BY JOHN CARTER JR
This Review is based to the Viki Rakuten English sub of Coffee Prince
What can there be said about the early 2000s when it comes to LGBTQ content? There’s the polarizing Brokeback Mountain, the dawn of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and more. However, there is one South Korean television series that seemingly, unintentionally, pushed the conversation about certain facets of the LGBTQIA + community – gender identity, the confrontation of internalized homophobia, how not accepting or understanding oneself can affect relationships, why some try to accept themselves and why some don’t, and why we do and don’t accept ourselves.
Coffee Prince (2007) seems to retroactively paint a picture about acceptance and looks at the reasons people choose to love or accept themselves or not. Directed by Lee Jung-ah, Coffee Prince is a love story between a person named Go Eun-chan (Yoon Eun-hye) and Choi Han-gyeol (Gong Yoo). The show presents the Haruhi Fujioka troupe in which a girl presents more like a man to the people around her. However, describing Eun-chan as a person, and not as a girl or a woman, is an important distinction to make, as this is what drives their narrative throughout the show.
In an attempt to avoid committing to one of the various blind dates his grandmother sets up for him, Choi Han-gyeol hires Eun-chan to pretend to be his fake gay lover. This mutually beneficial relationship ends up flourishing into something more than a simple business transaction, as the ways in which the two’s lives become personally intertwined allow deep, seemingly suppressed feelings to begin to bubble at the surface. The two eventually go on to fall in love with each other. Under these pretenses, however, it is the context of this pairing’s circumstances that force one to confront their own identity crisis and one to avoid it.
Internalized homophobia and transphobia are topics often tackled in queer storylines, often ending in tragedy or unfulfillment. Coffee Prince, however, gives another result of these life circumstances we don’t often see in queer media. A confrontation with internalized bias and a fear of it still ends up pairing two queer characters. Usually, in most progressive queer media, both characters tend to have to come to a sense of self-acceptance, each in order to end up in a relationship. And if they don’t, we get our classic unhappy gay ending. In order to understand the specific journeys each of the main protagonists go on, we must examine their individual battles with their own self-imposed prejudice.
In the case of Han-gyeol he certainly struggles with his feelings concerning Eun-chan, being worried about what it means to like someone he’s not supposed to. Someone his grandmother most certainly doesn’t approve of simply because of their perceived gender. However, he goes on to confront his feelings for Eun-chan, defying his grandmother’s idea of what is right and wrong, what others in public would think, and most importantly, his struggle with internalized homophobia.
We see this struggle come to fruition in the scenes the two characters share on the beach, with Han-gyeol trying desperately to see Eun-chan as just a brother figure. However, his tolerance for self-imposed oppression or oppression, in general, is low. He can’t handle not being himself, especially as he thought he knew exactly who he was the whole time. He never even considered he could like boys, or a specific one for that matter. For the first time in this rich, privileged man’s life, he was forced to reconcile the truth about his identity with himself. He is willing to do it, because he has nothing else to lose because he loves Eun-chan so much. They make him so happy, and he’s finally willing to consider it. In an emotionally cathartic moment, he says:
“Just this once, I’m going to say this just once, so listen carefully. I like you. I don’t care whether you’re a man or an alien anymore.”
His reason for confronting his internalized homophobia is for love and acceptance. However, although he has more than expressed his love, and his indifference to what Eun-chan is, Eun-chan still feels the fear of being rejected for who they are and tries to keep things as is One would argue that this could simply be because they have been lying. The whole show and their fear of rejection could simply be based on lies. The issue seems more the fear that Han-gyeol might reject Eun-chan for who they are. We see this when they discuss their predicament with Han-gyeol’s cousin. They say while painfully crying:
“He’s cozy, nice, and fun. I like him so much that I want to forget that I’m lying. I know what I’ve done is wrong, but I want him to stay by my side, and I want him to like me. I don’t want him to go to America. But look at me! I’m not a man or a woman. I’m too scared to tell him.”
Eventually, Eun-chan is the one to leave and come back with a new look more akin to a more traditional feminine aesthetic which, at the time of initially watching, threw me for a loop. How could this be the finale for the character’s arc? In examining it now, it seems that it takes looking at Coffee Prince from a self-accepting queer perspective to have understanding and sympathy for people like Eun-chan. It takes that same perspective to see this ending in a new light, which made the queer person in me recognize an all too familiar darkness towards the end of the series.
Remember the privilege that Han-gyeol has, Eun-Chan doesn’t have the same luxury. In their existence (being assigned female at birth, being poor, and happy to support her family), Eun-Chan has significantly less privilege than their counterpart. They have a higher tolerance to oppression and are more capable of navigating through their life while not disturbing people’s image of what they, Eun-chan, are supposed to be. It is much easier to not be yourself, especially after always living that way. The idea that some people give up on themselves and that life would just be easier if we didn’t exist as we are.
Eun-chan’s fears of not being accepted seem to vanish as soon as Han-Gyeol finds out the truth. The main problem he had was being deceived by someone he loved. The lack of honesty about how Eun-chan felt, what they thought of their identity, and what they thought of Han-gyeol felt like a complete betrayal of trust. All this time Eun-chan was a part of the queer spectrum and was growing extremely close to Ha-gyeol but they couldn’t be honest with the one person who would have accepted them the most.
Even in the end Go Eun-Chan is not completely representative of themselves. When their gender assigned at birth is discovered, everyone becomes more at ease, including Eun-chan, Han-gyeol, and even his grandmother. It very strongly affirms queer people’s reason for repressing themselves when the people around us feel relieved when they think that the queer identity is mutable. It is easier for the individual to attempt to become something else than struggle being themselves amongst loved ones who might not accept us. It’s a problematic solution as it is on a similar wavelength as the catholic Blackstone Films Anti Gay propaganda in the garbage film The Third Way or even the “solutions” given by conversion and aversion therapy.
Coffee Prince is an excellent and polarizing take on the queer experience. While the interpretations concerning its main protagonists might not have been what original showrunners or executives expected, it does convey a truth about queer experiences. We love each other. Queer people are constantly being forced to either confront a lifetime of oppression from the outside or a lifelong existence of repression in order to get the love we deserve. Either path that we choose to take is hard and painful. However, it is the path of self-acceptance that is more fulfilling. You can not truly be loved by others if you cannot accept who you are. Because they will never actually know the real whole you in order to love who that is. We cannot truly healthily love or be loved if we are not whole.
In the words of RuPaul
“If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen?”
Amen
I give Coffee Prince 10/10 cups of coffee for having excellent emotionally cathartic scenes and retroactively sparking conversations about homophobia and trans identity.
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