K-Pop Star Sunmi Tops Twitter Worldwide After Seemingly Coming Out At Concert

June is pride month and it’s important to remember that not every country has the enlightened views on love and sexuality we have in the West. And the West is just full of homophobes, so that’s saying something. While Asia is not as backwards as it is sometimes perceived to be on social issues, being gay isn’t as socially accepted there as it is here most of the time.

As an example, I watched a Korean drama called Schoolgirl Detectives (or Seonam Girls High School Detectives on some services) in 2015 which happened to feature South Korea’s first televised lesbian kiss. This caused complaints to the Korean equivalent of the FCC, but that was met with blacklash from LGBT groups in Korea, which, as I said, the views on homosexuality in Asia are not as unenlightened as they’re sometimes portrayed here. The US’s first on-screen lesbian kiss was on a 1991 episode of LA Law,  and it drew similar complaints at the time.

All this is to say it’s still pretty brave for a K-Pop singer to come out, especially considering the microscope K-Pop singers are under. And that is what singer Sunmi seemed to do at a recent concert.

Between songs Sunmi says “I have many different sides of me, like dorky… and LGBT. LGBT queen,” to the roaring approval of the crowd in attendance.

But, English isn’t her first language and she later tweeted she wasn’t coming out herself, just showing support for her LGBT fans.

Haha I was saying
"I have so many different sides of me like dorky and LGBT queen…"
Yeah, I support LGBT but don't get me wrong guys 🤣🤣😘😘

— Miyayeah (@miyaohyeah) June 4, 2019

So she’s not LGBT herself. But a K-Pop singer seemingly coming out is big enough news to trend #1 worldwide on Twitter for most of the day, which is really interesting.