Gay courtship on TV turns heads, but not at home
HONG KONG — The contestant approached the man she had been publicly courting on live television and confessed that the object of her affections had shifted.
“It’s someone else,” she said, then walked off the set with a fellow female contestant.
That plot twist, revealed in a trailer for the Vietnameselanguage adaptation of “The Bachelor,” has set the internet ablaze. No two contestants on the show, which debuted in the United States in 2002 and later expanded overseas, have ever walked out of its elimination ceremony together.
But in Vietnam, where the full episode was scheduled to air Tuesday night, the response has been muted and news media coverage focused primarily on how the episode has been covered abroad.
One apparent reason: Acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has become so commonplace in the country that they are no longer all that surprising.
“Ten years ago that wasn’t normal, but now it is, at least in the cities,” Xuan Hong, a homemaker in the capital, Hanoi, said by telephone. “Perceptions change.”
Vietnam is seen as a leader on gay rights in Southeast Asia, a region where social conservatism is common and some governments still enforce draconian laws that criminalize gay sex.
Its liberal reputation on the issue dates to about 2012, when the government first said it would consider allowing same-sex couples to marry or legally register. “I think, as far as human rights are concerned, it’s time for us to look at the reality,” the justice minister at the time, Ha Hung Cuong, was quoted as saying.
Two years later, the longstanding Law on Marriage and Family was revised to abolish a prohibition on same-sex marriages, although it did not fully legalize them either. And in 2015, the Civil Code was changed to allow people who have undergone gender reassignment to register under their new gender. A rule making that change a legal reality is now being drafted.
“We think the support is there,” said Luong Minh Ngoc, director of iSEE, a Vietnamese research outfit that advocates human rights, adding that gay rights issues are generally viewed in Vietnam within a moral context rather than a political one.