Thank you, yes, that's one of the reasons why I loved visiting Asia so much. I just hadn't heard them apply the actual term "Boy Love" to their curious cultural/pop media genre, before. I was wondering, and am still wondering, if that might be a loan-term from the English and if it might be traceable, at least in part, to our own movement. One curious thing I have found, over the years, is that Asia frequently imports some of our most subversive ideas in some (usually very small) part into their own culture, seemingly non-judgmentally, and then makes it their own. There were fleeting bits of evidence of this I encountered over the years. One thing that was very curious for me was in the films that were available on early DVDs in their markets, almost all of which were pirated. So, for example, "For A Lost Soldier," of all things, seemed to be available in a number of different Asian countries, including Rangoon, Burma (some call it Yangon, Myanmar; I do not) of all places. Also, "You Are Not Alone!" What's THAT all about? You couldn't find those in a Blockbuster (at the time) or Walmart to save your life! You could find them in many of the markets where illegal copies of movies and software were sold. So, these are not genres that they came up with but they have found some level of acceptance, at least as a foreign genre, that our own countries have anathematized. Sadly, I haven't been to Asia since IML became law, so I don't know what's happened in the intervening years. |