Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Exactly last year, Comic Book Resources celebrated Pride Month by coming up with a list of 63 LGBT characters in the DC and Marvel Universes -- which is well and good, but the topic has never really interested me. My geekiness swings to a totally different beat, and although I enjoy my cinematic incarnations of these worlds, I am not invested as into the minutiae of DC and Marvel as some of my friends are. Is Spider-Man gay? Eh, I don't care. (He's not, right?)
But I like comics. And there are some gay-themed comics I've found myself really loving, first for the magnificence of the art, and second for the way they become a kind of mirror (often funny and surreal) to my gay self in the way only comics could be.
The Boy in Pink Earmuffs has a list of these LGBT-themed comics, most of them exclusively for the web, but my favourites [most of them first recommended to me by my boyfriend who's a big comics fan] are...
Alex Woolfson and Winona Nelson's Artifice is a surprise and a delight: a delicious science fiction piece about an android sent by corporate masters to eliminate a team of scientists who know a little too much about a certain project, the surprise is that he fails spectacularly from completing the mission when he meets one of his targets, and... Love happens. (Read the comics here.) Meanwhile, EK Weaver's The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal is the story of two lost young men who find themselves unexpectedly sharing a road trip adventure into self-discovery. And love. (Read the comics here.) Then there is Alex Woolfson, Adam DeKraker, and Veronica Gandini's The Young Protectors which gives us the definite "gay" in the superhero genre by making us follow the life of one young super whose very dilemma is that the man he loves ... is the super villain he must fight. Love conquers all. (Read the comics here.) And finally, Gisele Lagace and Dave Lumsdon's Ménage à 3 is just a zany comic strip following a whole cast of characters -- all young, all beautiful, with all manner of gender identity -- as they stumble in and out of each other's beds, defining once and for all the glory of sexual fluidity. Love transcends! (Read the comics here.)
Go and read! In the meantime I'm trying to read this Japanese baramanga one-shot, Mentaiko/ Itto's The Holy Night[totally NSFW]...
3:54 PM |
An Addiction. Or: Bai Luo Yin and Gu Hai Forever
Meet Xu Weizhou and Huang Jingyu. They are perhaps the biggest and the unlikeliest stars to come out of China in the past few months. As the fictional characters Bai Luo Yin and Gu Hai, they have also inflamed the hearts (and colonised the minds) of millions in Asia -- and they've done it by embodying the unexpected: young men falling in love in the literary mode we know as BL (or "boys love"). It is the craziest thing.
I have always had an ambivalent attitude towards BL or yaoi, loving the kilig the genre brings but also finding parts of its formula a bit disturbing. In yaoi, the lovers almost always consist of an older seme, who is aggressive, and a younger uke, who is passive; and their courtship almost always involves a tango of advance and resistance that to a casual observer would look like rape. While I know that this genre is not at all tailored for me (its biggest audience are young girls scattered all over Asia -- more particularly in Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand), even if I am a gay man, its queer aesthetic and storyline nevertheless mark me as a curious participant and die-hard observer. Because what isn't interesting about seeing beautiful young boys falling in love with each other? When Junjou Romanchika (Pure Romance) -- perhaps the most fully-bodied example of the form -- first came out as a manga in 2002, and later as an anime series in 2008, I was already a big fan, teary-eyed as I followed the travails of Misaki Takahashi and Akihiko Usami. I was devoted to it, and that devotion continued in various selected iterations of the genre, embracing fully such fan favourites as Free! Iwatobi Swim Club (it is more or less yaoi, albeit of a more restrained variety).
For some reason, web streaming of late has been the most receptive platform to putting out live-action versions of yaoi. In Thailand, there are many BL series, the best of which seems to be Make It Right. In China, there is Counterattack (or Strike Back), based on the novel Falling in Love with a Rival by Chai Jidan. But towering over them all is Addicted (also known as Heroin), based on the novel Are You Addicted? also by Chai Jidan.
The series follows, for the most part, Bai Luo Yin (the incandescent Xu Weizhou) who lives with his careless but well-meaning and loving father and his grandmother. His mother has remarried, and the new husband, recently widowed, is a wealthy military official, who happens to have a son named Gu Hai (the irrepressible Huang Jingyu). Bai Luo Yin and Gu Hai rebel tempestuously against the new marriage, and their paths finally cross when the latter transfers impulsively to the former's high school -- all the while innocent of the identity of each other's parents.
The series chronicles how they slowly fall for each other in the expected fashion of seme aggressiveness (Gu Hai, of course) and uke resistance (Bai Lou Yin, of course). The crisp unfolding of that love story -- slow, tender, and filled with the tension of teenage hormones -- is what makes Addicted a winning series. It forfeited sleep for me, and I opted instead to binge in one go all of the fifteen episodes of its first season, which started streaming in China in late January 2016.
So here's the first episode of Addicted, which you can see because you don't live in China, you lucky bastard. (Follow the rest of the episodes in the subsequent links...)
11:15 PM |
Pink Spandex! Or: Enjoying Gay Comics
