{Seoul South Korea} A Performer Comes Out on TV

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times

  Seoul— 

Hong Seok-cheon stands beaming before an adoring studio audience. It's a place he has always felt at home — basking in the celebrity spotlight.

For years, the veteran actor has been an instantly recognizable media personality here, famous as the onetime host of a children's show that was South Korea's version of "Sesame Street" and costar of a popular 1990s sitcom.

But on this Saturday afternoon, the slender 41-year-old with the signature shaved head is playing himself, an out-of-the-closet gay man talking about what it's like to be a pariah in a conservative society where 77% of Koreans in one poll said they believed "homosexuality should be rejected."

Hong is the featured guest on a cable TV show called the "Star Lecture Series," making history, he says, as the first gay man to discuss sex and sexual orientation on-air in South Korea.

The room is edgily silent as he paces the stage, microphone in hand, before an under-25 audience, many of whose members still live at home with their parents.

"Older Koreans will ask me, 'If you're gay, why don't you dress like a woman?' And I tell them: 'Because I'm a man. I just happen to be attracted to other men,' " Hong says as viewers snap his picture with their cellphone cameras.

"In South Korea, we're led to believe that gay sex is dangerous, alien and dirty. For so many years, I've been treated as an outcast in my own country. I'm just so happy to be here today, talking openly about who I really am."

The audience applauds and Hong is near tears, grateful for the acceptance that for years he thought would never come.