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BL: The Boys' Love industry of Thailand -- success beyond all expectations [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-02
Thailand’s top export is office machine parts. That doesn’t promote a proud national image like precision watches do for Switzerland or beautiful tulips for Holland or rich coffee for Colombia. Fortunately, Thailand has another export that is eagerly welcomed around the world and boosts the country’s reputation: Boys’ Love dramas.
Just over a decade ago, the genre existed only as novels and mangas, some imported from Japan and others created by local authors. Some daring and ambitious Thai people took a gamble on turning those printed works into dramas and comedies starring highly attractive young actors and actresses.
Their gambit succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination and today Thailand absolutely dominates the global market of BL series and movies. Other countries are racing to catch up, but for now and the foreseeable future, Thailand is on top of the world, generating well over half of all BL live-action works.
Other nations have created powerhouses of popular entertainment forms, such as Hollywood’s former studio system for movies and South Korea’s integrated training and management organization for K-pop music. Thailand saw that and accepted the challenge: “Hold our beer.” The Thai BL industry constructed an incredible ecosystem beyond anything seen before.
Let’s take a dive into it after the break!
Our mission statement This regime wants to erase LGBQT people from public life and eliminate access to information, resources, and cultural heritage for our youth. Most LGBQT adolescents never see stories about people like themselves enjoying love and romance. In our current reality, watching a Boys’ Love or Girls’ Love series or movie might be the only means for young people to see models of how their own relationships could start, develop, and successfully grow. It’s also an act of subversion … so watch an episode, share it with others, and resist!
Origins
In 2013, Thailand produced zero Boys’ Love series … the same as every other country in the world that year. However, the Thai entertainment industry was preparing for change, even if they had no idea yet what a seismic shift that change would be.
BL scripts were being written, projects green-lighted, potential stars scouted. Along with the adventures in bringing a new genre to life, the communications industry was vastly expanding its reach and markets: Thailand was moving to digital broadcast television, opening an array of new channels for the public to enjoy. The media companies were also building new business networks, creating arrangements to cross-license and cross-market their products so that every possible consumer could view them on regular broadcast TV, standard definition digital broadcast TV, high-def digital broadcast TV, cable TV, internet streaming, and mobile data streaming.
The Thai BL that revolutionized the Thai entertainment industry
Thus, when Love Sick premiered in 2014, the public was hyped up, curious and ready for new experiences. Although some movies with male-male romances had appeared in cinemas in the past, none had the vast audience that Love Sick had during its debut. Its 48 episodes — based on an extremely popular Boys’ Love novel — broadcast over a year and a few months, became the water-cooler topic of Thailand, with speculations and opinions flowing freely about who should break up with or hook up with whom.
Surprisingly in a socially conservative country, the consensus of the public was that Boys’ Love was mainstream entertainment for everyone to enjoy. Entertainment executives and producers took a look at the numbers and listened to the public buzz and visions of baht (Thai currency) danced through their heads.
The Boys’ Love craze was about to begin … and in a few years, it would explode.
Growth
When I said “explode”, I wasn’t kidding. In 2014, Thailand produced several works featuring male-male couples: two feature movies, two short films, one series that had a male-male couple as non-lead characters, and Love Sick, which featured a bevy of boys falling in and out of love with each other (and thus was the only true BL of the bunch).
To date, Thailand has produced 478 BLs in total * — most of them episodic series. That’s an increase of 7,867% over a bit less than eleven years. And the growth rate keeps increasing. So far, with one-third of the year left to go, Thailand has already released 64 BL series in 2025, putting it on track to hit 100 by year’s end.
Dare You To Death (2025), a BL murder mystery
Think about that. BL series typically have 8-12 episodes, so if we average that out to 10 episodes per BL, it means Thailand will be producing around 1,000 episodes in 2025. That’s enough for us to watch nearly three episodes every day of the year. And that’s not including feature movies and short films.
A large part of that amazing growth was due to one terrible event, the Covid pandemic. In 2020, when billions of people were locked up at home, voluntary or otherwise, they started searching for new media to while away the hours and they discovered BL and liked it. Line TV, an Asian streaming platform, said that in 2019, BL accounted for roughly 5% of its viewing hours. In 2020, it shot up to 34%. That year, the Thai series 2gether went viral and became the first BL to surpass one billion views (for all of its 13 episodes combined).
Thai BL production houses noted that sharp uptake of BL content. They had already been steadily increasing production but now ramped up into overdrive, not only churning out new series but acquiring prodigious numbers of talented young actors (and some actresses) to feature in their works.
Not only did domestic consumption of BL content rise exponentially, international viewing rose even faster. Thailand’s media companies negotiated deal after deal in the late 2010s and early 2020s with streaming platforms around the world as well as broadcasters and cable providers in many nations.
Suntiny (2025), a comedy where rivals wake up horrified when they discover they’ve swapped bodies
Thai BLs became a staple in many countries, including some that might surprise you. Vietnam, a communist authoritarian nation, has Thai BLs shown daily; Brazil, a Portuguese-speaking county half a world away, is an avid consumer of subtitled Thai BL series.
It’s no wonder that Thailand is the world’s top BL producer, every year creating around 60% of all BL series. The other countries nipping at its heels — South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines — are building up their own BL production but Thailand is still the 800-pound gorilla eating their lunch.
In recent years, BL has become even more popular around the globe … with one glaring exception: the United States. I wouldn’t say it’s entirely due to homophobia; I think a significant part of the US population avoids BL more from what I call “homo-indifference.” In other words, many straight people just cannot connect emotionally with gay people, in terms of their romantic feelings, and thus disdain BL content. They don’t hate us but neither do they feel happiness when we find romance onscreen; in fact, many feel uneasy with it.
* Numbers here are derived from my personal database of BL works and thus are estimates of the actual numbers. There is no central definitive resource so I utilize several sites that specialize in listing and reviewing BL content around the world.
Why Thailand is so successful in creating BL content
Visual treats
Let’s be honest. In other words, let’s be superficial. Beauty isn’t everything but in the visual entertainment industry, it’s pretty darn important. Whether it’s Hollywood, Bollywood, the Milan fashion show, or K-pop’s idols, the public likes its stars to be very attractive, for the most part.
BL isn’t any different. If you watch Thai BL series, you’ll be treated to one gorgeous guy after another. Thailand is known for having more than its fair share of Asian beauties, male and female.
Thai culture very much values physical beauty. The downside is that it sometimes adopts practices many of us find objectionable, such as skin tone lighteners. On the positive side, many Thais take good care of their faces and bodies and do their best to look attractive.
Thai BL stars Fort Thitipong, Ohm Thitiwat, and Max Kornthas (left to right)
Competitive beauty is widespread. Universities have “Star & Moon” contests to select the best looking gal (Star) and guy (Moon) in each faculty. There are a slew of pageants in major cities, to select Mr. Something or Miss OtherThing. Even rural villages stage beauty contests.
The beauty fest isn’t limited to straight cis people either. Many universities include a Satellite sash for the winner of the LGBQT category. Small towns and villages will honor the loveliest kathoey (ladyboy), a sort of “third gender” that has been part of Thai culture since ancient times.
All of this brings the cream to the top. Pageants are an ideal setup for scouts to find a bunch of hot looking people. Even if a scout doesn’t find you, the experience of people telling you “You’re so good-looking, you should enter this pageant” may give you the confidence to self-scout and hie yourself to a studio, agent, or casting call.
Storytelling
Memoir of Rati (2025), a historical period drama set in 1918
Thailand has a long tradition of creating compelling stories for television and cinema. Every evening, prime-time TV channels typically show at least one episode of a lakorn (similar to soap operas and telenovelas but with the entire tale wrapped up within a fixed number of episodes).
Although many BL series are based on original novels or mangas, scriptwriters adapt them to the screen. Experienced lakorn writers know how to do that well, creating visual narratives that capture the viewer’s interest and attention.
A pretty face might lure someone to check out a BL, but a jumbled plot will not persuade him or her to stay for the whole series. Thailand’s bounty of talented screenwriters have created gripping dramas and charming rom-coms that are enjoyed by BL fans around the globe.
Original soundtracks
Modern Thailand is a hub for pop music. Modeling the success of Korea’s K-pop industry, Thailand has its own T-pop culture.
Hug E-Lhee (2025), a musical comedy of rivals
Western readers may not be familiar with many of Thailand’s pop stars and groups but Asian fans certainly are. Groups like BUS, LAZ1, Project Jasp.er, and LYKN attract stadium-size audiences when they tour abroad.
Solo performers such as Billkin, Jeff Satur, and Kin Thanachai routinely sell out their concerts in Asian countries and have begun touring Europe and the US in recent years.
The Thai BL industry has marshaled the musicians listed above, as well as many more, to create memorable original music for BL series and movies. BL fans often score a BL significantly higher or lower in their recommendations based on the soundtrack.
Thailand also has a rich legacy of traditional music. Some of the songs in BL incorporate these musical styles, which gives them a moving and unique flavor, differentiating them from the musical scores of BLs from other nations. This theme song from A Tale of a Thousand Stars has a haunting melody played on a khlui, a traditional bamboo flute.
Whether it’s T-pop sounds or ancient tunes given modern styling, the music is one of the key elements that have brought such success to Thailand’s BL productions. If you want to sample more, check out my stories that each offer a dozen unforgettable BL OST songs, here and here.
But wait, there’s more!
All of the above are factors that have contributed to Thailand’s incredible leap onto the world stage of popular entertainment in the past decade. But the biggest secret to its success is all about its talent: the handsome lads who charm and beguile us in series after series after series … and we want still more of them.
Tune in next week for part II of this story. I will take you inside the Thai BL stars’ ecosystem, the engine that has made the magic happen for us as fans and for the actors as global celebrities: How to Become a Millionaire by Kissing a Boy.
Coming up …
Next week, Krotor will take us inside the star-making ecosystem of the Boys’ Love industry in Thailand in his story How to Become a Millionaire by Kissing a Boy. If you thought K-pop is the ultimate well-oiled entertainment machine, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Join us next Tuesday at Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love.
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