“Love Yourself,” Says BTS
Just under a month ago, I watched my first BTS video on YouTube. Their Tiny Desk Concert with NPR, now at 29 million views, is the one of the most-watched Tiny Desk Concerts in history, surpassing such artists as Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Alicia Keys. This began my descent into madness as I dove deep into the pool of media available for free on YouTube. You may know their biggest American hit, the Grammy-nominated “Dynamite,” their first all-English song. There are seven members of this massive boy band, and they were chosen by Time magazine as the Performers of the Year for 2020. RM, Jin, SUGA, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook make up this group, three being rappers and four are singers.
Enough with the explanatory comma. The point of this exercise is to try and deduce why I have fallen so hard for them so quickly. I’m a 28 year-old white gay American originally from the Midwest who, up until this point, had been to three concerts in my life: Kelly Clarkson in 8th grade, Jason Mraz senior year of high school, and Ed Sheeran a couple years ago, when I was gifted tickets from one of my husband’s co-workers. I am on the “musical theatre gay” end of the spectrum—in high school, I would find songs through Limewire, but only after looking up top 40 hits for the year so I knew enough to have conversations. Many of my touchstones for pop classics actually come from Glee, as horrifying as it is to say. I’ve never pretended to be a “music” gay; I consistently wish I was, but the task of learning artists and songs and discography and producers and labels seems so daunting, I’ve never known how to start. So I never have.
BTS has good music. Great, even. A simple perusal of Twitter will find its fans, known as ARMY, constantly praising the singers voices or the flow and rhythm of the rappers. Their genre has changed in the seven years they’ve been together— originally starting as a hip-hop group, they now have songs that take them all over the genre map., I don’t speak a lick of Korean, so it is almost a sensory deprivation exercise when I listen to their music—the melody and their voices have to sound good without the crutch of lyrics. Once I’ve learned the general melody, looking into the lyrics is even more exciting because of the poetic lyricism with which they imbue their songs. . “Fake Love” gives you these translated lyrics: “I grew a flower that can’t be bloomed in a dream that can’t come true.”
Still, it wasn’t the music that hooked me. They are excellent at their craft. There’s nothing more enjoyable than watching people who are excellent at something get to do it with gusto. That itself is part of what makes The Great British Bake Off so enjoyable to watch. So, maybe it’s their choreography. A quick search on YouTube will find videos ranking their choreography from easiest to hardest, reaction videos from professional dancers and choreographers, and TikTok is loaded with fans who try and recreate their dances, with varying levels of skill and success. It is true that I more often than not have struggled to learn dances for musicals I’ve been in, and consider myself more of a mover than an outright dancer, but to my mind, theirdances are great. They have hip hop locks and isolations that are amazing, and then they will make these performances like the 2020 Melon Music Awards in Korea where they do a combination contemporary/ballet performance to their song “Black Swan” that leaves one absolutely agog.
But, it wasn’t that either. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I struggled with it as my husband asked me question after question, curiously trying to examine why I was getting so sucked into BTS. Of course they are seven attractive men, but it’s not sexual. I don’t feel the way about them I do for Chris Evans or Tom Holland. It’s something about their closeness. The way they are friends and are around each other. The brotherly affection they show towards one another. Something that I’ve never been able to experience and I’ve realized was missing in a drastic way from my life.
My parents divorced when I was in first grade. I was raised by a single mom with two older sisters. In school, my close friends were girls. I barricaded myself in the theatre department of my high school to protect me from the views the majority shared about effeminate gay men like myself in Indiana. When I got to college, I had no idea how to talk to straight men. I was constantly second guessing myself, deepening my voice to sound more masculine, and felt deeply awkward almost all the time. Over time, I’ve gotten more comfortable, and feel more confident in my interactions. But imagine if I had had these men to look to at a formative age. These men who can turn the swagger on and off at the drop of a hat, but have no qualms about cuddling together, telling each other they’re cute or handsome, and espousing sentiments of love for each other. I never knew boys could do that. In a way, I feel like I’ve reverted back to a younger version of myself and seeing them do these things for each other gives me feelings I didn’t even realize I’d missed out on.
When I watch them perform or one of the many videos where they’re just together in an off-stage scenario, I am constantly awed at how familiar they are with one another, and the lack of fear surrounding their affection and emotional variability with each other. It makes me wonder if I would be a different person had I been able to see closeness like this from masculine figures at a young age. How many young boys like me are getting the chance to see it, I wonder, knowing how much it has touched me in such a short span of time? Will they not waste years of their life trying to get to a standard that has no bearing on reality and only denies them full acceptance as to who they are?
So here I am today, on my 16th hour of fan-made compilations of soft BTS moments. V crying at a concert revealing his grandmother had passed away, RM referring to Jimin as the cutest of the group, Jungkook crying backstage because he misses his family, SUGA being shy about the revelation that he told V he loves him, the list goes on. Showing affection isn’t inherently tied to sexuality, nor does it need to be. This is what I was missing as a kid. This is the main reason I am so drawn to this group. They are helping craft a world and spread a message that there is no expectation for how one should act. Their entire campaign of loving oneself, means just that. And maybe now, at 28, I’m finally ready to hear it.
