Early history of Thai BL

I've been reading up a bit about the history of Thai BL as a genre, and it's quite established that while the first foundations were laid by the film The Love of Siam, whose release in 2007 caused a genre shock in Thai cinema, it wasn't until the broadcast of Love Sick in 2014 that BL became recognized as a mainstream media genre of its own. But a lot of detail on what developments happened in those intervening years remains quite sketchy. Here's my attempt at laying things out, both from memory and what I've been able to find online... Please don't take it as a definitive history.

First, though, a bit of background...

Yaoi, a Japanese import popularly known in Thai as "Y", became established as a subculture in Thailand, mainly among young females (known as "sao Y", the Thai term for fujoshi), in the early 2000s. Most media was initially in the form of doujinshi manga, and remained pretty much underground. (Many have told of how works had to be found in hidden unlabelled shelves in stores, and how their rising popularity even led to a reactionary government crackdown in 2005.) Gradually, online communities developed, and as "fic" writing - a term encompassing both fanfiction (mostly centred around shipping J-pop/K-pop idols) and original web novels - saw increasing popularity generally, a genre of "fic Y" emerged as well.

Meanwhile, gay relationships and identities (as opposed to stereotypes of kathoey or ladyboys, which Thai society had been familiar with for much longer) were gaining wider acknowledgement in society and general discourse. There was an emerging interest in stories depicting gay relationships, which led to the establishment of community websites such Thaiboyslove.com (2006). As the scope and audience of these stories very much overlapped with fic Y, the lines separating the genres became quickly blurred as communities of sao Y and gay readers merged together.

However, portrayals in the media lagged behind these developments, and depictions of non-heterosexual characters in TV and film remained mostly limited to kathoey (ladyboys), mainly as comic characters. While there were exceptions - the series Rak Paet Phan Kao* (2004-2005) included a male/male side couple, and some indie films (the award-winning Tropical Malady among them) explored gay issues - these remained isolated cases or outside of mainstream attention.

Which is partly why The Love of Siam caused such a stir upon its release. Though it came a few months after Bangkok Love Story, a heavily promoted film novel in its depiction of a gay relationship, the latter was a "hunky gay drama"† that never really sought to capture the mainstream audience. The Love of Siam, on the other hand, rode on a wave of Thai teen movies, and made every effort to appear as a regular teen flick in its promotion, catching audiences off guard. Once the initial shock passed, though, the film's message sank in, firmly leaving its mark on the social consciousness.

The Love of Siam's success is of course mainly attributable to its exceptional filmmaking, but it has also gained a cult-classic status thanks to how it deeply connected to the young gay audience. But the sao Y demographic also played a huge part in supporting the film - throngs attended promotional events featuring the main actors in images prescient of today's BL industry. This merging of gay and Y audiences also blurred the line between the genres - while questions of whether The Love of Siam was a gay movie were among the most prominent among the multitude of online discussions of the film at the time, it was probably as often stated as whether it was a "Y movie", though the intended meaning was the same.

The Love of Siam's intersection of the teen flick, gay, and Y genres would greatly influence its successors, though the effect wouldn't be immediately seen, as no major works in the genre directly followed. The attention of Y fandoms went back to focusing on shipping idols, which now expanded to contestants in the competing reality music competitions The Star and Academy Fantasia.

The next major male/male paring to appear in mainstream media would be on TV, in the lakorn Phrungni Ko Rak Thoe (Tomorrow I'll Still Love You, 2009), which generated a considerable craze mainly among sao Y, but it didn't follow the teen formula or feature characters in high school.

Interestingly, the trend emerges first in student films. Is This Love? (2011) and Just in Case (2011), by students from Assumption University and Bangkok University respectively, both feature the now-familiar high school/university settings. The setting would re-emerge in the mainstream in 2012, with the first segment of the film Home by the director of The Love of Siam. Though it can hardly be considered gay, as no overt attraction between the characters is ever shown, there's something unsaid between them, and Nay-Beam was shipped by many fans. Virgin Am I, a small-studio production from the same year, also had a minor storyline that was shipped quite a bit (and featured some serious swimsuit skinship). On TV, an episode from Club Friday The Series (an anthology drama series based on life stories from the popular phone-in radio show) also featured a male/male pair as one of three high-school stories, but didn't gain much attention.

Everything changed in 2013, with the explosive popularity of Nadao Bangkok's Hormones, which revolutionized the teen series genre, introducing a style of production and storytelling influenced by international productions. Among the characters of its ensemble cast are Phu-Thee, considered by some to be the beginning of the current Thai BL wave. They were heavily shipped, and the actors were among the first to extensively engage in real-life fanservice. Also in 2013, a male/male story was featured by the TV short film Change from the show Rak Ching Ping Koe on Bang Channel (GMMTV's satellite channel).

The first true Thai BLs, however, appeared on the silver screen. As the approach to LGBT themes of indie film productions and minor studios diversified, some veered towards a style we now recognize as BL, with a focus on a young attractive cast and simple plotlines with copious amounts of fluffy character moments. Timeline: Phro Rak Mai Sinsut (2013, not to be confused with the mainstream movie from the same year also titled Timeline) appears to be to be among the first that demonstrate clear BL elements, but though it did get a limited commercial public screening, it was mostly a low-budget production with little reach. My Bromance and Love's Coming, both released in early 2014, were more widely seen, and are firmly considered to be in BL territory. My Bromance also had a devoted following throughout its production period, thanks to being a novel adaptation. But these paled in comparison to the emerging developments on TV.

The adaptation of the popular web novel Love Sick had actually been revealed in early 2013, before Hormones was announced, but it was stuck in pre-production for a year before casting calls could even begin. As Hormones made the casting process for its second season into a show of its own called Hormones: The Next Gen, Love Sick's producers also started an online campaign to heavily promote its auditions. This built upon an existing trend of proliferating "cute boys" (and, to a lesser extent, "cute girls") Facebook pages (and Instagram accounts), which would "discover" and share pictures of good-looking teens and university students, helping many of them become internet celebrities as followers crazed after them. Through this craze, Love Sick generated huge fan engagement over who would become the series' Pun and Noh.

Looking at the series alone, especially in comparison to Hormones, it seems surprising that Love Sick became as popular as it was, given the much lower quality of its writing, acting, and the production in general. But it's a testament to the devotion of the fandom and the sheer numbers of eager audiences waiting to consume live-action BL. Hormones may have helped create a huge demand for new teen series, but it was the BL itself that made the audience stick with Love Sick despite its issues, including the internal drama that led to the production team being changed for the second season. It also helped that Love Sick the source novel was one of the most popular stories out there, making it the perfect choice for an adaptation, though the creators, unsure of the format as they were wading into this entirely new territory, tried to balance the story and make it a more typical teen series by adding female characters and storylines. This of course turned out to be entirely unnecessary, a lesson subsequent works took note of.

Today, Love Sick's success is widely seen as the turning point which kickstarted the BL industry as we know it. However, Love Sick was actually part of a trend, and while it was definitely the most influential, it was by no means the only BL on TV that year, partly thanks to the launch of Thailand's digital TV system which opened up a lot of content slots that new channels needed filling. Love O-NET, broadcasting on the THV channel, was released three months before Love Sick, and several other TV series and TV short films from 2014 and 2015 also featured BL couples as main or side characters. Among them are several Rak Ching Ping Koe and Club Friday episodes, as well as Room Alone, GMMTV's first effort in its shift in focus towards producing its own series for the group's new channels, One 31 and GMM 25.

As TV proved to be much more monetizable, the genre's cinematic output dwindled in comparison, though 2015 did see the release of Water Boyy (with its unforgettable swimsuit promotional images) and sequels to Love's Coming and Timeline, as well as the genre works The Blue Hour and Red Wine in the Dark Night (which aren't really BL, but are probably worth mentioning as they star familiar actors). Most theatrically released films since then have leaned more towards LGBT than BL, with a few exceptions.

This brings us to 2016, which is when the Thai BL industry really took off, with GMMTV being the first heavyweight player to enter the field and other creators also establishing themselves. Mainstream publishers established Y-specific imprints, picking up stories for publication which previously would have mostly been self-published. The momentous shift marked the beginning of a new period for the industry, the history of which will probably be more familiar to many, and is beyond the scope of this review.

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What do you think? Are there important observations I missed, or other milestones that should be mentioned? It would be interesting to more specifically explore the influences of these early works and see how much was derived directly from the genre's Japanese origins vs homegrown among the Thai fandom, considering the usual pattern of stories by women writers being adapted and directed by male creators, but that is beyond my knowledge.

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* I've used the official Royal Thai General System of Transcription for series titles, as the spellings used by fan sites are really inconsistent

† As put by u/froggydays in a thread reviewing Present Perfect (2012), which I haven't quite been able to place in context. I understand it's a student short film?