🇨🇳 Boys Keep Flirting With Each Other on Chinese TV But Never Fall in Love


In the fantastical world of ancient China, two handsome, superpower-wielding men find soulmates in each other. They flirt with ancient love poems, enjoy the moonlight on a romantic rooftop, raise an apprentice together, and come to each other’s rescue at life-and-death moments.

The stirring scenes are from the Chinese fantasy period series Word of Honor, the latest hit in the gay romance genre that has exploded in popularity in China: boys’ love. Well, not “love,” exactly. In a particularly emotional scene, one of the two male leads hugs his grieving companion, only to affectionately call him a “brother.”

Subtle gay dramas, adapted from boys’ love webnovels, has become a lucrative business in China, where censorship of anything LGBTQ-related is tight. But the appetite for queer content is just too big to ignore, a demand that comes not from gay men, but mostly straight women.

At least eight shows adapted from novels with boys’ love romances are expected to premiere this year across China’s major streaming platforms, including Alibaba’s Youku, Tencent Video, Mango TV, and iQIYI. The stories range from historical-fantasy action flicks to modern mystery thrillers and teenage melodramas.

The trend is a double-edged sword for China’s sexual minorities, providing a rare positive portrayal of queerness on mass media, but also perpetuating stereotypes for profit.

“This type of queer, more fantastic than real, does little justice to the gay community,” said Zhange Ni, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies Chinese webnovels. “Its social impact is largely under the control of digital capitalism. Only the ‘homonormative’ gay characters, men who are handsome, wealthy, with exceptional qualities, are liked by consumers. It is disconnected from the experiences of the LGBTQ population.”

High risk, high returns

Making and showing boys’ love dramas in China is a cat-and-mouse game between the profit-driven entertainment industry and the homophobic censorship regime.

In 2016, the hit teen series Addicted (also known as Heroin), a drama with explicit gay scenes, was pulled from online streaming platform iQIYI before it could release its last three episodes. In 2018, the sci-fi drama Guardian went offline on video hosting site Youku two months after its release, even though the original gay romance storyline was rewritten as friendship. But the demand for boys’ love was clearly insatiable — before it was banned from Youku, Guardian had already racked up over a billion views.

The potential for serious profits encourages companies to continue queerbaiting while trying to please censors by incorporating elements from official state ideology. The 2019 fantasy series The Untamed, featuring an unlikely bond between a cheeky magic-wielder and a stoic ice prince, started an online craze over the pair’s implicit romance. But the show’s promotion focused on its portrayal of Chinese traditional culture — a push consistent with Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

“By showing the beauty of Chinese culture, The Untamed has conveyed our cultural confidence and established positive values,” communist mouthpiece People’s Daily wrote at the time, in a surreal piece tying President Xi Jinping’s political buzzword to a boys’ love show.

Read more @ https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k95mg/boys...v-untamed-lgbtq