Ice-cream inventions, bunny suits, prancing eunuchs

Chef Maiyuu’s strawberry/cream ice-cream...the strawberry number was made mainly with milk and cream, with a few strawberries thrown in. 

Next up, he will turn his hand to making lavender icecream - with real lavender!

‘I’ve figured out how to do it,’ he says.

We will have to wait until pay day early next week before attempting it.

Today, however, he will have a go at creating yellow watermelon ice-cream, which he can make without adding cream or other complicated things. Pictures to come.

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Maiyuu has bought himself several cotton body suits. They button up at the front, rise to the neck, and stretch down to the ankle. They look like the full-length underwear outfits which in wintry climes some men wear to bed.

There’s another name for them, but because I have lived in hot places for so long I can’t remember it.

I’d like to add, ‘Pictures to come’, but we might have to wait for Maiyuu to go out first, as he is a reluctant model.

I call them his ‘bunny suits’, because Maiyuu looks like a baby rabbit when he wears them - minus the fluffy tail and twitching ears, of course.

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They are chaste and harmless, but that’s the way Thais like their gay couples portrayed.

Fans rave over the gay Kong-Phiwit coupling in the Channel 5 series, Tomorrow, I’ll Still Love You.

On webboards, enthusiasts have started mini-novels depicting the romance between Kong and Phiwit as they would like to see it end. Others call for sitcoms starring the pair.

In one recent episode, Kong and Phiwit looked as if they might share their first kiss.

Women fans were beside themselves, according to one guy writing at the Pantip webboard, who says his office came to a stand-still.

Yet what we have seen so far is tame - and not just because the pair have yet to go to bed.

Phiwit and Kong show each other puppy love. They bait and tease each other, which is romantic and cute.

Yet it is hardly real. Once they pass the initial courting stage, what next?

Asked what they want from the relationship, most fans at Pantip agree they are happy for the pair to hold hands, hug, and give each other moral support.

Few want to see it go any further, however, as that would take their relationship beyond the realm of ‘innocent love’, into a scary real-life zone.

Like...bad breath in the morning? A lover who sits around all day while his partner goes out to work?

When talking about their roles, the actors playing Kong and Phiwit are careful to say the characters are merely close friends. The dreaded 'G' word never gets a mention, and not just because they want to spare their own feelings as actors.

They want to keep the fantasy alive for mainstream viewers, many of whom are teenage women. The producers have told them that too much real stuff turns people off.

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As the series enters its final stretch, thinking types are opining on its virtues.

Gay blogger/broadcaster Vitaya S says critics of the series are not so much ‘old-fashioned’ as merely homophobic.

The series gets a brief mention at the start and again at the end of his article, but otherwise it’s just a vehicle for Vitaya the aspiring gay activist to hop on his soapbox. Knock yourself out!

More inspiring is ‘The unbearable lightness of chastity’, a think piece in the Nation newspaper.

Author Paisarn Likhitpreechakul says the relationship between Phiwit and Kong emulates a Thai-style courtship (just Thai?) where the guy goes to great lengths to gain the trust of the woman who has taken his interest.

Here are excerpts, with tiny editing changes (link to the original article follows):

"There's no sex involved. Just caring for the other and his family, staring into each other's eyes, occasional hand-holding and brief consoling embraces.

"Despite the crazy tumult of heterosexual lust, jealousy and rage around them [in the series], or perhaps because of it, Phiwit and Kong's relationship somehow emerges as the moral underpinning of the whole show. And that's what has put the conservatives up in arms.

"One newspaper columnist wrote that the show's portrayal of gay relationships may 'normalise such relationships and mislead Thai youths into believing that they are acceptable'.

"Most fans are average members of the audience who overlook the gender of the protagonists and see the relationship for what it is - an insufferable tenderness for each other that is love.

"However, there's another side to this enthusiasm. Although it is doubtful that we'll see so much as a peck on the cheek between Phiwit and Kong, I wonder how many of these fans would remain faithful if the star-crossed lovers were to be shown spending a night together in bed - something freely allowed to onscreen heterosexual couples.

"It seems the only same-gender relationships palatable to Thai audiences and the public at large will remain - for the time being - hopelessly idealistic relationships between eunuchs."

Vitaya’s turgid blog piece is here (Thai only). The Nation piece is here (link harvested - it died).