Homosexuality in Korea

Filed as: TLDR // Responses: 243

Let’s start off by saying that this is a difficult topic for us to discuss for various reasons. Primarily, everything we’re recounting is second hand, as we are neither Korean nor homosexual. And so, we’ve asked our Korean friends of various ages their thoughts about homosexuality in Korea, and have recounted those thoughts in the video. We’ve spoken with our gay friends living in Korea – both foreign and Korean – about their experiences as well, which we have also recounted. This video and post are by no means definitive answers about homosexuality in Korea, because our sources are quite obviously limited. We’re hoping that a bigger discussion can talk place in the comments from people who have had experiences with this topic, whether you are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgendered, or ubersexual. Thanks for the term, Super Junior. Ubersexual indeed.

Also, anything you’d like to contribute, be it your own experiences or thoughts on the matter, or other sources that people could use, will be greatly appreciated.

So, for starters, we can say that Korea is not as open to homosexuality as, say, Canada or the USA. There is no Korean Lady Gaga in the music sphere speaking out, and there are not many LGBT rights activists. There are very few openly gay Korean celebrities. The most famous, in our opinion, is Hong Seok-cheon 홍석천, who was fired from all his jobs on TV after he revealed his homosexuality eleven years ago. Since then, he’s successfully opened various bars and restaurants, all LGBT friendly. Sadly, the success he has achieved in promoting awareness of the LGBT community in Korea is not always the case, as several Korean celebrities have committed suicide after revealing their sexual orientation to the public. They were fired from their jobs, and harassed and bullied by netizens to the point in which they felt that suicide was their only option.

This brings us to the topic of Korean dramas. There are a lot of Korean/Japanese dramas that play with the concept of cross dressing, mainly in the form of girls pretending to be guys, which in turn causes the main male role to fall in love with the “guy” and question his own sexual orientation. Out of all the dramas I’ve seen this in, I feel like only “Coffee Prince” (2007) did a good job of portraying the difficulty a straight male would feel if he was suddenly attracted to another man. MAJOR SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN COFFEE PRINCE YET!!! In Coffee Prince, we see the main male lead, Choi Han-Gyul, struggle with his emerging feelings: he refuses to go to work, he locks himself in his room and thinks about his feelings, and he even visits a doctor who recommends medicine as a “cure” for his homosexuality. I especially felt like his visit to the doctor was a sadly symbolic scene as to how some Koreans view homosexuality as a curable disease. In the end, Han-Gyul rejects all these “cures” and decides to accept his feelings towards another man. He eventually discovers that the man he loves is in fact a woman, and – thankfully – he doesn’t just laugh it off, as if it was humorous all along, like I’ve seen in some Japanese dramas (I’m talking about Hana-Kimi, which I generally enjoyed, except for how they dealt with Nakatsu’s emerging homosexual feelings towards Mizuki; it was used as a gag relief joke).

The “laugh it off” or “gag joke” of someone being gay makes me cringe. It came up a lot in Personal Taste (2010) when Lee Min Ho plays a straight man pretending to be gay and also Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010) with – yet again – another girl pretending to be a boy. It’s “funny” that the lead men think they’re gay only because the audience knows that the boy is actually a girl, hence, the boy-on-boy action is not an actually gay couple. Compare these dramas to Life is Beautiful (2010). It deals with various people’s relationships, one of which depicts the difficulties a gay couple in Korea would face. How did SBS deal with a drama depicting a real in-love gay couple? They ended up pissing off the drama’s writer BIG TIME by cutting out the scene in which the couple professed vows of love to each other. Really SBS? It’s okay to joke about being gay when we all know that they aren’t really gay, but it’s not okay to show a happy and committed gay couple? This is the kind of thing that makes us feel really upset.

Even though we know that North American and other parts of the world are still not exactly ideal for LGBT people, we still feel that it’s more accepting than South Korea. As we mentioned in the video, not all the people living in Korea are closed-minded towards homosexuality, but we’re not exactly pleased with what we’re seeing in Korean dramas.

Ah! Sorry if that post was too long. Hopefully we did a bit of justice to the topic. Let us know what you think!

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http://twitter.com/chocolateai Samantha T.

i’m in somewhere in Asia and our country has not accepted this LGBT issue yet. there was, a few months back then, a society that wanted to be open about this and fight for LGBT’s rights. i clearly support them as i think LGBT have rights too, but still the government does not allow this because they say that the main religion in my country opposes to this LGBT idea, that God does not allow this.

i’m not really religious myself, that is why i think that this thing about “what God says” is unacceptable. i might be bashed for saying this, but really, i’m just stating my opinion.

i am a B, i’m sure you know what i mean. and i really do not like all these stories about how LGBT people getting all the bad treatment just because they’re “not normal” in a way. it’s really unfair, i mean, it’s not like they wanted to be that way, in some cases, it just came. i seriously pity all those people. i really hope for the world to open up their eyes about this as this issue is getting even wider now.

i really don’t understand what are those narrow-minded people thinking.
http://www.facebook.com/peggyryu Yuuki Natsumi

well i don’t rlly understand what u want to say ! So korean love to act they are gay , but they are not , or they are gay and that is very bad in korea ! umm i listen kpop , and there so much korean boys kissing each other etc. so what that mean are they gay or not ! however i love gays xD
http://twitter.com/zeiro0 Natalie Gilmore

I haven’t read all the comments, but another Korean movie is No Regret. It focused on gays, the main characters and all. It’s probably one of the most gay Asian movie I have seen. And I have seen quite a few lesbian and gay movies heh…. I don’t know how to write that without it sounding weird. But even in Japanese gay movies which there are a lot more of, it seems to never quite get to the issue, but I quite liked No Regret. but I wouldn’t recommend it to younger people, its pretty graphic actually. I have found that movies seem to be more open minded that the dramas. And on Antique Bakery. I really love Kim Jae Wook. I found videos on youtube where he did live music performances from Hedwig and the Angry Inch in drag. My personal opinion is he is more open minded. I really like all your commentary about things Simon and Marina. Thanks for them. Also, I have seen lots of pictures on tumblr in nightclubs where people seem to be gay anyways. So its nice to see at least somewhere where people can be open.
http://twitter.com/whoisbeauty1 dailymeals

Hi canadian couple. I’m Koaren girl who is enjoying many of your clips. my english is not good so pls understand me. ^-^ nowadays there are many dramas that use homosexual stories. when I watch them It’s kinda funny but sometimes I feel like awkward. and actually older people don’t like that kinda story. they worry about this. firstly it’s because of Social atmosphere. Korea is most strong Confucianism sociey in the world. Confucianis is embedded in every Korean from thousands years ago. that is something like courtesy, life way. but also history, tradition. still many of Koreans are conservatives. (hard to exaplin hope you know background, stories of Confucianism)
http://ygmh.skku.edu/
http://www.seonbitg.net/

in every country there are some gays. there will be also gays in Korea, they don’t reveal that. I know many Korean guys who live in abroad like UK, France ects. they say one of the hate things of Korea is that people too consider other’s privacy. Western people don’t consider or cling to other’s life because there is individualism. Korean people say egoism as a same way. in Eastern, people really care community, other’s life. it’s culture difference.
Korean people don’t care about Western people have gays couple. all Korean know that Western is open minded culture(talking as good way) so Western poeple tend to be frank and do as they want. but inside Korean society, people hate someone change their sex or being homosexual. there are many constraint conditions in the life like people respect older people. that is also reflected in language as well. there is no honorific in english. they just say”‘YOU” to thier mom, grandmother ects. Korean act like considering others, don’t easily be frank. for example. no matter how I’m hungry, I don’t say easily I’m hungry when others ask me “do you want something to eat?(I will buy for you)”.
It’s not the problem of there are many gays or not. cuz it’s problem of Korean social atmosphere. if there is someone who is man but wanna be woman, people will make joke of it.
mfaa07

I am confounded by the dichotomy of Kdramas. They constantly cast androgynous and effeminate (at least by Western standards) male leads. Yet homophobia remains an issue in Korean society by large. I lived in Seoul for 2 years and didn’t find Korean males to be well…very manly.

I’m not the least bit attracted to any of the popular idols either. They just aren’t very masculine. Of course, there are few exceptions (Rain comes to mind). Again, this must be the result of my own expectation bias. As my perception is tainted by the Western definition (Latin Western to boot) of what “manly” or masculine is supposed to embody. Korean men don’t usually fit that mold.
Jessy Lembke

Thank you guys so much for addressing this problem! It was really interesting to read all this information, and actually came up in a discussion that I had in a class not too long ago. It opened a lot of my classmate’s eyes (and minds) to the topic of homosexuality period, and they now are more interested in making a difference, even if it is just here in North America.
But when they read about the celebrities who committed suicide, that became a very real topic to them. I don’t know why that pushed them to realize that it does happen, but it did. And they also felt very upset over laughing off homosexuality in some dramas, but cutting such scenes as they did in Life is Beautiful. I was actually surprised to see some of my classmates get upset over it. I think them seeing that this is a topic in other countries too, where it’s not as open as it is here, made them reflect on what they thought and how they had been treating the homosexuals in our school, including one of my friends that had been intensely bullied.
So thank you. Just this one post that I brought up off-hand during a health class was enough to get some people to think about the topic period. Some of them are even LGBT rights supporters now after they started reading up on the subject more; which was something that I thought would never happen considering this is possibly the smallest, most homophobic town in the U.S.

Plus, most of them wanted to know where I had gotten this information, so they’re kind of addicted to kpop and your show now too… Love your show, and keep being awesome! :D
Rosa Kim

I’m Korean and raised (and still living) in New Zealand and I think it sucks that Korea is not very “2012″ with this issue. It makes me sad to think that my extended family aren’t open or tolerant towards homosexuality – even my parents who’ve lived here for 19 years aren’t comfortable with it – though I still have hope that eventually it will no longer be a taboo subject over there :)
http://elwood5566.net/ No Kang-ho

Yes, it sucks to be gay in Korea, but not as much as it sucks to be straight in the West. Britain and the USA are incredibly violent, and physically clinical places and in part this is due to the nature of Western masculinity. While not all Western men are hyper-masculine, you only have to ask a handful of Westerners about skinship or bathhouses to discover how insecure we are with our gender and sexuality. For many Westerners, intimacy, nudity and simply the presence of other males are highly threatening – indeed some schools in both the USA and UK have attempted to ban any forms of physical intimacy (eg – hugging and holding hands). And ask the same group about skinship between adults and children, as you might see in a bathhouse, and you expose a festering unease.

Yea, I can be gay and proud back in Britain but that doesn’t count for much when a lot of the men are repugnant, violent and aggressive and where you have to be constantly on guard should you choose to spend the evening in town. I should add, I spent five years working in the field of ‘hate crime.’ Despite all the freedoms in the West, and we have a lot less than we think, I’m far safer and happier as a male in Korea – but then I’m 56 and boring and quite content to shelf my sexual identity.
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