Seven Minutes of Our Lives That We Missed

Somedays, you’d take a break from work, curl up on your sofa and start scrolling YouTube lazily, without expecting much. Mostly, whatever comes your way, anything to pass the time.

If your genre is gay shorts, you’d probably end up never opening all the surprise boxes, lining up endlessly on your phone’s screen. Living under capitalism, I think it is something all of us miss.

I miss my student days when I didn’t have to work and could binge watch all the episodes of a two-seasons long Korean series in five days. These days, it feels like I need one more life just to finish watching every BLs I’ve ever bookmarked, along with every single other thing with heterosexual leads or without in my wishlist.

It seems no longer possible. None of us have free time anymore. But we used to have it once. And that is when we fell in love.

Gay short films, as always, do not run for long. The challenge always remains the same, how to build your story universe within a few minutes your budget allows.

Hold Me (2021) aced that challenge. It’s Korean name is ‘손잡아 줘‘, which means ‘hold my hand’.

In a lot of ways, many of us gays won the race. We do have our own little wins, all of us. And what’s happening here is, Google can’t determine whether the director Lee Jun-hui is gay or not. It tells me that this was a microbudget indie. Mostly, that is all we know so far.

But it was still a win. It was one more of us, as it still is.

The Mysterious Director

MyDramaList has this picture of a middle aged man in their showcase. Supposedly, it is Lee. And Google Lens just returned four exact matches from the same website.

He doesn’t really look ‘hot’ the way queer face economy likes it. And he looks a bit too old as well. But all this makes him strikingly resemble one of his own characters, Jae Min.

In fact, their faces are somewhat similar as well. And if a heterosexual director was trying to debut with a short, they’d probably choose a different subject, too, would they not?

Making a film is a dream come true, at least for those who always dreamed of it but never ended up making one. When a queer director does it, it is more likely to be a tribute to their own selves.

With all this, it is not unreasonable to conclude Jae-min is actually Lee Jun-hui. But Jae-min is also more than just him, without stopping to be him. Jae-min is so many of us who missed the train.

The Seven Minutes of Our Lives

The film is one short conversation between two boys. They are graduating from their school on that day. Both are nervous about it, and totally unsure what to say, or whether to say it at all or not.

How many mental rehearsals does it take? Going through the same lines over and over again, and wondering if you will make it or not, while hiding it from everyone you know and all that! A queer teenager’s first love is always an adventure, and it comes with dangers.

Jae-min and Yeon Ho’s conversation lasts less than five minutes. They start talking about finishing school at last.

That is the topic. Because that is something two boys can talk about. Jae-min still takes his chances and fixes up Yeon’s tie. Rather a lucky incident for him, the tie came undone. He isn’t sure if it is alright to go more.

Fixing up his tie becomes the silent language. For what else can a teenage boy do?

But then, their casual chitchat about going to Seoul University doesn’t seem like it will last forever. So, Jae-min decides to take the risk and holds his hand.

And the YouTube title is absolutely right about. It does take courage to do that, especially in a homophobic society like Korea where everyone in the school will start bullying them very soon.

Five out of the seven minutes of Hold Me’s runtime are already used up by this point. And this is where a fairy tale comes true. Yeon Ho puts his lips on Jae-min’s and kisses him.

The Queer Body Image

The only unconfirmed mysterious photo of Lee gives away every clue that he might have been suffering from body image issues. It doesn’t show his entire body shape, but looking at his face is enough.

The queer fantasy is still a multimillion dollar industry elsewhere, in Thailand, Taiwan and China. Regardless of all the official state policies, South Korea itself built its entertainment empire on queer appeal, too. And its face economy prioritizes handsome boys with faces like Greek sculptures.

Neither Jae Min nor Lee Jun-hui in that mysterious picture has that. But Hong Min Gi, who plays Yeon Ho in the film, does have that charm.

Perhaps, even if the character was gay, it still might have rejected Jae-min. For no other reason except how he looks. It is just the hard reality of gay world. And if he wasn’t, things could have turned dangerous.

We can’t declare anything as a concrete fact in absence of evidence. Lee doesn’t have any social media presence, at least not one that turns up in a Google search. And his sexual orientation is unknown.

All we know is he is the writer of the film, and he understands these dynamics very well. That is why the moment feels breathless when Yeon Ho prints a kiss on Jae-min’s lips.

Jae-min

By the time they declare they will live their lives ‘happily ever after’, the seventh minute is gone already. This is the seven minutes we all missed, just so many of us.

For something that comes true on screen did not in reality. And perhaps that is why 3.2 million people decided to watch it, to make up for something they themselves wanted so much but no one gave it to them.

Jae-min is one lucky bastard. That is the only word that applies. Jeon Yeong In portrayed his character.

And Jae-min is every gay boy born without that physical beauty of Michelangelo’s David. That is precisely why Hold Me succeeds in reaching millions. STRONGBERRY’s platform helped greatly, without a doubt. And now, four thousand comments are hanging under the YouTube video.

It is free to watch. STRONGBERRY still monetizes every stream, without asking for money. On its official website, it offers a merch, too. One of their latest photocards cost less than 10 dollars. Meanwhile, it itself is a subsidiary of the content studio MATCHBOX.

The existence of all this is always good news for the queers. And perhaps, that alone is reason enough to watch it. For after all, those seven minutes we all wanted might or might have not come true for us, but Yeon Ho and Jae-min still made it.