GLR May-June 2026

Two Steady Stars

My yoga instructor texts a photo of the Black Sea with a line from Seamus Heaney: “All I know is a door into the dark.”

Maybe a noisy rooftop bar in Old San Juan isn’t the best place to itemize our assets.

Under a red December super moon two hotel-sized cruise ships slide into San Juan harbor as we sit, thirteen years married, nursing today’s sunburns

We order another round from Lorna,

We switch seats to have a different view of empty rooftops, the sky, and each other.

who has the regulation tattoos and who lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a year until covid hit and she came home. Meanwhile, we look across the table at our accumulated risks and failures.

and order drinks at El Mezzanine, two floors above Calle del Sol. Two stars hover. A wire hangs limp from roof to roof.

Now the blue night’s clouds are the exact color of Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes. The moon hasn’t moved since I started this poem.

What will connect us as we grow older— our differences no longer youthful charms?

M ICHAEL J AMES O’B RIEN

nity. A 2022 Business Insider article on boys’ love indicated that “these shows focus on a romantic relationship between two boys who seem to exist in a world that’s unapologetically queer, free of the everyday obstacles that many members of the LGBTQ community face.” One intervie wee said: “As I got older and came into my identity as a bisexual, discovering a genre that exists in a world where no one bats an eyelash at everyone being gay really stuck out tome.” The concurrence of My Stubborn with my personal transitions has sometimes trig gered uncomfortable feelings, but as I’ve given myself over to the show, I’ve enjoyed its fantasy elements and begun employing its lessons in my daily life. Quinones writes that “hit novelas have created new hair styles and social trends” and that “large numbers of Mexican women learned how to conduct romantic relationships via the telenovela.” Sure, I’m an aging gay man in a youth-oriented culture, but I can note how Sorn dresses or how Jun flirts, relate their experiences to my own, and be proud of how much progress gay people have made in my lifetime. Gregory A. Dobie is an editor, educator, and writer currently based in San Antonio, Texas.

openly gay, not like the confused Steven Carrington of Dynasty ; that the plot is a gay love story, not an AIDS tragedy or a doomed relationship; and that this soap opera is for me, too, a gay man who can see aspects of his life represented on multi ple screens—computer, television, and cellphone. The leads in My Stubborn are Sorn and Jun, played by “Boat” Yongyut Termtuo and “Oat” Pasakorn Sanrattana. Their rela tionship is disturbing. Sorn is older and a superior at work, while Jun is an immature intern. The conceit is that Jun is sexually inexperienced, so Sorn offers to teach him. The troubling aspect is that Sorn is a jeal ous, possessive instructor who wants Jun only to practice with him. My Stubborn has earned an NC rating for its sex scenes, which are like nothing I’ve ever seen in a televised soap opera. Part of the fantasy appeal of the show is that the explicit encounters between Sorn and Jun occur by a koi pond, on a bathroom counter, and in an office stairwell, among other locations. While these trysts raise questions of sexual harassment, workplace misbehavior, and consent, the turbulent re lationship leads to a happy ending, in both senses of the phrase. The show’s publicity includes video clips of the actors watching themselves

perform in the sex scenes. Sanitizing the action for the audience of teenage girls, the actors react in exaggerated, almost infan tile ways, brandishing colored pillows to hide their faces. This certainly detracts from the fantasy, for what is embarrassing here? The actors effectively portray their characters’ sexual interactions, and neither the acting nor the homoeroticism needs any apologies. Aswith Los Ricos También Lloran , My Stubborn has found a global audience. The former was televised in numerous coun tries, whereas the latter is available through multiple Internet platforms, in cluding Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. An entire community of My Stubborn fans—from Nigeria, India, China, etc.—continues to comment on the show in online forums, and the stars, dubbed “BoatOat,” have had fan meetups in such far-flung locations as Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. While the characters’ sexual orientation is accepted without question in the series, the promotional ap pearances carefully skirt any direct men tion of homosexuality, although they capitalize on the actors’ chemistry, hinting that they are a couple. Despite this sensitivity to how the actors are perceived, boys’ love series have found an expanded audience in the gay commu

May–June 2026

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