Being Too Queer Even for the Queer: What’s the Deal With People’s Views of Asian Boys’ Love? (ft Heartstopper)

Guess who remembered their blog? 😅

It really can be difficult running so many accounts at once, and while I often have ideas for blog entries (eg on Mother’s Day I would’ve been happy evaluating some mother characters in donghua), it’s easy to get overwhelmed or distracted or simply not want to do something because you feel like you have to. 

But here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a while; this was originally a thread I made in response to some news in the world of boys’ love: a certain comment by Alice Oseman, the creator of Heartstopper, which is now a hit show on Netflix, went kind of viral for being—in some ways—an unfair criticism on popular aspects of the Asian boys’ love genre.

The Comment Reads as Follows:

Yup, no explicit sex in this comic - the characters are teenagers so it's just not appropriate, and even if they weren't, I'd have no interest in drawing that. I wouldn't describe this comic as 'yaoi' or even 'BL' - they're genres of comic that tend to fetishise and eroticise queer men in a really bad way. This comic is just a romance between two boys and a coming-of-age story!

This comment elicited an extremely divided response, but numerous Asians expressed frustration or even outrage at the implications that Asian creations prominently featuring gay relationships are once again being written off as just fetishistic and problematic and nothing more. This kind of criticism isn’t anything new and can more than certainly hold truth to it, but as an (East) Asian myself, I get the frustration as well. And hey, while the controversy has mostly blown over, it is Pride month (happy Pride, by the way! I have another post on introducing queer content in Chinese media that I’ll try to post next week~ 🌈), so it seems as good a time as any to post this!

I remain nearly as tired as when I first wrote these tweets, but the thread ended up conveying things I continue to feel, so I thought I’d compile them here—with new additional thoughts—as a blog entry. Having seen people call Oseman out for the rather dismissive tone she adopted towards yaoi and boys’ love, I have to agree her words lack nuance.

There’s the obvious point we can get out of the way first: despite her seemingly attempting to distance her work from similar stories made by women that focus on a gay relationship, it still makes sense by definition for her work to fall under the label of “bl”—because this label just means “boys’ love.” Ignoring all the connotations about genre tropes and target audiences, Heartstopper is still boys’ love.

Now I know people will say “but she’s just clarifying it doesn’t contain the problematic fetishization of gay men that works associated with yaoi/boys’ love have!” But then you have to consider cultural context. Why is it that “yaoi” and “boys’ love,” types of work that bring to mind Asian media, are the way they are—that they contain things we, in the west, view as “problematic fetishization”? 

It’s not a surprise these terms come from Asian media, where nations are perhaps somewhat more conservative towards the LGBTQ+ community. In some ways, the west is known for being “more progressive,” in the sense that less people have to feel like their life is in danger if they come out. We can thus see more visible and out queer authors tell authentic queer works without worry of persecution (of course this within itself isn’t entirely true, as many creators continue to have to fight for their works to even contain queer content, as seen by Disney asking shows such as Gravity Falls to remove visible queer couples, as well as calling The Owl House content they don’t view as fitting in under the Disney label. Additionally, to this day, you can see people get up-in-arms at the smallest things that can be read as queer. But for the most part, being blatantly queer has become more socially acceptable in the west).

So yes, occasionally it will seem like western queer stories target queer audiences while Asian queer stories target straight girls. But that doesn’t mean Asian stories only fetishize gay men.

As many people have happily pointed out, there are plenty of nuanced depictions of gay life in manga and more, and it can be just as authentic as the western stories. Additionally, even regarding the “more problematic” gay content, they can nevertheless serve as meaningful visibility. After all, there are Asian nations where a queer presence in media hasn’t yet been normalized. So for Asians who identify as queer, these stories can mean a lot to them, even if they aren’t as “pure” as western queer content.

Asian queer works also aren’t exclusive to being created by straight women. For example, you wouldn’t expect modern China to have any out queer authors, yet there exists Fei Tian Ye Xiang, a gay man writing danmei (Chinese boys’ love/yaoi). Is his content going to be as “wholesome” or as “pure” as western queer stories (which many people nowadays assume mean “this work will not have sex and will only depict a healthy, happy gay couple”)? Maybe not. But does it really have to be???

The first thing to ask is why his type of work automatically gets labelled “less good” than a queer story written by somebody in the west? Because, as we can see with all these debates about fetishization and what makes for good representation and wholesome home media, people have preconceived notions about what a good queer story is.

I was recently explaining how Chinese people depict LGBTQ+ when it’s less normalized there, as people often misunderstand China’s situation as “nothing queer can survive against the nation’s hostility,” with many people fearing that any creator who depicts anything remotely queer shall have to fear for their lives. I explained that that’s not the case; creators will often slip queer content in and many people are out on social media. I did mention how it’s a shame China is less progressive than the west on queer visibility and acceptance, and I got this comment in response:

The Comment Reads as Follows:

I just want to say thanks for the nuanced explanation since you better explained things about the current state of LGBTQ media in China than I would have the patience for. Just want to make one comment about something you said: "It 100% sucks that China isn’t as progressive as the west" 

Personally I disagree with you on this statement that China isn't as progressive as the west. As a gay American who understand both Chinese and American culture, I want to say that the west isn't really progressive but they like to pretend to be progressive as a way to shame non-white countries (aka the global south). Countries like the US, Canada, Australia and even Western Europe were very anti-gay up until recently. It was only 10 to 20 years ago that gay marriage became legal in the US. Also in California we even voted to take the rights of same sex couples to marry. LGBTQ people are still heavily discriminated. Right now our politicians are discriminating against transgender people and this country fights over which bathrooms a transgender person can use. Also in the 1980s, our president didn't do anything about AIDS and HIV because Americans thought it was the gay cancer and would only kill off gay people. 

Sure China is not perfect and yes China (like most of Asia) likes to pretend that LGBTQ people don't exist, but the Chinese government isn't actively persecuting LGBTQ people like what is going on in the US. China doesn't get into stupid fights over which gender can use which bathroom. Even the Chinese supreme court recently passed a ruling saying that transgender people should be ensured of equal rights as everyone else. Honestly as a gay person, I rather be in China and than live in the US right now (and I live in a supposedly progressive state that likes gay people). 

Whether you agree with what they said or not, they have a point. It’s all a matter of perspective. The west has its own way of normalizing the LGBTQ+ right now via representation in media and, in that same vein, Asia also has its own way of normalizing the LGBTQ+ via representation in media.

And as mentioned previously, it’s not like Asian queer media is only fetishistic, even if it can contain sex, and that sex may be depicted in a way that is meant to be erotic. For example, you guys have seen me cry about Erha he ta de bai mao shizun (Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun) twice now on my blog and even more on my Twitter and my Tumblr, and I don’t just love it because it contains sexual content. I mean, don’t get me wrong—in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying sex, and I’m saying that as a sex-repulsed asexual! I just mean that there’s also depth and nuance to the text that I enjoy along with it having erotic material. This is why you see many people mentioning that they enjoy danmei and baihe for its complex characters and detailed plots.

These stories are nonetheless incredibly engaging, and technically they’re doing good by having believable characters with a lot of depth who also happen to fall for someone of the same gender (so that it’s not just content that says, “Here is guy A and guy B. They are hot and they are fucking”).

Before being colonized, China was a lot more lax toward the concept of gay couples than China is now, which is—unfortunately—a result of colonization, westernization, and China’s own historical trajectory during the 20th century. So given the fact I know middle-aged Chinese people who now find it weird that Chinese boys wear make-up, grow long hair, and care about fashion or find it weird that gay relationships are a thing despite these things all once being normal in Chinese culture, I find it hopeful that China continues having a way to engage with queer identity through these boys’ love stories even with the government’s censorship. This can also apply for numerous Asian countries and how they engage with their own boys’ love!

That’s why, as someone who is Asian and identifies as queer, I for one am glad such stories exist, even if they’re not always as pure as people in the west may want. They serve their own purposes and have their own audiences, and it doesn’t make them lesser than western queer stories.  Like…there’s nothing wrong with the type of simple, innocent, coming-of-age queer story that Heartstopper tries to be. I don’t even care about seeing sex in a queer story (I often actually get uncomfortable with sex scenes). But if a work does contain gay sex, it doesn’t necessarily make it bad.

There’s been a recent obsession in the west with having good, wholesome content that rubs me the wrong way. In some ways, I understand it, considering that throughout history, queer people have struggled to be labelled as anything but problematic and wrong, and people now don’t want to indulge in anything that can be morally or ethically wrong (especially now with cancel culture, a modern trend that can contain both good and bad consequences). But even with that being said, you can’t expect fiction to always be wholesome. That’s not what fiction is.

Fiction is meant to explore and to make people think, and it is a way to express oneself in a way that is removed from reality. You could be into arguably “depraved” content in fiction, but it won’t necessarily make you a bad person, and it’s technically actually a good thing that people can explore darker themes in fiction without hurting anyone in reality. Of course, there will be people who take things too far even with fiction, and we can’t deny that. But we also cannot police things to always be morally pure.

Not only is that unsustainable, it just isn’t fair. In many ways, we see young queers now holding queer creators and queer content up to impossible standards of moral purity, where if the work “slips up” in the audiences’ eyes, the creators will be aggressively torn down and harassed, which is not behaviour we should be condoning, especially when it comes to vulnerable individuals and not corporations or truly horrible, powerful people (yes, it’s a slippery slope, and yes, I can’t fit all the nuances of this into a single blog entry, but you should be able to get what I’m trying to say).

Anyway, this whole recent obsession with moral purity in the west is indicative of an age-old obsession in the west with having content that can be deemed wholesome and good, which has been used against queer people throughout history. I mean, I studied film studies in university, and it’s important to remember things such as the Production Code and other forms of people trying to police what other people create. And that’s the thing—this policing is reminiscent of censorship, and with the way people in the west always cry about Chinese censorship, I was under the impression that censorship was a bad thing (*sarcasm*).

So yeah. I get why Oseman thought she should write her comment the way she did; she wanted to separate her work from a certain stigmatized genre that doesn’t always feel “authentically queer.” But as I’ve discussed, there are valid reasons why Asians haven’t taken kindly to her comment, as it doesn’t change the fact her comment was very dismissive of Asian queer culture and queer media.

To end this on a sweeter note though—to kind of combat this stigma, but mostly just to celebrate Pride—I’ll share some thoughts on why applying western perspectives to Chinese (and Asian, for that matter) queer content isn’t very fair next week—and then maybe the week after that, I’ll talk more about danmei, since the post for next week focuses more on queer subtext in Chinese donghua and manhua (which are more censored and do not always set out to focus on queer main characters but may still include suggestions of queer characters and relationships). So yeah, see all of you then—as long as I can actually get myself to maintain a regular blogging schedule! 🙈

Chose the image above to close out since Duanwu Jie was just a couple days ago (on June 3). Happy belated Duanwu Jie, happy Pride, and happy June, everyone! 🥰