this is not me being parasocial / delulu, i understand actors' sexual orientation is their personal business & it's just shipping etc, but do you think actors who accept being in a koojin / often play queer roles, esp in thai bl industry, can be a little bit queer? i'm not saying bl actors cannot be straight but from what i see in real life, straight (conservative) people often avoid engaging in queer-coded behaviors (unless it's for pranks and being funny) or don't want to be think of as being queer. maybe for money, they will, but again, the acting pay is abysmal unless you blow up. even if they have girlfriends in real life, that still not exclude them being bi or pan.
anyways, idk what im trying to say but i have been thinking about it a lot, esp when i see (proudly declared) straight men play gays in comedy tiktok skits for shit and giggles or when men avoid in disgust when other men being physically intimate with them...
You have no idea how happy I am to get this ask.
Do I think some of these actors are queer? Honey, let me tell you...
Not only do I think some of them might be queer. I think most of them are queer. But lemme break it down with a Thai-specific focus.
The idea that they are all straight seems to come from the early days of BL. A few entered into the industry back then with public girlfriends--Krist, Newwie, and I believe Jaylerr to name a few--and then there was one big pregnancy scandal with Captain Chonlathorn (Noh in the original Love Sick) that blew up his relationships with women. This was around the peak of the Anglo-sphere's discourse about letting only queer actors play queer roles, a well-intentioned but invasive and essentialist line of thought as seen by what occurred to actors like Kit Connor. Dating women to fans participating in this discourse as well as fans who were attached to the fantasy of the koojin (which literally means "imaginary couple") was treated as a betrayal. There was also a popular fan lie that spread about issues of homophobia towards out actors Saint and Cooheart on the Love By Chance set, which exacerbated many of these feelings. (There was real drama between Perth's manager and Saint, but that's a different story which may or may not have to do with New and Saint getting some funding for their own studios.) They condemned BL as fake! gay-for-pay! straight actors playing gay roles!
To my knowledge, though, none of the actors above have labeled themselves as straight. Krist has said he's not gay in response to a fan's instagram ask in 2016 misrepresented by the inter-fans as simply homophobic (which @thebroccolination does a great job of contextualizing). And there have been legitimately reported incidences of homophobia and femmephobia (Build comes to mind), but queers are as capable of those behaviors as straights.
Other than one less well-known actor who I've seen choose to put up an ally sticker on a Pride event wall in the background of their compilation of clips from Pride, Nanon is the only actor I know for sure has labeled himself as straight. It was in an interview with GMMTV actor Pompam, who is out as kathoey. I mention Pompam's identity because it gets at one of the cultural issues here. The Thai sexuality model, although its grown to align itself more with the Western model recently, is not the same. Kathoey could be what in English we call trans or it could just be sexual bottoms. So yes, kathoey is a gender category for the queers.
However, "man" is not a gender category for the straights. @heaven-is-in-your-arms-series has a wonderfully accessible historical post about Shine that lays out how men's sexuality in Thailand has not historically excluded them from having sex with dick-and/or-former-dick-havers. It just means they're gonna wanna top. Any hole's the goal. So the "straight" claim made after finding out that BL actors dated women ignores not just the possibility of bisexuality, but a culture that more readily expects bisexuality as a norm. As a rule, I don't speculate on specific actors sexuality on main (DM me for the gossip tho), but head on over to Jaylerr's instagram and tell me that man doesn't at least have bisexual swag in his fashion choices lol.
In fact, I think there are some official coming out statements that fans misread as advocacy because they are looking for the language of LGBTQ+ identitifiers or personal information about who their dating life or bedroom. When someone says they believe a person can fall in love with someone of any gender, as Jeff Satur, Boun, and Prem have, that is both a philosophical AND A PERSONAL statement of pansexuality. When you stop to think that the word "gay" had to be borrowed from English because the closest Thai could get was saying a person "likes men," you realize that someone saying they can like someone of any gender is a statement of sexuality. It's just devoid of the medical and categorical identity language English developed around it. Instead it focuses on the feeling.
Now all those "straight" reactions also ignore that for every actor who has been public about dating a woman, there's several more actors who have not made their dating life public. For every Krist, there's a Singto. For every Newwie, there's a Tay. And we can take that one step further to say, for every Gulf, there's a Mew. Mew's coming out was a mess and not exactly by choice and he shifted out of BL after the incident, which sheds some light on the pressures in the industry for BL actors specifically.
There are reasons not to come out publicly but they might be a little different than what you think. Cooheart has discussed the issues of getting work as an out actor (and done some great discussions about the challenges as a femme presenting actor, too, which people like rainbow-tattooed Fluke Nattanon have reposted). But I want to suggest that the evidence doesn't point to this being an issue with company policies, exactly. As the Ex-Morning stated outright, "the sponsors are conservative." Not the sponsors for all the shows playing to Thai audiences--Mew and Tul both continue to act prolifically outside of BL, and many popular films and shows in the country prominently feature kathoey comedy actors and did so before BL's surge. The Thai entertainment industry's not perfect free of homophobia, but being out does not seem to be its main issue.
Thai BL, however, until the past two or three years, was mainly sustaining itself through international support (while still holding Thai values and audiences as its core focus). 3 nations that heavily consume BL dramas and host fanmeets--China, Indonesia, and Malaysia--have laws and policies on the books that criminalize homosexuality and limit promotion of lgbtq+ agendas, laws and policies that were ramped up right around the time BL kicked off. And these have tended to target those who deviate queerly from expected masculine roles much more overtly than the other way around, which is why you have so many of the actresses being publicly out with their queerness in interviews. Daou, who came out publicly in April 2025, allegedly had his pre-recorded performance cut from the broadcast and refilmed for the ASEAN-China media week in June 2025 with fans speculating authorities had discovered his work in BL. Two other major consumers, Japan and the more conservative and majority Christian South Korea, have celebrity-fan cultures that privilege perfectionist images and discretion, a style quite unlike Thai celebrity dynamics that accept messiness and close-contact with their idols. We have to understand from a political and economic perspective the narrow needle eye through which the Thai BL industry--including its actors--is trying to thread internationally.
Like it or not, soft power is a long game of deception trying to win over increasing numbers of the public's hearts to queer (and Thai) causes while making the economic incentives impossible to ignore. But that means rendering their BL celebrities palatable. "Opening your heart but not going public" is the phrase Joong adapted from tiktok for a school project about relationships, and it applies to many of their sexualities/gender expressions, too.
It's actually the way most queer people live? They don't come out to everyone they meet, but they don't try to hide their voices, effeminate modes of expression, or queer interests. Queerness in many ways is more than just sexuality. We have actors openly using queer lingo and modifiers in their livestreams--Progress, Great, and Fluke Nattanon (among others I'm sure). I've got my gaydar pinging on all my limp-wristers and duck-lippers. Singto has been reading Y romance novels since before SOTUS. Khaotung's showing off his De Profundis in interviews (a book he's gifted to EarthMix). OhmKrit tells us how gay his music tastes are on tiktok. Papang flew out to Singapore for a Lady Gaga concert. Java has a pride flag jacket he posted. Petch did three different rainbow looks for Pride this year. This is all before I'm getting to actors who wear skirts and baby-tees to the airport--I'm looking at you, Gun, PP, and Lego.
This is not fan-service as its been traditionally understood, which at its core is about displaying intimacy between two men to excite fans with the delicious tension between reality and pretend. The things listed above are not known to draw as broad a range of consumers. The audience it draws are the queers who are in the know. And yes, the external signs are not a sexuality by themselves--anyone regardless of sexuality and gender has access to these behaviors and choices--but they still are expressions of gender and sexuality, and specifically expressions that misogyny and various queerphobias condemn. And they're doing it on their lives in Thai, or posting in their stories, or briefly mentioning them in passing in interviews. These aren't spaces for mass international consumption.
These actors don't want us invading their private lives or demanding they publicly label themselves. They do, however, seem to want to let their queer interests and forms of expression exist publicly without shame and to let other queer people see that (and honestly women of all sorts with eyes to see, too, cuz honestly fuck the misogyny that's at the core of homophobia). They are doing these things on their public-facing media, even though they certainly have private media they could use. (Phuwin's fans even know his private handle and remind one another to leave it and him alone.)
Thai fans emphatically protect and retain this delicate boundary. If you go into the BL rumor threads on reddit, you'll see international fans complaining about Thai fans "gatekeeping" information. Read up on Thai queer history and the country's history in general as it narrowly avoided colonization by multiple powers, you'll realize that this semi-closed cultural practice has a long history. Some privacy is necessary to retain personal autonomy and diplomatic strength. That's true for the BL industry, too. They're subtly letting us in if we're respectful and observant.
Let them keep their secrets and share what they want to share. Delete something if a fan reaches out and asks you to. I can say as a gay guy with connections to the NYC theater scene and hollywood, gays are gatekeeping lots of information about American actors, too, that they only let loose when someone does something egregious to the community (barring Perez Hilton's betrayal of this practice). It's been that way for a long time. But don't mistake privacy for hiding. They're letting us know, and it does no one good to have the automatic assumption be straight.
Now, if you feel obsessive or exhausted over trying to read the signs and in-between the lines like I sometimes do, I recommend opening a tab and finding some publicly out folks by turning on some of the great gay reality dating shows going on in Asia instead (Taiwan's Boys Like Boys available on Gaga is my absolute favorite but they're all fun), or getting into some of the out performers in the industry. @scarefox's mdl "Out and Proud BL Actors" list, which requires public statements to be considered out, is a great place to start. Otherwise, you might just be looking for some real life queer experiences and could look into what's possible for you.
To sum it up, yes, I think many (even a majority) of the actors are queer. I think nearly all of the actors sincerely support some form of lgbtq+ rights. I think many more men in the world have explored sexual experiences with other men than is generally acknowledged--I've hooked up with a few of them who fall under that category lol. This is on top of a massive and continuing expansion in younger generations of those who identify as lgbtq+ globally and a shift from a fairly strict gay-straight binary, to simply being queerly open to possibilities. Trust that plenty of people especially younger folks, especially people in the arts, especially people making queer content: Are. Queer. Most will not announce it to the world, at least while they're still working as actors, and we need to be chill with that. All we can do as fans is just appreciate what they offer us and resist assumptions. To end with the immortal words of Tom Hardy, "Of course I have [had sex with men]. I'm an actor for fuck's sake."
amandla
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
