WHERE do women situate themselves when the boys they love start loving other boys?
The possibilities are varied, dangerous, deceivingly supportive; their power as enchanting as the last fairy godmother offering the gift of solution after the evil witch has condemned a love that dares to speak out its name. Or even when nothing is declared, the women in the stories of boys loving boys, are there to provide always a solution and/or a complication.
These women come in forms of mothers, sisters, girlfriends, confidants, fans and observers.
Take the case of the most innocent of the BL series, the tale of Win/Bright and Sarawat/Tine. You, of course, know the story about these two squeaky-clean boys. No survival problem confronts them and no sexual menace haunts them ever. It is a world of boys made pure and perfect because the sensual woman, it seems, has been purged out of existence. In Together, the first of the series for the two actors, a woman figures but not for long. She is the ex-girlfriend of Sarawat who finds it in her heart to pursue the boy of her youth. Tine, who at a point is already assured of a place in the throbbing, disarming heart of Sarawat, will chance upon his boy-man in a kind of compromising situation with a putative rival.
Camera angling and dire circumstance conjure a heartbreaking scenario for our gentle Tine, making him believe Sarawat has opted to go back to the land where boys do love girls. Indeed, what is the bitter and better rival a boy loving another boy can face than being confronted with the surprising possibility that a boy can move back to loving a girl? But the girl proves to be not a rabid rival for she soon gives up. Without asking the entire Thai society to side with her, the former girlfriend even explains away her presence and eventual departure.
The story of Sarawat and Tine exemplifies at best the true and tested BL where no life-and-death conflicts can subsist. The girls in the school attended by the two are there to giggle, have fun, support and applaud the love between Sarawat and Tine to the point that they will die if the two will not end in each other’s arms or boxers.
The malevolent, scheming woman rises like a newly manufactured Asian sulphur in the almost realistic but dreamy story of Korn and Knock.
Imbued with a masculinity that would have been interpreted as toxic, Max as Korn and Tul as Knock are the epitome of manliness in whatever Asian society or culture. In a film industry that puts premium on male pulchritude, Max and Tul would have made supreme leading men to leading ladies, or action stars capable of annihilating other men of similar menace and musculature. But in Together
With Me, their great male hearts beat to the rhythm of love for other male hearts. Outside of the gaze of a society, Max and Tul hold on to a secret that will test their love for each other. That test will be the beginning of the next season.
In the meantime, Korn, in Together With Me, maintains a girlfriend who implicitly threatens to catch him with Knock in flagrante delicto. She provides the suspense in this thriller where no one dies but leaves young male hearts always gasping for dear life. A common friend, Yihwa is the woman curious about men liking other men. She possesses an irritating inquisitiveness, but she will always prove us wrong when, in the most crucial moment, she is turned into Love Incarnate, the deity guarding male beauty and love, ready to wave her magic wand over the desires of men for other men.
The story of Korn and Knock does not stop with the first series. It is so popular the next chapter has to be produced. Here, I must confess to the limitations of my review. First, my knowledge of Thai culture and history is limited. Second, I do not have any working perception of Thai culture. Third, and this to me is exasperating, Thai commercial cinema remains a terra incognita my mind has never mapped.
Be that as it may, the character of Yihwa is another woman presence in Thai BL. She is the woman friendly to male friends who turn out be the kind whose existential question is not only choosing between boxers or briefs but who wear them.
I must say it here: the actress Maengmum, who plays Yihwa, must be the loveliest Thai comedienne I have ever seen in any Thai BL. Petite and quirky, she is a force to contend with. Indeed, in Together with Me: The Next Chapter, she complicates the otherwise already dizzying rigmarole of loving, breaking up and loving again. She also falls in love with two men, this time men who love women.
Women as mothers are significant signposts in Thai BL. With fathers who appear from nowhere or, at least, arrive unannounced in the clean condos of sons falling for other sons, these mothers assume the function of objective correlative for the society controlling, hiding, and finally releasing its judgement on the kind of love that is ignored only if it remains submerged.
In the said Next Chapter, the parents of Knock appear ready to accept their son as, well, “gay.” In the case of Korn, his father is presented as violently against his son turning out to be not the man he always assumed he would naturally become. A comic relief is there in the encounters between the respective parents of Korn and Knock who represent the extreme in gender awareness, tolerance and acceptance. In those humorous moments are implicated to what degree homosexuality is seen in Thai society. The mother of Korn suggests another persona—a mother who, it seems, can love her son no matter what but remains voiceless in public even when her husband makes a fool of himself in disrespecting their son.
A footnote to Next Chapter is the appearance of the two girls (and other members of the group) stepping out to claim “Yaoi” as their battlecry.
The story of Kao and Pete in Dark Blue Kiss takes the matter of parenting to another level. With no woman out to emasculate man (which is an oxymoron because no one claims male identities in this series) and no female pulchritude to tease a boy’s love out of the shadow, a different conflict is constructed in this tale. Here, we have another boy out to steal a boy from a boy. The plot is disturbing because we meet in the otherwise celebratory BL a “gay” boy evil and scheming as the unwanted third wheel. There are problems of motivation but who cares? Who was it who said that motivation is for beginners?
Anyway, in Dark Blue Kiss, the boy who is eager to destroy the love between Pete and Kao is revealed to having a cruel father. Nearly blackmailed into submission by this boy’s father, Kao’s mother stands for her son and finally admits she has known all this time the “secret” of her son and even pushes her to run and meet and love the boy who loves him.
I really will not call what I have written as a critique of Thai BL; the genre is dense and more complex than my bristling overview and side comments. I wish I could do more about the politics of this form but, as I said, I have severe limitations in languages and cultures of Thailand. I await a Filipino to further ruminate and be critical about the splendor of this form called Thai BL.
What about you, Netchaii M, what kind of woman are you in the BL landscape?