~~~

Forever a fan of these panels. Really, they might some of my favourite tianshan panels in the past timeline. To me they are the perfect summary of why their dynamic is not only attractive but also so interesting to see develop.

I love how both are very honest and plain confessions of the state of their feelings. I mean, Mo's does come across as a bit offstandish, but:

Can you expect something else from him? <3;

He's not stuttering or pushing HT away! <33 He's not on the offensive or the defensive. He actually looks aside, pensive, thinking about how to word his thoughts before doing so. He's being serious!;

It's a response to HT reiterating that he's scared of Mo forgetting him, showing he does care <3<3<3.

It's the word 'bother' that gets me. For Mo, words like ‘love’ or even ‘like’ feel impossible to imagine having for someone else (let alone for another guy). 'Bother' is like a parasite, or maybe a seed unknowingly planted inside him, something he can’t stop from growing. And that growth changes him: suddenly he’s forming a friend group, feeling safe for the first time in years. It’s uncomfortable, even shameful at times --Mo sees it as weakness, as depending on others. Over time, he adjusts to it… or at least, as much as anyone can get used to a guy like He Tian, lmao. A foreign presence inside him that slowly, relentlessly molds him into someone who can finally find a bit of peace and self-confidence and worth.

We can't forget that He Tian's panel comes straight after we're reminded by He Cheng that his brother is expected to leave for another country soon! Is He Tian stating his true intentions --to live his days with Mo as a normal teenager-- so Mo gets it through his head that even when He Tian leaves he'll come back to him? Honestly, Mo doesn't know this yet, though surely he must remember these words when he finds He Tian's note.

I can't imagine what went through He Tian's head during those peaceful couple of days after their kiss. Though him giving Mo pieces of himself (visit to his mum's grave and his old dog's house) screams volumes as to how much He Tian wants to remain a part of him even when he's gone. These were very cute chapters, yet they were permeated with a sense of melancholy.

Anyway, I got sidetracked there. There's something incredibly charming to me that despite how layered and complicated their situation is, we do get these confessions as early as we do.

And how they carry through to their adult years lol.

In the present timeline, Mo is still "bothered" by He Tian (can't handle the emotions of having He Tian back and how he himself finds his walls crumbling with his own want). He Tian barges into Mo's life to sweep him off his feet. When he finds out that it's not going go smoothly, he does all in his hand to bring Mo to his life, or as much as he can show anyway (aka demolishing Mo’s apartment unit and dragging him into his own -- greedy bastard! -- and, on a slightly more acceptable note, trying to ease Mo’s discomfort about their difference in social status when bringing him into He Tian’s home). He Tian, if anything, stays true to his declaration of intent.

This is not to say they haven't changed at all. They’ve changed each other, and they’ve changed for each other in subtle and not so subtle ways.

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 "Actors and Creators Who Are LGBT+" 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.

I literally heard myself wheeze at one point reading these. 😂

This line has always unsettled me, and I've realized that may be because I'm misinterpreting what Vegas is saying here.

I've clipped this part of the scene, to give some context:

So, Vegas says that everything he loves has left him and that his life is pathetic. Pete counters by pointing out that Vegas has Macau - and this is the point at which Vegas says Macau is no different.

My brain has always connected this line with 'everything he loves leaves', with the implication being that Vegas is just waiting for Macau to leave too. But, it occurs to me now that this line may actually be connected with 'his life is pathetic', since Macau is also part of the unfortunate second family.

How do y'all interpret this line?

Here's a poll, that breaks things down a bit further to get at some potential nuance here:

This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.

For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.

I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.

It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.

I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.

Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.