A sitcom about three gay men sharing a flat in Ho Chi Min City has become a YouTube hit in Vietnam.

My Best Gay Friends, directed and created by 20-year-old drama student Huynh Nguyen Dang Khoa, has had its first episode viewed over 165,000 times.

Khoa plays the leading role, a character also called Khoa, whose parents make him move out of the family home on his 20th birthday in episode one. Khoa then moves in with his friends Han and Ngo Xuan Nhat.

‘All of us in the leading roles are gay in real life,’ said Khoa, as reported by Thang Nien News. ‘We hope that people will have a proper, comprehensive and compassionate understanding of homosexuality.’

Khoa said the response has been mostly positive, especially from the LGBT community. ‘Many of them have asked to take part in our film,’ he said.

The show has been a very public coming out for the three men, and the actors’ families have reacted to it in different ways.

Han’s mother, Thanh, has accepted her son is gay. ‘My son was born gay and can do nothing to change it. It is ok as long as he is happy and healthy,’ she said. ‘I will not exchange my son for others.’

But Nhat’s family on his father’s side want him to leave the house where he lives with them and his mother. Nhat’s mother, Thu Hong, said ‘it is a terrible feeling to be reprimanded and abandoned by our family’.

Watch the first episode of My Best Gay Friends (in Vietnamese with English subtitles) here: