Welcome back for the second installment of Queering SFF’s Big Gay Pride Month Recommendation List(s), for getting our vibes right via arts and entertainment. Last week I gathered four weird and sexy books for summer reading, and this week we’re talking television—specifically, because it’s been giving me life over the last eighteen months, the vibrant LGBTQ+ media scene coming out of Thailand.
If you’re newly dipping your toes into transnational queer media, consider this a starter package. Whatever flavor you’re searching for—whether campy, horny, serious, compassionate, and/or funny as hell—there’s something ready to satisfy. While there may be a learning curve with story structure, genre tropes, or language… isn’t that part of the fun? To fondly borrow the words of Parasite director Bong Joon-ho, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
Watching these series, then getting familiar with their actors and directors, has revitalized my own belief in and excitement about queer visual media. As I said after watching Kinnporsche: La Forte, “Wait, holy shit, we’re allowed to just do that?”
For one thing, seeing how queer masculinity(s) and desire between men were so passionately, lovingly rendered on-screen—without any hesitation!—was absolutely electrifying. I felt as if I’d been nibbling Saltine crackers for months and months then somebody finally served me a medium-rare ribeye. Other things also healed my spirit, like the ways effeminate men are presented as desirable and worthy; the unremarkable constant presence of trans characters played by trans people; and the underlying critiques of gender, sexuality, and politics that many series carry alongside their romances.
And when it comes to behind the camera? Several directors whose work features below are openly queer—plus, there are awesome trans directors in the field too, including Anucha “Nuchie” Boonyawatana and Golf Tanwarin Sukkhapisit. A significant number of actors are, shall we say, as obviously in the family as one might flag without doing a press release. These series are often created by independent studios whose audiences—and shows, whether labeled BL, GL, QL, or just broadly “queer”—cross a wide range domestically and internationally.
So, without further ado: my 4+1 series recs for Pride Month.
Ghost Host/Ghost House
Dir. Kwankaow Koosakulnirund
Ghost Host/Ghost House begins with the goofy-spooky vibes of Beetlejuice meets Buzzfeed Unsolved… then grows into a compassionate treatise on grief, mourning, and love.
Kevin, a cute ghost-hunting streamer, has come back to Thailand after growing up with his mother in the United States. However, when he arrives to stay with his aunt, uncle, and their two kids, something about them feels off—though they’re plenty welcoming!—and he can’t quite put his fingers on what. He also meets their handyman Pluem, a charming neighborhood guy who’s totally his type, and strikes up a flirtation. But when Kevin soon discovers that his relatives died in a car accident days before his arrival and he’s been living with their ghosts, the story turns toward how they processes their grief: what it means for the twins to never grow up, such as how to resolve the girl’s crush on another girl at school, and what it means for Kevin as he bonds with his family… only to have to say goodbye.
Without fail, Ghost Host/Ghost House made me cry during every episode of the second half; the story moves with a mature, thoughtful tenderness through the characters’ grief around their unexpected losses. (Mild spoiler, but the way the series handles ghosts’ final passing—when their clock runs out—as always an abrupt disappearance, where you might glance away during a conversation then turn back to find them gone, was beautiful and real and absolutely wrenching.) The growing relationship between Kevin and Pluem satisfied me, too, as the pair discover their sexual and emotional compatibility but also their larger life-related conflicts…though I won’t give away the ending!
Streaming on GagaOOLala
Kinnporsche: La Forte
Dir. Kome Kongkiat Komesiri, Pepzi Banchorn Vorasataree, and Pond Krisda Witthayakhajorndet
Kinnporsche: La Forte merges mafia action-romance with the gothic family saga, weaving through twists and turns as its protagonists struggle against one another (and the expectations of their fathers!) to survive… and to love.
Porsche—a bartender, pit-fighter, and older brother raising his sibling alone—accidentally becomes embroiled with the Theerapanyakul mafia family when he rescues its heir, Kinn, after the man bursts into his bar chased by armed thugs. Kinn returns later to demand Porsche work for him as a bodyguard, and Porsche tells him to go fuck himself… but then he leverages Porsche’s family debt and his baby brother Porchay’s college funding to force the issue. Backed into a corner, Porsche agrees to work for the Theerapanyakuls, and from there things only get messier.
If you happen to follow me on Twitter, you already know how I feel about Kinnporsche: La Forte, regarding which I have posted many threads. It’s one of those rare series that gets even better on a second watch—because it opens with a pair of episodes that campily play with genre expectations, and only later does it start twisting the knife. After seeing the entire thing, though? Certain early scenes and characters, even brief exchanges of dialogue, take on entirely new meanings. And I fuckin’ love any story that gets me twice. Furthermore, the show’s unflinching honesty about how complex the power dynamics are in its relationships—whether between Kinn and Porsche, Vegas and Pete, or Kim and Porchay—resulted in what is perhaps the most electrifying love confession scene I’ve ever witnessed. Ahem.
On the production side, Kinnporsche achieved some goddamn amazing results by onboarding the genre conventions of everything from “mafia AUs” to BL series to gothic dramas… then turning those expectations sideways by imbuing the characters with an intense emotional realism. Also, their open discussions of how important they felt it was to depict sex between men as erotic, joyful, meaningful, and ultimately worth embracing in the arts? I weep and gnash my teeth. The cinematography will simply knock you out, too. Nothing has made me feel as excited about the possibilities for what art a scrappy, newly-formed team of queer creatives can make—given enough funding and opportunity!—as Kinnporsche did, in quite a long time.
Streaming on iQiyi
The Warp Effect
Dir. Jojo Tichakorn Phukhaotong
A time-travel-shenanigans sex comedy with heart (and a pedagogical bent), The Warp Effect combines social critique and lightly edgy laughter.
The year is 2011. High-school senior Alex has decided he’s going to lose his virginity before midnight, when he turns eighteen, despite the fact that his religious late mother made him vow to stay “pure.” But when he discovers a Polaroid camera left on his porch, he takes it to his friends’ party… where he photographs his crew, gets blackout drunk, and presumably has intoxicated sex with his long-term close female friend. Except then the jocks he saw making out stuff him in the trunk of a car as a prank, and he wakes up transported ten years into the future. He has somehow become a renowned gynecologist, but the relationships he used to have are scrambled: he’s bed friends with the hot girl he used to have a crush on, the jock who beat him up is his gay best friend, and his closest friends… no longer speak with him. Oh, and he can’t orgasm. A weird set of future-vision Polaroids, however, reveal that maybe the secret to fixing his problem is resolving all of his friends’ sexual/romantic troubles—many of which he directly, or indirectly, caused. But he’s also going to learn that some things, you just can’t take back.
The Warp Effect ended up being one of my favorite recent shows—as much for its themes/messaging as anything else. Alex is a straightforwardly straight guy, but the rest of the show… really isn’t! While he helps people resolve their challenges, the audience humorously learns about topics like: reducing STI stigma and getting your HPV vaccine, the existence of gay men who are sides, negotiating one’s fetishes and kinks openly, conflict within a lesbian couple about becoming parents, issues of women’s bodily and sexual autonomy around abortion and assault, as well as nonbinary identities and body positivity. Given how limited (if not outright censored!) sex education can be… this show really hits some necessary points, while centering the story on a young man who has been negatively affected by purity culture and toxic, mainstream straight norms.
Also, I laughed my ass off. Just as an example, one storyline focuses on a straight couple—one partner cis, one partner trans—who’ve been together since high school but develop symptoms of HPV. The thing is, they’ve each been pretending to fuck other people in an open relationship because it makes coming home to fuck each other hotter… and the STI diagnosis forces them to admit they’ve been telling the silliest possible lie for years. Wheezing with laughter, let me tell you.
180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through Us
Dir. Punnasak Sukee
180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through Us condenses the claustrophobic, haunted house energies of the gothic into its richly-textured story of intergenerational queer trauma—and while the ghosts are metaphorical, their effects are very real.
As his twentieth birthday approaches, Wang arranges to get himself and his mother Sasiwimol—a famous lakorn director, who has raised him alone since the death of his father—onto the property of Inthawut, the reclusive architect who had once been his father’s closest friend. Complicated desires drive Wang: he’s recently come to understand that he is queer, he wants to understand his father better, and having discovered old photos of his dad and In together, he also wants to know… what was their relationship, and how did his father actually die? When circumstances trap the three of them together inside Inthawut’s isolated and beautiful home, Wang attempts to start a romance with him, thereby setting off an explosive series of conflicts and realizations.
180 Degrees was written and directed by an award-winning queer playwright—and that’s no surprise given its shatteringly crisp dialogue, mixture of stage and film techniques, and close focus on the deeply human flaws of its protagonists. I had to take breaks between episodes because the emotional tension was almost unbearable. The characters are compellingly real: none are villains, none are heroes, and their worst behaviors arise from unavoidable clashes in personality, beliefs, and capacity for change. The mother-son dynamic between Mol, loosely liberal but unaware of her son’s queerness and therefore constantly making mildly homophobic remarks, and Wang, who adores and loathes his mother in equal measure, is one I’ve rarely seen depicted with so much honesty… even though their fights are gutting. The show also handles the blossoming desire between Wang and In, as well as its consequences, with compassionate understanding for why each man acts the way he does.
And the ending absolutely bodied me—the highest compliment I can give.
As for my plus-one…
Moonlight Chicken
Dir. Aof Noppharnach Chaiwimol
If you’re going, “wait isn’t Moonlight Chicken contemporary slice-of-life drama?” Yes, okay, you caught me. No speculative elements here.
The thing is, Moonlight Chicken is also hands-down one of the best gay series I’ve ever seen—and so I cannot be stopped from recommending folks watch it, especially to get your vibes right during Pride. The series’ eight episodes are set across a period of several months, following an ensemble cast as their deeply interconnected relationships grow, change, end, and sometimes re-form. The primary storyline follows Uncle Jim, a gay man in his late thirties who runs a chicken-and-rice diner and has given up on the possibility of another romance, and Wen, the younger man who cruises him one night after closing time. Wen is in his late twenties, mired in a dying long-term relationship with his boyfriend Alan, and he decides he wants a future with Jim—even if Jim, who is busy raising his young nephew Li Ming, doesn’t quite agree. Another young man in the community, Gaipa, has also been quietly pursuing Jim for years; Li Ming, meanwhile, runs into another high-school boy named Heart, who has recently become deaf and whose parents are stifling him with their ableism.
Firstly, let me just say, this show is gorgeous. The cinematographic influence of Wong Kar Wai echoes throughout, and the performances the actors deliver are absolutely breathtaking. The soundtrack includes a cover of the iconic ballad once performed by Leslie Cheung for his lover, “The Moon Represents My Heart”… and okay, I cried again simply hearing it layered over the trailer. While these characters learn about and from one another—struggling with poverty, gentrification, adult relationships, and the ways three different generations of queer men experience societal homophobia differently—the show crafts a moving treatise on the importance of community. I cannot express how badly, how powerfully, I needed Moonlight Chicken as a single gay in my thirties. It made me feel some hope, again.
***
Ultimately, this only scratches the surface of what’s been produced over the last few years alone. And while I technically cheated there at the end, these recommendations are otherwise limited to genre shows! I didn’t touch on series about political protest with fuckin’ stunner acting (Not Me), contemporary queer youth dramas (I Told Sunset About You), crime shows with canonical bisexual threesomes (3 Will Be Free), sweeping gay melodramas (A Tale of Thousand Stars), or campy lesbian office romances (GAP).
So, go forth and watch! You won’t be disappointed.
As for next week, we’re going to be covering a selection of work by trans creators.
Lee Mandelo (he/they) is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction–especially where the two coincide. Summer Sons, their spooky gay debut novel, was published by Tordotcom, with other stories featuring in magazines like Uncanny and Nightmare. Aside from a brief stint overseas, Lee has spent their life ranging across Kentucky, currently living in Lexington and pursuing a PhD in Gender Studies at the University of Kentucky.
