‘My Best Gay Friends’ taking Vietnam by storm (VIDEO)

http://youtu.be/CdPHPBAEBQ4

VIETNAM — What started as a low-budget effort on YouTube about the travails of three perpetually broke 20-something friends living in Ho Chi Minh City, My Best Gay Friends has quickly evolved into one of the most popular shows in Vietnam. Shot on a shoestring budget with three unknown actors – all friends in real life – the comedy, complete with a laugh track and theme music, stands out not for its situational comedy but the fact that all the main characters are gay, lesbian or transsexual.
“I thought it would only interest Vietnam’s gay community – but we’re hearing that parents, grandparents, whole families watch and love the shows and long for new episodes,” noted Huynh Nguyen Dang Khoa, the series’ creator who also stars in the show.
My Best Gay Friends recently got a boost with the appearance of Cindy Thai Tai, a well-known transgender singer who was one of the first Vietnamese celebrities to have sex reassignment surgery.
Khoa created the show after hearing about the extraordinary events that kept on happening to a close friend of his who had recently moved to the bustling metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City and the idea for the show was born. “I wanted to show people that homosexuals have ordinary lives, full of emotion, friends, family – very normal lives.”
And the show could not have come at a more opportune time. While same-sex marriage is explicitly banned in culturally conservative Vietnam, shifts in public attitudes toward gay people coupled with a number of political statements – same-sex couples who engage in wedding ceremonies will no longer be fined – have helped fueled a belief that Vietnam is on the verge of endorsing same-sex marriage. (The Minister of Health recently released a statement supporting marriage equality observing that “everyone has a right to love.”)
But whether the show is a product of a fast changing culture or the leading engine of it is hard to discern. Sociologist Le Quang Binh told the press that social attitudes toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community were changing rapidly in Vietnam at the moment but it was hard to know how much My Best Gay Friends had helped.
Currently, there are no plans by Vietnam’s commercial networks to pick up the show which regularly garners almost one million views per episode.