Gay Courtship on Vietnam’s ‘The Bachelor’ Turned Heads Abroad. Back Home? Meh.

HONG KONG — The contestant approached the man she had been publicly courting on live television and confessed that the object of her affections had shifted.

“It’s someone else,” she said, then walked off the set with a fellow female contestant.

That plot twist, revealed in a trailer for the Vietnamese-language adaptation of “The Bachelor,” has set the internet ablaze. No two contestants on the show, which debuted in the United States in 2002 and later expanded overseas, have ever walked out of its elimination ceremony together.

But in Vietnam, where the full episode was scheduled to air Tuesday night, the response has been muted and news media coverage focused primarily on how the episode has been covered abroad.

One apparent reason: Acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has become so commonplace in the country that they are no longer all that surprising.

“Ten years ago that wasn’t normal, but now it is, at least in the cities,” Xuan Hong, a homemaker in the capital, Hanoi, said by telephone. “Perceptions change.”

Vietnam is seen as a leader on gay rights in Southeast Asia, a region where social conservatism is common and some governments still enforce draconian laws that criminalize gay sex.

Its liberal reputation on the issue dates to about 2012, when the government first said it would consider allowing same-sex couples to marry or legally register. “I think, as far as human rights are concerned, it’s time for us to look at the reality,” the justice minister at the time, Ha Hung Cuong, was quoted as saying.

Two years later, the long-standing Law on Marriage and Family was revised to abolish a prohibition on same-sex marriages, although it did not fully legalize them either. And in 2015, the Civil Code was changed to allow people who have undergone gender reassignment to register under their new gender. A rule making that change a legal reality is now being drafted.

“Vietnam is not behind other countries on this issue,” said Ngo Duc Thinh, an expert on len dong, a Vietnamese shamanic dance tradition that has traditionally featured many gay performers. “LGBT people have the right to be happy — that’s a human right.”

Luong Minh Ngoc, the director of iSEE, a Vietnamese research outfit that advocates human rights, said that while legislative progress has been slow and the government often prioritizes other issues, she has found officials in the Justice Department and Health Ministry who are genuinely interested in improving laws that affect the gay community.

“We think the support is there,” she said, adding that gay rights issues are generally viewed in Vietnam within a moral context rather than a political one.

That is notable because Vietnam is an authoritarian state, where hundreds of political dissidents have been jailed in recent years and the ruling Communist Party does not allow nonprofits or the news media to operate independently.

Michael DiGregorio, the Vietnam country representative for the Asia Foundation, said that gay rights issues were an “easy win” for the government and a natural fit for international donors who saw them as an important civil rights issue in the country.

But DiGregorio said recent changes to legislation on gender, marriage and families had only been possible because they reflected a “live and let live” attitude toward gay rights that is widespread among many Vietnamese. He attributed the tolerance partly to local religious and spiritual practices that focus on ancestor worship — not a powerful God who decides what is right or wrong — and also to a Communist ideology that has never tackled what he called the “religious mantles of morality.”

DiGregorio said one example of that tolerance was the warm reception that the Vietnamese public gave to Ted Osius, the last U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, who frequently appeared in public with his spouse, Clayton Bond, and their two children. “I knew that this would not be regarded as something strange or unusual, and Ted was immediately accepted,” he said.

In the trailer for the Vietnamese edition of “The Bachelor,” the contestant Minh Thu walks offstage with her female castmate Truc Nhu after telling the show’s eligible single man, Nguyen Quoc Trung, that she was not interested in him. But after the two women spoke together off-screen, Nhu said that she would return to the show after all.

Stories about the episode — “International Press Surprised to See Two Lesbians on The Bachelor,” one headline read — were not playing prominently on domestic news sites Tuesday. Ngoc of iSEE said authorities might be clamping down on entertainment coverage before a planned funeral for former President Tran Dai Quang, who died last week.

Another reason could be indifference. Gay rights issues are “a matter of morality,” Nguyen Thi Loan, a former professional volleyball player who won the 2017 Miss Universe Vietnam pageant, said by telephone. “Vietnamese people care more about material things that directly affect their lives.”

As of late Tuesday afternoon, the episode had not attracted much heated debate on Facebook, where tens of millions of Vietnamese communicate daily.

One Facebook user, Bui Quang Minh, wrote that he had been disappointed to see that the couple’s love — however short-lived — had been hidden in the first place.

“The best way to deal with your sexual orientation is to be open about it,” he said.