The works of Director X Nuttapong (Me and Thee, Cherry Magic Thailand, Vice Versa, Theory of Love, and so so many more het-centric series at GMMTV) are a great example of why the “queer” versus BL debate can be so silly.
Thomas Baudinette describes him in his academic book on Thai BL as one of the out gay writer and directors working in the industry, which was news to me because I had tried and failed to find info about that online. Plus, his repertoire makes no efforts to reference touchstone “queer” media the way other out gmmtv directors do, Euro-American nor Asian, and his series show little interest in exploring historically “queer” aesthetic fascinations: the male body, lust, loneliness, angsty coming-out narratives, sexual health questions, etc. Instead, he’s gung-ho about a lot of typically feminine media: het romcoms (and I mean the het romcoms the gays don’t have a cult following over), lakorn, and, yes, BL. That’s “BL” as in the most classic definition of it, BL manga from Japan. He has described his Cherry Magic adaptation as an exploration specifically of the manga genre. So he’s truly shown most of his aesthetic interest in media targeted towards women. I already have a gripe about how men being into feminine genres is often excluded from the “queer” canon when to me it seems both one of the most prominent of tastes and the most maligned of tastes for queer men, but I want to go deeper here. Because P’X isn’t just some writer/director with effeminate tastes.
He’s at the same professional level as celebrated queer director Aof Noppharnach at gmmtv, as a senior director of content production, and I believe he’s been in that position longer. In fact, X, Aof, and Jojo all started at Bang Channel (the digital predecessor to GMMTV) together. Along with Hormones and Love Sick, this was another project pushing Thai media forward beyond its conservatism with stories that leaned into depicting young people’s lives with more Social Realism. X directed lots of het short films for the Channel as well as a tragic kathoey love story with Fluke Nattouch and JJ Jaylerr. He also wrote and directed Room Alone (through a collab between Bang Channel and Room Alone), which had GMMTV’s first same-sex pairing.
More importantly, X’s BL production credits are prolific and a much better endorsement than his “queer” auteur counterparts’, who have a lot more flops under their producer belt compared to a pretty stellar list under X’s. In fact, he’s credited as a producer on at least one work of every publicly out director I know of that has directed at gmmtv except Jojo & Ninew.
But is his work “queer” enough for the “queer” club? I think a lot of times when people use the word queer to describe a show, they think they’re describing a politic when actually they’re describing an aesthetic. I’ve taken to calling it Queer Realism. It’s a very historically situated queer aesthetic, but it’s certainly not the only one. We all know Camp, but people easily slot that into the Queer label, too, because of how it pokes fun at gender and normalcy. It’s harder for many these days to conceive of queer aesthetics that are light but not pointed, sincere but not dour, queer aesthetics that don’t seem to be interested in making much queer commentary on society at all.
P’X’s work can feel quite assimilationist when taken alone. I’ve described Theory of Love as the How I Met Your Mother of BL, after all. A more expansive view, however, might urge us not to conceive of his aesthetic as one that actually exists alone. He’s constantly synthesizing a multitude of sources into a series and then questioning one’s ability to accurately read it in a hermeneutical fashion and apply it directly to life. What if we thought of his work through a similar aesthetic lens, with art not as a mirror but as something that coexists with people’s lived experiences?
One of Baudinette’s main arguments in his book so far, similar to a Thai paper on the industry I read over Thanksgiving, is that Thai live-action BL started out less queer and suddenly shifted around 2020 with the emergence of the queer auteurs who brought “actual” queerness into BLs. This ignores two major out directors Baudinette covers in depth, New Siwaj and Ma-Deaw, and others like Cheewin and Director X. New and Cheewin both worked on the first BL Love Sick and have worked basically non-stop on BL series since; Ma-Deaw wrote and directed the grandfather of all Thai BL, Love of Siam, and continued to work within the BL sphere; and P’ X, P’ X seemed to be busy building up the GMMTV BL empire, not simply with BL series of his own, but crafting popular het-romance series and supporting other queer creatives in their work. What Baudinette means, I think, is not queerness but Queer Realism in BL emerged around 2020. What the queer progenitors of BL were doing before that laid the queer ground for the political and economic shifts that made that possible. Is that not queer enough for the queer club?
I don’t think moderation, unobtrusiveness, familiarity, or pleasantness exist in opposition to radical projects when those that practice the former support and uplift the latter’s projects. That unimposing queerness might not look like the “queerness” we’ve come to regard as authentic and politically active, but P’ X’s normative BL romcoms do a different kind of queer work. He closes his eyes to the strife, and smiles, going about his gay merry way hand-in-hand with others committed to the fantasy.
