Reading the Youtube sitcom My best gay friends: what it means to be gay in Vietnam

ABSTRACT

My Best Gay Friends is a Vietnamese gay sitcom web-series that was well received by Youtube viewers. It is very rare to find non-stigmatised representations of homosexual people in Vietnamese mainstream media, especially as main characters. This series was created by a group of gay, lesbian and transgender (GLT) people and was circulated through the online platform Youtube. The growth of the Internet as an alternative channel for creating and distributing media has led to the increasing visibility of homosexual people. The interactive nature of Youtube, which allows audiences to comment on each video, has left room for active engagement with, consumption of and production of media content. In this article I explore how Youtube as an alternative media platform is used to negotiate and construct ideas about subjectivity and sexualities. I read the representation of gay characters in the sitcom in the context of legal, societal and cultural discourses on LGBT issues in contemporary Vietnam. The textual analysis of the series and its comments will shed light on how homosexual visibility has been shaped by Vietnamese heteronormative culture, but also how heteronormativity has been challenged.

KEYWORDS:

• Media studies
• cultural studies
• gender and sexuality studies
• LGBT
• Vietnam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This tool was developed by Philip Klostermann to scrape the text, username, and date of each comment, retrieved by http://ytcomments.klostermann.ca/.

2. Bot is an abbreviation of the English term ‘bottom’ used to indicate a male who plays a passive role in a gay relationship as opposed to a top.

3. Bà is a pronoun which refers to the other person as a female subject.

4. Vietnamese pronoun use varies according to age, gender, the relationship between participants and the context of use. Normally the pronoun clearly dictates the gender identity of the person mentioned and it can be used for all persons (first, second and third). This contrasts with the female pronouns bà/con/má/chị/cô and male pronouns ông/thằng/ba/anh/chú.

5. The third gender/the third world [giới tính thứ ba/thế giới thứ ba] is a vernacular term to signify non-normative forms of gender and sexualities.

6. Another variation of the term pede [pederast].

7. The original comment can be roughly translated as ‘I am neither đồng tính [homosexual] nor left [mispell of les]. The commentator conflated ‘homosexual’ with ‘gay’, and mispelled the term les [lesbian].

8. On Đổi mới, see Rydstrøm (2006), 283.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thi Huyen Linh Nguyen

Thi Huyen Linh Nguyen is a PhD Researcher based in the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on the representation of LGBT characters in contemporary movies and resulting social debates. She is also engaged in LGBT movements in Vietnam. Her most recent article was ‘New Zealand same-sex marriage legislation in the Australian media, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29:3, 287-303.’