’ consumption of Thai media thus had little to do with their preexisting interest in Thailand and was instead motivated by desires for queer content that Thai BL series serendipitously satisfied. As Cookie alluded in the above extract, the Chinese government made representations of same-sex romance in domestic media illegal in 2017 in reaction to the broadcast of Addicted (2016, known as Shang Yin in Chinese), a web series based on a danmei novel.56 The banning of explicit same-sex relationships across Chinese broadcast media—forming part of a cycle of crackdowns against the spread of homoerotic fan culture by the government aimed to moderate public morals and limit subversive media57—thus incentivized Thai BL fandom to emerge in China. One of the fans I interviewed over email succinctly reasoned that “if our government hadn’t shut down Chinese BL like Shang Yin, I wouldn’t have needed [Thai BL series such as] Dark Blue Kiss.”

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As a transnational queer popular culture form, Thai BL series and their khu jin stars therefore catered to the legions of Chinese fans already desiring homoerotic content, with these desires having emerged in part due to their previous engagement with the local BL tradition of danmei queer fiction. While Chinese series such as The Untamed (2019, known as Chen Qing Ling in Chinese) based on danmei novels eventually emerged, which depicted what Cookie termed “bromances” that imply queer romance without falling afoul of Chinese censorship regimes, Chinese gay fans seeking explicit depictions of romance and sex between men still needed to look overseas. My Chinese gay informants all noted a preference for filmic representations of queer intimate acts such as hugging, kissing, and sex, and Thailand serendipitously filled this gap which Chinese series like The Untamed were unable to fill due to the implicit nature of the queer romance which they depicted. Indeed, Limpongsatorn hypothesizes that one of the reasons why Chinese media distributors have heavily invested into Thai media production companies to facilitate the production of BL is due to their recognition that the Thai media landscape provides Chinese producers a space for creating queer content that can subsequently be sold to Chinese audiences which could not be feasibly produced domestically.58 Cookie certainly believed this was the case, arguing from his experiences in Chinese fandom spaces that “Thai BL fans in China are very happy to buy up [BL] content, we are the perfect, captive market.” Thai BL researcher Kwannie Krairit concurred, arguing that the “messiness” of Thai media productions’ global outreach strategies provided a strong motivation for Chinese producers to “swoop in” and “redirect their BL productions toward China by throwing around their money and expertise.”59 Finally, Cookie’s narrative points to an important opinion—held by many transnational Thai BL fans I have interviewed over the years—which has implications for the “Asia as method” approach adopted in this book. Cookie noted how Thai BL, in its focus on both “silly” and “romantic” stories, was more enjoyable for a Chinese gay man such as him than the queer films of Hollywood. He argued during our conversation in response to my follow-up questions that Brokeback Mountain represented an example of how “Western gay media is so focussed on sad endings that it just depresses me,” noting that “we [Chinese gay men] don’t need that, we need happy stories, happy endings!” Cookie’s friends presented similar positions, with one positing that “Thai BL is enjoyable because the actors are actually Asian … New is actually Chinese-background, he looks like us.” As I have noted elsewhere with reference to Chinese men’s consumption of Japanese gay pornographic films, Chinese gay men view “‘Western’ gay porn [as] less appropriate for their consumption, arguing that the narratives appearing in [Japanese porn] more closely matched their cultural expectations around sex and that [Japanese porn] contained performers who shared a similar ‘racial/ethnic’ background to them.”60 Likewise, Thai BL was appealing to Cookie and his friends due to its apparent “appropriateness” as another “Asian” queer popular culture form that directly resonated with their lived experiences. The queer affects of Thai BL fandom which motivated these Chinese gay men’s consumption were thus implicated in the process of making sense of one’s position as an explicitly “Asian”

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queer desiring subject. This was also a common narrative thread in my fieldwork interviews with Philippine fans.

Sana all: Filipino Fans, Queer Asian Knowledge, and Thai BL as a Resource of Hope Since the emergence of transnational Thai BL fandom, Philippine consumers have played a prominent role in both building Anglophone fandom spaces on social media and making Thai BL series accessible to consumers in other regions of the world, including large Anglophone fandom centers such as South Asia. My longitudinal ethnographic studies of this social media activity during the early stages of transnational Thai BL fandom uncovered that, like Chinese fans, many Filipinos had been led to Thai BL due to their strong desires for queer media content produced in Asia. A common refrain during interviews with Thai BL fans in Manila in 2019, for instance, was how Thai BL as an “Asian” media form provided narratives that resonated with their local experiences and that, while Thai and Philippine cultures were different, both societies represented heteronormative spaces where queer desire was understood as threatening to the status quo. Such fans thus failed to buy into problematic stereotypes of Thailand as a queer paradise, although some fans I encountered online between 2015 and 2017 certainly believed it was.61 While I remain skeptical of the “culture thesis” posited by some within the IACS tradition, it was certainly the case that there was a certain “Asianization” of the queer affects underlying Thai BL fandom among Philippine fans. This Asianization emerges in part from the postcolonial positioning of the Philippines in relation to its former colonizer, the United States, rather than an investment into cultural content encoded within Thai popular culture per se. The development of queer Asian knowledge among Philippine fans of Thai BL is thus entangled within their lived experiences of navigating the heteronormative culture of the Philippines and is ultimately expressed through the refrain of sana all, a radical and transformative hope that Thai BL will change Philippine society for the better. Thai BL fandom in the Philippines, I have learnt through my fieldwork and interviews, is typified by a strong aspirational mode of consumption. Within the sociology of consumption, aspirational modes of media engagement refer to how consumers invest significant affect into media as a site to imagine more positive futures, injecting themselves into the situations depicted within media texts and reimagining themselves as more empowered subjects.62 Within the Philippine context, fans’ aspirational consumption was specifically tied to notions that Thai BL was somehow more authentic or “real” than other forms of queer media accessible to them and thus represented a supposedly “appropriate” model for their hopes and fantasies. For instance, one gay male fan in his twenties explained his belief in the authenticity of Thai BL series in comparison to Japanese BL manga thusly, “Thai BL shows have real men kissing, like you actually see two cute guys kissing and as someone who desperately wants to kiss boys too, that’s so much more real [than

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manga].” Frequently, fans in the Philippines stressed how the televisual medium itself was “more real” for them, often in comparison to Japanese manga or local romance novels, and thus it was easier for them to reimagine themselves within its scenarios. In so doing, my Philippine interlocutors voiced a common belief in Philippine society concerning the role of television in transmitting both fantasy and reality simultaneously.63 Further, another reason Thai BL was considered “real” or “authentic” for Philippine consumers was the fact that, unlike Western texts which my interlocutors positioned as divorced from their lived experiences and overly invested into depictions of White bodies, the Asian performers in Thai BL series resonated with them. Acknowledging that many khu jin appeared East Asian and thus somewhat different to the typical Filipino, fans nevertheless found it easier to reimagine themselves within the scenarios from Thai BL than the Western texts which one bisexual woman claimed were “just too foreign to really feel real for us.” During the 6 Moons in Manila fan meeting, I met a bisexual male fan of Thai BL (pseudonymously) named Edwin in his late twenties who had been following Thai content since the broadcast of Lovesick in 2014. Edwin was of ChineseFilipino or “Chinito” descent and was heavily invested into the consumption of all kinds of Asian media, about which he had also studied extensively during both his undergraduate and graduate years at university as an international studies major. Edwin identified as a huge fan of K-pop group BTS and had also been consuming Japanese anime and manga, including BL manga, since his early teens. He noted during our conversation several days after the 6 Moons in Manila event that he understood his Thai BL fandom as part of his broader engagement with what he termed “Asian LGBT media” and proceeded to outline a sophisticated manifesto concerning the potential of transnational Asian queer popular culture to radically transform Philippine society. Reflecting on his Thai BL fandom from his positioning as a “Chinito” subject, Edwin suggested to me that: In the Philippines, we have seen anti-Chinese feeling for many years and there has been a feeling we Filipinos aren’t Asian as such … this is because we have always turned to the US because of colonization … our gay culture, it’s also been the same, people look to the US and try and connect it to our experiences here … that doesn’t work though, because Filipinos aren’t Westerners, we are Asian, I think … I’m Chinito and I feel that strongly, but over the past few years, as more people come to know K-pop and we all grew up watching Asian stuff, the idea we are also Asian has grown. People want to be sexy like a K-pop star, gay guys want to be sexy like [a Thai BL idol such as] Pavel [from 2moons2] … [East] Asian looks are now attractive which is great for me (laughs) … Thai BL is part of this shift I think, especially for LGBT fans … we’ve already spoken about how Filipinos look at Thai BL and feel kilig, right? I think it’s more than this … what is actually happening is, like, this whole new world of Asian queer content is opening up everyone’s mind to the idea that actually we can fight for LGBT rights through Asian positions, we can use K-pop or Japanese manga or whatsoever … I guess there is this huge feeling that Thai BL will change

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something here, do something that our obsession with the US could never do, right? That’s why when you ask me about sana all, I think it’s important ‘cause everyone here hopes that we can have what Thai BL shows have … we can make it real here and now … I mean, who wouldn’t want what we saw on stage [at 6 Moons in Manila] (laughs).

As the above extract from my interview with Edwin demonstrates, a sense of the “Asianization” of queer experience in the Philippines among Thai BL fans was often driven by deep reflections concerning the broader positioning of Philippine subjects within a world system dominated by fantasies of the United States and emerging counter-narratives which seek to reject such fantasy work.64 Edwin’s identification of Thai BL as just another example of Asian queer media like K-pop idol shipping and Japanese BL manga resonated with the beliefs of Hyacinth, a bisexual woman working at a public health NGO who I interviewed as part of a separate project exploring the activist potentials of Japanese queer popular culture in the Philippines. Hyacinth likewise argued for a rising “Asian solidarity” through fandom for transnational Asian queer media and its potential to positively transform Philippine society.65 My conversations with Thai BL fans in the Philippines revealed shifting fantasies and hopes tied to how Asian media such as Thai BL could lead to broader queer emancipation. As the bisexual female fan from Cebu who I introduced above put it, “Thai series isn’t just fun to watch, like K-pop or [BL] manga, it’s spreading among young people and changing attitudes to LGBTQ people.” Another bisexual female fan I interviewed in 2019 likewise argued that “together with [Japanese BL manga] and K-pop shipping … this huge boom of BL, from Japan, from Thailand, is helping Filipinos realise that it’s okay to love the same gender.” When shouting sana all at a Thai BL fan event, Filipinos were thus implicitly vocalizing their investment into transnational Asian popular culture fandom as a transformative space replete with queer affect that would lead to real and demonstrable change within society. Thai BL operated as a resource which fans in the Philippines deployed to not only make sense of themselves as queer subjects, but also to insist on a more emancipatory future in which queer desires would be realized in their everyday lives. That is, Thai BL was being drawn upon by fans—whether they be heterosexual women or same-sex desiring individuals—to bring queerness to life within a remarkably heteropatriarchal society. Like the Chinese gay men whose fan narratives I presented above, there were naturally Filipino fans who turned to Thai BL and the shipping of its khu jin celebrities as a site to manage experiences of heteronormative pressure or homophobic discrimination. Many also heavily participated in transnational fan networks for khu jin on social media where they met several other fans who shared their belief in the normalcy of queer sexuality and who provided support to Filipinos facing homophobic harassment at home, in school, or in the workplace. That these fan networks primarily connected fans from across East and Southeast Asia (especially Thailand and, after 2020, Japan) rather than the West reinforced many Philippine fans’ beliefs that Thai BL represented the cornerstone of an Asian movement founded in transnational queer

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solidarity. This solidarity was primarily affective but was also strongly political. Fundamentally, Filipino fans of Thai BL were transformed through participating in these transnational fandom spaces from those seeking simple entertainment to those seeking explicit social change. While many initially engaged in Thai BL fandom due to their personal aspirations for queer romance or sexual attraction to khu jin idols, most explained to me that they remained in the fandom because of the strength of the solidarity they built with other same-sex desiring people across Asia who also engaged Thai BL as a resource to combat homophobia at home. The Philippine fans I met during my fieldwork and who I have observed online were, therefore, using Thai BL in a more sophisticated manner than simple aspirational consumption and escapist fantasy. Investing into the idea that the romances appearing within Thai BL were somehow more “real,” “relatable,” or “authentic” for Asian subjects such as themselves and others across the region, Philippine fans like Edwin were utilizing Thai BL as “resources of hope” to combat heteronormativity through the creation of new knowledge grounded in queer affect.66 For these fans, Thai BL became a tool that could be practically utilized in the formation of hopes, dreams, and fantasies, where “hoping” created new epistemological systems based on emancipation, futurity, and utopian feelings which oppressed subjects use to make sense of and combat their abject positioning in the world.67 These fans’ hopes were embedded in a transnational queer-affective landscape centered around Thai BL, but which also included such Asian queer popular culture forms as K-pop idol shipping and Japanese BL manga. All three of these Asian media genres have been utilized by Filipino consumers from both heterosexual and queer communities in recent years to directly intervene in systems of heteropatriarchal oppression in Philippine society, revealing how fandom has quickly emerged as an important activist space for public advocacy concerning the rights of both women and sexual minorities in the contemporary Philippine context.68 As a “resource of hope,” Thai BL therefore provides fandom with more than simple emotional support but instead injects a radical futurity into fans’ everyday lives which can then be drawn upon as a resource in the constant struggle to justify the normalcy of queer sexuality in a heteronormative society.69 As seminal queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz has argued, “queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see beyond the present … it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”70 Sana all thus becomes a rallying cry for positive change and transformative action based on a deconstructive form of hoping grounded in a radical utopian ethos. Ariel, a gay fan of BL who invested in the genre because it combatted the tendency for mainstream Philippine media to present effeminacy as a social threat, particularly believed in the radical deconstructive potentials of Thai BL and was thus representative of many of my other fan interlocutors. During our conversation in 2019, Ariel argued that “as Thai BL fans become bigger, become visible … our media will have to change, they can’t continue to show gay love as wrong, it will look so backward compared to Thailand.” Thinking about the future

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of Thai BL fandom in the Philippines, Ariel continued, stating that “who knows, maybe we will get some Filipino BL and our own media will evolve … sana all, right? (laughs).” Little did Ariel realize that, in 2020, his predictions would indeed come true. The queer hopes expressed by Thai BL fans in the Philippines through the phrase sana all were starting to be realized.

Transforming the Philippine Mediascape: 2gether, The Series and the Pinoy BL Boom During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thai BL fandom reached a fever never before seen within the Philippines that shocked many fans who had become used to the notion that their fandom was a relatively minor player compared to the larger, more publicly recognized fandoms for K-pop or Japanese anime. As a result of the worldwide trending of both the Thai BL series 2gether and its khu jin stars BrightWin, a new generation of Thai popular culture fans emerged in the Philippines as those stuck at home due to the pandemic encountered a radical new genre of media centered on queer romance. The popularity of BrightWin and 2gether was so great, in fact, that soon GMM signed a development deal with the local Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN, who swiftly gained the rights to produce and broadcast a local, “Tagalized” dub of the series on their streaming service iWant.71 BrightWin’s star continued to rise as Thai BL became a wellknown popular culture form among Philippine youth, with local media frequently reporting with a certain level of surprise on how these romantic television series focusing on handsome Thai men falling in love were dominating Philippine social media.72 BL, which has had a long fandom among young Filipinos centered predominantly on the appreciation of Japanese manga,73 quickly became a household term among tech-savvy Philippine consumers. Viewers hooked on 2gether swiftly shifted to other GMM content, taking advantage of their accessibility on streaming services like YouTube where fans had uploaded Tagalog subtitles, with GMM subsequently becoming synonymous with BL among Philippine fans. Importantly, older generations of fans such as the majority of my informants (who had been engaging in the fandom since well before 2020) often took on key roles in bolstering the growing popularity of Thai BL. Forming part of their preexisting projects focused on boosting the careers of their favorite khu jin idols (discussed in the previous chapter), these older fans helped usher in new fans to the world of Thai BL, explaining how the genre functioned and facilitating access to series produced by companies other than GMM. While restrictions on international travel due to the worsening COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for Thai production companies to stage elaborate fan meetings in the Philippines to consolidate these emerging fandoms, many companies engaged fan-run collectives such as Raikantopeni Philippines or Thai Entertainment Portal to host virtual meet-andgreets with khu jin stars targeted specifically at Filipino fans. Further, as part of their marketing for their own Tagalized dubs of Thai BL series, ABS-CBN also

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hosted interviews with popular Thai BL stars such as BrightWin in 2020 and EarthMix in 2021 that similarly provided fans a space to interact with their BL idols. Finally, the prominence of Thai BL in the Philippine media landscape was cemented with the late 2021 selection of BrightWin as image characters for the most recent advertising campaign for Globe Telecom, the Philippines’s largest telephone company. Naturally, Globe Telecom’s campaign also included a virtual fan meeting with BrightWin. The rapid increase in Thai BL fandom among Filipinos which occurred after the broadcast of 2gether in 2020 is significant since it signaled shifts in the kinds of queer representations offered to the Philippine public via mainstream media. Cultural theorist Reuben Ramas Cañete, through his pathbreaking analyses of Philippine film, television, and advertising culture, argues that the figure of the effeminate same-sex desiring male or bakla has traditionally been juxtaposed in Philippine media with macho, hegemonically masculine men so as to situate the latter as natural and heroic.74 Simply put, affirmative depictions of same-sex desiring men have been lacking in Philippine media, where queer romance instead often operates as a dangerous force of social corruption.75 The mainstreaming of Thai BL fandom and the younger generation’s vocal celebration of its highly positive queer romantic narratives represent an explicit challenge to such local representational strategies, demonstrating that queer sexuality provides a more expansive, alternate vision of heroic masculinity. Importantly, not only did the rise of Thai BL fandom represent a queering of the regimes of representation surrounding same-sex desiring men specifically and queer sexuality more broadly, it also revealed to the Philippine media industry that affirmative representations of queerness were very profitable. Just as had occurred in Thailand previously, media producers in the Philippines came to understand that queer romance was more than a niche genre of interest to a select audience of sexual minority consumers, but that such stories could also be sold to the mainstream viewing public. As a result of this realization, the Philippines soon witnessed a boom in local “Pinoy BL” series in the second half of 2020. To explore the relationship of Thai BL to the emergence of local BL series production in the Philippines, I will briefly discuss two Pinoy BL series released in 2020 which are not only particularly indebted to Thai BL but that have also amassed significant fanbases of their own. These two series are Gameboys, a web series produced by The IdeaFirst Company which tells the story of two online gamers who fall in love, and Gaya Sa Pelikula (Like in the Movies), a web series produced by Globe Studios that focusses on the emerging romance between two antagonistic neighbors. Both series were first broadcast on YouTube and garnered attention among both Philippine and international consumers who were hungering for more BL content due to their having first encountered the genre after discovering it through 2gether, The Series. Narratively and cinematographically speaking, Gameboys deviates significantly from the norms which have emerged around Thai BL, owing in part to its production being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision by the production crew to deploy an innovative framing of the story via the kinds

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of digital communicative media that had emerged as central to COVID-19-era communications.76 Instead, the narrative of Gameboys owes more to the teleserye soap operas of the Philippines as well as Philippine “indie” queer cinema.77 But in producing a queer romance within the context of COVID-19, Gameboys’ production team explicitly positioned the series as a response to Thai BL’s popularity among Philippine consumers. The series’ producer, June Robles Lana, noted that “2gether came at the right time and caught the public’s attention. It was such a big hit that local producers [such as myself] saw it as an opportunity to experiment and come up with [our] own local version, and hopefully stir the same excitement as 2gether.”78 Ash M. Malanum, Gameboys’ chief writer, likewise stated “I wanted to write a BL story … I am an avid viewer of BL series. I am delighted it has become a norm, especially in Thailand” to justify his involvement in the project.79 Finally, the director Ivan Andrew Payawal explained that he was explicitly inspired by 2gether in his directing of the series, but interestingly also noted that “Mario Maurer’s movie, Love of Siam, really inspired me.”80 Payawal thus connected Gameboys to the pre-history of Thai BL introduced in Chapter 1. While the story’s narrative of online gamers connecting during COVID-19 and supporting each other through various struggles brought on by lockdown (including the death of one of the boy’s fathers from COVID-19) deviates from BL norms”, the characterization of the principal characters broadly aligns with the seme–uke rule. Notably, however, in reflecting on their characterization and their direction of the two lead actors, Gameboys’ production team explain their use of the seme–uke rule as a response to Thai BL rather than Japanese BL manga.81 The unfolding romantic narrative of Gameboys thus drew upon tropes that Philippine consumers understood as BL from their exposure to 2gether. Gameboys was therefore an explicit response to Thai BL that sought to domesticate the representational politics and themes of this transnational Asian queer popular culture form to the contemporary Philippine context, recognizing that one of the principal reasons for the explosion of interest in Thai BL among local consumers was their desire to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Malanum put it, “I really thought about whether I should relate the story to the pandemic … I was afraid that viewers might not like it, since BLs are usually light and easy to watch. But I realized the importance of confronting the current situation … it eventually became the edge of Gameboys—it helped people confront reality without being too pessimistic.”82 The affective affordances provided to Filipino consumers by the Thai Wind thus facilitated the exploration of COVID-19 through a queer romantic lens in Gameboys, a clear indication of how the mainstreaming of Thai BL impacted the production of this landmark Pinoy BL series. Gaya Sa Pelikula, on the other hand, was promoted to Philippine consumers as an explicit domestication of Thai BL; indeed the cinematography and narrative content of this Pinoy BL series owe much to Thai series popular among Philippine consumers. Originating as a fanfiction focusing on GMM’s various Thai BL series— the director and author of Gaya Sa Pelikula were such committed Polcas that they thanked TayNew at the end of every episode—Gaya Sa Pelikula focusses on the romantic adventures of an architecture student, just like 2gether. While not fully

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representing a campus drama like many seminal Thai BL series such as SOTUS, Dark Blue Kiss, and Theory of Love, Gaya Sa Pelikula deliberately characterized its leads as similar to the leads of Thai BL, once again adapting the seme–uke rule as expressed through Thai BL culture rather than Japan. Importantly, many of the cinematographic techniques adopted to represent male–male love within Gaya Sa Pelikula mimic the formula for producing a “sao wai gaze” that I introduced in Chapter 2 as central to Thai BL series. The queer affective cinematography of Gaya Sa Pelikula thus educated Philippine viewers about how to consume BL texts, just as Lovesick had previously done within the Thai context. In this way, Gaya Sa Pelikula differed to Gameboys, which adopted innovative cinematographic techniques completely divorced from Thai BL series precedents. Finally, many of Gaya Sa Pelikula’s episodes explicitly evoked the formal narrative structures and pacing of previous Thai BL series—most notably Dark Blue Kiss—owing to the series’ origins as a fanfiction about GMM celebrities and the production team’s identification as Thai BL fans who utilized Gaya Sa Pelikula as a site to celebrate their own fandom. In Figure 11, for instance, a climactic romantic scene from episode five of Gaya Sa Pelikula mimics a similarly climactic scene from episode seven of Dark Blue Kiss starring TayNew. Rather than representing an instance of plagiarism (as was occasionally remarked in social media commentary on Gaya Sa Pelikula), however, this homage to a highly popular Thai BL series demonstrates just how essential the transnational spread of Thai media and its fandom had been to Pinoy BL production and the development of queer media literacy among mainstream Philippine viewers. In many ways, Gaya Sa Pelikula sought to trigger nostalgia for Thai BL series, transforming Philippine fans of the latter into dedicated fans of the newly emergent genre of Pinoy BL. The fact that the stars of both Gameboys and Gaya Sa Pelikula quickly became popular imagined couples with dedicated transnational fanbases on social media suggests that Pinoy BL series fandom is following the precedents presented by Thai BL celebrity and fan culture. One wonders if theorists of inter-Asian referencing will soon need to begin discussing a Philippine wave. For the most part, Thai BL’s transnational fandom has emerged serendipitously and has had little to do with consumers’ previous interest in Thai culture as Jirattikorn has argued in her own work on the Thai Wind. Instead, this transnational fandom emerges solely because of consumers’ desires for affirmative depictions of queer romantic content. After stumbling upon Thai BL series and their khu jin stars, I have argued throughout this chapter that fans like those in China and the Philippines engage in a fundamentally aspirational mode of consumption. For both Chinese and Philippine fans, Thai BL operates as a “resource of hope” to not only make sense of their positioning in the world but to also imagine a world free from heteronormative control where the queer romance such as that depicted in Thai BL series can be effectively realized in everyday life. Importantly, my ethnography uncovered that there was a considerable belief in Thai BL’s status as an explicitly Asian resource for queer emancipation, revealing how the transnational Thai Wind is increasingly driven by queer affective entanglements that nuance and extend previous scholarly theories of inter-Asian referencing

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Figure 11  Pinoy BL series Gaya Sa Pelikula’s homage to Thai BL series Dark Blue Kiss (2019). Picture credits to Globe Studios and GMM.

and transnational fandom situated in the “cultural thesis” proposed by IACS. The Thai Wind, I further suggest, is not only queer due to its transformative impacts on fans, but also because it has directly led to more affirming representations of queer sexuality to emerge throughout spaces such as the Philippines. Fans I have encountered during fieldwork have repeatedly suggested that Thailand has become an important new center for the production of Asian queer popular culture. It is to this idea that I turn in the following chapter’s exploration of the emerging Japanese fandom for Thai BL, further teasing out the queer affective impacts of the transnational spread of Thai popular culture across East and Southeast Asia. In so doing, I summarize this book’s main interventions and outline a new approach to studying BL that moves beyond the previous literature’s focus on Japan as the center for BL production.

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Chapter 6 J A PA N ’ S T HA I B L B O OM : A N EW C E N T E R F O R T R A N SNAT IO NA L A SIA N Q U E E R P O P U L A R C U LT U R E

The center pages of the December 20, 2021, issue of AERA—one of Japan’s most prestigious weekly human interest magazines, published by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper—presented the mainstream Japanese reading public with a startling gravure centerfold. Rather than the ubiquitous photo spreads of male idols from Johnny and Associates that traditionally dominate Japanese magazines, this issue of AERA contained glossy, color photos of 2gether’s BrightWin locked in a series of passionate embraces. The issue’s alternative back cover also sported the two handsome Thai celebrities standing together, smiling directly into the camera as if enticing Japanese readers to enter the exotic transnational world of Thai popular culture. Incidentally, this gravure feature served as a broader advertisement for the Japanese release of GMM’s 2gether: The Movie, which GMM was promoting along with their new Japanese partner, TV Asahi (part of the media conglomerate that also owns AERA). Accompanying the explicitly homoerotic photo spread of BrightWin was a feature article entitled “Completely Immersed in the Beautiful Thai Swamp: BL Series Are Super Popular” (Utsushiki Tai-numa ni doppuri: BL dorama ga daininki). The opening paragraphs of the feature introduce mainstream Japanese readers to Thai BL series, celebrity, and fandom through the eyes of a dedicated Japanese female fan. The Korean Wave is not the only source for popular Asian television series [in Japan]. Right now, Thai series are extremely hot. The number of fans of these series’ fascinating stories and beautiful actors continues to grow. It was a sudden realization. “Thai actors could really be this handsome!” Miss Rain, who works as a “BL series navigator” at a Thai language school, unexpectedly encountered a Japanese subtitled version of the Thai Boys Love (BL) series 2Moons created by fans in the spring of 2018. At the time, when it came to the Thai celebrities that she could say she knew, there were only a handful of muay thai boxers. Then, she watched all 12 episodes [of 2Moons] in one sitting. Miss Rain is a resident of the “Thai Swamp” (Tai-numa) who avidly watches almost 30 Thai BL series each and every month. Having visited Thailand twice, nowadays she explains that “in this moment when there are so many series, I watch three a day for about five-to-six hours and there is no shortage

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of information [about Thai BL] on Twitter or Instagram.” This is how hot Thai series have become [in Japan]!1

It was not at all surprising for me to see this feature article in a major national magazine introducing just how passionate consumers of Thai series were in Japan, since I had been routinely interacting with Japanese fans such as Miss Rain myself during my many years of engaging with the transnational spaces central to Thai BL media fandom. For instance, there were a handful of Japanese fans in attendance at the 6 Moons in Manila fan meeting introduced in the previous chapter who remarked to me that they had travelled to the event to see the three khu jin of 2Moons2 because the Philippines was closer to Japan than Thailand. Likewise, each of GMM’s four Global Live Fan Meetings in 2020 prominently featured “lucky fans” from Japan, with KristSingto and TayNew also notably trying to speak in Japanese when interacting with them. In fact, when GMM launched a virtual live fan event featuring KristSingto and many of their other popular stars entitled SOTUS The Reunion 4Evermore to celebrate this seminal BL series’ fourth anniversary August 2020, they included a Japanese interpreter named P’Hymn to engage the many Japanese fans who attended. Japanese fans have become an increasingly prominent segment of the audience within GMM’s virtual fan meetings. Along with P’Godji and P’Wave, P’Hymn returned in 2021 as a Japanese interpreter at fan events such as EarthMix Love at 1st Live and Fish Upon the Sky Live Fanmeeting, starring GMM’s new khu jin EarthMix and PondPhuwin, respectively. From 2019 onwards, the world of Thai BL saw an explosion of interest from Japanese consumers,2 with companies such as GMM in turn recognizing them as important to the overall fandom for their khu jin stars. The growth of Japanese fandom for Thai BL should not, however, be viewed as an inevitability. Despite my own lack of surprise at its emergence, many Japanese commentators viewed the new “Thai BL boom” (Tai BL būmu) as an unprecedented phenomenon. Through the many conversations I have had with Japanese academic colleagues who specialize in Japan’s own domestic BL manga culture, there was a palpable sense of confusion that consumers in “the society with the most advanced BL culture at the time” would be turning to a relatively “minor player like Thailand.”3 Although Japan had previously experienced a nostalgic boom for East Asian popular culture in the 1990s (especially Hong Kong film and Cantopop music),4 many Japanese commentators were particularly shocked to learn that Japanese consumers were engaging with a society that they stereotyped as somehow backward due to its location in Southeast Asia.5 After all, during the height of the “Japan Wave” of the 1990s when Southeast Asia was eagerly consuming all things Japanese, Japan was the privileged center to which local consumers aspired through their consistent imitation via consumption.6 Within the axiomatic narrative of transnational media consumption in the Japan-Southeast Asia context, culture flowed outward from Japan into Southeast Asia rather than the other way around.7 As Japan has a long history of producing BL manga, anime, and other related media texts, many commentators were also surprised that there would be a need for Japanese consumers to look outside of Japan’s own domestic market for homoerotic content,8 thus replicating common stereotypes of the Japanese media

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landscape as fundamentally inward looking and insular.9 Other commentators such as investigative journalist Mori Mayumi and AERA’s feature writer Sakaguchi Sayuri, on the other hand, argued that it was only natural that Japanese BL fans would warm to Thai series now that they were easily accessible online since there already existed a fertile Japanese fandom for homoerotic media.10 In a ranking of ten of the hottest Thai BL series published in the Asahi Shimbun on which I collaborated with Mori, we both noted that a Japanese BL parody series released in 2018 named Ossan’s Love that had developed a large following among Japanese fujoshi revealed how Japanese consumers were primed for live action BL series.11 In fact, this collaborative article sought to introduce Thailand’s newly emergent BL media culture to Japanese audiences (and BL manga fans in particular), but at the time both Mori and I viewed the phenomenon as both novel and niche.12 We had no idea that as little as six months after our article was published online in December 2019 that Japan would be in the grips of a veritable Thai BL fever. Within this chapter, I turn my attention to the growing fandom for Thai BL among Japanese consumers to develop my argument that Thailand has emerged as a new center for queer popular culture in Asia. As noted in the Introduction, previous scholarship on the production and circulation of queer sexual knowledge across East and Southeast Asia has tended to center transnational Japanese media as the source of much of the newly emergent local popular culture forms in the region which challenge heteropatriarchy and homophobia. Much of this work, including my own previous contributions, tends to implicitly draw upon the theories of “inter-Asian referencing” developed by the seminal scholar of transnational Japanese media Koichi Iwabuchi.13 Yet, as I engaged with Japanese Thai BL fans from mid-2020 onwards as part of my ethnographic practices, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with an analytical framework such as Iwabuchi’s that explicitly “recenters” Japan within its theorization because Japanese fans of Thai BL still somehow sit outside Thai BL fandom culture’s “core.” In this chapter, I therefore deploy my explorative ethnographic study of Japanese fandom—conducted virtually from late 2020 to early 202114—to explicate the radical role of Thai BL as a transnational queer popular culture form that ultimately dislocates BL from Japan. From considering how and why fandom for Thai BL exploded in Japan in 2020, to profiling how Thai BL has become imbricated in Japanese consumer culture and exploring how the Thai state is deploying khu jin celebrities in its new soft power campaigns, this chapter provides an introductory glimpse of Thai BL’s newest transnational frontier.

Wading into the Tai-numa: Japanese Fans of Thai BL during the COVID-19 Pandemic The metaphor of complete immersion in a swamp (numa ni doppuri) may seem a somewhat confronting or hostile description of the passionate world of fandom, but many young Japanese consumers active on social media commonly utilize the trope of the numa to articulate the strong affective entanglements central to fan experience. Indeed, the “Thai swamp” was often described by my Japanese

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interlocutors as a “wonderful” (subarashii) place, hence why the AERA feature from December 2021 also consistently described it as “beautiful” (utsukushiki). The swamp metaphor fans utilize to describe their first encounters with Thai media focuses specifically on the unexpected nature of their discovery of the fandom space, with the image of wading into a swamp thus evoking a sense of anthropological exploration as well as a heightened sense of adventure. One Japanese female fan of TayNew explained to me over Twitter DM that “a swamp is something that you fall into without noticing it … a new wilderness where you become fully entrapped … and then you sink to the bottom, overwhelmed by pleasure. This is how I feel when I watch [Thai BL] or when I chat with friends [in the fandom].” This fan’s description of falling into the Tai-numa also perfectly conveys the key feelings of attraction and fascination that motivate Japanese fans to visibly engage with and celebrate Thai BL celebrities and series together on social media. In many ways, the discourse of the numa thus functions like the metaphors of magnetism that are commonly used in English-language fan discourses to narrate celebrities’ overwhelming power to attract and fascinate legions of fans.15 While the AERA article introduced above emphasizes the exceptionality of the passionate consumption in which “residents of the Tai-numa” engage from the perspective of mainstream society, I note that fans from other prominent numa such as aidoru-numa (Japanese idol fandom) or kanryū-numa (Korean Wave fandom) also participate in similarly conspicuous forms of hyper-consumption. As an online slang term for celebrity fandom, numa thus refers not only to spaces from which fans cannot escape due to the intensity of their affective attachments to celebrities, but also to the “media tribes” that have emerged through these affective entanglements to produce consolidated sub cultural groups based on consumer practices.16 Importantly, numa such as the Tai-numa always involves conspicuous performances of fandom across social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and thus represents a Japanese version of the “digital tribes” central to transnational K-pop fandom.17 This is unsurprising given the fact that the slang term itself first emerged among Japanese fans of Korean male idol groups. Most of the women and men I encountered during my virtual ethnography of Japanese fandom for Thai BL primarily identified as either “residents” (jūnin) or “citizens” (jūmin) of the Tai-numa. By describing their participation within Thai BL fandom through metaphors of residence, Japanese fans highlighted how the numa ultimately represented a space within which they were not only happy to participate, but with which they possessed a fundamental sense of connection that many explained to me was akin to the connection they felt to their own homes. While they may have stumbled on Thai BL serendipitously and become unexpectedly entangled, these fans thus consciously chose to remain due to the intensity of their affective attachment to the Tai-numa and this in turn led them to “build houses [there],” as one male fan put it. Further, many of my Japanese fan interlocutors suggested in late 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic’s Delta wave that the Tai-numa had gradually come to represent their ibasho. Ibasho is a Japanese-language term which refers to a space of comfort and support that acts as a proxy home, particularly for those living on the precarious margins of

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society.18 “After many years of searching,” one young woman stated, “I stumbled upon KristSingto and SOTUS. Suddenly I had found the place where I belonged [ibasho] … from then on, I have chosen to live in the Tai-numa happily together with other Peraya.” This young woman’s narrative of becoming a member of the unofficial Peraya fan club for KristSingto importantly reveals how the Tai-numa also represents a collective space. This fan explained that she frequently looked to other Peraya for support whenever she was “down and out due to too much work at home and in the office” or when she was having trouble with her young son. Throughout our many conversations, Japanese fans have consistently explained that the Tai-numa is ultimately based on “empathy” (kyōkan) and “collaboration” (kyōdō). Although the fans I encountered in 2020 and 2021 enthusiastically identified as residents or citizens of the Tai-numa, it should be noted that this Japaneselanguage term for Thai BL fan culture is relatively recent when considered from the vantage point of the fandom’s broader history. Prior to 2020, large collectives of Japanese fans for Thai BL were relatively rare, with my ethnography identifying that most fans in Japan tended to instead identify primarily as fans of actor couples (such as KristSingto) or specific series (such as SOTUS) rather than fans of Thai media itself. SOTUS fandom was an especially prominent case in point, since this BL series was one of the first to receive official Japanese-language subtitles from GMM in the middle of 2019 and had thus become mildly popular through word of mouth among those who had no previous other connection to Thai media. The fractured and somewhat dislocated nature of Thai BL fandom in Japan completely changed, however, in mid-2020. As had occurred in the Philippines at the same time, many Japanese consumers stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic— most of whom had not previously interacted with Thai media in any meaningful way—discovered 2gether and BrightWin.19 As 2gether began to trend on Japanese Twitter and Japanese consumers voraciously consumed the BL series uploaded to GMM’s YouTube channel, Thai BL fandom in Japan exponentially grew to eventually peak at the end of 2020.20 It was during this “Thai BL boom” when the term Tai-numa first emerged as an in-group marker for this new media tribe due to savvy Japanese social media users drawing upon slang terminology from K-pop fandom to describe their new, all-consuming passion for Thai BL series.21 Like other fan communities in Thailand, Mainland China, and the Philippines, the overwhelming majority of participants in the Japanese fandom for Thai BL are heterosexual women, most often in their twenties or early thirties.22 All of the Japanese fans of Thai BL I met during traditional fieldwork at fan events prior to the Thai BL boom were women, although I had encountered a small number of men online. Observing Japanese female fans’ discourses on social media, it became apparent that they not only identified as “residents” of the Tai-numa, but that by the beginning of 2021 many of them had also started to call themselves “Y gāru” or “Y girls.” The adoption of this identity label is particularly interesting, as it represents a Japanese rendering of the Thai-language term sao wai, which is itself based on the Japanese-language term yaoi. Many Japanese female fans of Thai BL active on Twitter were seeking to explicitly acknowledge their solidarity

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and identification with fellow female fans of BL series and khu jin stars living in Thailand, thus signaling the fundamentally transnational nature of the fandom for Thai BL that is effaced by the dominant Japanese-language term Tai-numa. Notably, when interviewing fans who identified as Y gāru about why they had chosen this term to label themselves, many women explained to me that calling oneself a Y gāru was also a strategic way to separate oneself from Japan’s local fujoshi fan culture.23 “Fujoshi are fans of BL manga but we are fans of Thai BL series,” one Y gāru explained in a representative comment, “we have come from a completely different background … many of us prefer the 3D world of idols, not the 2D world of manga.” These Japanese fans were thus consciously decoupling their Thai BL fandom from Japanese precedents. The common focus on a preference for the so-called 3D world of idols over the 2D world of manga among many of my Japanese fan interlocutors is also significant. The majority of Thai BL fans I have observed on social media and interviewed as part of my virtual ethnographic practice did not appear to participate in Japan’s domestic BL manga culture. Of those that did, quite a number of the women and men I interviewed explained that their interest in Japanese BL manga only emerged after they had begun regularly consuming Thai BL series. That means that for some participants in the Tai-numa, Thai BL series provided an introduction to Japan’s own BL manga culture rather than vice versa. Most surprisingly, three women who I interviewed via Twitter DM expressed that they had no awareness of Japan’s own tradition of BL media until after having discovered Thai BL series, with one noting how her fandom for Thai BL had thus “opened [her] eyes to the history of our own BL culture.” Transnational Thai BL’s role as a gateway for some Japanese fans to discover Japanese BL manga indicates an inversion of the historical narrative of adaption that I recounted in Chapter 1 where Thai consumers’ previous interest in Japanese BL manga played a crucial role in the development of Thai BL novels and series. For many of the Japanese fans of Thai BL that I interviewed, Thailand operated as the originator of BL media and its fandom culture, a phenomenon I analyze more thoroughly in a later section. Whereas Mori and I had posited during our discussions in late 2019 that fans of BL manga would likely be receptive to Thai BL media and its celebrity culture,24 my ethnographic investigations in 2020 and 2021 pointed to a different fan community as the basis for the Tai-numa. Rather than Japanese fujoshi, it was instead Japanese fans of the Korean Wave—particularly male idols and Korean dramas—who have come to dominate the Tai-numa. Indeed, Miss Rain from the AERA feature is typical in that she is one of many Japanese women who came to enter the Tainuma after several years as a dedicated K-pop fan.25 Many of those participating in the Tai-numa, I learned through my interviews, had developed an attraction to the aesthetics of Korean male idols in preference to Japanese idols due to their intense consumption of K-pop media. They were thus primed to appreciate the “Korpanese” aesthetics of Thai BL idol celebrities. This also speaks to why many of the Y gāru I interviewed expressed an interest in the so-called 3D world rather than the 2D world of manga comics, since their previous practices as K-pop fans

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had been tied to flesh-and-blood idol celebrities rather than the fictive characters appearing in BL manga. Furthermore, my interviews with female fans of Thai BL in Japan also revealed that the majority of them had practiced idol shipping as K-pop fans and, just like young women in Thailand, they were thus attracted to Thai BL media and its attendant khu jin celebrity culture due to their desire to ship handsome male actors together and enjoy performances of staged homoeroticism. Several fans described instances of staged homoeroticism between Thai khu jin—which Japanese fans referred to as kappuru (couples) using language commonly deployed in K-pop fandom spaces in Japan26—as replete with moe and their shipping practices mirrored those I had observed among the Thai fans that I introduced in Chapter 4. Conversations between Thai BL fans in Japan online, which I encountered during virtual ethnographic fieldwork, also consistently drew upon the terms seme and uke to describe the relationships between khu jin idols. My own conversations with a number of my fan interlocutors revealed that fans’ use of the seme–uke paradigm had little to do with their previous engagement with Japanese BL manga fan culture. Rather, their use of the terms seme and uke related to these terms’ common deployment by Japanese K-pop idol shippers.27 Japanese fans also commonly deployed the idol fan concept of “oshi”—or what in Anglophone fandom is termed a “bias”—to discuss their favorite Thai celebrities, with the most popular oshi among those I observed online being Bright or Win since many had entered the Tai-numa in 2020 after discovering 2gether. Japanese fans of Thai BL thus articulated their attraction to staged homoeroticism and the queer practices of idol shipping through the vocabulary of K-pop fandom, another instance of the Tai-numa’s separation from Japanese BL manga culture. I also encountered a handful of male residents of the Tai-numa while conducting my virtual ethnography and, unsurprisingly, all of them identified as either gay or bisexual. Forming a significant minority within the Japanese fandom for Thai BL, many of these gay and bisexual men had likewise come to watch Thai BL series and follow khu jin celebrities due to their previous engagement with the Korean Wave. According to one of these gay men, “I am a fan [of Thai BL] because unlike Japanese media which lacks positive depictions of gay romance, Thailand has live action gay romance … we [in Japan] just have porn comics from gay magazines, or the BL manga written for girls … I don’t like them at all.” Contrasting his enjoyment of Thai BL with his aversion to manga, this fan further explained that “I became a fan of Thai BL series because the romance felt real to me. It’s not like the stuff the girls make in manga, that’s not real, it’s fake.” He continued when I asked him to elaborate, arguing that “BL live action series from Thailand feel more real, the romance is more real … you won’t ever see men kiss like that on Japanese TV except in a girl’s anime.” While certainly not as common a narrative in the Japanese context as my ethnography had revealed it to be in the Philippines, some Japanese gay consumers were thus attracted to Thai BL series due to their belief that it presented a more authentic expression of queer romance. That they contrasted this expression with Japanese BL manga is unsurprising given a historical context where several gay activists in Japan have labeled BL manga as inauthentic due to

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its emergence from young women’s consumer culture.28 Once again, underlying these gay fans’ narratives was an attempt to distance Thai BL from Japanese media, revealing another instance where participants of the Tai-numa made sense of their fandom through decoupling their engagement with Thai BL series from Japanese BL manga. While Japanese men and women have come to the Tai-numa from a variety of prior contexts with differing motivations, they have ultimately emerged as a significant new consumer tribe within Japan. Importantly, both the Thai and Japanese content industries have not ignored the emergence of Thai BL fandom in Japan. GMM in particular moved quickly to consolidate its prominence among Japanese consumers by signing a strategic partnership with TV Asahi.29 This partnership aimed at not only facilitating broadcast rights for GMM’s series in Japan, but also aimed to enable the collaborative production of Thai BL series explicitly designed for both broadcast in Thailand and export to Japan.30 Kadokawa, one of Japan’s largest publishing companies, has also likewise launched a dedicated publishing subsidiary headquartered in Bangkok that focuses on translating Thai BL novels into Japanese for release in the Japanese market. Perhaps most interestingly, the “Kado Thai BL” label has also invested into the production and circulation of manga versions of the hit Thai BL novels SOTUS and 2gether in an attempt to draw Japanese fujoshi fans of BL manga into the Tainuma. Notably, these manga have not been translated back into Thai at the time of writing. 2020 also saw the launch of two quarterly magazines focused on Thai BL series and celebrities entitled Be a Light and Thai Magazine D that typically include photospreads and interviews exclusively produced for Japanese audiences. The emergence of these magazines coincided with the release of Japan-exclusive photobooks for key series such as 2gether.31 In licensing photobooks and engaging with Japanese publishers, Thai production companies are thus once more following in the footsteps of K-pop production companies who similarly release fan goods exclusive for the Japanese market as part of a broader strategy of mainstreaming K-pop within young Japanese women’s consumer culture.32 As the above explorative introduction to the Tai-numa makes clear, the Japanese fandom for Thai BL series represents a distinct media tribe which both fans and production companies alike view as completely separate from the fujoshi subculture centered on the consumption of Japanese BL manga. Even those fans I interviewed who had come to Thai BL media after having previously been a participant in BL manga fandom tended to emphasize the differences between the two fandom cultures rather than their similarities. “Thai BL is completely different from BL manga,” one young woman who enjoyed both Thai BL series and Japanese BL manga explained over Twitter DM, “[because] fujoshi have an interest in 2D beautiful boys and Thai BL fans yearn for 3D beautiful boys.” Acknowledging that both fujoshi and residents of the Tai-numa were attracted to “beautiful boys” (bishōnen), this woman drew on her own experience as a passionate TayNew fan to argue that “the [feeling of] moe triggered [by Thai BL] is really different [from Japanese BL manga] even if we still just call it moe.” “After all,” she concluded, “a manga character isn’t a real man, but I can actually imagine dating a Thai actor

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because they are 3D like me.” Drawing upon common narratives in Japan that sharply separate manga and anime consumption from other forms of media engagement,33 residents of the Tai-numa ultimately insisted that Thai BL fandom was separate from Japanese BL fandom because of its focus on idol celebrities and khu jin couples. Although affective engagement with queer romance was thus important to both Thai BL series and Japanese BL manga fan communities, for residents of the Tai-numa it was the fandom’s focus on performance of this queer romance by flesh-and-blood actors that qualitatively distinguished them from other Japanese consumer cultures. As such, they also understood the affects produced through their fandom practices as fundamentally different to the queer affects circulating throughout Japanese BL manga fandom, even though both affects tended to be termed moe within fans’ discourses. Like other numa, then, Japan’s Tai-numa is first and foremost a form of celebrity fandom built upon parasocial relationships between idols and their fans. My Japanese interlocutors consistently emphasized that Thai BL fandom thus had more in common with K-pop idol fandom than Japanese BL manga fandom. For this reason, the queer idol celebrities tied to Thai BL media have become especially important in the Japanese consumer context, entering into competition with Japan’s own idols and the handsome male idols from K-pop groups. Through their affective engagement with Thai idols, Japanese fans of Thai BL series and their khu jin stars are involved in an ongoing process of positioning Thailand as an important new center for the production of Asian queer popular culture. Before considering this process in more focused theoretical depth, however, I must first comment on how the transformation of Thai BL celebrities into significant soft power resources in the Japanese context also plays a role in conceptually shifting the center of BL production from Japan to Thailand.

Thai BL as Soft Power: Cultural Diplomacy through Ambiguously Queer Idols Joseph Nye Jr.’s notion of soft power has become so axiomatic within studies of the transnational circulation of popular culture throughout East and Southeast Asia that it hardly needs an extended introduction here. Simply put, soft power refers to a nation-state’s ability to attract consumers to its popular culture and transform this attraction into a broader desire to both emulate and participate in the nation-state’s emblematic consumer lifestyles.34 Nye suggests that within the post-Cold War world, the effective mobilization of soft power instead of the traditional “hard power” of military interventions and economic domination would be key for nation-states to achieve their foreign policy goals.35 In the early 1990s, Nye posited that the United States and Japan were best placed to commence this international public relations exercise due to the sophisticated transnational consumer markets that had evolved around their popular culture.36 Within an incredibly influential article within Foreign Policy published in 2002, Douglas

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McGray drew upon Nye’s conceptualization of soft power to famously argue that Japan was dominating the world with its “Gross National Cool,” positioning Japan as a leader in soft power development.37 This is a position that popular writer Matt Alt has also resuscitated in his 2020 book Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World where he outlines how both Japanese goods and popular media that he terms “fantasy-delivery devices” interacted with US media production to form the backbone of the twentieth century’s global consumer culture.38 Joseph Nye, however, ultimately revised his predictions concerning the centrality of Japan to East Asia’s soft power landscape to instead suggest that the globalization of K-pop had led South Korea to dominate the world with its soft power.39 Importantly, within all previous studies of soft power with which I am familiar, Thailand has always been conceived as falling under the sway of other nation-states’ soft power initiatives. Thailand has rarely been considered to possess soft power of its own except, perhaps, via its role as a Southeast Asian tourism hub. One of the reasons for the neglect of Thailand in previous scholarship is that Nye’s theorization of soft power implicitly evokes the World-Systems Theory of Immanuel Wallerstein when considering whether a nation-state’s consumer goods or popular media can act as soft power resources within international contexts.40 As should be evident, the two nation-states which Nye originally identified as well-placed to mobilize soft power—the United States and Japan—are both located within what Wallerstein terms the “Core” of the World System. That is, as nationstates who dominate the World-System economically through multinational capital and militarily through strategic security alliances (specifically the stationing of US troops throughout the Japanese archipelago), the United States and Japan have shaped global experiences of the Cold War, particularly in Asia. Both the United States and Japan were thus able to exert affective control over “fantasy-production” throughout the world due to their already privileged position within the WorldSystem, derived in part from their preexisting hard power resources and extensive mutual cooperation.41 “Peripheral” nations within the World-System who fell under the sway of the Core due to their economic dependence upon it thus represent the sites where soft power is deployed rather than produced. Thailand, as a semi-peripheral state and regional power in Southeast Asia heavily exposed to US and Japanese foreign direct investment thus represents an axiomatic example of how the Core dominates “fantasy-production” within peripheral nation-states through their soft power initiatives.42 Indeed, the history of Thai BL recounted in Chapter 1 reveals how this genre first emerged due to influence from Japanese media. Considering this history, one may be tempted to solely theorize Thai BL as a product of Japanese (and perhaps South Korean) soft power since, on the surface, Thai BL appears to simply represent what Iwabuchi would term the “glocalization” of Japanese BL manga.43 The rise of Thai BL fandom in Japan, however, suggests that such a theoretical explication of Thai BL’s transnational provenance neglects how khu jin celebrities— especially GMM’s Four Royal Couples—have emerged as soft power resources for

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the Thai state, at least within the Japanese context. The increasingly prominent fandom for Thai BL celebrities in Japan has recently come to the attention of not only Thai and Japanese media production companies but also the Thai government. While conducting virtual ethnography on Twitter in October 2020, I noticed several hundred excited tweets from participants of the Tai-numa promoting a new account with the handle @ThaiBLLovers. Entitled Tai BL ni Koi Shitai (I Want to Love Thai BL), I initially assumed that this new account was just another Japanese fan-run project designed to share information about Thai BL series to members of the Tai-numa similar to the many other such accounts I had seen emerge during the latter half of 2020. Clicking the link to visit this new Twitter page to see what all the fuss was about, I landed on a Twitter account with a remarkably professional header image profiling popular series such as SOTUS, Love By Chance, and 2gether (see Figure 12). This collection of Thai BL series promotional posters—all series which had dedicated followings among members of the Tai-numa—was coupled with a catchy headline stating “Our beating hearts can’t stop. Let’s completely fall in love with Thai BL series!” (Mune kyun ga tomaranai. Tai BL dorama ni koi

Figure 12  Header and profile biography for the Tai BL ni Koi Shitai Twitter account.

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shichaō). But it was the Twitter profile’s biography that caused both Japanese fans and I to become extremely excited (and led me to follow the account immediately): This is a specialized account about Thai BL series run by the official public Twitter account of the Tourism Authority of the Government of Thailand [This first line is highlighted in Figure 12]. We will be sharing information pertaining to Thai BL series. Please send all inquiries to the below address: [email protected].

The Tai BL ni Koi Shitai account which I serendipitously discovered by following the retweets of the Japanese fans I was observing online represented the Thai government’s very first public acknowledgment of not only the transnational fandom for Thai BL series, but even of the Thai BL media industry itself. I must admit that both myself and several of my Thai aca-fan colleagues working on the Thai BL media industry, such as Poowin Bunyavejchewin and Kwannie Krairit, were extraordinarily shocked to see this public acknowledgment.44 We had all previously predicted that the Thai government would always turn a blind eye to the development of transnational Thai BL fandom even if international fans themselves developed strong attractions to Thailand through their consumption of this queer media genre. As I will reveal, however, the use of Thai BL celebrities as soft power resources is ambiguously queer at best, at least from the perspective of production. That said, Japanese fans’ embrace of these soft power campaigns as sites to satisfy fan affects based on the enjoyment of queer romance demonstrates how Thailand continues to represent a new center for queer media production in Asia. Since the Twitter account’s founding in October 2020, TAT have consistently deployed Tai BL ni Koi Shitai to publicize and circulate a number of soft power projects designed to introduce residents of the Tai-numa to traditional Thai culture and society. The first such initiative that TAT produced was a free e-book for Thai BL fans listing filming locations and restaurants related to the popular series SOTUS and TharnType, The Series. Published in late 2020, this e-book was obviously designed to facilitate the Japanese phenomenon of “contents tourism” whereby Japanese fans visit sites tied to the media products which they enjoy as part of performatively acknowledging the central affective role these media have played in the formation of their fan identities.45 The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the closure of Thailand’s international borders to tourists for much of 2021, led TAT to subsequently pivot to developing other soft power campaigns which were accessible to fans in Japan unable to visit Thailand as tourists. In early 2021, for instance, the Consulate-General of the Kingdom of Thailand in Osaka hosted its annual Thai Culture Festival. In previous years, this festival’s focus had always exclusively been traditional arts and Thai cuisine (as well as a trade show), but in 2021 TAT also included a series of virtual fan meetings with Thai celebrities in order to tap into the growing fandom for Thai media in Japan. Unfortunately, the vast majority of celebrities featured at the Thai Culture Festival had not appeared in BL series and most Thai BL fans in Japan expressed a lack of familiarity with

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the stars from mainstream, heteronormative lakhorn who were initially scheduled to participate in these virtual meetings. At a late stage, the Tai BL ni Koi Shitai account announced that BrightWin from 2gether would headline the final virtual event, thus reassuring Thai BL fans that the TAT recognized their centrality to Japan’s newly emergent Thai media fandom. The event, which I attended virtually, functioned like the other virtual fan meetings introduced in Chapter 4 except that it noticeably lacked performances of staged homoeroticism. Importantly, the fan meetings were broadcast live and subsequently archived on YouTube so fans unable to visit the physical festival in Osaka could also watch BrightWin interact with their Japanese fans.46 After another misfire where TAT once again focused on traditional Thai culture through a series of Thai cooking livestreams with consulate staff (rather than Thai idols) on the Tai BL ni Koi Shitai Twitter account, TAT announced two special events produced exclusively for fans of Thai BL in Japan. These two events were May 2021’s Amazing Thailand with KristSingto and December 2021’s Charming Chiang Mai with TayNew. The first of these events included a live virtual fan meeting with KristSingto (once again, lacking explicit instances of staged homoeroticism) as well as a short film in which the popular khu jin from SOTUS introduced fans in Japan to the sites and sounds of Bangkok.47 The second event did not include a live fan meeting but was instead a short film in which Japanese fans were invited to join TayNew “on a date” in Tay’s hometown of Chiang Mai. TAT’s decision to produce and promote these two events featuring popular khu jin celebrities whose fandom in Japan was explicitly tied to both affective attachments to BL series replete with queer romance and the appreciation of performances of staged homoeroticism is significant. By mid-2021, TAT obviously came to recognize that their soft power initiatives needed to directly target fans of Thai BL series and their celebrity stars to be successful and that promoting basic information about Thai BL series through the Tai BL ni Koi Shitai account was insufficient. Despite an implicit acknowledgment of the fan practice of shipping, however, these events were ultimately ambiguously queer since they rarely explicitly acknowledged the importance of homoeroticism to the popularity of these khu jin in Japan (as well as elsewhere, including Thailand itself). Charming Chiang Mai with TayNew is a short thirteen-minute video in which TayNew travel to famous temples in Chiang Mai, try on traditional northern Thai costumes, and eat famous dishes from Northern Thailand, including Chiang Mai’s iconic kao soi noodles.48 Although playfully advertised on the Tai BL ni Koi Shitai account as presenting a date between TayNew, the video lacks the explicitly queer moments of skinship one would find in the khu jin’s previous BL variety show TayNew Meal Date. There is also a notable absence of the use of the hirahira aesthetic to signal moments of intimacy between the two idol celebrities, who instead spend most of the time throwing gentle barbs at each other (as mentioned previously, TayNew’s continuous bickering is particularly appreciated among this khu jin’s Polca fans). Unlike the BL variety shows produced by GMM as part of their broader BL Machine, Charming Chiang Mai with TayNew thus represents a much more standard form of idol endorsement where the two popular celebrities

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merely act as “image characters” for TAT’s broader tourism campaign.49 While obviously catering to Thai BL fans in their conscious decision to use an established khu jin with wide appeal in Japan as their image characters, TAT instead seeks to mobilize the traditional parasocial relationships between idols and their fans in their campaign without injecting any explicit queer affects into the media text. In many ways, as I was watching Charming Chiang Mai with TayNew for the first time, the representational strategies adopted by TAT to promote tourism to Thailand by Japanese fans of Thai BL made me recall the “wavering queerness” that was essential to Lovesick and the initial production of BL series in Thailand discussed in Chapter 2. Many of the soft power initiatives developed by Thailand’s government to attract Japanese fans of Thai BL to Thai culture and society thus only implicitly acknowledge the queer affects central to this transnational fandom culture. Unlike Taiwan, which has recently sought to promote its own tradition of queer popular culture in conjunction with the Taiwanese state’s legalization of samesex marriage in 2019 as a soft power strategy to raise its profile as a defender of human rights in Asia,50 Thailand’s government has instead chosen to downplay the queer interventions of its transnational popular culture. For this reason, all of TAT’s projects at the time of writing neither explicitly catered to fans’ desires for queer romance such as those depicted in Thai BL series, nor did they provide opportunities for fans to view the explicit performances of staged homoeroticism which drive the shipping culture central to khu jin celebrity. TAT instead sought to reposition the Tai-numa as just another form of idol fandom in Japan for whom content tourism campaigns akin to those that had emerged around K-pop idols could be developed. Embracing a somewhat “paranoid” critical reading of TAT’s soft power initiatives,51 one could even argue that there were attempts to bracket away the queer affects central to the emerging Thai Wind in both Japan and around the world. Such a reading aligns well with the previous critical scholarship into the role played by the Thai Ministry of Culture in censuring expressions of queer sexuality as part of its broader mission to uphold remarkably conservative notions of what it means to be Thai.52 Nevertheless, Japanese fans who were already primed to read all interactions between khu jin as replete with homoerotic potential readily consumed Charming Chiang Mai with TayNew as an explicitly queer text. Fan discourse around the short video, for instance, produced its own catalogues of fleeting moments of skinship between the couple, with many Japanese Polca (as well as Polca around the globe who also eagerly watched the video) reinterpreting the khu jin’s bickering as a site within which a queer affect was produced. Fans had created similar lists for Amazing Thailand with KristSingto several months earlier.53 Although, from the perspective of production, TAT had almost obsessively sought to hide away the queer representational politics of Thai BL media, it was only natural that Japanese fans for whom Thai celebrity culture is always already entangled with queer affect would read these soft power campaigns as instances of homoerotic performance. Of most interest to me was the fact that several of the accounts I encountered during my virtual ethnographic investigations of the

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reception of TAT’s soft power campaigns indicated that participants in the Tainuma understood these campaigns as “BL” texts. Whereas my critical training as a queer theorist and my knowledge of Thai media history had initially led me to view these soft power campaigns as just another instance of the Thai state limiting queer expression, Japanese fans on Twitter were instead celebrating Thailand for producing BL texts full of homoerotic tension specifically for them. These fans’ affective engagements with Thai BL and their parasocial relationships with khu jin celebrity couples thus encouraged them to decode these texts as explicitly queer. For residents of the Tai-numa, then, Thailand’s soft power was fundamentally based on satisfying their desires for queer romance even if a critical analysis of these very campaigns suggests that TAT was trying to downplay this aspect of transnational Thai BL fandom culture. In the following section, I wish to further unpack how these fans’ affective investment in khu jin celebrities symbolically transforms Thailand into a privileged center for the production of queer media in Asia.

Decentering BL: Shifting the Borders of BL Studies Away from Japan Thailand’s emergence as a new center for BL among fans in Japan, Mainland China, the Philippines, and even within Thailand itself provides an important opportunity for scholars of Asian queer media to question the centrality of Japanese media culture to previous theorizations of queer sexuality across Asia that I presented within the Introduction. Below, I present extended excerpts from Zoom interviews with two Japanese fans of Thai BL to lay the groundwork for my argument that we must decenter Japan within the study of BL to truly make sense of the powerful, transnational queer affects that Thai BL produces across Asia. Both of these fans developed fascinating discourses concerning the differences between Thai and Japanese BL media which were representative of broader opinions I had encountered among other Japanese fan interlocutors during my virtual ethnographic fieldwork in late 2020 and early 2021. My interviews with these fans both occurred in February 2021 and the names I assign them are both pseudonyms. The first interviewee was Yuyu, a Japanese woman in her early thirties who runs several Twitter fan accounts dedicated to a variety of different Thai khu jin couples. Yuyu stated passionately to me at the beginning of her interview that she believed Thailand had caused a “revolution” (kakumei) in BL media culture. When I asked her to explain her reasoning, Yuyu replied with much sophisticated reflection that: To put it simply, Thailand’s BL has a completely refreshing feel when compared to the staleness of BL manga in Japan that are always doing the same old thing … the fixation on manga and the hesitance of Japan’s entertainment industries to seriously develop an idol culture tied to BL is very frustrating for many people here who have no interest in the 2D world … when I first discovered Thai BL series and became a fan of Thai [idol] couples, I felt an overwhelming sense of

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satisfaction . Like, wow this is moe, this is moe like nothing I had ever seen before, even with my favorite K-pop group . … I had dabbled in Johnny idol fandom before and even though my heart would beat when I saw their brief skinship on stage, it doesn’t come close to what you see in Thailand . The same was true of K-pop groups, but their skinship is better than Japanese idols, I believe … I think Japanese media companies have seen the Thai BL boom, have seen just how much Japanese viewers want to see 3D idols performing homosexual acts like kissing and hugging and being intimate together, and it has lit a fire under them. This is why we saw more Japanese BL live action series like [2020’s] Cherry Magic appear only after the success of Thai BL series in Japan … The Japanese entertainment industry realized how crazy fangirls are for BrightWin, for idols who are actually intimate with other men on screen and on stage, and they woke up! Japan is now following Thailand’s lead, for sure … which is only for the best in my opinion!

The second interviewee was Tocchi (a pseudonym), a young gay man in his twenties living in a rural prefecture to the north of Tokyo who stumbled upon Thai BL series after having given up on his previous attempts to read BL manga while searching for affirming depictions of male–male romance in Japanese media culture. As a gay man, much of Tocchi’s discourse reflected the typical skepticism of BL manga within Japan’s gay culture,54 but he also agreed with female fans such as Yuyu that Thailand was doing something new which Japanese media should emulate. As he explained to me during our Zoom interview, [T]he biggest problem with Japanese media’s representations of gay men is that most of it is written for heterosexual women and because of this, it has become linked with stereotypes from BL manga … I guess that kind of thing is okay if you just want to have a fantasy of gay romance, but as someone who is directly concerned (tōjisha), I want to see two real people showing the beauty of the love between men because I want to experience the same kind of romance myself with my future boyfriend one day soon . … I know you will remind me that Thai BL series are made for women too and I understand that, because I’m not an idiot … this is something I struggle with every day because I know that some of my opinions don’t really make sense . But Thailand is doing something we don’t see in Japan at all, it has taken this thing called coupling [that is, idol shipping] from Korea and transformed it into something innovative and absolutely fun. So, I can’t help feeling how I feel about it . Most importantly for me, as a gay man, is that Thai BL actually shows real people in love, even if its just a performance, and that is something I can’t resist … Because Japanese BL is only made for women who like manga, Thailand built a new space to do something that we cannot do yet here [in Japan] … Also, some of the Thai couples have actual gay men in them, you know, and many of the series directors are gay too! So even

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if Thai BL series could also be considered a fantasy for girls, it is still different from the 2D world of Japanese BL and more fun for actual gay men to enjoy. The feeling is different, that’s the main point .

Synthesizing Yuyu’s and Tocchi’s very different reasoning for why Thailand should be considered as a new, innovative center for BL production when compared to Japan, a number of commonalities emerge. Both indicated, for instance, that Thai media companies had created a new form of queer representation, whether this be Yuyu’s belief that Thailand has unlocked the power of idols to produce queer affects or Tocchi’s insistence that Thai BL is more “fun” for actual gay men to enjoy since it is divorced from Japan’s women-focused manga industry. Importantly, my interviews with these two fans revealed that neither of them possessed the naïve belief that Thailand was somehow a queer paradise and they both dismissed the notion that Thai BL series and their khu jin celebrity culture had developed in the kingdom since Thailand was somehow more sexually progressive than Japan. Yuyu instead stated bluntly that, “it’s about money, actually,” and explained that the key difference between Japan and Thailand was that the former had yet to fully realize that explicit (rather than implicit) performances of staged homoeroticism are profitable. Likewise, Tocchi stated that “since actual gay men are involved in Thai BL, they also understand that gay men can be an important market … Japan is still only focused on young girls.” While I would personally question the veracity of Tocchi’s claim, it was clear that both of these Japanese fans—as well as several others with whom I interacted during virtual fieldwork—believed that the Thai media industry had a more sophisticated awareness of the market potentials of live action BL starring purpose-built idol couples. Perhaps more important than their belief in differences between the two nation’s media industries, however, was Yuyu’s and Tocchi’s continued emphasis throughout our Zoom conversations that Thai BL media possessed stronger queer affective potentials than Japanese BL manga, particularly for those who lacked interest in the so-called 2D media of manga. The feelings of moe that Yuyu described when interacting with khu jin on social media as an active fan site or the sense of fun that Tocchi experienced from consuming affirming depictions of queer romance in Thai BL series were positioned as qualitatively different from the affects generated by BL manga. Of course, this is unsurprising since both of these fans indicated a broader lack of interest in manga, but their consistent argument that the affective affordances of Thai BL celebrity culture in particular produced a more visceral sense of enjoyment grounded in truly transformative queer fan practices is significant. For Tocchi, this intensity of affect was articulated via the common narrative among gay fans of Thai BL I have interviewed in several national contexts that the flesh-and-blood performance of actual intimate acts between khu jin stars resonates with their own queer desires and hence produced a more affirming affective experience than a media genre such as manga. For Yuyu and many female Japanese fans of Thai BL—as well as the Thai fans whose experiences I introduced in Chapter 4—the production of media that explicitly facilitates shipping strengthens the parasocial relationships between

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idols and fans. “Yes, BL manga has male-male love,” Yuyu argued, “but that feels different to the sense of connection you feel when Thai idols perform coupling just for you … that performance just feels stronger, the romance is purer because you can connect with it directly through the idols’ relationships.” Entangled within these discussions of queer affective potential was also several fans’ recognition that they could more readily “fall in love” or sexually desire a Thai idol. As Tocchi put it, “I could have sex with Bright or Win … I can’t ever have sex with a manga character. Of course, that means Thai BL produces a different type of moe .” It is instructive here to recall that media theorist Patrick Galbraith specifically argues that moe, as it has been traditionally understood within Japan, is tied to affective entanglements with fictional characters and the related emergence of a new sexual orientation toward the so-called 2D world among fans of anime and manga.55 Many residents of the Tai-numa, following in the footsteps of Japanese practitioners of K-pop idol shipping,56 instead conceive of moe as an affective intensity emerging from their sexual attraction to Thai BL idols as well as the feelings of arousal produced through viewing performances of staged homoeroticism. Last, underlying both Yuyu’s and Tocchi’s narratives was a strong insistence that Thailand’s BL media industry was more developed than the BL industry of Japan, even though both recognized that Japanese publishers had been producing BL manga and related content since at least the 1970s. Yuyu expressed this most clearly when she indicated that Cherry Magic, a Japanese live action series released on TV Tokyo in October 2020 that was based on a best-selling BL manga, was most likely released as a response to the success of Thai BL dramas in the first half of 2020. Whether or not this is true, several residents of the Tai-numa highlighted their belief that Thai BL series were opening the eyes of Japanese production companies to the economic potentials of live action BL. Yuyu noted, however, that Cherry Magic (which she had enjoyed) lacked explicit scenes of intimacy between its handsome leads and thus “fell short of what fans of Thai BL series expect to see … at least give us a kiss scene!” Tocchi likewise suggested that Thai BL media possessed the potential to “shake up Japan’s boring entertainment industry full of straight [male] idols” but was skeptical that “the power of BL manga will be broken any time soon.” Another Japanese gay fan I interviewed was somewhat more optimistic, however, arguing via Twitter DM that the strategic partnership between GMM and TV Asahi would eventually lead to live action co-productions as well as future physical fan meetings in Japan where fans could enjoy explicit acts of staged homoeroticism between khu jin couples. For several of my fan interlocutors, the partnership between GMM and TV Asahi was positioned as an opportunity for the Japanese company to learn from Thailand rather than the other way round, signaling their belief that when it comes to BL media, the Thai company was the more developed member of the partnership. For Yuyu, TV Asahi was “just there to supply the money … GMM will do all the real work .” Both Yuyu’s and Tocchi’s discussions of the queer affective potentials of Thai BL ultimately resonate with the narratives of the fans from Mainland China and the Philippines that I introduced in the previous chapter. The tendency for Japanese participants in the Tai-numa to celebrate Thailand as a new center for innovation

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within the production of BL in Asia once again speaks to the importance of queer affect to the success of the transnational Thai Wind, even within a context such as Japan which has its own history of local queer media. One thing that was missing from most of these narratives, however, was a recognition that the Japanese BL manga that fans such as Yuyu and Tocchi denigrated as stale or somehow inauthentic provided the original narrative and thematic frameworks upon which Thai BL series rely to produce these queer affects. As I have argued in Chapter 2, while certain series have come to challenge the classic BL ōdō derived from Japan, many of the most popular series that have driven the transnational Thai Wind (including SOTUS, Love By Chance, and, importantly, 2gether) perfectly conform to the narrative logics of Japanese BL manga. This thus raises an important question when considering whether or not BL production has truly been dislocated from Japan. Why do fans of Thai BL around the world downplay the genre’s historical relationship with Japanese media when insisting that Thailand represents a new center for transnational Asian queer popular culture? Within my previous writing on the first online communities of Thai BL fans among Philippine consumers—deriving from ethnographic fieldwork in 2015 and 2016 conducted well before the Thai BL boom of 2020—I sought to answer this very question. Among the mostly gay male Filipino members of a Facebook group that I assigned the pseudonym Everything’s BL, I had encountered a Thai BL fan community, which insisted that the BL genre was originally and fundamentally Thai.57 Further, following the lead of the six gay Filipino moderators of this fan group, members of Everything’s BL valorized Thai BL as an authentic genre created for gay men compared to an inauthentic genre that they all termed “Japanese yaoi” (that is, Japanese BL manga).58 Within these Philippine fans’ discourses, “Japanese yaoi” was always positioned as problematic since they argued that it represented texts created for and by heterosexual women.59 Fans on this Facebook group therefore rejected any discussion which suggested that Thai BL and “Japanese yaoi” were somehow linked. When fans who were aware of the historical links between these two supposedly separate genres raised their objections, other members of Everything’s BL or even its moderators would respond by “educating” them about how they were wrong, insisting that “Japanese yaoi” was an inauthentic genre which fetishizes gay men.60 Willfully ignoring the fact that the very same criticism could be leveled at Thai BL series—the historical development of which many members appeared to have little understanding—members of this early Philippine fan community instead circulated fantasies of Thailand as a sexually emancipated space of queer liberation.61 It was, I argued, their affective investment into these fantasies of emancipation as a site to combat their lived experiences of homophobia in the Philippines that instead led them to construct a history of Thai BL that countered the kind of nuanced developmental history that a scholar of Japanese media such as I would likely produce.62 In making sense of the affective work of fans trying to make sense of Thai BL as a “resource of hope” to combat heteropatriarchal discrimination in the Philippines, I posited a theory of “creative misreading.” I define creative misreading as “a fundamentally queer method of engaging with texts that dislocates a cultural

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product from its purported history and, in so doing, opens new horizons of hopeful knowledge that meaningfully intervene in conditions of heteronormativity and homophobia.”63 My decision to specifically highlight that the willful dismissal of history represents a “misreading” represents a provocative challenge to traditional scholarly accounts of the transnational spread of Japanese popular culture, principally the work of Iwabuchi.64 Within his history of East and Southeast Asian consumption of Japanese consumer goods and popular culture, Iwabuchi sought to “re-center” the analysis of globalization away from the West to consider what globalization may look like from the perspective of Japan.65 In so doing, Iwabuchi famously argued that Japanese media’s popularity in Asia was due not only to its ability to be easily “glocalized” to new cultural contexts as inherently “culturally odorless” commodities, but was also due to the privileged positioning of Japan as an aspirational center within the cultural politics of Asian modernity.66 As fan studies scholars Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto rightly point out, however, Iwabuchi’s project is one that dismisses the affective consumption practices of fans in order to simply privilege the structural power of Japan to dominate Asian consumer culture.67 Put another way, Iwabuchi’s attempt to de-center the West within his accounts of cultural globalization still relied on the creation of a new center— Japan.68 Within such an approach to understanding the affective practices of Thai BL fans, their dismissal of the history of Japanese influence on the production of BL media within Thailand is therefore a clear misreading of the relationships between Japan and Thailand.69 But Iwabuchi’s seminal analysis, based on research conducted in the 1990s, only revealed what was happening on the surface and it therefore does not allow scholars of transnational BL to appreciate how fans across Asia create new, emancipatory fantasies through their affective engagement with khu jin celebrities or Thai BL series. Further, it relies on a remarkably structural understanding of inter-Asian consumer culture based on unidirectional flows that operate hierarchically to center Japan as the source of all knowledge.70 Yet, within the contemporary postmodern world, such “grand narratives” of the circulation of transnational media have collapsed in the face of the increasingly migratory behavior of fans who seek to satisfy their desires by consuming whatever media products that they are able to access, chiefly online.71 As I have already established, fans participating in the Thai Wind do so due to their experience of queer affects rather than due to their investment into so-called cultural odors. My theory of creative misreading therefore focuses on how fans’ active production of emancipatory fantasies through their affective fan practices refuses to center any nation-state within their conceptualization of transnational media.72 After all, queer theory fundamentally rejects the development of normative structures or hierarchies of knowledge and accounts of the transnationalization of a queer genre of media like BL must therefore similarly resist the centralizing, positivist tendencies underlying seminal frameworks such as those of Iwabuchi.73 Focusing on the agency of fans, engaged within affective worlds triggered by their enjoyment of queer romance, to create their own accounts of BL media through a queer scavenger methodology akin to the theoretical approach which informs my own ethnographic practice will achieve this important analytical aim.74

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It is for this reason that I call upon my fellow theorists of BL media in Asia to resist the temptation to center Japan within our theoretical accounts of this increasingly transnational Asian queer popular culture form. In the end, fans such as Yuyu, Tocchi, and several of my other interlocutors across Asia strongly argue that Thai BL is separate from Japan’s BL media culture and theorists must accept such conceptualizations in good faith to produce an account of their affective worlds which is true to their own lived experiences as fans.75 By resisting the implicit theorization of Japan as the “center” from which BL media flows, this chapter has ultimately revealed how Thai BL series and their idol celebrities produce new affective entanglements that queer the very normative hierarchies that have traditionally been deployed to make sense of inter-Asian media flows in the previous scholarship. Although my own fan interlocutors have consistently argued that Thailand should be considered a new center for the production of transnational Asian queer popular culture, I would suggest a more radical interpretation of what is happening here. In recognizing that many consumers across Asia—but especially in Japan—have turned to Thai BL due to their dissatisfaction with Japanese BL manga, we can see how fans’ “creative misreading” of Thailand as an originator of an innovative new form of BL media actually further destabilizes the idea that there can be any one privileged “center” for BL media production at all. To return briefly to the previous chapter’s discussion of the Philippine response to the Thai Wind, it is important to acknowledge that within that specific social context, Thai BL has led to the production of local, Pinoy BL series. The emergence of Pinoy BL series and dedicated fandoms for shows such as Gameboys and Gaya Sa Pelikula among local consumers who have no previous awareness of either Thai BL media or Japanese BL manga provides a stark example of just how dislocated the genre of BL has become from its putative origins within Japanese media culture. During my ethnographic fieldwork of the Tai-numa, I also met some Japanese men and women who had grown bored of Thai BL series and had subsequently shifted their allegiance to Pinoy BL. Some of these fans suggested to me through Twitter conversations that Pinoy BL series’ willingness to explicitly tackle questions of social justice in the context of COVID-19 and societal homophobia once again presented a revolution in BL media culture. With the Pinoy BL series Gameboys receiving an official release in Japan in late 2021, I have been left wondering whether the cycle of dislocation initiated by the Thai BL boom that I have recounted in this chapter is poised to begin again. Perhaps, in a few years, I will need to begin writing about a Firipin-numa (Philippine swamp) as Thailand and its BL media culture and khu jin idols become just another old center against which fans seek to compare their newest queer media obsession to make sense of the radical emancipatory potentials of transnational BL fandom.

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C O N C LU D I N G R E M A R K S : W H I T H E R T HA I B L ?

In mid-January 2022, the Anglophone fan account BL Update posted a list which they had adapted from an earlier post to the Thai-language Facebook page Y Relation of all the Thai BL series that were scheduled for broadcast in 2022.1 To both my own shock and the surprise of many of the Twitter users from around the globe who retweeted this list, BL Update had identified ninety-three BL series produced in Thailand for imminent release in 2022, with twelve scheduled for broadcast across a variety of international streaming services in February alone. This meant that there would be more Thai BL series released in 2022 than had been produced between 2014 and 2020 combined, and twice as many as had been broadcast in 2021. In fact, February 2022 would have more Thai BL series than were produced between 2014 to 2018! The exponential growth of the production of Thai BL series speaks to how the Thai media landscape has rapidly transitioned into a space where series celebrating the queer romances between handsome young men represent a mainstream genre with a broad consumer base that appears willing to watch a dozen series each month. Importantly, both Thai production companies and aspiring male actors alike are also increasingly viewing BL series as a key method of breaking into Thailand’s novel—yet highly saturated—idol celebrity market. Reflecting back on my first serendipitous encounter with Lovesick in late 2014 when I had become fascinated by this seminal series’ “wavering” depiction of queerness that strategically engaged fans of Japanese BL manga in Thailand, I realized just how far Thailand’s BL media had truly come. I argued in Chapter 2 that when Lovesick was first broadcast, its producers took great pains to utilize the series as a resource to educate a mainstream audience unfamiliar with passionate romances between men about how to affectively interpret and enjoy such queer narratives. By 2022, however, ninety-three series were in production to satisfy both Thai and international fans’ voracious appetites for the queer affects central to Thai BL media and its attendant celebrity culture. The transformation of the Thai media landscape that I first encountered when visiting Bangkok in 2019 had been completed. Boys Love Media in Thailand has revealed that queer romance is now central to Thai popular culture and its growing fandom across East and Southeast Asia. The rapid transnational spread of Thai BL series, I have demonstrated, has even led the Thai government to recognize and engage Thai BL idol fandom as

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a site for the development of soft power and encouraged Chinese and Japanese companies to heavily invest in Thai media production. Further, the emergence of khu jin idols such as GMM’s Four Royal Couples has transformed advertising culture in the kingdom into a space full of handsome male celebrity couples endorsing everything from popular snacks to cosmetics.2 Fandom for these idols has also expanded a “Thai Wind” that actively competes against the Korean Wave, with this new popular culture fandom grounded in queer affective entanglements. The growing mainstream positioning of BL series in the contemporary Thai media landscape is also evidenced by the prominence of its fans and certain of its idol celebrities within social media activism concerning the rights of sexual minorities in Thailand. As I finalized Boys Love Media in Thailand in February 2022, the Thai parliament was sitting to debate the introduction of a same-sex marriage bill by the progressive Move Forward Party.3 This debate comes after several months of prominent activism among Thai youth—forming part of the broader Thai pro-democracy protest movement against the government of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha4—where celebrities involved in the BL industry such as Tay Tawan, Off Jumpol, Mix Sahaphap, PP Krit, Saint Suppapong, and Tul Pakorn vocally called for the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. As the lower house of the Thai parliament sat debating the bill, members of the Move Forward Party specifically highlighted that since Thailand was a society whose BL series had become famous around the world, it was absolutely essential that marriage equality be legislated to better reflect the new affirming values of contemporary Thai society.5 Unfortunately, the lower house moved to defer further debate on the bill to an unspecified time later in the year despite broad public support for marriage equality.6 The deferment of the debate over the bill supposedly formed part of an attempt by the main opposition Pheu Thai Party to force the government to dissolve parliament.7 In response, Thai BL celebrities and fans trended a variety of hashtags to shame the parliament (and Pheu Thai specifically) for once again failing Thailand’s sexual minority communities. As this instance of fan activism reveals, Thai BL media is beginning to play a role in debates concerning queer rights in the conservative kingdom. The week before this debate in the lower house of the Thai parliament, one of GMM’s new BL series had actively stepped into the political furor. In so doing, the company broke the common perception among many of the Anglophone fans (mostly in the Philippines) I have been observing online that GMM was disinterested in broader questions of social justice. Episode seven of Not Me (2021, Khao … Mai Chai Phom, “He … Is Not Me” in Thai), starring khu jin power couple OffGun, included a scene where the principal leads actively protested in support of marriage equality.8 Within this scene, Sean (played by Off) encounters White (played by Gun) at a street protest where young demonstrators are calling for the legalization of same-sex marriage while brandishing a large rainbow flag. Sean and White—who is masquerading as his comatose twin brother Black to discover which member of Black’s motorcycle gang is to blame for his coma—have had a fairly antagonistic relationship until this point in the series. Their meeting at the protest and joyful coming together to explicitly call for marriage equality while

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dancing and chanting along with the other protestors under the rainbow flag represents an important turning point in their developing romantic relationship. Within the context of Not Me as a BL series starring one of Thailand’s most popular khu jin celebrity couples, this protest scene represents just another moment designed to produce fin for fans. Yet in this moment between Sean and White, the queer affect of fin has also been linked to an explicit political act calling on the Thai government to legislate marriage equality. As a series focusing on young, downtrodden men finding love during the tumultuous youth protest movement, Not Me has not shied away from politically sensitive content. Its inclusion of a scene focused on queer activism and LGBTQ+ rights is thus well in keeping with the series’ broader tone and focus on social justice in contemporary Thailand. Indeed, the broader political activist focus of Not Me shields episode seven’s moment of fin from complaints about queerbaiting, as does Off ’s and Gun’s subsequent social media posts when the episode aired in which they both publicly affirmed their continued support of LGBTQ+ activism in Thailand. Fans both in Thailand and in Anglophone fandom spaces alike have thus celebrated Not Me and OffGun’s social media commentary as important moments of authentic queer activism emerging from the Thai BL industry. Once again, Thai BL media is maturing as its young fanbase likewise develops an increasingly sophisticated political consciousness. While Thai BL fans certainly continue to seek both a sense of affective excitement from queer romance and a sense of intimacy with idol celebrities—as I have argued throughout this book— it is also clear that simple campus crush concepts no longer satisfy many of the women and men who participate in transnational Thai BL fandom. The Thai BL industry is therefore pushing the limits of the genre and subsequently evolving to consider complex social questions and activist concerns through the playful and creative manipulation of its classic tropes, just as the Japanese BL manga industry did via the “evolutionary form” of BL identified by scholar Mizoguchi Akiko.9 Yet the Thai BL industry’s involvement in overt political activism and the call for marriage equality separates Thailand from Japan, where the BL manga industry remains relatively divorced from Japan’s queer activist scene.10 Another instance where the economic success and growing consumer base of BL series has perhaps unexpectedly resulted in the further mainstreaming of queer romance in Thailand can be seen via the example of Gap Yuri The Series (2022, Thritsadi Si-chompu, “Pink Theory” in Thai). Based on a novel by the pseudonymous author Devil Planoy and produced by Idol Factory, a company founded by Saint Suppapong of Love By Chance fame, Gap Yuri is one of the first “Girls Love” or GL series to be broadcast in Thailand.11 Starring Becky Armstrong and Freen Sarocha Chankimha, who have both been promoted together by Idol Factory as a female khu jin since mid-2021, Gap Yuri both adapts the Japanese genre of female–female romances known as yuri and the conventions of Thai BL series to the story of two office ladies falling in love.12 FreenBecky were also featured as one of the side couples within Idol Factory’s debut series, a standard BL campus crush series entitled Secret Crush on You (2022, Aep Long Rak, “A Hidden Love” in Thai), which acted as a vehicle to launch Idol Factory’s new khu

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jin stars. Studio Wabi Sabi have likewise indicated their intention to release a GL series in 2023 and GMM prominently included a female–female romantic side couple within their hit BL dramedy series Bad Buddy (2021, Khae Phuean Khrap Pheuan, “We’re Just Friends, My Friend” in Thai). It must be noted that Bad Buddy, starring idols from GMM’s next generation and establishing the khu jin of Ohm Pawat Chittsawangdee and Nanon Korapat Kirdpan, also received fan and critical acclaim for its positive depiction of such queer topics as coming out, navigating queerness as an adolescent, and managing family pressure. Just as Lovesick acted as a watershed moment in the mainstreaming of queer romance between men in Thai media culture, Gap Yuri possesses the potential to deepen Thailand’s fandom and celebrity cultures through the celebration of the love between women. In fact, Saint has specifically expressed that his motivation for producing Gap Yuri was to deepen representation of queer sexuality in Thailand beyond a simple focus on men and thus contribute to ongoing LGBTQ+ activism in the kingdom.13 The transnational fandoms that I have written about throughout Boys Love Media in Thailand have embraced the shift to GL with much excitement, once again demonstrating the ongoing maturation of these participants in the Thai Wind for whom its fundamentally queer affects have become essential to their lives. In February 2022, fandom for live action BL series continues to conspicuously grow in Thailand, Mainland China, the Philippines, and Japan, with many of the fans who I interviewed as part of this project throughout these regions remaining committed to Thai media fandom more broadly and GMM’s khu jin stars in particular. A new generation of male khu jin has also emerged at GMM, including popular couples like EarthMix, OhmNanon, and PondPhuwin who continue to push the BL Machine forward and engage fans around the globe. Indeed, after gaining attention for their performances in early 2021’s BL series 1000 Stars, EarthMix became the first khu jin couple after BrightWin to advance through to the next stage of the BL Machine with the launch of their own variety show EarthMix Space in mid-2021. Further, these three new imagined idol couples were so popular that GMM announced in December 2021 that they would each return to headline a BL series in 2022, with EarthMix in fact set to star in two series.14 Since mid-2021, fan communities for Thai BL series and their stars are also emerging in other parts of the world as the Thai Wind strengthens. Indonesia, South Korea, and Latin America have transformed into important new nodes within this increasingly transnational fandom culture. As Thailand emerges as an important center for Asian queer media among a growing number of consumers, however, the development of live action BL industries initially kickstarted by the popularity of 2gether, the Series and BrightWin are going strong too. Pinoy BL series have particularly garnered acclaim, with Gameboys notably winning a number of international awards at prestigious film festivals in both Asia and Europe.15 But challengers to Thailand’s position as the new center for transnational Asian queer popular culture have also emerged as both South Korea and Taiwan increasingly produce live action BL series designed for transnational consumption. The process of dislocating BL from Japan that I theorized in Chapter 6 thus shows no signs of slowing down, with Thailand’s series entering into competition with newly

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developing nodes in the broader Asian BL culture industries. That fan interlocutors who I first interviewed as Thai BL media consumers were sharing passionate posts on their Twitter profiles in early 2022 about popular South Korean BL series like To My Star (2020, Na-eui byeol-ege, “Towards My Star” in Korean) and Semantic Error (2022, transliterated into Shimaentik Ereo in Korean) further reveals that fans increasingly reject any “center” when seeking to satisfy their desires for queer romantic content. When thinking about the future of Thailand’s BL media, its celebrity couples, and transnational fandom as both a scholar and fan of this revolutionary new queer media, I remain optimistic. Thai BL series continue to engage disadvantaged sexual minority communities across Asia as well as young women whose sexual agency has been traditionally denied by hetero-patriarchal social structures. I argued within Chapter 5 that Thai BL media represents an important “resource of hope” for Asian subjects struggling to manage their abject positioning in societies replete with homophobia. The growing sophistication of Thai BL series in 2022 suggests to me that this media’s role in deconstructing heteronormativity and mainstreaming queer affects will only strengthen in the coming years. From the perspective of “Asia-as-method,” the rising awareness of Thai BL series among consumers in the West is also a clear indication of a broader recognition that Asia has the agency to narrate its own accounts of queer emancipation without relying on Western European or North American cultural models. As a recent piece in the US magazine Teen Vogue suggests, Asia has become an important new producer of “nuanced, romantic queer storytelling” that is revolutionizing global queer media.16 It is therefore only a matter of time until consumers from all corners of the globe and not just Asia will join together with Thai fans to share in the intimate production of fin and recognize Thai BL media’s powerful interventions into global queer culture. I look forward to a time when everyone can unite at a series of worldwide fan meetings for handsome khu jin couples from Thailand and lose themselves in a world replete with fin and its attendant queer hopes.

APPENDIX Thai BL Series List Year

Title

Production House

Director

Author of Novel

Leading BL Stars

2014

Lovesick, The Series

MCOT

Rachyd K ­ usolkulsiri

INDRYTIMES

White Nawat Captain ­Chonlathorn

2016

SOTUS Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng, (The Viscious Hazer and the Freshman)

GMM

Phadung Samajarn

Bittersweet

Krist Perawat Singto Prachaya

2016

Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey Run Phi Secret Love: Puppy Honey (The Senior Student’s Secret Love: Puppy Honey)

GMM

Weerachit Thongjila

Original Screenplay

Off Jumpol Gun Attaphan

2017

2Moons Duean Kiao Duean (The Moon Courts the Moon)

Motive ­Village

Kanchanapun Meesuwan

Chiffon_cake

Bas Suradej God Ittiphat Copter Panuwat Kimmon Warodom Tae Darvid Tee Thanapon

2017

SOTUS S

GMM

Phadung Samajarn

Bittersweet

Krist Perawat Singto Prachaya

2017

Together With Me Ork-hak Ma Rak Kap Phom (When You’re Heartbroken, Come Love Me)

TV Thunder

Jet ­Boonyoprakarn

Saisoo

Tul Pakorn Max Nattapol

2018

’Cause You’re My Boy A Thi Khorng Phom (Tee Is Mine)

GMM

Rachyd ­Kusolkulsiri

Original Screenplay

Frank Thanatsaran Drake Sattabut

2018

Love By Chance Bang-oen Rak (Accidental Love)

Studio Wabi Sabi

Siwaj ­Sawatmaneekul

MAME

Saint Suppapong Perth Tanapol Mean Phiravich Plan Rathavit Mark Siwat Gun Napat Title Kirati Earth Katsamonnat

2018

What The Duck, The Series Rak Laen-ding (Love Touchdown)

Jinloe Media Works

Yuan Danop Taninsirapapra

Original Screenplay

Oreo Puwanai Strong Charoenchai Art Pakpoom Mew Suppasit

2019

2Moons2 Duean Kiao Duean 2 (The Moon Courts the Moon 2)

Motive ­Village

Anusorn Soisa-ngim

Chiffon_cake

Earth Teerapat Benjamin Braisier Joong Archen Nine Kornchid Pavel Naret Dome Woranart

2019

Dark Blue Kiss Jup Sut-thai Phuea Nai Khon Diao (A ­Final Kiss Just for You)

GMM

Noppharnach Chaiwimol

Hideko_Sunshine

Tay Tawan New Thitipoom

2019

The Effect The Effect Lok Orn Rai (The Effects of an Evil World)

JakJai ­Productions

Worawut Thanamatchaicharoen

SweetSky

Oat Chakrit James Prapatthorn

Year

Title

Production House

Director

Author of Novel

Leading BL Stars

2019

TharnType, The Series Kliat Nak Ma Pen Thi Rak Kan Sa Di-di (The More You Hate Me, The More I’ll Make You Love Me)

Me Mind Y

Bundit Sintanaparadee

MAME

Mew Suppasit Gulf Kanawut

2019

Theory of Love Thritsadi Jip Thoe (The Theory of ­Hitting on You)

GMM

Nuttapong Mongkolsawas

JittiRain

Off Jumpol Gun Atthaphan

2020

2gether, The Series Phror Rao Khu Kan (Because We’re a Couple)

GMM

Weerachit Thongjila

JittiRain

Bright Vachirawit Win Metawin

2020

I’m Tee, Me Too Khon-la Thi Diao-kan (The Different Tees Are Identical)

GMM

Nuttapong Mongkolsawas

Original Screenplay

Krist Perawat Singto Prachaya Off Jumpol Gun Atthaphan Tay Tawan New Thitipoom

2020

I Told Sunset About You Plae Rak Chan Duay-jai Thoe (I’ll Convey My Love to You with My Heart)

Nadao ­Bangkok

Naruebet Kuno

Original Screenplay

Billkin Putthipong PP Krit

2020

Still 2gether, The Series Phror Rao Yang Khu Kan (Because We’re Still a Couple)

GMM

Noppharnach Chaiwimol

JittiRain

Bright Vachirawit Win Metawin

2020

Why R U, The Series Phror Rak Chai Pao? (Because It’s Love, Isn’t It?)

DoMunDi

Thanamin Wongskulphat; Bancha Luangakkaratorn

CandyOn

Tommy Sittichok Jimmy Karn Saint Suppapong Zee Pruk

2021

1000 Stars Nithan Pan Dao (A Tale of a ­Thousand Stars)

GMM

Noppharnach Chaiwimol

Bacteria

Mix Sahaphap Earth Pirapat

2021

Bad Buddy Khae Pheuan Khrap Pheuan (We’re Just Friends, My Friend)

GMM

Noppharnach Chaiwimol

Afterday; -West-

Nanon Korapat Ohm Pawat

2021

Lovely Writer Nub Sip Ja Jup (Count to Ten and I’ll Kiss You)

DeHup House

Bundit Sintanaparadee

Wankling

Kao Noppakao Up Poompat

2021

Not Me Khao … Mai Chai Phom (He … Is Not Me)

GMMTV

Anucha Boonyawatana

++saisioo++, with significant rewrites

Off Jumpol Gun Attaphan

2022

Gap Yuri The Series (GL) Thritsadi Si-chompu (Pink Theory)

Idol Factory

Nuttapong Wongkaveepairoj

Jao Planoy

Becky Armstrong Freen Sarocha

2022

Secret Crush On You Aep Long Rak (A Hidden Love)

Idol Factory

Thanamin Wongskulphat

Darin

Billy Patchanon Seng Wichai

NOTES Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Jackson, “Offending Images,” 221. Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 80. See Heryanto, Identity and Pleasure. See Kim, Women, Television. See Sun and Yang, ed. Love Stories in China. Scott Barmé, Woman, Man, Bangkok. LINE Insights, Y-Economy Study, 10; Mori, “Ossanzu Rabu yori atsui?.” For a more in-depth reflection on terminology, see Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings.” 9 See Otzmagin, “A New Cultural Geography.” 10 Situated to the north of the prestigious Chulalongkorn University, Siam Square not only sits at the heart of Thailand’s capitalist economy but is also central to the development of BL fandom in the kingdom. For a survey of the district and its role in Bangkok’s consumer culture, see King, Reading Bangkok, 94–9. 11 See Giffney, “Introduction.” 12 That is, I draw upon the poststructural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to posit queerness as a productive process that generates new ways of being and doing through the “re-territorialization” of knowledge from one sociocultural assemblage to another. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 504. 13 Following pioneering queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, my reading seeks to avoid an overtly pessimistic analysis produced through a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that may ignore the significantly affective and positive work a queer text may do, even if imperfectly. See Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading.” 14 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 1. 15 Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century,” 38–9. 16 See Jackson, First Queer Voices. 17 Altman, Global Sex. 18 Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century,” 39. 19 See, for example, Baudinette, “Aspirations for ‘Japanese Gay Masculinity’”; Jacobs, People’s Pornography; Kang, “Eastern Orientations”; Kong, “Transnational Queer Sociological Analysis.” 20 The term yaoi as a referent to homoerotic parody comics emerged in Japan in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, however, the term Boys Love (bōizu rabu) is more commonly used in Japan. See Welker, “A Brief History,” 46. 21 McLelland and Welker, “An Introduction,” 3. 22 In making this argument, I follow cultural historian James Welker in emphasizing that Japanese BL is recently causing Asian sexualities to undergo a series of “transfigurations.” See Welker, “Bōizu rabu (BL),” 19–20. 23 Santos, “Queer Affective Literacies,” 82–3.

Notes

189

24 See, for example, Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century”; Kang, “Eastern Orientations”; Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’”; Sinnott, “Korean-pop.” 25 By neoliberalization, I refer to the broader marketization of everyday life and the increasing stratification of consumer markets that have developed under late capitalism, wherein consumption has become inextricably tied to identity formation. See Brown, Undoing the Demos, 28. 26 Kwon, Straight Korean, 18–19. 27 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 2. 28 Glasspool, “From Boys Next Door,” 120–3. 29 LINE Insights, Y-Economy, 1. 30 Lim, “Staying ‘2gether’.” 31 LINE Insights, Y-Economy, 12. 32 Yoshida, “Why So Popular?.” 33 Pongsapitaksanti, “The Growing Popularity.” 34 Jacobs, “Internationalizing Porn Studies,” 115. 35 Au, “Speaking of Bangkok”; Wang, “Bridging Tourism.” 36 See Kang, “Queer Media Loci.” 37 See Jackson, “An Explosion.” 38 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 3. 39 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 3. 40 This table is adapted from Ojanen, et al., “Intersections,” 531. 41 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 2. 42 Jackson, “An Explosion,” 409. 43 Jackson, “An Explosion,” 409. 44 Barmé, Man, Woman, Bangkok, 4. 45 Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 80. 46 Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 80. 47 Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 80. 48 Townsend, “Prisoner of Love,” 579. 49 Townsend, “Prisoner of Love,” 581. 50 See Townsend, “Prisoner of Love.” 51 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 59. 52 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 71. 53 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 64. 54 See Jackson, “Offending Images.” 55 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 61. 56 Jackson, “Offending Images.” 57 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 65. 58 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 59. 59 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 75. 60 See Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 81–98. 61 See Musikawong and Khumsupa, “Notes on Camp Films.” 62 Fuhrmann, Ghostly Desires. 63 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 4. 64 See Jackson, “An Explosion.” 65 See Sinnott, “The Language of Rights.” 66 See Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 18–19; Ross, Reading Bangkok, 117–22. 67 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 19. 68 Kang, “Eastern Orientations,” 188–92.

190

Notes

See Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’”; Kang, “Eastern Orientations.” Kang, “Surfing the Korean Wave,” 50. Kang, “Surfing the Korean Wave,” 59–61. See Sinnott, “Korean-pop.” In writing about “female masculinity,” Sinnott is responding to and refining the influential theorization of Jack Halberstam. See Halberstam, Female Masculinity. 73 See Sinnott, “Korean-pop,” 463. 74 See Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization. 75 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 89–92. 76 See Katsumata, “Japanese Popular Culture.” 77 Otmazgin, Regionalizing Culture. 78 Welker, “A Brief History,” 46. 79 Welker, “A Brief History,” 67. 80 Nagaike, “Elegant Caucasians.” 81 For a discussion of Mori Mari’s influence on Japanese BL, see Vincent, “A Japanese Electra.” For a brief reference to the influence of the gay magazine Barazoku, see Welker, “Flower Tribes,” 226, n19. 82 Welker, “A Brief History,” 47. 83 Welker, “A Brief History,” 55. 84 Welker, “A Brief History,” 55. 85 Welker, “A Brief History,” 63. 86 Welker, “A Brief History,” 64–5. 87 See Yano Research Institute, Cool Japan Market. 88 Fujimoto, “The Evolution of BL,” 78–9. 89 Fujimoto, “The Evolution of BL,” 79. 90 Mizoguchi, “Theorising Manga/Comics”; Welker, “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent.” 91 Mizoguchi, “Theorising Manga/Comics,” 156–8. 92 For a detailed account of the yaoi dispute, see Ishida, “Representational Appropriation.” 93 See Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 101–7. 94 Aoyama, “BL (Boys’ Love) Literacy,” 66. 95 Santos, “Queer Affective Literacies,” 82–3. 96 Aoyama, “BL (Boys’ Love) Literacy,” 66–7; Santos, “Queer Affective Literacies,” 75. 97 Azuma, Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan. 98 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 127. 99 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 127. 100 McLelland and Welker, “An Introduction,” 10. 101 Aoyama, “BL (Boys’ Love) Literacy”, 66. 102 Kwon, Straight Korean; Zhao, et al., “Introduction,” xiv. 103 For a more in-depth history of danmei, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this book, see Yang and Xu, “Chinese Danmei Fandom.” 104 Welker, “Boys Love (Yaoi) Manga.” 105 Santos, “Disrupting Centers.” 106 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 71–2. 107 Pagliassotti, “GloBLisation.” 108 Kwon, Straight Korean, 43. 109 Kwon, Straight Korean, 44. 110 Kwon, Straight Korean, 48–9. 69 70 71 72

Notes

191

111 Kwon, Straight Korean, 43. 112 Kwon, Straight Korean, 44–5. 113 See Kwon, “Queering Stars.” 114 Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 102–3. 115 Keenapan, “Japanese ‘Boys Love’.” 116 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 117 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 118 Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgō.” 119 As of January 2020, the online novel had been read by 1.3 million registered readers on the popular portal site Dek-D. See https://my.dek-d.com/em_oh/writer/view. php?id=436675 (accessed January 4, 2020). 120 Harrison, Sinnott, and Fuhrmann, “SOJOURN Symposium,” 181. 121 Jackson, “South East Asian.” 122 Jackson, “Space, Theory, and Hegemony,” 5. 123 Chen, Asia as Method, x. 124 Winter, “Cultural Studies,” 247. 125 Chen, Asia as Method, 212. 126 Chen, Asia as Method, 212. 127 See Jackson, “An Explosion”; Jackson “Space, Theory, and Hegemony”; Jackson “Queer Bangkok.” 128 Lim, “Glocalqueering.” 129 Lim, “Glocalqueering,” 404. 130 Martin, et al., “Introduction,” 3. 131 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 13. 132 See Baudinette, Regimes of Desire. 133 I have reading fluency in Chinese and Japanese, which I draw upon to augment my English-language observations of Thai BL. 134 I particularly wish to acknowledge the assistance of my colleagues Chavalin Svetanant, Poowin Bunyavejchewin, Asawin Nedpogaeo, Rawin Rangsiyawaranon. Kwannie Krairit, Natthaya Parinyanat, Weerayut Singtee, and Wanchana Tongkhampao. Without these colleagues’ Thai-language assistance, this book would not have been possible. 135 Chen, Asia as Method, 213. 136 Cristofari and Guitton, “Aca-fans,” 714. 137 Mori, “Ossanzu Rabu.” 138 See Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings.” 139 Schein, “Homeland Beauty,” 205. 140 Due to the intermediate nature of my Thai proficiency, interviews with Thai fans were primarily conducted in English or (occasionally) Japanese. To build rapport, however, I would try my best to use Thai whenever possible. In the Philippines, English is an official language and all my interlocutors were highly fluent. Interviews with Japanese fans were conducted in Japanese. 141 See Boellstorff, et al., Ethnography and Virtual Worlds. 142 For an extended discussion of the necessity for reflexivity in contemporary ethnographic practice, see Shah, “Ethnography?.” 143 Cristofari and Guitton, “Aca-fans,” 714. 144 Cristofari and Guitton, “Aca-fans,” 714. 145 Cristofari and Guitton, “Aca-fans,” 715.

192

Notes

146 Cristofari and Guitton, “Aca-fans,” 715. 147 Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 32. 148 Sandvoss, Fans, 13. 149 See Brennan, “Introduction.”

Chapter 1 1

Double O (@MoonLightsAum), Twitter post, December 29, 2019, 1:38am. Available at: https://twitter.com/MoonLightsAum/status/1210933052743942145?s=20. 2 See ‘Twitter Trends In Thailand’, December 28, 2019. https://getdaytrends.com/ thailand/2019-12-28/17/. 3 See “[ENG SUB] Dark Blue Kiss Jup Sut-thai Phuea Nai Khon Diao | EP.12 [1/4]|,” YouTube video, 9:19, GMMTV, December 29, 2019, https://youtu.be/ DnE3EWDuUsA. 4 GMMTV (@GMMTV), Twitter post, December 29, 2019, 2.31am. Available at: https://twitter.com/GMMTV/status/1210946492040482816. 5 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 13. 6 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxiii. 7 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 104–10. 8 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 108. 9 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 53. 10 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 54. 11 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 67–8. 12 Toyoshima, “Longing for Japan,” 263; 270. 13 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 69. 14 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 75. 15 Toyoshima, “Longing for Japan,” 277. 16 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 17 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 18 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 131–2; King, Reading Bangkok, 94–9. 19 Keenapan, “Japanese ‘Boys Love’.” 20 Keenapan, “Japanese ‘Boys Love’.” 21 See Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love”; Keenapan, “Japanese ‘Boys Love’.” 22 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 23 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 24 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 106. 25 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 26 During the 1990s, the use of online forums was often restricted to upper-class households. Via interviews with first generation BL manga fans in Thailand, journalist Mori Mayumi revealed that penfriend networks facilitated by manga magazines helped spread Japanese BL fandom throughout the poorer provinces. See Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” 27 Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” 28 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 29 Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” 30 See Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 31 Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.”

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Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 73. Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 73. Vichayawannakul, “Phu-ying.” Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 72. Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’,” 198. Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” Prasannam, “Phap fan.” Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” My translation. Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 99. Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’,” 194. Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” Fujimoto, “The Evolution of BL,” 79. Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’,” 198. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for providing detailed information concerning the etymology of this significant term within BL fandom culture. 51 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 52 Galbraith, Otaku, 81. 53 See Galbraith, “Moe Talk.” 54 Galbraith, Otaku, 82. 55 Galbraith, Otaku, 80. 56 Bunyavejchewin, “Japanese Boys Love.” 57 Poowin Bunyavejchewin, personal communication, November 8, 2019. 58 Ünaldi rightly points out that Poj Arnon’s Bangkok Love Story predated Love of Siam by two months but has largely been forgotten due to its poor reception with audiences. See Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 75. 59 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 87. 60 See “Thai Box Office Weekends for 2007,” Box Office Mojo, https://www. boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/2007/?area=TH (accessed December 5, 2022). 61 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 87. 62 See Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 77. 63 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 88. 64 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 88. 65 See “Love of Siam—Trailer,” YouTube video, 3:14, tematicadvdperu, February 9, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4TMGrhLVfk. 66 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 67 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 68 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 87. 69 Rithdee, “Love, Actually.” 70 See Tirapalika, “Rak haeng Sayam.” 71 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 72 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 73 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 97. 74 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 97–8. 75 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 98. 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

194

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76 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate”; Mahavongtrakul, “Blossoming Boyhood Love.” 77 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 77; Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 87. 78 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 77; Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 88. 79 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate”; Rithdee, “Love, actually.” 80 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 81 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 82 Chookiat Sakveerakul, personal communication, February 10, 2020. 83 Chookiat Sakveerakul, personal communication, February 10, 2020. 84 Chookiat Sakveerakul, personal communication, February 10, 2020. 85 Saeng-Aroon, “Love in a Hot Climate.” 86 Mahavongtrakul, “Blossoming Boyhood Love.” 87 Kwon, Straight Korean, 97–8. 88 See “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale),” YouTube video, 42:02, Kuda Lakorn, September 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HPzBjzkodvo. 89 Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, February 13, 2020. 90 Asawin Nedpogaeo, personal communication, November 29, 2019. 91 “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 92 Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 80. 93 See Mori, “Ossanzu Rabu.” Further, there was also a shift towards exploring the lives of the urban poor and the members of Thailand’s queer communities in lakhorn at this time. See Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 81. 94 “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 95 James, “Boys in Love.” 96 James, “Boys in Love.” 97 Many of the characters in the novel are specifically identified as Sino-Thai and a Eurasian lead such as Love of Siam’s Mario Maurer would have been inappropriate. 98 “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 99 “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 100 See Brown, “The Politics of Soaps.” 101 Farmer, “Battling Angels,” 80. 102 See Fiske, Television Culture, 179–80. 103 James, “Boys in Love.” 104 James, “Boys in Love.” 105 Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 99. 106 James, “Boys in Love.” 107 James, “Boys in Love.” 108 James, “Boys in Love.” 109 Historically emerging out of anime fandom in the late 1980s, fan-subbing refers to the practice whereby fans produce unofficial subtitles for a non-licensed work. See Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez, “Fansubs.” 110 See Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings.” 111 See “Thai BL dramas,” MyDramaList (November 26, 2017; updated February 14, 2020). Available at: https://mydramalist.com/discussions/thai-dramas-lakornsmovies/31270-thai-bl-dramas (accessed February 14, 2020). 112 Other content which is typically censored—either through outright omission or the blurring of content in scenes—include negative depictions of Buddhism or the

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monarchy, gambling, under-age drinking and smoking, and violence (within certain contexts). See Hunt, Thai Cinema Uncensored, 2–3. 113 For a detailed discussion of censorship in Thailand, see Hunt, Thai Cinema Uncensored. 114 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 65. 115 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 4. 116 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 61. 117 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 72. 118 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 61. 119 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 67. 120 Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’,a 200. 121 See LINE Insights, Y-Economy Study, 12; and “Kap-tan Ma Aeng Wan-wan Kon Walentai Phap Khu Krist-Singto Dit The Ron-raeng,” DaraDaily News (February 13, 2020). Available at: https://www.daradaily.com/news/88404/read (accessed February 14, 2020). 122 Due to the novel’s online popularity, it was subsequently published by Ever Y as a physical book just prior to its adaption for television. See Mori, “Nichi-Kan, tai de yūgo.” 123 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 73. 124 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 125 Incredibly violent and awash with ritualized humiliation, in the past the SOTUS system has led to student deaths, prompting government intervention. See Overland, “Thai Government Wants to Ban Hazing.” 126 See “Sotus and Sotus S Filming Locations,” WishyWashy Yeoja (March 8, 2018). Available at: https://wishywashyyeoja.blogspot.com/2018/03/sotus-s-filminglocations.html (accessed February 14, 2020). 127 See “[ENG SUB] ½ Singto Prachaya Born to be Sup’Tar,” YouTube video, 23:02, LIONSUB, January 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT3cg1R_WXc. 128 See “Krist-Singto Dang Klai Kham Prathet Kwa Recommendation Artist Award 2017,” Siam Dara (April 19, 2017). Available at: https://www.dailynews.co.th/ entertainment/614855 (accessed February 14, 2020). 129 LINE Insights, Y-Economy Report, 12. 130 See “KAZZAwards2017,” Kazz E-Magazine (January 26, 2017). Available at: https:// kazz-magazine.com/7483-2/ (accessed February 14, 2020). 131 See Attitude Thailand, Issue 69 (November 2016). 132 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 74. 133 LINE Insights, Y-Economy Report, 12. 134 “KAZZAwards2018,” Kazz E-Magazine (February 20, 2017). Available at: https:// kazz-magazine.com/19263-12/ (accessed February 14, 2020). 135 See “Nap Toi Lang Don-raek Sotus S The Series Krist-Singto San Dor Khwam Fin,N Daily News (December 9, 2017). Available at: https://www.dailynews.co.th/ entertainment/614855 (accessed February 14, 2020). 136 See “My Baby Bright (2018),” MyDramaList (no date). Available at: https:// mydramalist.com/28950-my-baby-bright (accessed February 16, 2020). 137 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 81. 138 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 80–1. 139 Asuncion, “In Focus.” 140 In this way, GMM is mirroring a similar phenomenon that has occurred in South Korea. See Kwon, Straight Korean, 167.

196

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141 Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, February 18, 2020. 142 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 61. 143 “Ap-daet Khwam Khuep Na Duean Kiao Duean Si San Roe Lun Nak-sae-daeng Nam Kham-baek,” Sanook (October 16, 2017). Available at: https://www.sanook.com/ movie/72713/ (accessed February 19, 2020). 144 ABS-CBN Lifestyle Team, “Hot Stuff.” 145 Watson, “Boys Love.” 146 See Jinloe Media Works, “About Us.” 147 See Yang and Xu, “Chinese Danmei Fandom.” 148 See Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 171–3. 149 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 172. 150 Khannita J., “Khwa-ja Dai Pen ‘Bang-oen Rak’.” 151 Fabella, “Thai Stars.” 152 Sasukjit, “Phrakatpon 15 Rang.” 153 See “Boet por si-ri mai pi 2020 korng GMMTV tang si-ri-wai,” The Standard (October 16, 2019). Available at: https://thestandard.co/gmmtv-2020-new-next/ (accessed February 14, 2022). 154 See De Guzman, “Boys’ Love.” 155 De Guzman, “Boys’ Love.” 156 LINE Insights, Y-Economy Report, 12. 157 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 4. 158 Townsend, “Prisoner of Love,” 581. 159 Kwon, Straight Korean, 167–8. 160 See Townsend, “Prisoner of Love.” 161 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 77. 162 Kwon, Straight Korean, 168. 163 Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 101–7. 164 Sasukjit, “Phrakatpon 15 Rang.”

Chapter 2 Okada “Shingo ryūkōgo,” 271. See “[Official] Love by Chance | EP.7 [2/4],” YouTube video, 8:30, Studio Wabi Sabi, October 15, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLN3cyKdSSw. 3 See “[Official] Love by Chance | EP.7 [2/4].” 4 See Tiku-gamisama, “TikTok de kabe-don.” 5 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 127–8. 6 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 71–2. 7 Prough, Straight from the Heart, 1–2. 8 Prough, Straight from the Heart, 2. 9 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 70. 10 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 71. 11 See Regis, A Natural History, 30. 12 Regis, A Natural History, 19. 13 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, 26. 14 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 71. 15 For a detailed discussion of such sexually explicit “hard BL” which is regrettably beyond the scope of this book, see Mori, Onna wa poruno o yomu, 152–78. 16 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 71. 1 2

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17 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 70–1. 18 See Ishida, “Representational Appropriation.” 19 See Fujimoto, “The Evolution of BL,” 79. 20 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 24. 21 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 29. 22 McLelland, Male Homosexuality, 70. 23 McLelland, Male Homosexuality, 71. 24 Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 101. 25 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 66. 26 Ishida, “Representational Appropriation,” 221. 27 See Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 158–62. 28 McLelland and Welker, “An Introduction,” 10. 29 Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 158. 30 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 70. 31 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 71. 32 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 103–4. 33 The tendency for seme to be sexually voracious and lacking in self-restraint speaks to dominant Japanese ideologies of masculinity that emphasize men’s inability to control their sexual desires. See Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 19–20. 34 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 70. 35 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 71. 36 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 77. 37 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 127–8. 38 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 25. 39 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 25. 40 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 71. 41 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 127. 42 Fushimi, Seiyoku mondai, 71–2. 43 Fushini, Seiyoku mondai, 68. 44 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 128. 45 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 25. 46 Ishida, “Representational Appropriation,” 221. 47 Prough, Straight from the Heart, 128. 48 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 136. 49 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 137–8. 50 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 137. 51 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 128. 52 Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 128. 53 See Santos, “Bitches of Boys Love.” 54 The term riba derives from Japanese gay slang for a man who is “versatile.” See Nishimura, BL karuchā-ron, 133–4. 55 Aoyama, “BL (Boys’ Love) Literacy”, 66. 56 Aoyama, “BL (Boys’ Love) Literacy”, 66. 57 Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 155. 58 Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 154–5. 59 Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 158–9. 60 Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 158. 61 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 71–2. 62 Farmer, “Loves of Siam,” 88. 63 Townsend, “Prisoner of Love,” 580–1.

198

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64 Ishida, “Representational Appropriation,” 221. 65 See “[ENG Sub] Love Sick The Series (Uncut) S1E01,” YouTube video, 37:36, Kuda Lakorn, July 25, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCP3bwe00Gc. 66 Townsend, “Prisoner of Love,” 579. 67 See “[ENG Sub] Love Sick The Series (Uncut) S1E01.” 68 Ünaldi, “Back in the Spotlight,” 65. 69 See “[ENG Sub] Love Sick The Series (Uncut) S1E03,” YouTube video, 38:44, Kuda Lakorn, July 27, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1sQllqgd8M. 70 See “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 71 “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 72 “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series S1E12 (Season Finale).” 73 See James, “Boys in Love.” 74 Chan, “A Heteropatriarchy,” 85. 75 See “[ENG SUB] Love Sick The Series (Uncut) S1E02,” YouTube video, 39:01, Kuda Lakorn, July 26, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OcbOpvNF1w. 76 Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 155. 77 See “WHY R U The Series | Phror Rak Chai Pao [OFFICIAL TEASER],” YouTube Video, 3:55, WHYRU Channel, September 13, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=c9oDYxdSS_4. 78 Fiske, Television Culture, 168–78. 79 Fiske, Television Culture, 168. 80 Fan, “The Poetics of Addiction,” 36. 81 Fan, “Poetics of Addiction,” 40–1. 82 Fan, “Poetics of Addiction,” 37. 83 See Galbraith, “Moe Talk,” 158–9. 84 See “[ENG Sub] Love Sick The Series (Uncut) S1E03.” 85 Poowin Bunyavejchewin, personal communication, November 8, 2019; Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, February 18, 2020. 86 Peter Jackson, personal email communication, November 12, 2018. 87 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 71. 88 See “[Eng Sub] SOTUS The Series Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Neung | EP.8 [3/4],” YouTube video, 10:14, GMMTV, December 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oHQISaAJl8k. 89 See “Enemies to Lovers,” Fanlore Wiki (no date). Available at: https://fanlore.org/ wiki/Enemies_to_Lovers (accessed March 2, 2020). 90 While Kongpob literally threatens to make Arthit his “wife” (tham mia), a translation that replicates the force of the Thai idiom would be “I just make you my bitch.” 91 See “[Eng Sub] SOTUS The Series Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng | EP.1 [3/4],” YouTube video, 7:35, GMMTV, September 20, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8qlm2E0FKvw&t=1s. 92 Indeed, the phrase “tham mia” is frequently deployed in Thai BL series in both derogatory and loving ways, always within the context of the phra-ek asserting their masculinity over the nai-ek. This tendency has been criticized by gay male creatives active in the industry and is increasingly out of vogue. 93 See Satha-anand, Kham, 120. 94 See “[Eng Sub] SOTUS The Series Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng | EP.10 [2/4],” YouTube video, 8:07, GMMTV, December 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1q-c-W3v2A8.

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95 See “[Eng Sub] SOTUS The Series Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng | EP.10 [3/4],” YouTube video, 9:49, GMMTV, December 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=imepGkCzSv8. 96 See “[Eng Sub] SOTUS The Series Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng | EP.13 [3/4],” YouTube video, 9:04, GMMTV, January 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VHbB-xW9AvE. 97 Galbraith, Otaku, 218. 98 See Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 50–2. 99 Kwon, Straight Korean, 48–9. 100 See Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’,” 194. 101 See “[Official] Love by Chance | EP.7 [2/4].” 102 See “[Official] Love by Chance | EP.9 [3/4],” YouTube video, 10:51, Studio Wabi Sabi, October 31, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eq02JnEKpA. 103 See “[Eng Sub] SOTUS The Series Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng | EP.14 [3/4],” YouTube video, 13: 46, GMMTV, January 24, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NJcvTnsZQBw. 104 Ying-Kit Chan argues that Pete’s potential challenge to heteronormativity is partially mitigated by his alignment with representational strategies that emphasize his status as a member of the wealthy upper class. See Chan, “A Heteropatriarchy,” 86. 105 See “[Official] Love by Chance | EP.14 (Season Finale) [2/4],” YouTube video, 11:38, Studio Wabi Sabi, December 1, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YzSpUInQhkk&. 106 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 82. 107 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 83. 108 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 86. 109 Mori, Onna wa, 113–14. 110 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 84–5. 111 Townsend, “Prisoner of Love,” 581. 112 See “The Effect Lok Orn Rai | EP. 2 [5/5] (Ton Wan),” Line TV video, 10:57, JakJai Production, October 19, 2019, https://tv.line.me/embed/10462132. 113 See Psycho Milk (@psycho_milk), Twitter post, 24 October, 2019, 4.19pm. Available at: https://twitter.com/psycho_milk/status/1187237175617736704?s=20. 114 See “The Effect Lork On Rai | EP. 2 [5/5] (Ton Wan).” 115 See “The Effect Lok On Rai | EP. 2 [5/5] (Ton Wan).” 116 Mori, Onna wa, 113. 117 I note that this fan consented to have this experience shared in this book and that I followed my institution’s guidelines in offering them counselling support. 118 See “The Effect Lork On Rai | EP. 3 [4/5] (Ton Wan),” Line TV video, 14:55, JakJai Production, October 26, 2019, https://tv.line.me/embed/10581024.

Chapter 3 1 2

See “Rak Lap Kap OffGun Season 2 Boet Hong Non Sot Sot Ti Ma Prom Kap Fan Request Jak Babii,” YouTube video, 8:30, GMMTV, December 10, 2019, https://youtu. be/DyS1pcADMWM. For fans, this positioning of Gun as the senior produces immense fin since in real life, Off is the older member of the couple.

200 3

Notes

This type of fanfiction is commonly referred to as a “chatfic” and is typically posted on social media. See “Chatfic,” Fanlore Wiki (no date). Available at: https://fanlore. org/wiki/Chatfic (accessed June 21, 2021). 4 In this extract, I place angle brackets around instances of dialogue where Off and Gun “break” character and comment on their reading of the fanfiction. Square brackets are used to indicate behaviors or to describe how the performers speak. Text presented without parentheses represent when Off and Gun read from the script. 5 Gun expressed some amusement over the use of the term nai as this term of address is typically used when addressing one’s social superior, such as one’s boss in the workplace. 6 See Galbraith, Otaku, 218. 7 Since the writing of this chapter, GMM has created a number of other khu jin, with an additional eight couples joining OffGun, TayNew, and BrightWin as part of GMM’s promotional strategies in late 2022. Unfortunately, in-depth discussion of these other couples is beyond the scope of this book. 8 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 2. 9 Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62. 10 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 76. 11 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 76–8. 12 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 120. 13 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 121. 14 For the Japanese context, see Karlin, “Through a Looking Glass.” For the South Korean context, see Maliangkay, “Catering to the Female Gaze.” 15 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 121. 16 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 120–1. 17 Barmé, Man, Woman, 4. 18 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 28. 19 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 28. 20 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 15. 21 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 28. 22 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 43. 23 In their report on a survey of fans of BL actors, LINE Insight notes that all but New sit within the top ten most popular idols active in the Thai BL industry. See LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 12. 24 See Glasspool, “From Boys Next”; Kwon, Straight Korean; and Zhou, “From Online BL Fandom.” 25 Kwon, “The Past, the Present,” 96. 26 Nagaike, “Johnny’s Idols,” 106–7. 27 Nagaike, “Johnny’s Idols,” 107. 28 Elfving-Hwang, “K-Pop Idols,” 195. 29 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 125; Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 102. 30 See Chin and Morimoto, “Towards a Theory,” 95. 31 Kwon, “The Past, the Present,” 105. 32 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 126; Kwon, Straight Korean, 48. 33 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 125. 34 Kwon, Straight Korean, 168. 35 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 124. 36 Elfving-Hwang, “K-Pop Idols,” 194. 37 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 126.

Notes 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

201

Nagaike, “Johnny’s Idols,” 108–9. Santos, “Queer Affective Literacies,” 82–3. Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 126; Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 103. Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 124; Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 103. Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 104. Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 126. See Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘Fan’ no ‘Fan’” and Prasannam, “Phap Fan.” GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 4. I present these stages as if they are chronological but I note that many stages in fact overlap and there is considerable variation in how specific khu jin move through the BL Machine. 47 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 48 See “Bright Vachirawit Chivaaree,” MyDramaList (no date). Available at: https:// mydramalist.com/people/21997-vachirawit-chivaaree (accessed June 25, 2021). 49 Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘Fan’ no ‘Fan’,” 194. 50 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 63–4. 51 Indigo Girl, “Phra-wat Tay Tawan.” 52 See “[Eng Sub] 1/2 Singto Prachaya: Born to Be Sup’Tar,” YouTube video, 23:02, LIONSUB, January 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT3cg1R_WXc&ab_ channel=LIONSUB. 53 GMMTV, Kissing 3, 6. 54 Elfving-Hwang, “K-Pop Idols,” 194. 55 An interesting reflection on Krist and Singto’s experiences with this process can be found in GMM, Kissing 3. 56 GMM, Kissing 3, 34–8; and GMMTV, Stay New, 37–8. 57 Elfving-Hwang, “K-Pop Idols,” 196. 58 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 125. 59 “Nap Toi Lang Don-raek Sotus S The Series Krist-Singto San Dor Khwam Fin,” Daily News (December 9, 2017). Available at: https://www.dailynews.co.th/ entertainment/614855 (accessed February 14, 2020). 60 GMM, Kissing 3, 34; and GMM, Stay New, 38. 61 See “(Eng Sub) NEW & NEXT 2020: 2GETHER THE SERIES INTERVIEW,” YouTube video, 9:05, Gifted Garden, February 25, 2020. Available at: https://youtu. be/_FesflgicNs. 62 See “(Eng Sub) Tay Tawan Interview about TayNew Hashtag of the Year,” YouTube video, 3:49, KWAN, December 28, 2018, https://youtu.be/T2h5tXxErGk. 63 Indigo Girl, “Phra-wat Tay Tawan.” 64 Guzman, “Boys’ Love”. 65 Hackley and Hackley, “Television Product Placement,” 100. 66 See “[Eng Sub] Phror Rao Ku Kan 2gether The Series | EP.10 [1/4],” YouTube video, 19:29, GMMTV, April 25, 2020, https://youtu.be/1TxmnWod1_o. 67 In their work on J-pop idols, Jason Karlin notes that fans are inculcated to believe that purchasing products endorsed by idols will increase the idols’ reputation and hence career success. My Thai fan interlocutors appear to share similar beliefs. See Karlin, “Through a Looking Glass.” 68 See “Oishi Summer Trip 2019 @ Okinawa O Fun & Colorful Party,” YouTube video, 1:29:52, chorochaa, September 16, 2019, https://youtu.be/xm6r8UBlg3o. 69 See Karlin, “Through a Looking Glass.” 70 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 79.

202

Notes

71 Elfving-Hwang, “K-Pop Idols,” 195; Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 9. 72 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 125; Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 103. 73 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 74 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 76. 75 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 4. 76 Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 77 Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 78 Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 79 Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 80 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 3. 81 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 15. 82 See Svetanant, Ballsun-Stanton, and Rutherford, “Emotional Engagement in Thai.” 83 Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 84 Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 85 Lactasoy 力大狮, Weibo post, March 14, 2021, 12:00. Available at: https://weibo. com/6960251486/K68jhbEVH?from=page_1006066960251486_profile&wvr=6&mo d=weibotime&type=comment#_rnd1624840526123. 86 See Dunkin’ Thai (@dunkinthai), Instagram post, August 13, 2020. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDzAEV6gqSH/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link. 87 See Dior Official (@dior), Instagram post, June 25, 2021. Available at: https://www. instagram.com/p/CQi2NPCIRah/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link. 88 Kirsch, “Next-Door Divas,” 75. 89 Kirsch, “Next-Door Divas,” 84. 90 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 54. 91 In her sociological study of the commoditization of romance in late capitalist America, Illouz particularly singles out the freedom of the automobile as central to the emergence of modern dating practices. See Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 56–9. 92 Glasspool, “From Boys Next,” 125; Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 102. 93 See “Rak Lap Kap OffGun EP. 9 [Last Episode] Rak Lap OUTSIDE Kap TayNew,” YouTube Video, 28:38, GMMTV, July 12, 2018. Available at: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=IzJF39EPphQ&ab_channel=GMMTV. 94 See “Kin Kan Kap TayNew | EP.3 Is Sweeter than Dessert … [Eng Sub],” YouTube video, 20:15, GMMTV, January 31, 2019. Available at: https://youtu.be/uvc9H-LzBgk. 95 Honda, Ibunka toshite, 177–8. 96 Santos, “Bitches of Boys Love,” 283. 97 See “Kin Kan Kap TayNew.” 98 Illouz, Consuming Utopia the Romantic, 13. 99 Illouz, Consuming Utopia the Romantic, 43. 100 See “Khaeng Thi Hork Ki Baep BrightWin | Bright—Win Inbox EP.9 | Season finale [Eng Sub],” YouTube Video, 27:21, GMMTV, November 25, 2020, https://youtu.be/ Dg0xl-8XyDI. 101 See “Khaeng Thi Hork Ki Baep BrightWin.” 102 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 121. 103 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 48. 104 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 54. 105 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 56. 106 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 77. 107 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 48. 108 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 28.

Notes

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109 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 48. 110 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 15. 111 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 65. 112 See Chasin, Selling Out. 113 For a summary of these debates from the UK context, see Woods and Hardman, “‘It’s Just Absolutely Everywhere’.” 114 Chasin, Selling Out, 184. 115 Brennan, “Introduction,” 1. 116 Ishida, “Representational Appropriation,” 211. 117 Ishida, “Representational Appropriation,” 217. 118 Chasin, Selling Out, 184. 119 Chasin, Selling Out, 184–5. 120 Chasin, Selling Out, 185. 121 Brennan, “Introduction,” 5. 122 These fans are thus similar to Japanese and Chinese gay fans of BL content I have explored in previous scholarship. See Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 101; 205. 123 It is important to reiterate that gay male fans of Thai BL series represent a prominent minority in the fandom, with 21 percent of the respondents to LINE Insights’ survey of BL viewers being gay men. See LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 5. 124 Chen, Asia as Method, 212. 125 Jackson, “Queer Bangkok,” 1. 126 Jackson, “Offending Images,” 221. 127 Jackson, “Offending Images,” 221. 128 Kwon, Straight Korean, 178–9. 129 Kwon, Straight Korean, 178. 130 Kwon, Straight Korean, 179. 131 Santos, “Queer Affective Literacies,” 82–3. 132 Brennan, “Introduction,” 5. 133 Wilson, Intimate Economies, 126–32; Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-FirstCentury,” 37–9. 134 Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century,” 37. 135 See Sinpeng, “Hashtag Activism,” 202. 136 Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century,” 38. 137 Sinpeng, “Hashtag Activism,” 193–4. 138 See มซ (@wixxiws), Twitter post, June 29, 2021, 12:47PM. Available at: https:// twitter.com/wixxiws/status/1409704963610071041. 139 See Tul Pakorn T. 吴旭东 (@tul_pakorn), Instagram post, June 10, 2021. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CP6C8UBgdSz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_ link. 140 See Nadao Bangkok (@nadaobangkok), Twitter post, 29 June, 2021, 12:02AM. Available at: https://twitter.com/NadaoBangkok/status/1409512436739108865 ?s=20. 141 See Tul Pakorn T. 吴旭东 (@tul_pakorn), Instagram post, June 10, 2021. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CP6C8UBgdSz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Chapter 4 1 Illouz, Consuming the Romantic, 15. 2 Chin and Morimoto, “Towards a Theory,” 95.

204

Notes

3 Sandvoss, Fans, 13. 4 Stein, Millennial Fandom, 9. 5 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 2. 6 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18. 7 Sandvoss, Fans, 16. 8 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 8. 9 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 19. 10 Nagaike, “Johnny’s Idols,” 109. 11 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 22. 12 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 22. 13 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 21. 14 Elfving-Hwang, “K-Pop Idols,” 194. 15 Kim, K-Pop Live, 3. 16 See Cho, “3 Ways.” 17 Choi, Gender, Labor, 94–5; Ju, “Premediating a Narrative,” 25. 18 Jenkins, “Interactive Audiences?,” 279–295. 19 Jenkins, “Interactive Audiences?,” 280. 20 See Jin, New Korean Wave. 21 See GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 4–5. 22 While I principally observed Thai BL fandom spaces on Anglophone social media between 2014 and 2017, from 2018 onwards my digital ethnography shifted to observing the Thai-language social media fandom practices which represent the focus of this chapter. 23 See Baym, Tune In, Log On. 24 See Siriyuvasak and Shin, “Asianizing K-pop,” 122. 25 Jin, New Korean Wave; Park and Kawashima, “Wrestling with or Embracing.” 26 Jin, New Korean Wave, 141. 27 Ju, “Premediating a Narrative,” 25. 28 Jin, New Korean Wave, 141. 29 See Hugh McIntrye, “2021 Has Turned Out.” 30 Ju, “Premediating a Narrative,” 26. 31 Epstein, “From South Korea,” 214; Siriyuvasak and Shin, “Asianizing K-pop,” 121. 32 Chang and Park, “The Fandom.” 33 Chang and Park, “The Fandom,” 269. 34 Ueno, “Techno-Orientalism,” 96. 35 Ueno, “Techno-Orientalism,” 97. 36 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 6. 37 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 7. 38 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 6. 39 LINE Insights, The Y-Economy, 7. 40 Jenkins, “Interactive Audiences?,” 280. 41 See Nelson-Field, The Attention Economy, 72–3. 42 See Abidin, “Aren’t These Just Young.” 43 Choi, Gender, Labor, 197. 44 Choi, Gender, Labor, 198. 45 Choi, Gender, Labor, 218. 46 Choi, Gender, Labor, 198. 47 Choi, Gender, Labor, 74–5. 48 Chang and Park, “The Fandom,” 269. 49 Choi, Gender, Labor, 69.

Notes

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50 Cho, “3 Ways.” 51 Chang and Park, “The Fandom,” 261. 52 Choi, Gender, Labor, 110–11. 53 Choi, Gender, Labor, 111. 54 See “‘Mahal Ko Kayo, Kapamilya!’ BrightWin announce fandom name, greet fans in 2Gether: The Series Live PH Mediacon,” ABS-CBN: Entertainment (June 30, 2020). Available at: https://ent.abs-cbn.com/articles-news/mahal-ko-kayo-kapamilyabrightwin-announce-fandom-name-greet-fans-in-2gether-the-series-live-phmediacon-12503 (accessed July 9, 2021). 55 In K-pop fandom, food support refers to the practice of sending boxed lunches, snacks, and beverages to idols and fans at concerts. See Choi, Gender, Labor, 71. 56 While Anglophone fans call such accounts “fan sites,” in Korean they are called hommaseuta, a Konglish contraction of such accounts. Gender, Labor, 230–1. 57 Chang and Park, “The Fandom,” 269. 58 Siriyuvasak and Shin, “Asianizing K-pop,” 121. 59 At the time of Y I Love You 2019, the stars of the 2018 series Cause You’re My Boy (A Thi Khong Phom, “Tee is Mine” in Thai), Frank Thanatsaran Samthonglai and Drake Sattabut Laedeke looked to be on the verge of becoming a Royal Couple. 60 A “light stick” is a piece of official merchandise that fans wave at a K-pop concert to show their support for their favorite group. See Choi, Gender, Labor, 69–70. 61 At a K-pop concert, a “ment” (menteu) is the moment when idols address their audience in a scripted way, typically thanking them for attending and introducing themselves. See Morin, “K-Pop 101.” 62 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 63 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 64 Choi, Gender, Labor, 97. 65 Choi, Gender, Labor, 97. 66 Choi, Gender, Labor, 97. 67 Choi, Gender, Labor, 168; Kwon, “Queering Stars,” 103. 68 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 69 Cho, “3 Ways.” 70 See Daly, “K-Pop Artists Are Pushing.” 71 Prasannam, “The yaoi Phenomenon,” 75. 72 Cho, “3 Ways.” 73 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 4. 74 The use of pre-recorded segments is also typical of ostensibly “live” K-Pop music shows. See Kim, K-Pop Live, 65–75. 75 See Kim, K-Pop Live, 75–91. 76 Kim, K-Pop Live, 81. 77 Kim, K-Pop Live, 79. 78 Kim, K-Pop Live, 76. 79 Kim, K-Pop Live, 89.

Chapter 5 1 2 3

WheninManila, “6 Moons in Manila.” See Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings.” Santos, “Queer Affective Literacies.”

206

Notes

4 Pontillas, et al., “Sana All.” 5 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 104. 6 Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62. 7 Giffen, “The Q Word,” 1. 8 See Altman, Global Sex. 9 See Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society. 10 See Chua and Iwabuchi, “Introduction.” 11 Chua and Iwabuchi, “Introduction,” 2. 12 Chua and Iwabuchi, “Introduction,” 3. 13 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 94–5. 14 Iwabuchi, “De-Westernisation,” 47. 15 Iwabuchi, “De-Westernisation,” 48. 16 Iwabuchi, “De-Westernisation,” 50. 17 Chua and Iwabuchi, “Introduction.” 18 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 181–98. 19 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 193. 20 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 181. 21 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 32. 22 Chua and Iwabuchi, “Introduction,” 1. 23 Kim, K-pop Live, 26. 24 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 170. 25 Jirattikorn, “‘Pirated’ Transnational”; Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas”; Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic.” 26 Jirattikorn, “‘Pirated’ Transnational,” 30. 27 Jirattikorn, “‘Pirated’ Transnational,” 51. 28 Jirattikorn, “‘Pirated’ Transnational,” 32. 29 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas”; Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic.” 30 Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic,” 131. 31 See Chang and Park, “The Fandom.” 32 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 104. 33 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 171. 34 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 178. 35 Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic,” 134. 36 See Chin and Morimoto, “Towards a Theory.” 37 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 171. 38 Chin and Morimoto, “Towards a Theory,” 95. 39 Wilson, “The Role of Affect.” 40 See Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings.” 41 Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic,” 131. 42 See Thai Update, “The Top 25.” 43 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas”; Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic.” 44 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 172. 45 Jirattikorn, “Thai Television Dramas,” 172. 46 Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic,” 130. 47 GMM Grammy, Annual Report 2018, 61. 48 Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, November 11, 2021. 49 Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, November 11, 2021. 50 Jirattikorn, “Between Ironic,” 131. 51 Zhang, The Reception; Limpongsatorn, Fuhua wuzai.

Notes

207

52 Zhang, The Reception, 37; Limpongsatorn, Fuhua wuzai, 60. 53 Limpongsatorn, Fuhua wuzai, 122. 54 Zhang, The Reception,143; Limpongsatorn, Fuhua wuzai, 62. 55 Zhang, The Reception, 37; Limpongsatorn, Fuhua wuzai, 60. 56 Wong, “Towards a Queer Affective,” 509. 57 Wong, “Towards a Queer Affective,” 501. 58 Limpongsatorn, Fuhua wuzai, 60. 59 Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, November 11, 2021. 60 Baudinette, “Aspirations,” 264. 61 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings.” 62 Corrigan, Sociology of Consumption, 87. 63 See Pertierra, “Televisual Experiences of Poverty.” 64 See Tadiar, Fantasy-Production. 65 See Baudinette, “Investigating the Activist.” 66 Baudinette, “Aspirations,” 264. 67 Miyazaki, The Method of Hope, 19. 68 Baudinette, “Investigating the Activist.” 69 Baudinette, “Aspirations,” 264. 70 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 71 See “Mahal Ko Kayo, Kapamilya!.” 72 For a representative example, see Lim, “Staying ‘2gether’ During the Pandemic.” 73 See Santos, “Localising Japanese Popular Culture.” 74 Cañete, Masculinity, Media, 17. 75 Cañete, Masculinity, Media, 18. 76 See Gatchalian, Gameboys, 86. 77 See Sánchez, “Introducing Gameboys.” 78 Gatchalian, Gameboys, 13–14. 79 Gatchalian, Gameboys, 80–1. 80 Gatchalian, Gameboys, 60–1. 81 Gatchalian, Gameboys, 13. 82 Gatchalian, Gameboys, 80.

Chapter 6 Sakaguchi, “Utsukushiki Tai-numa,” 41. Yoshida, “Why So Popular?,” 130. Hori Akiko, personal communication, March 12, 2021. Please note that Hori was discussing other fan and academic commentators as she herself was a new aca-fan of Thai BL as well as a prominent scholar of Japanese BL culture in her own right. 4 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 194. 5 Hori Akiko, personal communication, March 12, 2021. 6 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 54. 7 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization; Otzmagin, “A New Cultural Geography”; Katsumata, “Japanese Popular Culture.” 8 Hori Akiko, personal communication, March 12, 2021. 9 See Park and Kawashima, “Wrestling with or Embracing Digitization.” 10 Mori, “Ossanzu Rabu”; Sakaguchi, “Utsukushiki Tai-numa”.

1 2 3

208

Notes

11 Mori, “Tsundere ari.” 12 Mori Mayumi, personal communication, January 12, 2020. 13 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization; Iwabuchi, “De-westernisation.” 14 Online interviews with Japanese fans were conducted in Japanese and all translations from excerpts presented in this chapter are my own. 15 See Breeze, “Tarnished Stars,” 12. 16 Ueno, “Techno-Orientalism.” 17 Chang and Park, “The Fandom.” 18 Allison, Precarious Japan, 3. 19 Sakaguchi, “Utsukushiki Tai-numa,” 41. 20 Sakaguchi, “Utsukushiki Tai-numa,” 41. 21 Sakaguchi, “Utsukushiki Tai-numa,” 42. 22 Yoshida, “Why So Popular?,” 129. 23 It should be noted, however, that there were also residents of the Tai-numa who happily described themselves as fujoshi and a minority of my interlocutors also viewed the terms Y gāru and fujoshi as interchangeable. 24 Mori Mayumi, personal communication, January 12, 2020. 25 Sakaguchi, “Utsukushiki Tai-numa,” 42. 26 See Baudinette, “Idol Shipping Culture.” 27 Baudinette, “Idol Shipping Culture.” 28 Ishida, “Representational Appropriation,” 221. 29 Thai Channel, “Nihon de ‘Tai-ryū’.” 30 Thai Channel, “Nihon de ‘Tai-ryū’.” 31 See GMMTV, 2gether The Series. 32 See Philipps and Baudinette, “Shin-Ōkubo.” 33 Galbraith, Otaku, 80. 34 Nye, “Soft Power,” 197. 35 Nye, “Soft Power,” 197. 36 Nye, “Soft Power,” 200. 37 McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” 38 Alt, Pure Invention, 11. 39 See Nye and Kim, “Soft Power.” 40 See Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis. 41 See Tadiar, Fantasy-Production. 42 Tadiar, Fantasy-Production. 43 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 71–2. 44 Poowin Bunyavejchewin, personal communication, November 3, 2020. Kwannie Krairit, personal communication, November 18, 2020. 45 See Seaton and Yamamura, “Japanese Popular Culture.” 46 In December 2021, the YouTube archive of this fan meeting was quietly deleted and the fan meeting is no longer archived. 47 See “Amazing Thailand,” KristSingto.com, June 4, 2021, https://kristsingto.com/ amazing-thailand/ (accessed February 11, 2022). 48 See “Charming Chiang Mai with Tay New—Full Ver.-,” YouTube video, Amazing Thailand JP, 10:00, December 24, 2021, https://youtu.be/Xfs12VkzvRI. 49 Galbraith and Karlin, “Introduction,” 2. 50 See Otzmagin, “A Taiwanese Soft Power?.” 51 See Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading.” 52 Jackson, “Offending Images,” 221.

Notes

209

53 See “Amazing Thailand.” 54 As I have written elsewhere, Japanese gay men tend to denigrate BL as inauthentic precisely because it has emerged within young women’s consumer culture and contains representational strategies which conflict with those of the Japanese gay media landscape. See Baudinette, Regimes of Desire, 108–13. 55 Galbraith, Otaku, 81–2. 56 Baudinette, “Idol Shipping Culture.” 57 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 101. 58 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 105. 59 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 107. 60 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 107–8. 61 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 109. 62 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 113. 63 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 103. 64 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization. 65 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 27. 66 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 158. 67 Chin and Morimoto, “Towards a Theory,” 95. 68 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 102. 69 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 111. 70 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 102. 71 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 110. 72 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 113. 73 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 102. 74 See Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 13 as well as the Introduction. 75 Baudinette, “Creative Misreadings,” 114.

Conclusion 1

BL Update (@BLUpdate2022), Twitter post, January 17, 2022, 5:09 pm. Available at: https://twitter.com/BLUPDATE2022/status/1482958347485671428. 2 See Baudinette and Svetanant, “Mobilizing Idol Celebrity.” 3 See “Move Forward Party’s Same-Sex Marriage Bill Stalled, Pending Cabinet Vetting,” Thai PBS World, February 9, 2022. Available at: https://www.thaipbsworld.com/ move-forward-partys-same-sex-marriage-bill-stalled-pending-cabinet-vetting/ (accessed February 12, 2022). 4 See Sinpeng, “Hashtag Activism.” 5 ไอ่เต๊ะๆอะไรนั่น (@OGTNAF), Twitter post, February 9, 2022, 10:10 pm. Available at: https://twitter.com/OGTNAF/status/1491368994334396419. 6 “Move Forward.” 7 “Move Forward.” 8 See “[Eng Sub] NOT ME Kao … Mai Chai Phom | EP.7 [3/4],” YouTube video, 11:02, GMMTV Official, January 31, 2022, https://youtu.be/5wWH1kVctmU. 9 Mizoguchi, BL Shinka-ron, 137–8. 10 This is not to suggest, however, that Japanese fans of BL manga are uninterested in social justice or LGBTQ+ activism, which is certainly not the case. See Baudinette, “Investigating the activist.”

210

Notes

11 See Friedman, “Thai Yuri Novel.” 12 A discussion of yuri media is regrettably beyond the scope of this book. For an accessible introduction, see Erica Friedman, “On Defining yuri.” 13 See not cherry (@cherrysawas), Twitter post, February 2, 2022, 1:45 am. Available at: https://twitter.com/cherrysawas/status/1488524015455117316. 14 See “Here Are the Upcoming Thai Series of GMM TV in 2022,” Thai Update, December 5, 2021. Available at: https://www.thaiupdate.info/gmm-tv-series-2022/. 15 See “‘Gameboys’ Gets International Emmy Nod,” Rappler, September 9, 2021. Available at: https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/series/gameboys-earnsnomination-international-emmy-awards-2021/. 16 Williams, “11 Best BL Dramas of 2021.”

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INDEX Abidin, Crystal 115 ABS-CBN 51, 151 academic fans (aca-fan) 20–1, 112, 168, 207 n.3 adaptation 6, 14–15, 23, 40, 45–6, 48–9, 52, 57, 61–5, 73, 80 Addicted (Shang Yin) (2016) 145 advertising, BL 23, 44, 47, 52, 86, 95–7, 100–2, 104–6, 108, 116, 180 AERA magazine 157, 159–60, 162 affect 21, 35 to consumerism 93 narrative production of 58–61 After School Club 130 aidoru-numa (Japanese idol fandom) 160 AJ Chayapol Jutamat 27 AKB48 110–11 Akimoto Yasushi 110 alpha man hero character (arufaman hīrō kyara) 58–9 Alt, Matt, Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World 166 Amarin Publishing 92 Amazing Thailand with KristSingto (2021) 169–70 Anglophone fandom 14, 23, 42, 45, 76, 103, 119, 139, 147, 163, 179–81, 205 n.56 anime 11–13, 15, 30–1, 35, 137, 148, 151, 163, 165, 174, 194 n.109 anti-identarian and anti-normative 4, 17 Anucha Boonyawatana 187 Anusorn Soisa-ngim 185 Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol 53, 185–7 Aoyama, Tomoko 13, 61 Apichatpong Weerasethakul 10 Arashi 88 Art Pakpoom 185 ArtPop 143 Asahi Shimbun newspaper 157, 159

“Asia as method” approach 5, 16–20, 106, 136, 146, 183 Asian idol celebrities 85 Asianization 147, 149 Asian LGBT media 148 Asian queer cultural studies 16–20, 22, 24, 141, 150, 155, 165 appropriateness 146 transnational (see transnational Asian queer popular culture) Western theory 17 Attitude magazine 46 Au, Alex 7 auto-ethnographic observation 112 Babii fandom 118, 124, 126 Baby Bright 47, 96, 105 Bacteria 187 Bad Buddy (Khae Phuean Khrap Pheuan, “We’re Just Friends, My Friend”) (2021) 182, 187 Bancha Luangakkaratorn 187 Bangkok Love Story (Phuean … Ku Rak Mueng Wa, “Friend … I Love You”) (2007) 10, 193 n.58 Bangkok Post newspaper 37–8 Barazoku magazine 12 Bas Suradej 184 Be a Light magazine 164 Becky Armstrong 181, 187 Bella Swan (Twilight) 68 BenEarth 133–4 bias 163 Big Bang 34 BigHit Entertainment (HYBE) 113–14, 117 Billkin Putthipong Assaratanakul 108, 186 Billy Patchanon 187 bishōnen (beautiful boys) 5, 13, 58–60, 65, 74, 164

224 Bittersweet, SOTUS 45–6, 91, 184 BL fandom 2, 6, 13, 14–15, 20–4, 29–35, 42, 46–8, 51, 53, 56, 69, 107–20, 131, 133, 135, 138, 140–1, 145–8, 150–2, 155, 158–62, 164–6, 168, 188 n.10, 193 n.50, 204 n.22 BL Machine 23–4, 47–8, 50, 52, 85, 87–95, 102, 109, 111, 116–17, 120, 123–4, 126–7, 131, 169, 182 advertising practice 96 ethics of 103–8 promotion process 91 BL Update 179 bootleg comics 30–5 Boys Love (BL, bōizu rabu) 1–2, 4–5, 7, 9, 11–15, 22–4, 27, 31, 34, 36, 188 n.20. See also specific BL series creation of 39–43 decentering 171–7 evolutionary form (shinka-kei) 60, 73, 181 hard 58, 196 n.15 from Japan to world 11–15 mainstream 43–9 matured 23, 43, 50–3, 57 “year of BL” and transnationalization 50–3 Braisier, Benjamin 185 Bright Vachirawit Chiva-aree 51, 186 BrightWin 22, 51, 85, 87, 90, 92–3, 96–7, 100, 102–3, 108–9, 112, 116–18, 120, 126, 128, 131, 135, 139, 151–2, 157, 161, 169, 182, 200 n.7 fan meeting 127 homoerotic intimacy of 109 BrightWin Inbox (2020) 23, 85, 95–8, 100–1, 127 Brokeback Mountain 146 bromances 38, 146 BTS (boyband) 113–15, 117, 132, 148 Bundit Sintanaparadee 186–7 Bunyavejchewin, Poowin 31–2, 34–6, 70, 168 Cagney & Lacey 68 CandyOn 187 Cañete, Reuben Ramas 152 Captain Kongyingyong Chonlathorn 40, 42, 64–5, 184

Index cartoon wai/yaoi 15, 31 Cause You’re My Boy (A Thi Khong Phom, “Tee is Mine”) (2018) 185, 205 n.59 celebrity(ies) 2, 20–1, 29, 35, 40, 44, 81, 91, 107, 112, 145, 180–1. See also specific celebrity advertising campaigns 86 culture 1–2, 4, 6, 11, 14, 19, 24, 28, 81, 84–5, 87, 95, 162–3, 170, 173 endorsement 86, 93, 101 fandom and 4–6, 17, 22, 24, 28, 53 management 2, 85, 87, 108 re-imagining 42 social media engagement 18 Chang, WoongJo 113, 117 Chan, Ying-Kit 65, 199 n.104 Charming Chiang Mai with TayNew (2021) 169–70 Chasin, Alexandra 104 chatfic 200 n.3 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 16, 18 Cherry Magic (2020) 172, 174 Chiffon_cake 184–5 Chin, Bertha 87, 176 Chinese money 142–7 Choi, Stephanie 116, 124 Chua Beng Huat 137 Chuealaem, Lilli, “Loek Khui Thang Amphoe Thoe Khon Diao” (I’ll Stop Flirting Around the District Just for You) 94 “Chula Cute Boy” Facebook page 90 classic Western romance fiction 58 Comic Market (Komiketto) 12 commoditization of romance 58, 86, 95–103, 202 n.91 “Completely Immersed in the Beautiful Thai Swamp: BL Series Are Super Popular” (Utsushiki Tai-numa ni doppuri: BL dorama ga daininki) 157 consumer culture 1–2, 4–5, 23–4, 86–8, 96, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 136–7, 142, 159, 164–6, 176, 188 n.10, 209 n.54 cultural proximity 139 image characters 85 contents tourism 168

Index Cool Japan scheme 12 Copter Panuwat 184 COVID-19 pandemic 6, 51, 119, 126–7, 129, 135, 139, 151–3, 168 Japanese fans of Thai BL during 159–65 and societal homophobia 177 creative misreading 141, 175–7 Cristofari, Cécile 20 cultural fragrance 140 cultural thesis 137, 139–40, 147, 155 danmei 14, 143–6, 190 n.103 Darin 187 Dark Blue Kiss (Jup Sut-thai Phuea Nai Khon Diao, “A Final Kiss Just for You”) (2019) 27, 50–1, 53, 75, 80, 104, 144–5, 154, 185 Kao 27–8, 50, 144 Non 27 Pete 27–8, 50, 144 DeeHup House 143, 187 Dek-D (website) 1, 15, 32, 39 Deleuze, Gilles 188 n.12 deredere 73 Devil Planoy 181 Dew, Let’s Go Together/Dew Pai Duay Kan Na (2019) 38 digital broadcast and streaming services 43 digital ethnography 3, 19, 29, 85, 103, 112, 135, 143, 204 n.22 digital tribes 113, 117–18, 120, 160 dōjinshi 12 Dome Woranart 185 DoMunDi 68, 187 Drake Sattabut Laedeke 185, 205 n.59 dramas 6, 12, 23, 30, 40, 96, 137, 174 Dunkin’ Donuts 96 Earth Katsamonnat 185 EarthMix 107, 152, 158, 182 EarthMix Space (2021) 182 Earth Pirapat 187 Earth Teerapat 185 Echo 32 economic exploitation 24, 103–4 targeted marketing 117

225

The Effect (The Effect Lok Orn Rai, “The Effects of an Evil World”) (2019) 23, 57, 185 Bright 79 de-romanticizing sexual violence 76–81 Keng 77–9 Pramote 79–80 Shin 77–9 Elfving-Hwang, Joanna 111 ethnographic methodology 17 ethnographic research 3, 6, 19, 112, 130–1, 135, 138, 140–2, 159, 162, 175, 177 Eurocentrism 17 Ever Y 33, 45–6, 50, 89, 195 n.122 Everything’s BL 175 EXO (K-pop boy group) 114 Facebook 19, 39, 43, 83, 89–90, 112, 115, 119, 122, 135, 139, 143, 175, 179 fan affect 96 fan art 15, 21, 38, 88, 115 fan cafés 118 fan club 21, 32, 117, 119, 121, 143, 161 fanfiction 15, 21, 34, 38, 71, 83–4, 88–9, 115, 153–4, 200 nn.3–4 fan service 15, 21, 73, 122–3 fan sites 119, 205 n.56 fan studies 5, 20–2, 176 fan-subbing 42, 194 n.109 fantasy-delivery devices 166 fantasy-production 166 fan tribe 21, 113 Fan, Victor 68 Farmer, Brett 8, 37 female masculinity 11, 190 n.72 femininity 11, 60 feminized spectatorship 68 Filipino fans 138 Queer Asian knowledge and Thai BL 147–52 fin 21, 38, 47, 55, 57, 61, 69–70, 72–3, 75–7, 79–80, 84–6, 90–3, 95, 97, 99–100, 102, 109, 112–13, 115, 120–3, 126, 129, 135, 183, 199 n.2 fan affect of 105, 109 feelings of 30–5, 66, 96 to leisure activities 102

226

Index

queer affect of 66, 81, 86, 93–4, 96, 102, 105, 108, 181 revolutionizing through virtual intimacy 126–32 TayNew as 100 First Conference on Queer Sexualities (Bangkok) 17 Fiske, John 68 Foreign Policy magazine 165 Four Royal Couples 23–4, 51, 85, 92–4, 101, 105, 109, 116, 118–19, 131, 166, 180 Frank Thanatsaran Samthonglai 185, 205 n.59 Freen Sarocha Chankimha 181, 187 Friend Ship with KristSingto (2019–20) 23, 85, 95–8, 101 Fuhrmann, Arnika 10 Ghostly Desires 16 Fujimoto Yukari 12 fujoshi (rotten women) 22, 56, 59, 61, 134, 159, 162, 164, 208 n.23 Full House 139 Fushimi Noriaki 60 Galbraith, Patrick W. 35, 61, 66, 85, 110, 174 Gameboys (2020) 152–4, 177, 182 Gap Yuri The Series (Thritsadi Si-chompu, “Pink Theory”) (2022) 181–2, 187 gay 9–10, 13, 22, 31, 34, 37, 44, 50–3, 59, 63, 75, 103, 105, 143–6, 175, 209 n.54 culture 13, 148, 172 identity politics 37 male communities 7 male culture 4, 11, 35 male market 46 paradise 7 Gaya Sa Pelikula (Like in the Movies) (2020) 152–5, 177 gender 59, 75 ambiguity 13 cinematic regime of representations 9 ideologies 1, 8, 60 and sexuality 3–5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 22, 53, 69, 136 Glasspool, Lucy 88

Global Live Fan Meetings (2020) 24, 109, 112, 126–32, 158 Global Live Fan Meeting with BrightWin 110 Global Live Fan Meeting with TayNew 129–30 global queering 4–5, 10, 17 Globe Studios 152 Globe Telecom’s campaign 152 glocalization 14, 57, 62–3, 65, 80, 111, 136, 166, 176 GMM25 49 GMM Grammy 23–4, 27, 42–53, 71, 75, 80, 83, 85–6, 109, 112, 116, 120, 134, 142, 151, 153, 157, 164, 166, 169, 180, 182, 184–7, 195 n.140, 200 n.7 BL Machine 23–4, 47–8, 50, 52, 85, 87–95, 96, 102–9, 111, 116–17, 120, 123–4, 126–7, 131, 169, 182 “Creative Space” 128 Grammy’s 2018 Annual Report 95 hirahira techniques 99, 101, 169 mimicking practices 48, 90, 96 production practices 85, 127 Tay 90 GMM New and Next 2020 event 91 GMMTV 92, 95, 187 God Ittiphat 184 good fandom 116–17 GOT7 (K-pop boy group) 114, 141 “GoThaiBeFree” campaign 7 Guattari, Félix 188 n.12 Guitton, Matthieu J. 20 Gulf Kanawut Traipipattanapong 50, 186 Gun Attaphan Poonsawas 44, 184–7 Hackley, Amy Rungpaka 92 Hackley, Chris 92 Hagio Moto 12 Tōma no Shinzō (Heart of Thomas) 59 Halberstam, Jack 17, 29, 190 n.72 Halperin, David 85, 136 Han Media Culture Co., Ltd. 142 hard power 165–6 Harlequin romance 58 Harrison, Rachel 16 hashtags 27, 51, 92, 107, 112, 115–16, 118, 180

Index hermeneutics of suspicion 188 n.13 heroine character (hiroin kyara) 58 hetare seme (shitty attacker) 60 heteronormative society 1, 8–9, 13, 34, 41, 50, 53, 60, 62, 65–6, 103, 105, 136, 141, 144–5, 150, 176, 183 heteropatriarchal society 9, 13, 22–3, 29, 140, 149–50 heterosexuality 4, 8, 36–7, 41, 46, 53, 58, 63–5, 86, 103, 133, 150, 175 hetero system 60–1 Hideko_Sunshine 185 hirahira 99, 101, 169 history (Thai BL) 11, 22, 28–9, 34, 51–2, 80, 91, 141, 162, 166, 175 hommaseuta 205 n.56 homoeroticism 2, 5–6, 13–15, 36–8, 40, 42, 52–3, 67, 85, 88–90, 93, 98, 102– 3, 106, 108, 111, 115, 120–4, 127, 130, 133–5, 163, 169–70, 173–4 homophobia/homophobic society 7, 23, 29, 38, 50, 59, 150, 159, 175–7, 183 homosexuality, bans depictions 24 Honda Masuko 99 Hori Akiko 207 n.3 H.O.T 117 human relationships (ningen kankei) 58 ibasho 160–1 Idol Factory 49, 181, 187 Ikeda Riyoko 12 Illouz, Eva 58, 86, 100–2, 104, 202 n.91 I’m Tee, Me Too (Khon-la Thi Diao-kan, “The Different Tees are Identical”) (2020) 116, 186 INDRYTIMES 15, 39–40, 42, 184 LOVE SICK: Chaotic Young Men in Blue Shorts (LOVE SICK: Chunlamun Num Kang-keng Namngoen) 15, 39 (see also Lovesick, The Series (2014)) Instagram 89, 108, 115, 119, 160 inter-Asian consumer culture 176 Inter-Asian Cultural Studies (IACS) 137, 139–40, 147, 155 inter-Asian media ecologies 111, 136 inter-Asian referencing 136–7, 154, 159 international fandom 6–7, 19, 46–7, 95, 119, 130, 132, 138, 168, 179

227

international streaming services 43, 179 intimacies 24, 40, 47, 61, 90, 96, 102, 108, 110–12, 174 co-presence 111 fans and khu jin 110 homoerotic 52, 72, 100, 102, 109, 123, 125 online 112–20 revolutionizing fin through virtual 126–32 staged 15, 48 transactional 116 at Y I Love You Fan Party 2019 120–6 intimate economies 30, 124 Ishida Hitoshi, appropriation of representation 104 I Told Sunset About You (Plae Rak Chan Duay-jai Thoe, “I’ll Convey My Love to You with My Heart”) (2020) 108, 186 Iwabuchi, Koichi 14, 30, 137, 140, 159, 166, 176 iWant 118, 151 Jackson, Peter 4–5, 7–10, 16, 107 Queer Bangkok 4 JakJai Production 77–8, 185 James Prapatthorn 185 Jamsai Publishing 33, 45, 89 Jao Planoy 187 Japanese popular culture 2, 6, 11, 30, 32, 57, 73, 86, 176. See also anime; Boys Love (BL, bōizu rabu); manga homophobic discrimination 13 and Korean 18–19, 34 mainstream fandom 31 Japan Foundation 30 Jenkins, Henry 111 Jet Boonyoprakarn 184 Jian Xu, Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies series 5 Jimmy Karn 187 Jin, Dal Yong 113 Jinloe Media Works 48, 185 jintanakan (imagination/fantasy) 44 Jirattikorn, Amporn 138–43, 154 Jittirain 51, 186 Johnny and Associates 87, 157 Joong Archen 185

228

Index

JoongNine 133–4 “The Journey of Lovesick, The Series” 64 J-pop industry 87–9, 93, 111, 138 J-Wave 137, 140 kabe-don (slam against the wall) 55–6, 74, 78 Kadokawa 164 KA Lipcare 95 Kanchanapun Meesuwan 184 Kang-Nguyen, Dredge Byung-chu 11, 34 kanryū-numa (Korean Wave fandom) 160 Kao Noppakao 187 kappuringu (coupling) 14 kappuru (couples) 163 Karlin, Jason 85, 110, 201 n.67 kathoey (ladyboy) 7–10, 42, 52, 62–4 KAZZ Magazine 46 Keenapan, Nattha 31 keopeulling 14 khu jin (imagined couples) 22, 42, 44–8, 50–3, 69, 71, 73, 81, 83, 85–6, 96–8, 100, 108–9, 114, 117, 122, 130, 133, 141–2, 144, 148–9, 162, 166, 169, 180, 182–3, 200 n.7, 201 n.46 debuting talent 91–2 fan events 93–5 homoerotic interactions 101, 104 product placement 92–3 scouting talent 89–90 training talent 90–1 variety shows 95 kilig 21, 134–5, 141 Kimmon Warodom 184 Kim, Suk-Young 130 The King and the Clown/Wang-ui Namja (2005) 38 King, Ross 31 Kiss Me 91, 94 Kiss Me Again (2018) 92 Korean popular culture 2, 11, 14, 34–5, 39, 86, 113, 138, 142 Japanese and 18–19, 34 Korean Wave 87, 113, 137–9, 142, 157, 162–3, 180 Korkaew Vanhecke 32 Korpanese 11, 34, 74, 89, 162

K-pop fandom 15, 24, 29, 42, 92, 111–14, 118–19, 124, 128, 130, 139, 160–1, 163, 205 n.55 food support 205 n.55 Thai BL and 114 K-pop idols 2, 11, 15, 28, 34–5, 42, 88–9, 93, 111–12, 120, 124, 130, 132, 170 concert 120–2, 124, 205 n.61 enemies to lovers 71 fanfiction 34, 71 groups 34, 87, 124, 130, 141, 165, 172 production industry 90 real-life contents 111, 127 shipping 74, 89, 143, 149–50, 174 Krist Perawat Sangpotirat 45–7, 184, 186 KristSingto 22, 45–7, 50–1, 73, 85, 87, 92–3, 95–7, 102–3, 105, 108–9, 112, 114, 116–24, 126, 128, 131, 138–9, 158, 161 Kusolkulsiri, Rachyd 184–5 Kwannie Krairit 39, 47, 70, 143, 146, 168 Kwon, Jungmin 5, 15, 38, 52–3, 88, 106 lakhorn 8–9, 39–41, 48, 58, 62–4, 66, 69, 71, 76–7, 79, 85, 138, 140–2, 169, 194 n.93 lesbian 10, 71 identity 13 LGBT cultures 4 LGBTQ+ activism 181–2, 209 n.10 LGBTQ+ community 53 LGBTQ+ creatives 53 LGBTQ+ rights 180–1 Lim, Eng-Beng 16–17 Limpongsatorn, Kongkiat 143–4, 146 LINE Insights (Thai BL) 46, 96, 102, 114, 200 n.23, 203 n.123 LINE TV 44, 49, 51, 77, 91, 95 Lion Corporation 116 Love By Chance (Bang-oen Rak, “Accidental Love”) (2018) 2, 23, 34, 43–50, 53, 55, 57, 114, 142, 167, 181, 185 Ae 49, 55–6, 74–5 Kengkla 49, 75–6 NC scenes 49–50 Pete 2, 49, 55–6, 74–5 queer narrative 55

Index Techno 49, 75–6 Tin and Can 49, 55, 75 Tum and Tar 49, 75 using ōdō 70–5 Lovely Writer (Nub Sip Ja Jup, “Count to Ten and I’ll Kiss You”) (2021) 81, 143, 187 Gene 81 Nubsib 81 Love of Siam (Rak Haeng Sayam, “The Love[s] of/from Siam”) (2007) 10, 23, 29, 35–8, 41–2, 52, 62, 153, 193 n.58, 194 n.97 Donut 36 Mew 36–7 queer potential 37 Tang 36–7 Tong 36–7 Ying 36 Lovesick, The Series (2014) 15, 18, 23, 29, 39–43, 45, 53, 57, 61, 72, 107, 148, 154, 170, 179, 184 Aim 41, 62–5, 75 “Angel Gang” 64 Jeed 63–4 Khom 62 modeling queer affective reading 65–70 Noh and Phun 40–2, 61–9 Pang 41, 66–9, 84 Pop 66, 69 San (SHAKE) 40, 68 Shay 66, 69 wavering queerness and heteronormativity 61–5 Yuri 41, 62–4 Mainland China 6, 14, 42, 48, 135, 161, 171, 174, 182 Thai BL fans in 142–7 mainstreaming of BL 4–5, 12, 23, 31, 43–50, 52–3, 61, 73, 80–1, 92, 135, 142–3, 152–3, 157, 180 Malanum, Ash M. 153 male-male relationships 13–14, 22, 34–5, 42, 44, 49, 52–3, 56–9, 63–4, 66, 68–70, 92–3, 106, 154, 172, 174 pure fantasy 61

229

MAME 33–4, 39, 49–50, 74, 185–6 manga 2, 11–15, 22, 28–35, 38–9, 41, 53, 55–7, 59, 62–3, 65–6, 69, 71–2, 74, 76–7, 80, 88, 99, 103, 106, 137, 147–51, 163, 165–6, 171–2, 177, 179, 181, 192 n.26, 209 n.10 “Cinderella story” 58 fandom 14, 29, 30–5, 51 foreign piracy of 32 fujoshi fans 59, 61, 134, 162, 164 homoerotic interaction 68, 88 mainstream awareness 36 male-male couple in 35, 65, 69 queer potentials 88 sao wai fans of 46, 66 shōjo 55, 58, 60, 99 translations 15, 31–2 2D media of 162, 164, 171, 173–4 yaoi manga 31–2 Mark Siwat 185 marriage equality 180–1 Maurer, Mario 36, 38, 153, 194 n.97 Max Nattapol Diloknawarit 48, 184 McDonaldization 136 McGray, Douglas 165–6 MCOT 38–9, 42, 45, 49, 63, 184 Mean Phiravich 185 media tribes 113–15, 117, 120, 124, 131, 137, 160–1, 164 Me Mind Y 50, 186 ment (menteu) 122, 124–5, 205 n.61 Mew Suppasit Jongcheveevat 50, 185–6 middle-class fans 2 Mix Sahaphap Wongratch 107, 180, 187 Mizoguchi Akiko 13, 60, 76–7, 181 modernity 8, 30, 136–8, 176 melancholic critique 10 moe 21, 35, 61, 73, 77, 84, 163–5, 172–4 moe-banashi 22, 61, 66, 69–70, 88 monogamy 63 Mori Mari 12, 190 n.81 Mori Mayumi 34, 159, 162, 192 n.26 Morimoto, Lori 87, 176 mōsō (delusion/madness) 61, 66, 68–9 Motive Village 48, 184–5 Move Forward Party 180 mukokuseki (nation-less) branding 14 Muñoz, José Esteban 150

230 Nadao Bangkok 42, 108, 186 Nagaike, Kazumi 87–8 nai 70, 200 n.5 nai-ek 70, 198 n.92 nang-ek 9, 41, 64, 69 nang-wai 36 Nanon Korapat Kirdpan 182, 187 Naoko, Mori 58, 77 Naruebet Kuno 186 national popular culture (N-pop) 8, 138 The Nation magazine 37–8 Naver Corporation, V-Live 109, 111 neoliberalization 5, 189 n.25 New Siwaj Sawatmaneekul 53, 185 New Thitipoom Techaapaikhun 27, 44, 185–6 “Ngan Ten-ram Nai Khuen Phra-jan Tem Duang” (A Dance on the Night of the Full Moon) 122 Nine Kornchid 185 Nishimura Mari 13, 58–9 Not Me (Khao … Mai Chai Phom, “He … Is Not Me”) (2021) 180–1, 187 numa 159–60, 165 Nuttapong Wongkaveepairoj 187 Nye, Joseph, Jr. 165–6 Oat Chakrit 185 ōdō (noble formula) 13–15, 22, 57–9, 65–6, 88, 104, 175 adapting 61–5, 70 challenging 60, 76–81 glocalization 62 jouissance 61 in SOTUS and Love By Chance 70–5 within Thai context 70–5 OffGun 22, 44–5, 50–1, 85, 87–8, 93–4, 97–8, 102–3, 108–9, 112, 114, 116– 20, 123–6, 128, 131, 180–1, 200 n.7 OffGun Fun Night (2018–19) 23, 83–5, 95–8, 101 Off Jumpol Adulkittiporn 44, 180, 184, 186–7 OhmNanon 182 Ohm Pawat Chittsawangdee 182, 187 Oishi Summer Trip (2019) 93 Okada Shōhei 55 omnibus television series 44–5 Orawan Vichayawannakul. See MAME

Index Oreo Puwanai 185 Original Screenplay 184–6 oshi 163 Oshin (1983) 30 “Oshin Boom” 30 Otmazgin, Nissim 12 Pagliassotti, Dru 14 Pantip (website) 1, 15, 32, 39 parasocial relationships 21, 87–8, 93, 110–11, 116, 120, 123–4, 126, 130–1, 165, 170–1, 173–4 Park, Shin-Eui 113, 117 patriarchy 8, 13, 29, 60 PavelDome 133–4 Pavel Naret 185 Pchy Witwisit Hiranyawongkul 36, 38 Peraya Official 118–19, 121, 123–4, 139, 161 Perth Tanapon Sukumpantanasan 49, 185 P’Godji 100–1, 127–8, 130, 158 Phadung Samajarn 184 phet 7 categories 8–11 Pheu Thai Party 180 Phibunsongkhram, Plaek 30 Philippine fan community 76, 133–6, 139–40, 147, 150–1, 154 Japanese yaoi 175 “love without gender” 141 of SOTUS 71 Philippine media/mediascape queer romance in 133 transforming 151–5 Philippines 6, 24, 35, 42–4, 50–1, 76, 133–4, 136–7, 142, 147–51, 158, 161, 163, 171, 174–5, 177, 182, 191 n.140 phi-norng 71–2 phra-ek 9, 41, 63–4, 69–70, 198 n.92 phu-chai (cisgendered men) 8, 10, 62–4 PhunNoh 42 phu-ying (cisgendered women) 8, 10 pink economy 103–4 Pinoy BL series 151–5, 177, 182 Plan Rathavit 185 Poj Arnon 10, 193 n.58 Polca fans 97, 112, 118, 121–2, 124, 131, 145, 153, 170

Index PondPhuwin 158, 182 Pontillas, Marlon 135 PopShay 69 PP Krit Amnuaydechkorn 108, 180, 186 Praew magazine 1, 92 Prasannam, Natthanai 33–4, 45, 47, 70, 85, 93–4, 122–3, 126 Prayut Chan-o-cha 180 pre-history (Thai BL) 23, 35–8, 153 Puar, Jasbir 29 P’Wave 127–9, 158 queerbaiting 23, 103–8, 181 queer idol celebrities 85, 94, 104–5, 108–9, 112, 117, 120, 126, 132, 165 commoditizing romance 95–103 cultural diplomacy 165–71 queer/queerness 4, 9, 11, 31, 85, 105, 136, 140, 150, 182, 188 n.12 activism 181 Asian studies 16–20 assemblage 29 boom 4, 10 Chinese money and affect 142–7 cinema 10, 153 culture/cultural production 4–6, 42, 183 identity politics 24, 104 knowledge 18, 24 liberation 7, 105, 107, 175 popular culture 11–12, 15–16, 18–20, 22, 24–5, 29, 35, 50, 57, 114, 132, 135, 141, 146, 148–50, 155, 159, 165, 170, 177, 182 sensibilities 10 sexuality 2, 5, 10, 21, 24, 37, 52, 64, 103, 105–6, 132, 149–50, 152, 155, 170–1, 182 wavering 23, 61–5, 70–1, 170, 179 rak 22 rape 9, 23, 61, 76–7, 79–80 rape scene 76, 78 The Reading Room 32–3 real-life contents 111, 113, 123, 127 real shipping 123 Redmond, Sean, Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies series 5 resources of hope 147–51, 154, 175, 183

231

re-territorialization 188 n.12 revolution (kakumei) 53, 171, 177 riba 61, 197 n.54 romanticization of commodities 58, 86–7, 95, 100–1 romantic utopia 58, 101–2, 104 Room Alone (2014) 44 rup 22 Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana 2, 49, 114–15, 180–1, 185, 187 Saisoo 184 Sakveerakul, Chookiat 10, 35–8 same-sex desire 1, 3–5, 8–11, 13, 22, 42, 50, 52, 59, 62, 65, 108, 135, 141–3, 145, 149–50, 152, 180 legalization, marriage 108, 170, 180 in twenty-first century 7–11 sana all 134–5, 147–51 Santos, Kristine Michelle 5, 13, 88, 99, 106 sao-praphet-sorng 10 sao wai (yaoi girls) 22–3, 30–5, 39, 41–5, 48, 52, 72, 74, 77, 80, 84, 94, 100, 104, 109, 161 culture 47 fans 42, 46, 52, 66, 70, 80, 85 gaze 68, 80, 154 Pang/viewer as 65–70 recognition of market 35–8 savior couples 122 SBFIVE (boyband) 48, 141 scavenger methodology 17, 19, 29, 176 Schein, Louisa, ethnotextual approach 19 Scott Barmé 8, 86 Sechs Kies 117 Secret Crush on You (Aep Long Rak, “A Hidden Love”) (2022) 181, 187 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 188 n.13 Semantic Error (Shimaentik Ereo) (2022) 183 seme (attacker) 14, 22, 56, 59–61, 63, 69–70, 72–7, 79–80, 88, 163, 197 n.33 seme nature (semerashisa) 77 seme-uke rule 13–14, 22, 58–61, 62, 63, 65–6, 73–4, 88, 153–4, 163 Seng Wichai 187

232 Senior Secret Love (Run Phi Secret Love, “The Senior Student’s Secret Love”) (2014–16 & 2017) 44, 83, 91, 118, 184 series Y (wai). See Boys Love (BL, bōizu rabu) sexuality 5, 7–11, 37, 60, 136 heteronormative conceptualizations 8–9, 60, 103, 150 queerness 2, 5, 10–11, 21, 24, 37, 52, 64, 103, 105–6, 132, 149–50, 152, 155, 170–1, 182 sexual minority community/culture 1–2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 17, 24, 34, 35, 50, 52, 85, 103–7, 142–3, 180, 183 sexual violence 9, 78 de-romanticizing 76–81 Shan fans of Thai pop culture 138 Shinhwa 117 shipping 14, 22, 34, 42, 74, 87–90, 92–5, 97–9, 111, 114–15, 120–1, 124, 143, 149–50, 163, 169, 173–4. See also specific ships shōjo manga (girls’ comics) 55, 58, 60, 99 shōnen’ai (love of young boys) 12, 14 Showa Era 12 Siam Square 2, 31–3, 36, 86, 188 n.10 Sina Weibo 143 Singto Prachaya Ruangroj 45–7, 184 Sinnott, Megan 11, 190 n.72 6 Moons in Manila event 133–4, 135, 139–40, 148–9, 158 skinship 15, 21, 89, 94, 99, 122–5, 127, 169–70, 172 SM Entertainment 89, 127 social media 6, 17–18, 21, 27, 29, 36, 46, 51, 77, 85–6, 89–92, 107, 109, 117, 126, 130–1, 135, 139–43, 151, 159–61, 173, 180–1 advertising campaign 96 analysis and ethnography 24 and concerts 111–12 fandom practices 108, 147, 204 n.22 intimacies online 112–20 Pride Month celebration 107–8 sites 19, 41, 112, 135 soft power 12, 165–71, 180 SOTUS S (2017) 184 SOTUS S Nation Y Fan Meeting 47

Index SOTUS, The Series (Phi Wak Tua Rai Kap Nai Pi Nueng, “The Vicious Hazer and the Freshman”) (2016) 23, 43–9, 51, 53, 57, 84–5, 96, 121, 138–9, 154, 161, 164, 167, 169, 184 Arthit (Krist) 45–7, 71–3, 75, 89–91, 198 n.90 awards and nominations 46 Kongpob (Singto) 45–7, 71–3, 75, 89–91, 198 n.90 Praepalin 71 “Story Of True love between US” 45 using ōdō 70–5 staged intimacy 15, 48 status quo 9, 17, 37, 53 Still 2gether (Phror Rao Yang Khu Kan, “Because We are Still a Couple”) (2020) 51, 96, 186 Strawberry Krubcake (2013) 89 Strong Charoenchai 185 Studio Wabi Sabi 49, 71, 73–4, 76, 182, 185 Sudsapda magazine 1 Super Junior 34 Svetanant, Chavalin 95 Sweetsky 77, 185 Tae Darvid 184 Tai BL ni Koi Shitai (I Want to Love Thai BL) 167–9 Takemiya Keiko 12 Kaze to Ki no Uta (A Song of the Wind and Trees) 59 TAT 168–71 TayNew 22, 27–8, 44–5, 50–1, 85, 87, 91, 93–4, 97–100, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 112, 114, 116–18, 120–3, 126, 128–30, 131, 144–5, 153–4, 160, 164, 169, 200 n.7 TayNew Meal Date (2018–19) 23, 85, 95–101, 105, 169 Tay Tawan Vihokratana 27, 44, 180, 185–6 Teen Vogue magazine 183 Tee Thanapon 184 teleserye 153 Thai BL boom (Tai BL būmu) 51, 158, 161, 172, 175, 177 Thai Culture Festival 168 Thai familialism 37, 63

Index Thai Magazine D 164 Thai Ministry of Culture 9, 170 Thainess (khwam-pen-Thai) 9 Thai swamp (Tai-numa) 157, 159–65, 167–8, 170–1, 174, 177, 208 n.23 Thai Wind (T-Wind) 132, 136–43, 145, 153–5, 170, 175–7, 180, 182 Thanamin Wongskulphat 187 TharnType, The Series (Kliat Nak Ma Pen Thi Rak Kan Sa Di-di, “The More You Hate Me, The More I’ll Make You Love Me”) (2019) 50, 168, 186 Theory of Love (Thritsadi Jip Thoe, “The Theory of Hitting on You”) (2019) 50–1, 53, 83, 125–6, 154, 186 Theriault, Nicole, “Mai chai mai chai” (No Way) 94 1000 Stars (Nithan Pan Dao, “A Tale of a Thousand Stars”) (2021) 107, 182, 187 TikTok 56, 94 Title Kirati 185 Tocchi 173–5, 177 2gether: The Movie (2021) 157 2gether, The Series (Phror Rao Khu Kan, “Because We’re a Couple”) (2020) 6, 51, 89, 91–2, 96, 109, 118–19, 135, 139, 151–5, 157, 161, 163, 167, 169, 182, 186 Sarawat 92 Tine 92 Together With Me (Ork-hak Ma Rak Kap Phom, “When You’re Heartbroken, Come Love Me”) (2017) 48, 107, 184 tom (butch) 8, 10–11 gay king 11 gay queen 11 Tommy Sittichok 187 To My Star (Na-eui byeol-ege, “Towards My Star”) (2020) 183 Townsend, Rebecca 9, 77 transgender 9–10, 42 transnational Asian queer popular culture 16, 25, 29, 43, 132, 146, 148–9, 153, 170, 175, 177, 182 transnational fandoms 21–2, 43, 51, 135–40, 145, 154–5, 160, 168, 170, 177, 181–3

233

transnationalization 5, 7, 14–15, 19, 24, 50–3, 57, 135–6, 176 of Thai popular culture through BL 136–42 tsundere 73, 75 Tul Pakorn Thanasrivanitchai 48, 107–8, 180, 184 tut (sissy) 8, 10–11, 42, 52, 62–4 TV stations 39, 43–4, 91, 142 TV Thunder 184 TVXQ 34, 89 Twitter 27, 78, 92, 108, 112, 115–17, 119, 121, 123, 128, 131, 135, 139, 143, 145, 158, 160–2, 164, 167–9, 171, 174, 177, 179, 183 2Moons (Duean Kiao Duean, “The Moon Courts the Moon”) (2017) 48, 141, 157, 184 2Moons2 (Duean Kiao Duean 2, “The Moon Courts the Moon 2”) (2019) 133–4, 139, 148, 158, 185 Ueno, Toshiya 113 uke (receiver) 13–14, 22, 56, 59–61, 63, 69–70, 72–5, 77, 79–80, 88, 163 Ünaldi, Serhat 9–10, 64, 193 n.58 The Untamed (Chen Qing Ling) 146 Up Poompat 187 U-Prince (2014–16) 44 variety shows 23, 35, 83–5, 89, 95, 104–5, 169, 182 commoditizing romance 95–103 VCR cartoon 122, 127, 131 visibilization of romantic love 86 V-Live application 109, 111–12, 117, 126–9 Wallerstein, Immanuel 166 Wang, Yohsin 7 Wankling 187 wavering queerness 23, 61–5, 70–1, 170, 179 WeChat 145 Weerachit Thongjila 184, 186 Welker, James 13, 188 n.22 What the Duck, The Series (Rak Laen-ding, “Love Touchdown”) (2018) 48, 142, 185

234

Index

X Nattaphong Mongkolsawas 53, 186 XOXO Cosmetics 2–3, 114–15, 121

Year 24 Group 12 Y gāru 161–2, 208 n.23 Y I Love You Fan Party (2019) 24, 93–4, 112, 127–8, 131, 205 n.59 fans and idols, intimate connections 120–6 youth culture 89 “youth fiction from Thailand” (nawaniyai wairun thai) 33 YouTube 19, 43–4, 49, 51, 83, 91, 95, 139, 151–2, 161, 169 Y Relation 179 Yuan Danop Taninsirapapra 185 yuri 181, 210 n.12

yancha uke (naughty receiver) 60–1, 75 yaoi. See Boys Love (BL, bōizu rabu)

Zee Pruk 187 Zhang, Junqi 143–4

WhiteCap 42 White Nawat Phumphothingam 40, 42, 184 Why R U, The Series (Phror Rak Chai Pao?, “Because It’s Love, Isn’t It?”) (2020) 68, 187 wide shows 97 Wilson, Ara 30–1, 86, 107 Win Metawin Opas-iamkajorn 51, 186 Worawut Thanamatchaicharoen 185 World-Systems Theory 166

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236

237

238

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