#mewtop

Okay, but Jojo's take-down on twitter of the person criticizing Thai BLs' gay representation because of their inclusion of sexuality + the fact that it's Only Friends one year anniversary is getting to me! Because, for Jojo and his team, the issue of sexuality in BL is at the very core of Only Friends!!! That's what the antagonism between Mew and Boston is all about!!!

Mew at the start is the very SYMBOL of BL history and tropes that the twitter commenter is admiring. He's pure and chaste, and he has the glasses to prove it. He loves romance books because they're about love that's deeper than sex. He's in for the long game, and doesn't want to waste his virginity on anything less than lifelong perfection and the happiest ending.

Meanwhile, Boston is the paragon of queer media's history. Just pure 'no day but today' immediate sensual experience and satisfaction. To show off that he knows his queer history, he's got his film photography dark room to develop all his artistic nudes, a regular Robert Mapplethorpe. If that's not anti-establishment queer enough, anyone in a relationship inspires Boston's lustful antagonism because that would mean they think that life should be deeper than the surface, and that's a sin against Boston's aestheticism. Beauty for beauty's sake only; sex for sex's sake--nothing deeper nor longer-lasting. A love story is a worst-case scenario.

But then Top and Nick come along and mess up Boston and Mew's perfectly amiable division. We should've seen it coming. The very title of the show tells us this is a show about inclusion and exclusion, who's in and who's out--in coupling and in friend circles. There's that random crown in the title sequence; this is a show of parliamentary political jostling of parties to claim power. The little motif of Boeing and his plane trinket sprinkled across the entirety of the series before his introduction in the last two episodes, hints about the coup that finally comes to send someone out.

Boston's name should have given it away that he couldn't stay, but that name's also his saving grace, a sign that maybe that beautiful slut actually escaped the prison of Thai BL branded partnerships. Boston, after all, is the kind of marriage that lesbian women practiced prior to any licensed gay marriage. The Bostonians is also the name of the novel by Henry James, an author whose queerness is the type that historians find it hard to put a finger on, for which Boston marriages are named. And The Bostonians was adapted by the non-monogamous gay film-making couple Merchant & Ivory (the team that brought, among other acclaimed films, brought the queer story of Maurice to the screen, whose protagonist gets his happy-ending by running away).

Yes, Boston was slimy and slippery, but he had a need to escape definitions that Mew, who grew up inside his own BL bubble with his supportive lesbian moms, never had. Boston's dad was a politician who wanted improvement for his country, according to his campaign poster, and was someone the youth could be into, according to his son (and for all his faults, Boston was never much for lying). Although he didn't know about what happened regarding the gender of people deeper beneath Boston's sheets, this dad accepted his son for his promiscuity and passion for the arts, in other words, for who his son was. Still, the political aspect limited who Boston could document himself as in Thailand (and Boston's 1998 t-shirt when we first meet his father speaks to political connections about the complicated emergence of Thailand's democratic state and the first democratically elected prime minister to serve a full-term who similarly went into exile). So Boston focuses on the feelings and experiences of queerness he can garner because naming it isn't something that's promised or even preferable for him.

In someone with digital savvy like Nick, Boston discovers the potential for the appreciation of discretion, someone who can help him integrate his love for fleeting moments with more long-term connection. (You know, how the internet transformed photographs into tools for social connection rather than just for private albums or high art?) Yet even Nick's digital tastes, boundary-crossing as they might be, can't find comfort beyond monogamy. Boston can't find happiness for his boundless sexuality within the confines of the Thai BL's settings.

Mew, our sweet BL cinnamon bun, would've been Boston's complete opposite if he hadn't have been persuaded to have his visual and emotional impairment corrected by the realities of queerness Boston introduced him to (a fantastic subversion of the BL boy no longer needing their glasses). Instead, Mew has to contend with feelings for a real gay man who has a sexual past, lust, and fucked up habits from a life that hasn't been perfect. Even then, Top's still a pretty classic romantic alpha-male romcom interest. But Only Friends, having removed Mew's literal and figurative blinders, let's him process that as well as any real-life, self-righteous, purity-ring wearing princess would. Mew as Harley Quinn is just short of digging his keys into the side of his pretty little souped-up four wheel drive, and he is reveling in using his bff Ray's crush on him to get revenge. The fluffy BL castle on a cloud comes tumbling down when it encounters actual queerness.

But Only Friends lives in a BL world. The branded pairs must remain the branded pairs, and Boston, despite his conniving gaze, always seemed more confused by the politicking than everyone else at club YOLO, anyways. Every character and every actor has played their roles to their purpose, giving us three theories of love and their allowance within a BL. Topmew's tenuous romcom energy persists by force, Sandray's addictive and codependent romance with all its desperate struggles and tears will remain (though everyone's concerned its unhealthy), and Bostonnick's queer tendencies, with their carnal, discrete, and digital predilections, must be banished by the final scene. But they haunt the Only Friends hostel (or should we say hostile) even when they're not there. They're the people behind the lens and behind the screen that frame everything. They are the queer urges that both make possible and, as another man walks into the room--in that undeniably provocative form of Mix Sahaphap--threaten the gay happy ending.

When I say Only Friends is one of my favorite series, it's because I think this commentary of BL is the story it was telling from the beginning, and Jojo's twitter rant just affirmed that for me. I see Aof Noppharnach as the romantic optimist of Thai BL queer possibilities. He saw how they could be utilized to tell utopic queer stories. His friend and collaborator Jojo is not cynical but his works often serve to question and prod the genre about its extents and limits. Only Friends performs this prosecution through Shakespearean tragedy ala Julius Caesar, and the contentious reactions of fans stands as a testament to its interrogation about queer sexuality's acceptability within the BL realm.

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