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In 2026, it has never been easier to find queer stories on screen. From Thailand's BL dramas and the Canadian hit series Heated Rivalry to Hollywood shows streaming in Indonesia, like Overcompensating on Prime Video, queer characters are everywhere — and they are no longer the funny sidekick. They are the subject, leading their own stories, dramatically and on their own terms.
It wasn't always like that. When Will & Grace and Ellen put openly queer characters on network television, their struggles still had to be delivered as punchlines. Comedy was the price of admission. Then came Kurt Hummel in Glee, who came out to his stereotypically masculine father in a scene that felt, at the time, genuinely radical. The Hollywood Foreign Press gave actor Chris Colfer a Golden Globe for it.
Decade by decade, Western media learned to take queer life seriously. And now, with Heated Rivalry earning critical acclaim and a global audience, Asia is telling its own queer stories too, but in its own way, with the nuance of what it means to love someone in a culture that has not yet decided what to do with you.
But a TV show is a TV show. In real life, in Indonesia, coming out is not a scene. It is not a conversation that ends.
When you can come out to everyone but your mother
Kurnia Alexander is a queer filmmaker. He has written and directed four short films centering on gay men, including Closeting (2022), which follows a gay Muslim man who discovers his boyfriend has died while celebrating his own 25th birthday. In the film, the main character, played by Kurnia himself, cannot tell his mother how devastated he is. He cannot even name what he has lost.
Kurnia's films are mostly screened at independent festivals, where Q&As follow the screenings and the audience already knows the language. During Pride Month, attendance tends to skew queer. "It's always fulfilling to see our work meet the right audience," he says. Outside of Pride, he worries about something he cannot quite control: whether the people in the room can fully understand what they are watching.
He films under an alias. His mother does not know about his work.
Raised in a conservative religious family, Kurnia spent years hating himself, waiting for the feeling to go away. It took time to accept that it would not, and that that was not something to fix. Coming out to his queer friends came first, and more easily. Coming out to his mother has never come.
He knows what is at stake. He cannot bring himself to imagine being cut off from her. He knows she has a life mapped out for him that looks nothing like his own, and he feels the distance between them even as he loves her. "I've had moments when I thought I could tell her," he says. "But those moments were always followed by the realization that I couldn't."
He has found a chosen family, people who know him fully. But he also knows that with his mother, he is not yet fully honest. He does not know if he ever will be. For now, the distance remains.
When you use art to say what a phone call can’t
Queer non-binary director Mica Tedja has made a career of saying the things that are hardest to say. They just released their first Netflix original series, Night Shift for Cuties, this June, starring Citra nominee Shenina Cinnamon and newcomer Nadya Syarifa. But it is their earlier, smaller work that maps the more personal terrain.
Their first queer-themed film, Dear to Me (2021), is a Citra-nominated short starring Jourdy Pranata as a young man who falls in love with a character played by Jerome Kurnia. He comes from a deeply Christian household. His family prays together at the dining table. Throughout the film, religion is not background noise — it is the architecture of how the family sees everything, including him.
But fiction, Mica felt, could only go so far. There were things it could not carry. So they made a documentary.
My Therapist Said, I'm Full of Sadness won a Citra Award for Best Documentary Short Film and is now on Netflix. It opens with old footage from a digital camera, Mica as a child in a crowded, festive pool with the whole family. Then it cuts to the present: Mica getting ready in front of a mirror, in Berlin, where they now live with their partner. The contrast takes less than five seconds to land.
What the film captures, carefully, is the shape of Mica's relationship with their parents. Their mother calls when Mica is sick. There are intimate moments. There is also distance. Religion is present here too, the same way it was in the fiction. The same unspoken weight.
When asked about where things stand with their parents now, Mica answered with a question: "Does coming out have an end?"
When what came after was harder than coming out
Omad is better known as @sebuahruanggila on TikTok, where he posts memes, hot takes, and speaks openly about being queer. Coming out, for him, was not hard.
"I came out in 2018, and I was very loud about it," he says. He kept telling people he was gay until he started asking himself why he needed to keep announcing something that straight people never had to announce. The logic of coming out, he realized, already assumed that straight was the default.
Coming out to his mother was easier than it has been for many others. "I told her I'm a different kind of son, and she knew," he says. Since he was a child, he had been taunted with bencong (a derogatory slur for effeminate men). It was his mother who first told him, gently, that he was a flamboyant boy. She has not fully embraced his sexuality, but they can now sit in a cinema together, watch Dev Patel in Monkey Man and giggle.
What Omad was not prepared for was what waited on the other side of coming out.
"After coming out, I felt like I needed to fit into a drawer to be gay," he says. Gay culture comes with its own taxonomy: bear or twink, femme or masc. Omad did not fit any of them. He was rejected in gay dating circles. He felt compelled to change his body, to become someone the culture would find legible.
He did, and he found people who were attracted to him, but the taxonomy had not disappeared. It had just admitted him on different terms.
Omad is still navigating it. He has found enough contentment to stay, he says. But he is clear-eyed about what the culture asks of people: that coming out to your family might be the easy part. What comes next, finding love, finding community, finding a version of yourself that fits, is its own longer work.
Coming out, if it happens at all, rarely looks here the way it looks on screen. There is no music swell, no father who comes around, no single conversation that changes everything. For many queer people in Indonesia, it’s more like a lifetime of negotiation.
Perhaps that is why Pride here is rarely loud. It’s rather quiet, tactical and deeply internalized.
It is not about letting yourself out. It is about figuring out who you are willing to let in.
