Thailand is high up the list of destinations for lesbian, transgender, and gay travelers. It is one of the few countries where you can feel safe from physical or verbal attacks – at least from the Thai people; it is one of those countries where a woman can usually travel alone without problems. The diversity of genders and sexualities is more obvious in Thailand than other places. Here it is not just “hetero” and “homo,” “women” and “men,” but toms, dees, bisexuals, gays, gay kings, gay queens, kathoey (transsexual and transgender women), lesbians, and men or women who have sex with people of the same gender without defining themselves as different. At first glance, from the outside, the “Land of the Free” seems to live up to its name, but unfortunately the reality of everyday life is often very different: more homophobic and transphobic. Thailand is not a paradise among human societies. “The first thing I stole in my life was a gay magazine,” said twenty-six-yearold Jay in a Bangkok Post article about a Thai Queer Resource Center media project supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. “I stole it out of curiosity, and out of fear that people would think I was gay if I simply walked up and bought it.” Gay magazines are viewed with distrust by society and the authorities, and fall under a generalized suspicion of being pornography. Yet they play an important role in education about HIV/AIDS and in raising awareness that being “different” in terms of sex or gender does not mean you are alone. This project arose out of discussion events with representatives of lesbian/gay/trans/queer movements that – for example in the debate on the new Constitution in 2007 – were much more visible than the country’s women’s movement, at that time in a state of paralysis. In the complex reality covering vastly different lifestyles, private and societal spaces, and ambivalences, it is difficult to work out where to begin in addressing discrimination, stereotyping, homophobia, and transphobia.
›› Download full publication (English, PDF, 75 pages, 2,4 MB)
