Manaaki, the 19-year-old Māori protagonist in the TikTok BL series Ships in the Night, is standing on the moonlit beach, scuffing his shoes in the sand as the lights of Tāmaki Makaurau gleam behind him. His love interest, 19-year-old Johnny, writes his deepest secret on the shoreline, awaiting the tide. It’s something Manaaki learned from his father about carving your confessions into the sand — “Release it all to Tangaroa,” his father would say — and asking the Māori god of the sea to wash them away. Manaaki whispers something in Johnny’s ear. It moves him. Tangaroa as witness, they embrace.
In Māori, the indigenous culture of Aotearoa (New Zealand), there’s a concept called Tūrangawaewae, which translates as “a place to stand.” It’s where we feel empowered and connected; a foundation on which we foster a sense of belonging. When we introduce ourselves, Māori recite our pepeha, an acknowledgment of genealogy, and what has nourished and raised us (our word for land, whenua, is also our word for placenta), from the mountains to the rivers to our tribes. The beach, where the land meets the sea, is Manaaki’s tūrangawaewae.
Writing Ships in the Night, I knew that a good deal of the story would unfold at the beach. After all, it was heavily influenced by BL dramas from South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines — queer romances which in recent times, one way or another, deliver their characters before the sea. Staring at a stale, blank page in Final Draft, I considered the beach. The bridge between two points, a space of elemental harmony, and especially alluring to queer characters on screen.
Take Barry Jenkins’ Best Picture winner, Moonlight, the story of a young Black man navigating his identity across three stages of his life. At the beach, Mahershala Ali’s Juan teaches Little Chiron how to move in the water, floating on his back with Juan’s hand supporting his head like a baptism, in what Jenkins called “a moment of spiritual transference.” The sound of the sea bookends the film, reflective of Miami’s oceanic surroundings. It also speaks to “a character who is always surrounded in open space and yet feels so locked into himself,” Jenkins told BFI.
In the film’s second act, Teen Chiron explores his sexuality at the beach with Kevin, played by Teen Vogue Young Hollywood alum Jharrel Jerome. “On the inside, [Kevin] has so much hidden that he only lets Chiron see for a brief second on the beach. He has a lot of inner feelings he hasn't even addressed personally,” Jharrel told Teen Vogue in 2019. Something about the beach and its seclusion affords them this rare intimacy, and gives Chiron a deeper connection with another person that we had seen only once before, as Juan taught him to swim.
What is it about the gays and the beach? During press for Netflix’s Heartstopper last year, I asked Kit Connor and Joe Locke this precise question. “Beaches are like spaces between spaces,” Locke said. “The sea is like traveling so it’s sort of, almost like it’s their own space.” In the final episode of the first season, Nick and Charlie make a day trip to the beach, where they make their relationship official. Nick runs to the ocean, arms outstretched, shouting, “I like Charlie Spring, in a romantic way, not just a friend way.” Nick scoops Charlie up in his arms and carries him into the sea (“We’re boyfriends!”) and we collectively swoon at the sweetness, because “beaches are like spaces of freedom,” as Locke put it.
“Culturally, water is a symbol of change,” Alice Oseman, creator of Heartstopper, tells Teen Vogue over email. “The beach setting is symbolic of the transformation Nick and Charlie go through in the scene. Nick's decision to come out and them officially becoming boyfriends provides an emotional release for the characters and allows them to move into a new place in their relationship. There is a sense of joy and playfulness to the beach that fits the scene and their relationship.”
There’s something in how fictional queer characters stand on the beach, facing an ocean that stretches as far as the eye can see, and profess their romantic feelings, untamed. Thai BL drama Bad Buddy similarly features a screaming-at-the-sea moment, as Pat and Pran escape the forces that seek to keep them apart — the show establishes them as products of rival school faculties and feuding families, rather than societal intolerance. (“We like each other. Why does it bother anyone?” Pran shouts). Connor labeled the beach as “a place of safety and comfort and security,” and that’s exactly what Pat and Pran found each time they visited.
Connor’s description of the beach extends far beyond the realms of fiction, however. Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove was an exhibition that ran at the New-York Historical Society in 2021, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It pulled together remnants of a forgotten, pre-Stonewall history — the isolated Fire Island beach enclave known as Cherry Grove, one of the first gay beach towns in the U.S.. “It was an escape for everyone to be able to come out here on the weekend and be yourself,” Audrey Hartmann said, quoted by NBC News. “It was a safe haven. I could say to someone, ‘I’m Audrey Hartmann… and I’m gay’.”
Safety, comfort, and security. Cherry Grove was accessible by boat but not by car, and despite discriminatory law enforcement, the community enjoyed a spirited social scene at night, with house parties, once the last boat (and potential police presence) left the island. One of the exhibition’s curators, Susan Kravitz, recalled that “because it’s isolated, people are not judging you, like you’d be afraid of in the real world.” Cherry Grove still flourishes to this day.
Of course, the adjoining community of Fire Island Pines has since arrived on-screen, in Joel Kim Booster’s Fire Island. Booster’s Noah is changed by his time on Fire Island, making him realize “how much power I was giving away to other people to make me feel a certain way, and I took it all back,” he says in the film. As Naveen Kumar writes in them., “Having an imperfect, Asian body there can feel like wearing an invisibility cloak. Keeping an open heart seems near impossible when the temptation to snap it shut grows greater with every rejection.” That environment today, decades on from Audrey Hartmann’s first experiences at Cherry Grove, pushes Bowen Yang’s Howie to stand staunch in his vulnerability. Kumar concludes, “It’s really the only way to live, at the edge of the world or back on its shores.”
The Eighth Sense, a BL drama from South Korea, lives and dies by the beach. Oh Jun-taek plays Jihyun, a college student from a small town who struggles to acclimatize to metropolitan Seoul. When Jihyun joins the surfing club, he bonds with his senior, Jaewon, played by Im Ji-sub. As they fall in love, the beach becomes their spot for sleeping under the stars and even kissing in the ocean. “The beach is kind of like a tool that connects us,” Ji-sub tells Teen Vogue over Zoom, in his native Korean. Jun-taek adds that the “beach is very wide but Jihyun has been living in a world that has been very small,” and although “the ocean itself is very cold, the ocean was actually very warm for Jihyun.” It’s a site of transformation for them both, just as water metamorphoses between its forms.
Ji-sub names the beach as a “special spot” for Jaewon, “where he can relax and heal mentally as well.” Jaewon’s younger brother tragically passed away a number of years before we meet him in the series, and the trauma still sits with him. “I didn't realize how broad a range of emotions can be felt when you love someone until I played the character Jaewon, because it's something that I personally didn't experience,” Ji-sub says. Jaewon welcomes Jihyun into his place of significance, illuminating his dark spaces and ultimately bringing the pair together.
Jun-taek alludes to the title of the series, recalling our senses as human beings. Interoception, often called the eighth sense, is the brain’s perception of the body’s state, thanks to signals transmitted from our internal organs. Understanding these signals can help us regulate our physical and emotional state, though at the same time, trauma can inhibit those pathways. “The beach kiss scene was the sequence [in which] someone with pain and bad memories, PTSD in the past, turns into love and being healed by Jihyun,” Jun-taek says. “Although you have bad memories or trauma…you can be healed. Do not remain, do not stay with the pain.”
Inu Baek, one half of The Eighth Sense’s writer/director duo, attributes the beach to a specific cultural symbolism. He refers to the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s 2015 advice for South Korea to adopt comprehensive protections for all citizens, which would prohibit discrimination against the queer community. “We have not been able to enact the anti-discrimination law in Korea yet,” Inu tells Teen Vogue. He wanted to “give the Korean audience a message because Korea has experienced lots of disasters in the ocean” that are still ever-present traumas for citizens, such as the Sewol ferry tragedy — the show even pays tribute to those lost with a covertly placed yellow ribbon. “The beach symbolizes the hope of the harmony of this country,” Inu says.
The show’s other writer/director is Werner du Plessis, who offers the beach as a representation of “the ebb and flow of relationships, the way that they move, the way that they’re never consistent,” but also a “space that is simultaneously peaceful, while being extremely dangerous, like the ocean is such an unknown.” And also, quicksand exists. Intrinsic to our genesis as queer people is navigating identity, from day dot. As the intersection of two worlds, toeing the line between who society expects us to be and who we truly are inside, the beach is “such a beautiful metaphor for queer people,” Werner says, “because it’s exactly the way that we’re designed.”
Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, closes in on the beach at the end of the 18th century, and through the female gaze, tells a love story between Héloïse, an unwilling bride-to-be, and Marianne, the woman tasked with painting her. While Héloïse refuses to pose for any artist, Marianne observes her at the beach, which is also where their romance thrives. It activates in the stolen glances and the hidden spaces. “We wanted to give back to these women from the past their hearts, their desire, the rush of blood to the cheek. It was a love story, of course, but it was also a movie about the rise of desire,” Sciamma told Vox in 2020.
When Héloïse returns from mass, she tells Marianne: "In solitude I felt the liberty you spoke of. But I also felt your absence.” That statement rings true for the beach, too. Across these various queer romances, our characters find liberty in their seclusion, but they also have somebody with which to partake in that freedom. Héloïse and Marianne share their first kiss on the beach, sheltered by walls of rock, as they each remove their face-scarves (a way of consenting) and make good on their simmering tension.
Sciamma’s film is a testament to the power of lesbian creatives putting lesbian characters on film, reminding us they’ve always been here. “If you look at the suffragettes, for instance, lesbians were there,” Sciamma said. “The tragedy is that we get erased from history. But we are activists and sometimes more in the position to be.” It’s like Cherry Grove. We remember and we memorialize so that those who come after will know the history of their community and those who nourished and raised them.
Dr. Thomas Baudinette, senior lecturer in Japanese and International Studies at Macquarie University, outlines the significance of the beach in Thai BL dramas. “The beach often functions as a site of transformation,” Baudinette tells Teen Vogue. “It's a site of freedom because that kind of leisure, enjoyment and relaxation that the beach functions as is the site of escape from the everyday, the mundane, [that] you'll see within a lot of series.” Queerness is brought into reality at the beach, externalizing the internal.
In GMMTV’s A Boss and a Babe, as Force and Book’s characters traverse their working lives and power dynamic, the beach becomes a space for them to “reaffirm their romantic connection,” Baudinette says. Nadao Bangkok’s coming-of-age series I Told Sunset About You stars Billkin and PP Krit as high schoolers, for whom “all of the key moments in their relationship, where they unpack their romantic attachment to each other, always happen at the beach. And that’s because the beach operates as that symbolic space that facilitates that.” When they lose proximity to that integral setting in I Promised You the Moon, they drift apart.
Tracing this thread takes us back to SOTUS: The Series, GMMTV’s 2016 seminal BL which had its own beach episode — “What happened in that beach episode? They finally realized they fell for each other.” The very notion of the beach as this site of queerness was “embedded within the DNA of BL in Thailand,” Baudinette says, “And that’s part and parcel of a broader tendency within Thai media to just position the beach as this space of escape.”
There are other reasons for the beach setting; as Baudinette points out, it fits with our desire to see the leading men shirtless. It’s a green checkmark for tourism, and geographically, there's a high likelihood that the characters are surrounded by bodies of water (and dramas with straight characters have their own share of beach excursions). “If queerness is about challenging the everyday or finding utopic spaces that allow us to be who we want to be without the strictures of everyday society,” Baudinette says, “the beach functions as a symbolic site that allows those couples to enact their freedom.”
Case in point: Never Let Me Go, directed by Jojo Tichakorn Phukhaotong. The series stars Phuwin Tangsakyuen as Nuengdiao, the teenage heir of a wealthy family, and Pond Naravit Lertratkosum as Palm, Nuengdiao’s teenage bodyguard. Chaos shrouds them and danger becomes an omnipresent companion, but they find their own patch of calm at the beach. It’s “Palm’s own comfort zone, and it’s a place that he feels most comfortable in” so he is “sharing his happy place with Nuengdiao,” Pond tells Teen Vogue. Phuwin says it’s like “opening up a lot of doors about yourself” to someone you care about, because “you’re letting them into places that most people won’t ever have access to.”
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Never Let Me Go incorporates the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, lovers who shared a forbidden romance, leaving them exiled to opposite sides of the Milky Way. Once a year, a bridge formed by magpies reunites them for a single night. “That story is quite a direct analogy to both of our characters and the struggles that they have to face,” Phuwin says. “It’s a symbol that no matter what you do, or no matter what happens, life will find a way for you just as the land meets the ocean.” Cowherd and Weaver Girl, Palm and Nuengdiao, Land and Ocean — two sides united.
Palm and Nuengdiao help a gay couple get engaged, and later married, at the beach. “It’s like Palm himself seeing a reflection of his own relationship, twenty years in the future,” Pond says. If these two strangers can stand on the beach and make their wedding vows, then “the love that he has for Nuengdiao right now will also be possible in the future.” It’s so important for queer youth to see the older generations, living proof that there are good and long lives waiting for us.
The way Phuwin sees it, the getaway car is never destined for the noisy, crowded city. You want quiet, calming, relaxing. A place “that can really help you to gather and collect your thoughts, right?” The landscape is divine, because “other than the sound of crashing waves and the stars in the sky, it’s just you and your significant other,” Phuwin says. “There’s nothing else to come between the raw emotion between you two.”
The beach has long existed as a space for the enactment of queerness, in real life and in fiction, too. The beach lies waiting, for those running away from or towards something; a liminal space that begets transformation. These stories stay with us: the burnt yellow sunsets, the blue shine of Black skin in the moonlight, the orange flame licking at fabric. Queer storytellers across the world commune at the beach, disconnected yet tethered by this natural thread; speaking different languages, observing different customs, yet united where the sea kisses the land. History, new queer cinema, BL dramas — all influencing one another, ebbing and flowing like the tide.
Back in Ships in the Night, Manaaki and Johnny part, still reeling from their embrace. Johnny shares his true identity, Yiuyeung, the Cantonese name he was given at birth. He’s a diaspora kid and all too familiar with assimilating to fit in. Manaaki steps forward, before Tangaroa, and recites his pepeha. It’s the beach as shared with another, like Palm bringing Nuengdiao into his world. Manaaki claims his identity, cycling through his mountain, the canoe his ancestors voyaged in, his ocean, river, marae, tribe and subtribe. What he doesn’t expect is Johnny stepping forward to recite his own pepeha. Tūrangawaewae, it’s about standing in your power. That’s the allure of the beach. A place to stand.
