looking for Thai & JFilm friends

The short story "Close" came to be in a matter of hours. The central idea arrived in the evening of the 24th. The notes I got back up to jot down whilst trying to fall asleep kept going and by 3:30 in the morning of the 25th, the first draft was here. Two online friends gave it a read that day, which helped me understand what I needed to bolster to better convey the relationship, and now on the morning of the 26th, it is essentially complete. Bar the usual tendency to tweak and adjust.

These are some thoughts from conversations I've had with readers, gathered here because social media posts are fragmented and easily lost.

( continued with spoilers )

On one level, it's pretty simple. Love is love and a good story is a good story. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

Except it also is, and for me it's more about what there is and isn't in mainstream series.

Speaking generally, mainstream dramas tend to lean into the addictive nature of stress to gain and keep viewers, while BL ("boys love") and youth series tend to be better at mitigating the stressful moments of their plots. Stronger friend networks and found family are more common. And the boys play, even the older ones who have become young men, spontaneous moments of confidence, friendship and freedom.

So the reason why I keep ending up back in BL, and back with Thai series, is that real life is stressful enough and I'd rather spend my time with characters who are helping each other.


BL has a few additional things baked in. Acceptance, and especially self-acceptance, are very natural aspects of characterisation and development. And while it's difficult for het story lines to get away from sexism, BL can at least park that away from the main couple. Not that it always does of course.

The respite from romanticised sexism has left me even more attuned to it in het stories. Will we ever move on from that? Sexism, especially when it's romanticised, complicates my feelings and can set off deeply-rooted insecurities, especially when the women found worthy of love are presented as being extraordinary in some way. (And double yikes if it's in GL too.) It's easier for me to simply be present with the emotions of the story when the characters are gay men, and the men are allowed to be ordinary. Because that's the way it should be for everyone.

So these things are all true for me: The genre I never get far from is known as BL but in my mind it's just stories where some of the characters are gay and, for the most part, they live in a gentler, kinder corner of the world than a lot of LGBTQ+ fiction. I don't care if the protagonists are gay or straight or ambidextrous but I also do. It's still something special, but it's also completely, thoroughly and utterly normal, like when I send the story I make up cheer myself up to an online friend and don't think to mention that the characters are gay. Because of course they are, like you wouldn't think to say, oh hey, these characters are straight.

And the ex-youth worker in me will always cheer them on as they find their place in the world, even when they're as old as Uncle Jim.

I'd really like for these positive aspects of BL to have a greater place in mainstream stories. I'd like to think that there would be an audience for it, that I'm not the only one who watches BL for the strength of the support networks, for the break from romanticised sexism, for their kindness.

We don't have to stay in thrall to the addictive nature of stress. We can tell stories that thrive with acceptance, respect, support and love. It's how we're meant to be.


Addendum: Why the two stories I've written, and various half-started ideas, are BL or gay men - Somewhere along the way watching more BL and GL than het has reset my conditioned assumptions. Instead of assuming characters are straight unless specified differently, it's become normal for me to assume they're gay or lesbian unless specified bi/pan or het. So that's my default when characters introduce themselves to me.

The first BL story I wrote is the kind of low stakes, endlessly playful story with good friendships, healthy relationships and found family I'd love to see. My "series which will never be made" to cheer myself up. I don't know that I'll ever get there, but ideally I'd like to become able to use what I learn through writing same sex-orientated stories to write het ones as well, as free as I can manage from the sexism and romanticised sexism we're so accustomed to in straight fiction -- the kind of het stories I would love to read. Even if I don't get there, it's a way of continuing to reset from cultural norms to something more balanced.