We need histories of gay Bangkok, gay Tokyo, gay Mumbai, and other major non-Western cities that are as detailed and comprehensive as those we have of gay Sydney, gay New York, gay London, and gay Amsterdam.ĭiscussions of global queering have also emphasized synchronic rather than diachronic analyses of cultures and societies hence the anecdotal rather than systematic character of observations of “change.” In this essay I provide a historical perspective to our understanding of Southeast Asian gender/sex categories by tracing shifts in discourses in Thailand. Our histories of gay and lesbian identities are overwhelmingly Eurocentric. While there is no doubting these observations, we nevertheless lack detailed historical studies of the transformations in non-Western discourses that have led to the proliferation of new modes of eroticized subjectivity. 4 However, discussions of global queering have been based largely on anecdotal observations of the emergence of new gendered and eroticized identities in non-Western societies. 3 More recently, Fran Martin and Chris Berry have considered the role of the Internet in the emergence of “syncretic sexualities” in Taiwan and Korea. 2 In particular, Dennis Altman’s discussion of what he has called “global queering” has provoked considerable debate. For I argue that the Thai construction of gay identity is a distinctive formation in which gender and sexuality remain integrally bound and so cannot be reduced to Western understandings of “gayness” or “gay identity.”Ī growing number of authors have observed that the proliferation of gay, lesbian, and transgender/transsexual identities is a global phenomenon. I italicize “gay” where the term refers to the Thai appropriation of the English word in order to mark its reinscription and redefinition in Thai discourses. These press reports do not merely reveal a preexisting but previously hidden set of homoerotic institutions and sentiments having contributed to the establishment of a new form of public discourse about male homoeroticism, they also provide insights into attitudes and practices at a crucial transitional moment in the history of Thai discourses of gender and sexuality. In contrast, gay marked the emergence of a more prestigious form of male homoeroticism in which both partners assumed a masculine gender identity and to some extent participated in the higher status accorded the Thai “man.” Here I draw on contemporary Thai- and English-language press reports to reconstruct police attempts to solve Berrigan’s murder, and I use this long-forgotten event to trace the emergence in Thai public discourses of the category of gay. Notions of class and social status were also important in marking the kathoey-“man” distinction kathoey were commonly thought of as low-class social riffraff. This gendered pattern was reinforced by a number of related oppositions, such as senior-junior and inserter-insertee, that established a power hierarchy between a masculine, senior “man” and his feminized, junior kathoey partner. The Thai- and English-language press reports that followed police efforts to solve this crime documented for the first time the existence of a subculture of Thai homosexual men who called themselves the chomrom gay, the “ gay association” or “ gay community.”īefore the 1960s male homoerotic relations in Thailand were structured within discourses that ascribed masculine and feminine/effeminate gender positions to same-sex partners. 1 Here I consider an originating moment in Thai gay history: the murder in October 1965 of the expatriate American Darrell Berrigan, the homosexual editor of the English-language newspaper Bangkok World. I have described elsewhere the cultural and socioeconomic factors that have supported the historical development of a commercial gay scene in Thailand. Bangkok today is home to some of the largest and most visible gay and transgender subcultures in Southeast Asia, and it is the site of the region’s most extensive commercial gay scene of bars, discos, restaurants, saunas, and boutiques.
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