Clever Turtles

Apparently there was recently a conference on issues of transgendered individuals in prisons.

I don't have much more information on the conference aside from the Yonhap article, but it looks to be more focused on transgender issues than other queer issues. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, but it seems that in Korea, there is a tendency to be more comfortable with issues of gender reassignment than gender non-normative behavior.

Really, Jose, are you disappointed?

So apparently the lesbian experience in college is more a product of popular imagination than actual cultural experience, according to a CDC study carried in the NYTimes.

Of course, this provoked me to think about the Korean case, as everything I ever read does. It's on the brain, man. Like kuru.

I recently discovered that the independent film "후회하지 않아" ("No Regret") was available through a US distributor. It is purportedly the first feature film to be produced in Korea by a gay director, and is one of the few Korean films to focus on queer relationships in Korea. Furthermore, one of the leads is played by the popular actor Kim Nam-gil, albeit under a pseudonym.

I'm very aware, to begin with, that Korean male pop stars often seem effeminate or homoerotic to Westerners while being very masculine and virilely heterosexual to Asians -- this is a matter of cultural signifiers not translating or mistranslating across cultural boundaries. In most cases, I think, the most glammed up, smooth-skinned, long-haired young men are, in the proper cultural context, very, very straight.

But when I ran across the Big Bang/No Brain collaboration, "Oh My Friend".

Interesting story today: Gay culture has really not penetrated Korean popular culture very far. They are still very much in the closet. In the time I spent teaching adults, it never really came up unless I specifically brought it up as a discussion topic, and there is not really any equivalent to "Will + Grace" in the popular culture. That is changing, for example Koreans seem interestingly more accepting of the transsexual pop singer Harisu than they are of homosexuals generally.