In 2000, actor Hong Seok-cheon was finally starting to see his hard work pay off. After being scouted in the comedy circuit and costarring in '90s sitcoms, he became the host of South Korea's most popular children's show. This was going to be his breakthrough. When a talk-show host probed Seok-cheon about the sexuality of his sitcom character, the rising star decided that if he was going to make it big, he'd do it on his own terms. He was the first South Korean celebrity to publicly come out.

Within a day, he was fired from all of his TV and radio gigs.

He faced a country whose older generation knew little about homosexuality, and those who did mostly learned it from Korea's huge Christian churches. Two-thirds of the country is Christian, and 77% of polled South Koreans say homosexuality should never be accepted.