Yes, I’ve made this complaint before, so just bear with me because I need to make it again.  I am fucking tired of movies about gay romances that end tragically! Can we please see stories about same sex love that succeeds, that triumphs over adversity? My thanks in advance.

I am so starved for romance that I can relate to, that the other night I find myself trolling YouTube for film clips from Japanese "boy’s love" anime that I don’t have yet.  If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, which sometimes goes by the name "Yaoi" in both manga and anime, it’s mostly torrid soap opera style love stories of the sort you might find in any paperback romance novel, save for the cultural differences in style, and the fact that they’re about gay male couples.  I’m told the audience for these stories in Japan are mostly teenage Japanese girls. 

I like them for the beauty of the males in the storylines, and the torrid romance of the storylines.  I used to smirk at some heterosexual friends, female, who had racks and racks of those Harlequin Romance paperbacks at home.  Well, I sure couldn’t smirk at them now.  I guess it was just a matter of not seeing any of it that I could relate to.  I tell myself these days that I’m finally having the teeny-bopper experience I couldn’t back in 1969-1970.  Well…apart from all those Tiger Beat magazines I used to buy, take home, devour, and hide under my bed, all the while telling myself that I was a perfectly normal heterosexual guy.

So…anyway…I’m busy trolling YouTube for some same sex romance, and I come across a set of 10 posts comprising an entire live action Japanese film titled, appropriately enough, Boy’s Love.  Ohmygod, thinks I, the leads are go goddamned Cute!  So I start watching the first one.  And I notice that it’s in Japanese with no sub-titles.  Oh well.  I keep watching, while trying to deduce the plot from the visuals.  Later on I find this about the film on Wiki…

Just doing his job, magazine editor Taishin Mamiya (Yoshikazu Kotani) interviews high school model Noeru Kisaragi (Takumi Saito). Despite Noeru’s bad attitude, an enchanting picture of the ocean he draws leads Mamiya to invite him out for dinner afterwards. They connect at the restaurant, but while in the bathroom there Noeru solicits Mamiya sexually. The next morning, Noeru’s office calls the magazine office where Mamiya works. "Your editor was rude. Have him come and apologize." When Mamiya goes to Noeru’s house to deliver the apology, he sees Noeru with a dirty-looking man. Mamiya is shocked to discover at that moment that his interest in Noeru goes beyond article research–he truly wants to know more about him.

Heh.  Yeah.  Sort-of.  There’s more to it, including a jealous classmate who the commenters on YouTube took to calling "Harry Potter" because of his glasses and bookish look I suppose.  But it’s pretty much your standard gay soap opera plot.

Warning…Major Spoilage after the jump…

So I’m watching this film, with these two absolutely beautiful young guys who are obviously trying to connect over some pretty heavy personal conflicts that I can’t quite make out exactly because I don’t know any Japanese.  But the story that I can See is so full of passionate yearning that I just can’t take my eyes off it.   The one guy, the model I later learn, is also a student in some sort of school and has a less attractive, but still very cute (to my eye) room mate who seems right from the start to have the hots for him.  But he also seems a tad…ominous.  He later turns into a psycho jealous creep when he sees that his room mate is actually falling in love with the editor. 

The model seems to have this dark secret (I said it was a soap opera), that has to do with his giving himself sexually to other random men, I guess as some sort of emotional substitute for love.  Which makes the editor (who seems to be about the same age as the model) unaccountably angry.  They fight.  Then they talk.  Then they fight some more.  Then they start falling in love.

Then the model comes home one day to find the psycho jealous room mate has taken down from their wall a painting the model created of a young man looking out to sea.  Perhaps the psycho jealous room mate tells the model he threw the painting out or something, I can’t tell, I don’t speak Japanese.  Anyway, the model angrily confronts the psycho jealous room mate and of course the psycho jealous room mate considers that a perfect time to confess his love for the model, who quite reasonably punches him in the face and then leaves.  That had been one of my paintings a psycho jealous room mate destroyed and I’d have taken his head clean off.

The model goes out wandering the streets, gets drunk, and then is raped by a street thug.  The next day, his boss at the modeling agency gets angry with him because his face is all bruised.  Perhaps he’s fired then…I don’t know.  It’s really painful at this point to watch this guy holding all the pain in his life quietly inside of himself.  Right after that there is a scene in which the editor finds the model, once again in bed with a complete stranger, who leaves.  The editor just stands there and stares and the model breaks down and finally has some sort of cathartic release in the arms of the editor.  The power of the scene reached me even though I had no idea what he was saying through his tears.  They embrace.  A little later the psycho jealous room mate comes in to find them together.

So the model and the editor become lovers.  We watch their love grow and deepen for a few scenes more…

…and then the psycho jealous room mate kills the model.  The last scene is the editor carrying his beloved’s body into the ocean, where he presumably kills himself as well.

Now wasn’t that a nice movie?  Does your heart good to see two people fall madly in love with each other, and then die horrible deaths.

So add two more dead faggots to Vito Russo’s necrology at the back of The Celluloid Closet.  And I am just fucking Fed Up!

Can we please see stories about same sex love that succeeds, that triumphs over adversity? My thanks in advance.