In the world of sexuality, there should be no such thing as “normal” at all. Normal or abnormal is only ever a reference to how the majority behaves — that is, to the ethics and morals that constrain us. Statistically speaking, homosexuals, who differ from the heterosexual majority, are the “other,” the “abnormal” — but this criterion is anything but scientific; it is simply the many bullying the few. Homosexuals are not inferior. Havelock Ellis already said in his Psychology of Sex that every person has their own way of being sexual.

The film’s protagonist, Mieko, also once looked at the group of gay elderly men in the Rainbow Retirement Home with disgust. Seeing an old man in a long dress must have given her quite a jolt. In her place, suddenly thrust into a space where gender felt slightly scrambled, I too would have felt uneasy. But after spending time with them, she gradually comes to belong among these lovable old men, becoming a member of this warm, rainbow-colored home. Homosexuality is in no way pathological. If there’s nothing wrong with love itself, how can it be wrong who one falls in love with?

The group of old gay men in the film are innocent, idealistic, even a little stubborn. Under the pressures of life in the retirement home, they can still laugh and trade easy, unselfconscious sexual jokes with the young; in the face of a real world corrupted by filthy, debased morality, they dream of their own fairy-tale kingdom. Loving stubbornly, guarding that love stubbornly, their inner world feels like that of sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds running and shouting after a dream. Seen this way, I can’t help but find them magnificent.

I think their world is not of this earth, but should exist within the rainbow — that place where heaven is built inside a dream.