Our current place has hardwood floors. The kitchen is open. We can’t fill all the storage space. Every room gets natural light — saying a lot for Taipei. We front onto a community park. We pay below-market rent for living one block from a major shopping area and three blocks from a subway station. The neighbors don’t make noise, though some future dead man loads recyclables onto a truck around 2 a.m. once or twice a week. My commute takes 15 minutes by bicycle. A cleaning woman hired by the whole apartment building deals with everyone’s trash, sparing us the task of chasing pass-through garbage trucks through the neighborhood at 10 p.m.
So our guests look north from our flat to an alley past the community park and behind some other buildings. They laugh. Your patch, they say, belongs to Taipei’s historic red-light district.
It’s true. We’ve seen red lights as well as Japanese-language signs that read “massage” or “for a rest, NT480 (about US$14).” A guy standing in the street once asked me if I was looking for ladies. I’ve never seen anyone come or go from the places. Much of the Japanese clientele have left Taipei and many of the whores have retired, I hear. Still, our guests can’t resist the comment.

And there was a GAY KISS scene on Korean TV..and this is in a comedy show too!!! Its when the hunk gets drunk cos he fell in love with a woman and u see the sad face on his gay hyeong…awwww…then he force-kiss his hyeong cos he mistakens him for the girl…they zoomed in on the kiss and you could see that the two actors kissed lip on lip for real….OMG!!!! They could have faked it using ‘angle shots’ but they insisted on the real kiss…

You could tell that the korean media and audiences had changed in their perception of homosexuality as they didn’t even think for once that showing a gay story WITH a gay kiss scene would create some kind of backlash, if anything, roommate proved extremely popular.

They also portrayed the gay romance in a very sensitive way and realistically portrayed the pain a gay man goes thru when he falls for a straight man…and further, the host later said she at first thought what kind of romance can happen between two grown men but later was touched by the story thus in a way promoting an acceptance from audiences too….