From the 2010s to the early 2020s, boys’ love media (BL) dominated the Southeast Asian silver screen. Spearheaded by Thai Shows like 2gether The Series, SOTUS, and LoveSick: The Series, Southeast Asia perfected its adaptation of the original Japanese Yaoi/Boys’ Love genre, interweaving the emotional narratives of loving the same gender with university settings, a love of soap operas, and heteronormative societal pressures.^[1] This top-down success of creating these shows and successfully marketing actors in shipping pairs was matched by a fervent bottom-up response, shown through the rabid shipping of male-male pairings from TV shows to football teams members, thousands of fanfiction posts.^[2] The term yaoi was also translated into regional cultures, such as serie(s)-Y in Thailand and đam mỹ in Vietnam.^[3] With a market value of over millions of dollars and expected market growth of 30-40%, the boys’ love industry represents a well-paid investment into production, distribution, and fandom development, a pop-culture giant.^[4]

In the face of this success, the question remains as to why BL’s female counterpart, GL, has not been as successful. In the Southeast Asian same-sex love genres, characters must still wrestle with heteronormativity and gender identity while crafting a compelling romantic relationship; the main difference lies in the genders of the characters involved. This has raised the question of why GL has been so underrepresented among Southeast Asian production houses and fandom, and how the recent political developments in the region regarding queer rights have begun to develop this niche drama genre into a powerhouse of representation. This article will focus on how GL production in Thailand can continue to radiate into its neighbouring countries.

Initial Representations

To begin, Girls’ Love has a much smaller fanbase and creation space than Boys’ Love. The BL genre as a whole is primarily created by and for straight women. It’s strongest appeal often lies in its opposition to traditional heterosexual media that enforces fixed gender identities,^[5] in which having two men explore the borders of their expected gender roles represents a refreshing change from the cultural norm, and creates a larger imagined community based around these romantic and sexual fantasies. However, the largest appeal of BL lies in the homoeroticism and/or fetishization of male queer relationships, ironically re-establishing gender roles by assigning each partner a label associated with the standard heterosexual sexual position; the more masculine “top” or “prah-ek”, and the more feminine bottom, or “nai-ek”. This organized format centers on the aesthetics rather than the nuance of queerness; it is a digestible product for the majority straight female audience to consume without complexity.

In comparison, Girl’s Love as a genre is largely consumed by queer women. Historically, romantic and/or sexual relations between women in media have been largely dominated by a heterosexual male gaze, most often in portrayals in lesbian pornography, to the point where it has become a societal expectation.[6] In its first representations in Southeast Asian media published by media giants like GMMTV and Channel 3, especially in the pre-pandemic era, there was an overt dominance of stories that catered to their largest audience base of heterosexual men and women in the name of profit. Club Friday: The Series, produced by GMMTV, dramatizes the relationship stories of the titular podcast. In the series, “Women-Loving-Women (WLW)” relationships are primarily centred around women’s relationships to men and the expectation of heteronormativity. In the sequel Club Friday 3, the female leads, Jay and Dream, entered a romantic and sexual relationship not out of genuine love, but rather as a form of escape from the turmoils of their straight relationships, with their interactions with each other seeming regressive and childlike. To these initial forays in the female queer relationship, WLW relationships are depicted as childish escapism, a falsehood perpetuated by confusion and uncertainty to avoid the “authenticity” of heterosexuality, rather than a “true” love story.

To be fair, this is merely a reflection of a large majority of pre-pandemic queer media in Thailand, where specific queer orientations such as gay, bisexual, and lesbian were not defined by attraction, but by their culturally relevant gender roles. Gay men were often lumped together under the term “katoey,” which refers to feminine traits and aesthetics, while Lesbians were perceived under the roles of the more masculine, dominating “Tom,” and the feminine, submissive “Dee,” emulating the straight relationship. As such, any deviations from these gender roles, such as a masculine man with feelings for men and or two feminine women in love with each other, could not be translated as a queer identity or relationship. Such gender presumptions are reflected in Thai media. A masculine male lead would not proclaim he was gay; he just so happened to like this particular man. On the other hand, if two feminine women liked each other, it was because they were struggling with their straightness, or experiencing a small lapse in judgement before they would return to their societal expectations to marry and bear children – a form of Foucault’s docile bodies. The difference is, while BL did treat its relationships seriously, Lesbianism was an experimentation, and bisexuality was just temporarily denying one’s inherent straightness. It constituted a break from reality, not reality itself.

For queer audience members who wanted to see GL, they did not want fanservice and couple pairings. What was missing was the authenticity of love, being in love with another woman despite the social prejudices, and not feeling compelled to add men as a ‘solution’ in the picture. The problem with GL is that its requisite investment relied on a vested interest in these authentic stories, including a wider audience of not just queer women, but other straight women and substantive inclusion of the LGBTQ community.

A Change in Status-Quo

However, there have been some changes over time in the production and reception of GL. GMMTV’s profit-focused production would negatively impact their GL series, as their own first foray into a post-pandemic GL representation, Angkhan Khlumpong The Series: EP.3 in 2021. Despite including a suggestive scene where the two female leads seduce the male antagonist in order to defeat him, the censorship of implied love scenes exclusive to the female leads indicated a continued adversity to showcasing the sexual and romantic aspects of WLW relationships. In the 2020s, Gen Z youths in Thailand begin to enter adulthood along with their increased social awareness that included an openness to LGBTQ rights,^[7] and a savviness with tech and media that would broaden their cultural horizons. This environment creates the condition in which genuine queer representation can achieve mass popularity, prompting smaller production companies like WeTV or IDOLFactory to take up the mantle of serving the interests of young audiences. The release ofGAP: The Series in 2022 on national television would invigorate the GL genre, representing a breakaway from the conservative values upheld since the 2010s. By focusing on the genuine development of romance in its narratives, GL was soon able to grow as a genre in a similar path to BL, complete with shipping pairs like FreenBecky(GAP) or LingOrn (The Secret of Us), book adaptations, and worldwide fans. Most importantly, because the now invigorated queer female audience would care about romantic stories, onscreen relationships would less strictly adhere to gender roles, showing relationships between feminine women, and the filming process starts to become safer for lead actresses, though there still remains a struggle of finding intimacy coordinators^[8]. A changing cultural atmosphere alters the public consumption of media, which in turn continues to bring queer rights and representation to the forefront of Thai society.

GL media in Thailand has also benefited from the gender progressiveness of the state. In January 2025, Thailand legalized same-sex marriages, becoming the first in Southeast Asia to do so. For GL, this creates a window of opportunity for queer relationships to be normalized both in the public space and in their depiction on screen. Current series like Love Design andQueendom are creating stories where the discovery of queer identity is not the main plot point, but is rather already written in the characters’ stories, with the added bonus that marriage between women is now a concept that can be explored as a potential romantic option.

Conclusion

For the rest of Southeast Asia, Thailand acted as a cultural starting point. The Philippines has already begun to pick up the GL trend in the 2020s, producing shows like Stand-in-Love and Sleep with Me. However, the rest of Southeast Asia does not hold as much of an openness to queer marriage or queer relationships, which could limit their production of GL. What Thailand shows is that the creation of GL requires a deeper evaluation of gender roles and the reorientation of heterosexuality in its society. For an audience who are different from the gender mould that society expects of them, they do not want stories that reduce their existence to a heteronormative confusion by profit-steering mainstream producers, but rather well-written stories that demonstrate, not merely tell them, that their identity is validated, and more importantly, that feels natural to the trials and tribulations of life.