Girl Group SNH48's Lesbian Music Video Reportedly Banned In Korea

Various LGBT+ media claim Korean media is speculating the Korean produced music video by girl group SNH48 has been banned because it features a heavily implied lesbian relationship.

Gay Star News, Pink News, and Gay Echo are reporting that Korean media is speculating that the removal of the video three days after it initially premiered online (presumably on official Korean music websites) is due to its homosexual content. The problem is, none of these reports (nor the blurb by The Windy City Times), offer any link to the supposed Korean sources, and my attempts to search in Korean only led me to this Chinese report and this Japanese report which essentially say the same thing as the English reports (I happen to be well acquainted with LGBT+ vocabulary in Kanji) and can confirm the Japanese report is pretty much identical to the English reports.

SNH48 is the Chinese counterpart to Japanese girl group AKB48, and both groups are apparently not popular in South Korea (although they’d like you think otherwise), but they do have fans in Japan and China (which explains why news on SNH48 would be picked up in those languages). The 16 member group has done Chinese versions of AKB48 songs, such as the extremely popular “Heavy Rotation.”

While homosexuality is legal in South Korea, conservative religious groups hold tremendous sway in the country. There are no protections against discrimination, no hate crimes legislation, and (of course) same-sex marriage or civil partnerships are neither legal nor expected to be.