Thai sex gay

Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre

Australian National University

Thailand is well acknowledged internationally for the size and vibrancy of its diverse and highly noticeable gay, lesbian and trans (kathoey) communities. In comparative studies of the histories of modern homosexual communities in Asian metropolises, such as Tokyo, Taipei and Bangkok, there has been considerable debate about whether local factors have been the driving forces in the ascend of new queer cultures or whether Asian societies hold borrowed or imported these novel cultural forms from the West. In this article, we quarrel that in the later decades of the 20th century, Bangkok’s gay bars and magazines were significant local influences in the progress of modern patterns of homoeroticism and gay culture in Thailand. We employ Thailand’s first commercially successful gay magazine, Mithuna Junior, as a source of historical information to understand the emergence of social and commercial connections between gay bars and urban middle-class male lover men in Bangkok during the 1980s and 1990s. As Thailand’s market economy gr