Meet Sean Foo, the founder of Dear Straight People, one of Asia's most popular LGBTQ+ media platforms

The journalist and filmmaker gets real about the importance of storytelling, and producing Singapore’s first BL series

When Sean Foo came out at age 23 to a few of his straight friends, the experience of being “bombarded with questions” helped launch Dear Straight People, which today is one of the most popular LGBTQ+ online media platforms in Asia. “I was the first openly gay friend for many of them,” says Foo. “I realised just how rife the misconceptions were about the queer community. It struck me that a gap exists between the straight and queer communities because queer publications were only talking to queer audiences.”

For a passion project created in 2015 during Foo’s final year of his communications degree in Australia’s Monash University, Dear Straight People—its name a bold declaration and direct confrontation all at once—has since built an impressive following in countries in regions as close to home as Southeast Asia and those as far‑flung as the US. Having written and published touching, heartbreaking and uplifting stories about the queer community in Singapore and Asia, Foo has also collaborated with leading groups such as LGBTQ+ counselling centre Oogachaga and sex workers’ rights group Project X to raise funds for their respective missions. Nowadays, Foo, who runs Dear Straight People full‑time mostly on his own, also publishes some of these stories exclusively on content subscription platform Patreon, where more scintillating features such as gay‑for‑pay massage therapists and a sneak peak into the lives of Taiwan’s most popular gay OnlyFans couple are hidden behind a paywall.

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“Given the stigma surrounding the LGBTQ+ community, it’s not feasible [to run] Dear Straight People solely on advertising,” Foo explains. “That’s why I’ve been focusing heavily on building a community on Patreon. After a lot of trial and error, [I found that] people [were more likely] to sign up as patrons with the edgy content.” But Foo is quick to point out that this is not purely a business decision. “There’s value in stories like these. They open a window to another world, even for a gay person like myself. I try my best to cover these stories in a way that’s dignified, respectful, and perfectly in line with Dear Straight People’s grand mission of advocating for a world that is more inclusive and less discriminatory.”

As Dear Straight People has grown in popularity, Foo has become somewhat of a public figure, especially since appearing in Singapore’s first gay BL, short for boys’ love, web drama series Getaway, which he produced and was forced to star in because of budget reasons. Unfortunately, this has made him a “target for homophobes”. Citing an anonymous email he received where the sender took aim at his physical appearance, Foo says: “I’d be lying if I said I’m not affected when haters take shots at my insecurities.”

But with this many years behind him running the website, Foo has developed a thick skin. “I’ve never been one to shy away from controversial content, so the reception to Dear Straight People has always been mixed,” he says. “As long as I can answer to my own conscience, that’s what matters.”

Such haters will never deter him from continuing to tell stories about the community. In Getaway, which premiered in May last year on YouTube, Foo plays the lead character Sam, a Singaporean who flees to Bangkok in search of his estranged gay uncle after his coming out to his father goes wrong. “The fact that [the series] even came out at all was honestly a miracle in itself,” Foo muses. With no prior experience in film‑making, he walked on set armed with a simple desire to create a gay drama series, a “natural progression” for his “inherent passion for narrative craftsmanship”.

The hard work paid off: the series was nominated for Content of the Year at the 2023 edition of national broadcaster Mediacorp’s content creator awards, The Pinwheels. It also won seven awards, including Best Series, at the World Film Carnival (a home‑grown film festival with a global reach) and made the official selection of the LGBTQ Unbordered International Film Festival, one of the leading queer film festivals in the US. “Up till today, I have people coming up to me to tell me how much they enjoyed watching Getaway. If you go on TikTok, you’ll find tons of fan‑made videos, often in another language,” Foo says.

He recalls refusing to produce more films, but the gravitational force of Getaway’s outsized cultural impact has pulled him into producing other web series such as Straight Best Friend in June this year. The series was partially scripted using artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.

Foo’s film‑making work—his passion is scriptwriting—comes at a time when Section 377A of the Penal Code, a law that criminalises sex between men, has been repealed (although the tenor of discourse around queer rights has been fraught ever since). But Foo has no desire to wade into the furore, only to continue doing what he has always done. “Storytelling has always been at the core of Dear Straight People,” he says. “While I care about effecting social change, I’m no activist. I don’t understand policy‑making. The only thing I have is this platform and a passion for storytelling.”

Dear Straight People is clearly a personal project for Foo. “In many ways, Dear Straight People gave purpose to my life,” he says. “I’ve always wished that one day, it’ll become commonplace for LGBTQ+ people in Asia to say that they grew up with Dear Straight People—how the coming‑out stories on the platform showed them that [life] does get better; that they cried watching my films; or how [the platform has helped] broaden their minds, whether it’s with regard to same‑sex families or OnlyFans creators. If this fantasy becomes a reality—man, that’d be amazing.

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Sean Foo, founder of Dear Straight People, on running one of Asia's most popular LGBTQ+ media platforms