In recent years, Korean movies and TV have taken steps toward embracing diverse sexualities, including the release this year of their first ever LGBTQ reality show, Merry Queer (메리퀴어), which breaks through traditionalism to offer refreshingly new content. Together with the hosts, the audience gets to observe the everyday lives of three queer couples—more specifically, a gay couple, a lesbian couple, and  a couple in which one partner is trans—as they deal with the topic of marriage.


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Ga-ram and Seung-Eun, the lesbian couple, currently live together and plan to get married before the end of the year. Before they start planning, they pay a visit to another lesbian couple that’s about to get married. At one point in the conversation, Ga-ram asks the other couple how their friends and family responded when they decided to get married; the answer she receives is that the majority of their non-queer friends said it was amazing and extremely brave to get married in South Korea, spend money on a wedding, and tell their friends about it. But their families completely refused to understand their decision.


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The theme of the second episode is difference. But what does “difference” mean? And will this kind of difference result in misunderstandings, even attacks? One of the hosts says, “Being different and being wrong mean two completely different things. But most people think, those people’s lives are different from ours, and that’s wrong in itself, it’s a life lived the wrong way. In truth, this is a very dangerous way of thinking.” Difference is uniqueness, is diversity, is a million possibilities; what it certainly isn’t is wrong. As the trailer says, “This is a story about being different. Not being wrong, just being different.”

LGBTQ+ people in every country often have a difficult path to walk, but worth celebrating is the fact that there are many people speaking and taking action in their support. Shows like this one can introduce more people to their differences—and perhaps eventually everyone will realize that we’re not so different after all.

Watch Merry Queer on GagaOOLala

 

Yi-min lives alone with her son, as her husband works away from home. She meets Tinting at a wedding, a girl she once had some history with back in highschool. Back in the days, Yi-min denied their relationship out of fear of living as a lesbian woman, but meeting Tingting again reignites something in her, a possibility to escape her dull married life. Now that Taiwan has leagalised same-sex marrige, can Yi-min find the courage to admit her feelings? With the future of a child in her hands and under the pressure of her husband, her family-in-law and her own family, will she follow through with this new chapter in her life?