Happy alone? Sad young men in East Asian gay cinema

This essay chooses as its texts three films representing contemporary gay male subjects from each of the "three" China's: HK, Taiwan, and the Mainland. Relocating the homoerotic image of the "sad young man," a trope popular from Hollywood rebellion films of the 1950s and 1960s, to contemporary China, I discuss how this masculine icon has been transformed from one of heroic rebellion to one of existential isolation. Indeed, as the politics of both the outmoded Confucian family and fractured Chinese nationhood intersect, what the sad young (gay) man rebels against is a political fluctuation which is no longer fixed; as the young man's opposition is no longer fixed, so too does he become alienated even from his own rebellious cause.