Related to your recent post about internalized homophobia - I also find it fascinating when it pops up in queer media. Could you list some of your favorite characters that have it and wrestle with it? (No pressure, and thank you in advance!)
SO SO MANY XD!!!! Thank you @abstractelysium!!! This ask has me so excited.
I've decided to create some random categories for it, so I can secretly list a bunch while I pretend to pick just one from each category.
The Year 24 writers understood exactly how compelling internalized homophobia could be. Poem of Wind and Trees and Heart of Thomas are beautiful grapplings of deep-seated shame. Gilbert is still one of the all-time-great antiheroes in the canon (see the reference to him in What Did You Eat Yesterday), but I'm going with my angst-ridden Kazuhiko from Summer Vacation 1999, the live-action adaptation of Heart of Thomas. 3 boys alone at an isolated boarding school's during the summer vacation in the not-so-distant future mourn a classmate. Some say the classmate jumped from a cliff into the lake after writing a love note to Kazuhiko. Some say Kazuhiko pushed him. Then a mysterious boys who looks just like the one they lost arrives at the school as if he has come back to haunt them. It’s a beautiful convoluted metaphor for the kind of things you have to kill off in yourself, the paths you foreclose by doing so, and the hurt you can cause others in the process. Kazuhiko is played with so much angst and interiority by his actress (yes, the whole cast of boys is played by girls, which adds a whole nother layer of queerness). This film would go on to inspire Revolutionary Girl Utena, which took the isolated school setting and turned it into a whole egg-breaking metaphor for internalized homophobia and abuse. But where Utena finds freedom, the ending is less optimistic. Not everyone finds their way out of the school of internalized homophobia.
Other important ogs: Tong in Love of Siam
Not a common dramatic topic, but you could fill tomes with queer people attempting to repress their sexuality through aesceticism. If I can detach, if I can master self-control, if I can let go of earthly desires, if I can devote myself to higher ideals...(then maybe I can stave off my condemned feelings). What impressed me most with Lan Wangji's depiction in The Untamed is the restraint in the story and the performance. Never has "the love that dare not speak its name" been more apropos than with this man of so few words. It's not until halfway through the series that the depths of his longing becomes apparent as his clan's brilliant ethical wisdom and his heart diverge paths along the Qiongqi Path. When far later, a changed man after grieving the death of his unspoken love for 16 years and unbelievably receiving a second chance, he readily invites Wu Xian into his Quiet House it speaks volumes. By the end, you look back and understand how much pain existed that was never shown. Lan Wangji takes the tsundere to its extremes--extremes are not a very austere thing to do...but that's the point.
Other aesthetes: Shiro in WDYEY, Phupha in ATOTS, Semantic Error,
I love a bitch. Bitchery is an armor for gays. Sometimes it’s all femme and wit—see the Diary of Tootsies for great representation there—but there’s also the full-on adversarial cunt. Jojo’s fascination with the blunt slut and his ambiguous relationship to the queer ‘community’ is my favorite of his motifs, and it came to its pinnacle with Boston. Boston is so open and direct with his sexuality but it’s thrown into such a sharp contrast with the closet he keeps to protect his politician father. It’s a painful friction that rubs against every choice Boston makes in the series, leading to his ultimate excommunication from the friend group. And Neo conveys every ounce of mis-directed pain. Growing up with that level of internal conflict doesn’t make you pretty or nice or wise. It makes you wary and distant and angry and ambivalent about your relationships to even the people who are good to you. I will feel compassion for these kinds of characters until the day I die. I want them to sort out their struggles but as long as there is homophobia in the world, queer people will benefit from characters who show what happens to a queer soul when it grows up inside of it. The velvet rage.
See also: Love in The Big City, Be My Favorite (not a slut but he’s a bitch), Sinoo in Light On Me, Jojo’s other cunts in GayOK Bangkok and Friend Zone
The Best Little Boy in the World
The Best Little Boy in the World is a term coined by Andrew Tobias, originally publishing under a pseudonym in the 1970s. It’s since been taken up by some as a psychological/personality framework for appreciating the kind of overcompensation some gay men do (and queer people generally—see the song Little Miss Perfect by Joriah Kwame for a sapphic version). The NYTimes described the concept, “The Best Little Boy in the world never had wet dreams or masturbated; he always topped his class, honored mom and dad, deferred to elders and excelled in sports…” His shame compartmentalizes the parts of himself he sees as bad—the sexuality and especially the homosexuality—so he can be a paragon, a caricature of a good boy. Daon in Light on Me is perhaps the character who's embodiment of this issue is made the most explicit, but I like the subtlety of it in MSP even more. This type of internalized homophobia is not made explicit in My School President, but I recognized myself so quickly in this fruity overachiever. Somehow popular, scholarly, talented, without even seeming to worry about those parts of life. Things come easily when they’re what you use to avoid your real problems lol. The anxiety about his mother is a strong pulling ever tauter in the series, though, snapping finally when the existence of homophobia is made explicit at the end. The wisdom in Tinn and the other ‘Good Boys’ of BL, whether homophobia exists in their universe or remains in a world without homophobia the subtext with which the writers and we as viewers can’t help but shade in from our own world, is as wlw poet Mary Oliver says “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.” Internalized homophobia can be frustratingly productive, but it’s a splitting of the self that can go so deep it creates chasms in your mind that can’t be bridged.
See also: The Eclipse, Arthit in SOTUS S, Pran in Bad Buddy, Cherry Magic (all versions), 10 Things to Do Before 40, Shane in Boys in Love
Internalized Homophobia as Subtext
What blew me away most when I first started watching BL was, while seemingly creating world’s of acceptance, the use of extended metaphor to depict the experiences of homophobia. No one’s resume brims with that like Aof Noppharnach’s, and no character hit harder for me than, from one of the first BLs I watched, Tian and how Mix brought him to life. There are so many layers just in the premise. My jaw fully dropped when Tian stuck his hand through the slit of his shirt, bloody with wine stain, to touch the scar of his feminine heart in episode one. But the parallels build even from there: his deceit of the people to act like a good person, his desire to be the girl the people and his crush want while feeling simultaneously like her murderer, his immune system suppressants. The list goes on. And there’s something extra beautiful that happens here and across Thai BL, especially, which is the outward refusal of the mystic or fantastical elements—paraphrasing here: ‘you can’t inherit the previous owner’s feelings from a heart transplant’—while the narrative is in fact INFUSED with the emotional resonance of those mystical ideas—we see a vision of Torfun literally handing over he light to Tian as Phupha stands by and the whole story plays with this rebirth idea as a metaphor to support same-sex relationships. This is the height of fiction writing for me. People talk about ‘good writing’ as if it’s all about pacing and dialogue. Sure, those things matter, but without multilayered storytelling like this to sink your teeth into, fiction’s insubstantial. If you’ve experienced homophobia, you don’t always need or want to see it repeated, but modern queer storytelling can feel emotionally devoid of truth for many of us without it. The metaphorical approach nearly ubiquitous in BL is a BRILLIANT breakthrough in queer fiction for the best of both worlds.
Other examples are too many to name, but the most intricate and unique I can think of outside of Aof's work is Color Rush.
Another favorite part of eastern queer concepts, especially Thai ones, is the retention of sexuality and gender as part of a single spectrum. These gendered feelings play out across BL series and provide added layers to the internal struggles characters face. The common discourse topic about labeling "the wife" is not simply an issue of misogyny, for example. It's related to more indigenous formations of the gender/sexuality spectrum in the region. I've written about 'The Lost Girl' trope and it's relation to queer experiences of gender/sexuality, as well. But a few key series go further, bridging into what Westerners would likely delineate as trans* experiences. None go quite as far as Love in Great Men Academy. It's heartbreaking to watch them go from their idyllic cabin perfectly aligned with their sense of self into adolescence at a boys' school where they must keep their identity a secret and eventually lose access to their feminine identity entirely. James Teeradon and New Chanyapuk are so perfectly cast here, and mirror each other's performances at such a high caliber. When they finally embrace, it's a queer catharsis unparalleled in any other media. What might more awareness about internalized transphobia have to add to our conversations about internalized homophobia? Why are we so insistent on keeping them separate in the West?
Other Gender Benders: Summer Vacation 1999, The Shipper, Smells Like Green Spirit, Kamisama no Ekohiiki (aka God's Favor)
Unlike some, I don't think I'm ready for a world without well-done queer subtext in fiction. Peaceful Property and High School Frenemy had incredibly compelling dynamics at their center but denied calcification of the relationship in the form of a kiss or a proclamation (Saint made plenty of declarations of love lol but none ever fully shifted the friendship into a sexual or romantic one explicitly). Assurance of romantic feelings is not always the point. You could put that on my tombstone with how much queer historical research I do over it. These stories have other culminations and themes at their center and perhaps want an audience bigger than just queer romance lovers to relate to it. That is not a denial of a queer reading--Both Peaceful Property and High School Frenemy put in plenty of explicitly queer parallels and deeply romantic dialogue and plotting to read the relationship through a queer lens. Using that lens, you just have to accept that these stories don't invite you into their romantic lives or physical intimacies. That doesn't inherently make the story worse or even less queer. In life and in fiction, we are not always entitled to those privacies just because we want answers. And isn't that a central question of the concept of the closet? Do we keep things private because of internalized homophobia? Is one's queerness more or less real because it has been physically manifested for others to witness? "Love has no form," Aof Noppharnach wrote in Dark Blue Kiss, which means we must pay attention to the signs of love to know it. To me, queer subtext is the ultimate expression of that sentiment.
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