A Song for Seng, the Master of Effeminacies
Finally catching up on last week's Me and Who episode, and My Seng! My Seng! My Seng has come back to me! I've had less than a minute of screen time with him so far, but he's already doing what I love about his BL acting so much.
One of my preoccupations is effeminate performances. I find the emphasis on representing straight-passing and/or masculine gays in media SO BORING. (Even though I fucks with the soundtrack,) I have no love in my heart for Brokeback Mountain. That str8 population is a minority among queer men, and it ignores--at worst purposefully spurns--the more prevalent and encompassing stigma behind homophobia: misogyny. You aren't initially teased because you're fucking men, it's cuz you're not acting like one. They'll say "you throw like a girl" before they learn the word "fag," and it's why bottoming is more denigrated--it's feminine to be penetrated. In fact, the traditional Thai gender system, in contrast to the Euro-American gender/sexuality division model, is set up around these distinctions.
As many of you probs know, I'm very interested in the actors behind the performances. Part of that started because I wanted to know about what Thai culture considered effeminate or queer and how the actors differed or aligned with what they brought to their queer characters--are they heightening their own aspects or transforming into a different character. Not as some kind of factor for including or excluding actors because of their sexuality, mind you. Amongst the tumblr discourse about which BLs are "queer," I wanted to understand what was lost in translation and what parts of my own intimate familiarity with effeminacy from my own cultural context I ought to bring to my perspective on that. Seng has been instrumental to my appreciation of this.
Seng, due to a disgusting invasion of privacy, is publicly out as a girl-dater. Even without that information, though, Seng's public persona he shares on social media and at events is nothing like any of his characters. He totally transforms. And to my eyes what he brings to his characters reads as so very Gay.
Not only that, he's brought vastly different kinds of effeminacy to each different character. From his campy dork in SCOY to his soft and slightly sad young professional in Knock Knock Boys, his two-faced diva in War of Y to the perfect ex he's giving us in Me and Who--every single one of these characters would get clocked by middle school bullies for their distinct queer presentations. Femme, no, but from the tilting of his gaze to the fluidity in his walks, Seng's characters each in their own ways embody so many subtleties of queer men, and it never feels like a parody of them.
Seng is one of the prime examples of what BL can offer in terms of breaking ground for queerness on screen, not because of his own sexuality. It’s because he takes the Effeminate seriously in his work. That's what I'm here to see from these actors.
