Streaming Pride

Written By: Aleena Sebastian

Edited By: Malaika Noorani

Graphic Designer: Iniya J

The COVID-19 era was a time stretch that many people term as something that passed in a ‘blur’. The whole world had to shut its doors to the outside environment, and a looming stretch of gloom and apprehension of how the world would progress clouded the minds of people. 

But people were locked in not just physically, but also emotionally, especially those who were still “in the closet”. Physical intimacy and connection to others were next to impossible, and so, many people resorted to finding warmth, connection, and a sense of belongingness online, with many stumbling upon the entertainment genre of ‘BL’ or ‘Boy’s Love’, just like I had at the tender age of 14. 

Locked inside, looking for something soft, romantic, funny, and emotionally absorbing, a lot of us found ourselves watching stories that gave queer affection a kind of visibility mainstream media had long denied. The Thai BL entertainment industry was one of the first to catch up and quickly rode the wave of online attention, “producing some of the finest BL series during the COVID-19 era”,noted by a TIME report that identified the genre’s boom to be tied to people being isolated and streaming more online, with over 170 Thai BL dramas being produced and aired by December 2022 itself.

The reason for the genre’s popularity can be traced to its emotional honesty and engaging cinematic themes, with characters having catchy yet honest storylines and dynamic landscapes that relate to the lives of ordinary people and brings accurate queer representation to the forefront, in a media background worldwide where queer characters were still too often side characters, punchlines, or those destined for a tragic ending.

One thing that many ‘veteran’ fans were able to pinpoint closely by following trends and identifying media patterns was the genre’s version of a carefully packaged display of queerness, especially by the Thai BL entertainment industry– polished enough to sell, tender enough to trend, and rarely messy enough to fully challenge the audience.

Over the years, the genre spread from just Thailand in Asia to countries like China, Japan, and South Korea, with scholars coining BL as a “globalized fandom culture”. Literature like Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia has identified BL to be appealing to both heterosexual female and LGBTQIA+ audiences, while another recent chapter on Asian fandom emphasizes the “queer affects” that BL consumption has ‘produced’. People aren’t watching these stories for one single reason, and that complexity is part of the genre’s power. 

However, increasing popularity can't be attributed to actual progress, since many of these shows still rely on familiar formulas of idealized couples, glossy cinematography, highly marketable chemistry, and a fantasy of queer love that feels safe enough to sell. This ‘representation’ feels emotionally satisfying, but also flattens real queer lives into an “aesthetic packaging”, essentially obvious by the innumerable online ‘ships’, edits, fanpages, reaction videos, fanfictions, and fanarts that flood people’s algorithms. This genre’s consumption is internationally and culturally diverse, forming a shared emotional language made up of a social media ecosystem and fan economies.

Moreover, the genre has blind spots that are too big to go unnoticed. Most queer stories revolve around conventionally attractive male couples, with trans people, lesbians, non-binary people, and many others being sidelined or barely given equal representation. BL series are queer-coded, but they are not necessarily queer-led, and many directors filter queerness into a ‘fantasy-like paradigm’, shaped by what markets can safely sell rather than what communities actually need to see.

Problems arise when the genre’s pleasure depends on distancing queer relationships from actual queer politics. A lot of BL content invites viewers to enjoy intimacy without asking them to sit with discrimination, legal inequality, family rejection, or gender nonconformity. That makes the genre feel politically soft at the exact moment it becomes commercially powerful. Queer representation in the media has opened doors for people to see and recognize the truth and existence of queer people in real life, but opening a door can't be equated with building a room people can actually live in. Queer love can be made visible without being fully understood, and representation can be both generous and evasive at the same time. Creators online can do more than package queer intimacy for clicks, and platforms can do more than reward whatever is easiest to binge, because both shape what kind of queer visibility gets normalized.