The Megacity of Bangkok Rescaled through Queerness

Abstract

The Megacity of Bangkok Rescaled through Queerness Charlie Yi Zhang (bio) On March 15, 2021, the organizers of Thailand Festival, an annual event sponsored by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, announced that they would collaborate with the Royal Thai Consulate-General in Osaka, Japan, to bring the grand celebration online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring Thai actors Singto (Prachaya Ruangroj) and Krist (Perawat Sangpotirat), this event was designed to introduce an array of tourist spots to Japanese people through a staged "dating" trip of these two young men across Bangkok, who have risen to international stardom through their performance in the Boys' Love (BL) drama SOTUS: The Series (GMM One, 2016–2017).1 Since the 2014 debut of the TV show Love Sick: The Series (Channel 9, 2014–2015), Thailand has emerged as a prominent player in the global BL market, and its influence has now circled back to Japan, where BL originated.2 Indeed, Thai BL has built a solid fan base by integrating the hyper-romanticized queerness popularized by Japanese BL and the androgynous masculinity characterizing K-pop culture into its unique sociocultural milieu. Thailand's contextual specificity as a rainbow mecca has attracted myriad [End Page 164] LGBTQ visitors from around the world.3 The capital city Bangkok, in particular, is known for its surfeit of party circuits, celebrity DJ networks, muscular tourists populating bars and nightclubs, and fictional sites and characters defining its so-called gay-friendly history. This megacity is part of what Bobby Benedicto calls "gay globality" that combines both real and virtual into "an imaginative planetary geography" to pique and retain the curiosity and excitement of travelers.4 I visited Thailand from January to April 2022 as the country went through its most severe COVID wave to date. Drawing on this experience, I will explore how the fantasized homoromanticism cultivated through BL media culture spatializes the urbanity of Bangkok in ways to reposition the city for the emerging challenges and opportunities in the wake of the pandemic by appealing to the growing international fan group of Thai BL dramas. These drama-created scenes of queerness do not reference concrete materialities of erotic and exotic urban life that Bangkok's LGBTQ visitors can actually partake in, however. Rather, they suggest a cluster of fantasies, aspirations, and tendencies that are both transgressive and complicit, plastering a pristine image of Thai urbanity while tucking away escalating confrontations underneath mesmerizing queer sceneries. AN OUTWARD URBAN LOOK STEERED THROUGH BL EYES On a sunny afternoon in February 2022, after I walked out of Siam Skytrain station and stepped into Centerpoint, a fashion and lifestyle shopping center located in central Bangkok, I was immediately greeted by the images of Zee (Pruk Panich) and NuNew (Chawarin Perdpiriyawong), two Thai actors whose BL series Cutie Pie (Workpoint TV, 2022) had just started to gain momentum. As the beauty ambassadors of a Korean cosmetic brand, these young men try to improve the reputation of their patrons using the fame bestowed by their queer TV personas. This job previously was almost exclusively reserved for K-pop stars. These young Thais, however, fully realize the aesthetical standard set up by previous Korean idols and further increase their popularity by personifying fictional BL characters. Almost identical with a lanky figure, stylish and often dyed hair, almond-shaped eyes with double eyelids, and pronounced nasal bridges on light skin perfected by makeup, they are attractive enough to embody the ethereally beautiful fictional BL characters. To attract fans' attention and maximize the sales number, they need only to strike a pose and stage intimacy with each other to approximate a real dating relationship. This, and just this, would suffice to enable them to fulfill an otherwise daunting task of meeting and exceeding the queer reading and fantasizing desires of captious BL followers, a group that is composed of mostly well-educated young women with good jobs. Fran Martin notes that, for this form of queer fandom, BL creates a participatory space replete "with immense imaginative [End Page 165] energy and generative of great pleasure and intellectual as well as affective engagement."5 Borrowing Sara Ahmed's insight on affect, one might also say that the...