ACIEPA Can Dream High: Developing Asian-Peruvian Relations

Being “out” in Asia, yaoi and the media

Wendy: It’s just really hard to compare one society’s openness with another, so for me it’s about looking beyond of how closed I perceived a society.

Janell: It just seems Asia is really closed as a society in terms of dealing with these subjects outside manga, movies or dramas. In that sense, it’s a lot like here [Peru].

We heard they were trying to censor some mangas, trying to avoid female characters that have too much of a strong personality because, apparently, that turns heterosexual men into gay men. But as you can see, we are as open-minded as people can be. People shouldn’t mind when seeing same-sex couples acting like couples outside, and we wouldn’t bat an eye if some of our idols came out as gay men. However, that’s our point of view — and there’s many.

When you read good yaoi, it ends up being the story of two characters — it doesn’t really matter if the two characters are two men. Just like when you watch a movie or a drama, it’s about what happens in the story. It’s the same, you can have the most ugly or most beautiful actor in the world playing a role convincingly, it’s about selling the story.

Janell: For example this Taiwanese film, Eternal Summer (盛夏光年), where the actor Joseph Chang — he’s really a macho man. I had seen him in other films, but in this one he falls in love with his male best friend and you start seeing him in another light. It’s a really great story and the actors are part of what sell it.

Janell: I also personally love Rainie Yang — she is THE actress. I’ve seen her in everything, but seeing her in Spider Lilies was like woah with Isabella Leong. I think it was in an interview where they asked her which one had been her best on-screen kisses and she wondered if she could pick Isabella.

As you can see we watch and listen to just about everything. We manage to do it watching maybe 2 hours of drama a day or keeping up with it on iPods and/or smartphones. Every fifteen minute break in university, it’s time to keep up with reading manga or fanfiction. It’s the worst when you get caught in the middle of a yaoi manga by a friend who doesn’t always know what you’re reading.

Once you read and become a yaoi fan, you can see the Twilight poster with Bella, Edward and Jacob — you’ll just see yaoi while everyone else see a love triangle. There’s no helping it.