The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name

They met at university and never quite moved apart. Years on, two men still share a flat in Hong Kong, one running a cafe and the other going in to an office, and they have carried each other through every uncertainty their twenties could produce. What they have is closer than friendship, neither has ever put a word to it, and that is precisely why it has held. Then their circumstances change, the arrangement they live inside can no longer stay as it was, and the cafe owner decides to act. Oscar Fong and Colman Chan play the pair, and at roughly five minutes an episode across six instalments the series stays inside domestic routine and small habitual exchanges, so the shift registers as a disturbance in ordinary life rather than as an event. Interdependence, the cost of silence and the risk in changing the terms of a long friendship are what it is actually about.

The production is as unusual as the scale. 有愛錄 was mounted not by a studio but by The Fu Court (糧食供應所), a BL and GL specialist bookshop in Mong Kok that sells manga, novels and doujinshi by Japanese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese creators and presents itself as an advocacy body for BL culture as much as a retailer. 螢火蟲 (Firefly) is the filmed arm of a cross-media project the shop billed as video plus prose plus comics plus an audio reading drama. Asked why they bothered, one of the four owners, Maron, answered with a question of his own: why does Hong Kong not have BL dramas, and if someone watches one and then becomes curious about Hong Kong culture, would that not be excellent.

Six episodes ran to 15 November 2021 on the shop's own YouTube channel with Traditional Chinese and English subtitles built in, followed three days later by a making-of special that GagaOOLala now carries as a title in its own right. Overseas viewers volunteered further subtitle tracks, Portuguese among them, so a Cantonese two-hander shot in a flat turned into a small export. It did not stop there. An eight-instalment run billed as Season 1.5 followed through 2022 on a fortnightly Thursday pattern, with long literary episode titles where the first season had simply used numbers, one of them invoking Freud on smoking and ice cream. A 螢火蟲 photo book appeared under the shop's own 糧倉原創 label, the same shop went on to make a second cross-media BL series set in a BL book cafe, and in 2023 it helped organise the first Hong Kong BL Festival at Eaton HK.