Ray Yeung has been telling queer Asian stories for years and people are finally taking notice

In the ongoing conversation about LGBTQ representation, sometimes the need to expand beyond the American zeitgeist gets lost. Last year, writer/director Ray Yeung managed to do just that with his critically-acclaimed film Twilight’s Kiss. In it, Yeung confronted two hereto-little investigated areas of queer life: Aging queer seniors, and the LGBTQ community in China. For him, the story began after stumbling on several real-life stories of older men in Hong Kong who were in love with other men. As he told Queerty in February of this year: “I came across this book called Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong. The book is a collection of 12 interviews of gay men who are in their 60s or 70 years old…After I read it, I thought it was very interesting. It’s a topic we very rarely touch on within the LGBTQ community but within cinema in general. Stories about older people are rare. I decided to recreate a story really, not really based on any one of them, but the spirit of it. Imagine what it would be like if [they met as older people] and fell in love.”