The Thai Gay-Quing

[Guest wowpow]

The Persistence of Gender: From Ancient Indian Pandakas to Modern Thai Gay-Quings

Peter A. Jackson

 © all rights reserved

 Bangkok's gay and kathoey (transvestite/transsexual) subcultures are among the largest and most vibrant homoerotic subcultures in Asia.But while pride in masculine homosexual identity is common to Western and Thai formulations of gayness, there is much about being gay in Thailand that Western gay men would find foreign and unexpected.

 

In this paper I suggest that contemporary attitudes to homosexuality and transgenderism derive from an ancient and distinctively Thai cultural source.

Historical linguistic evidence suggests that prior to the 13th century AD, when the Thais adopted Buddhism, Thai language and culture lacked a concept of non-normative male sexuality that did not at the same time involve culturally ascribed cross-gender behaviour. The Buddhist scriptures, often called the Pali canon, include examples of gender-normative male homosexuality among monks and among others, but in Thai these men are consistent ly misread as being kathoeys, transvestites or transsexuals. Pali, a close relative of Sanskrit, is the classical language of Theravada Buddhism. Indeed, it appears that Buddhist teachings have not had sufficient cultural power in Thailand to supplant indigenous sex/gender conceptions, and that instead there has been a consistent historical misreading of the Buddhist scriptures. 

The continuing power of indigenous gender-based conceptions of sexuality in Thailand is not only evidenced in erudite translations of the Buddhist scriptures. Indigenous attitudes are also strongly reflected in the history of the new homosexual iden tity of gay. Until the past couple of decades Thai language and culture possessed only two sex/gender categories for males, namely, the gender normative 'man' (phu-chai) and the non-normative kathoey which included all males who were regarded as breaching normative male biology or normative masculine behaviour.

 

In the past two decades, however, there has been an explosion of new bisexual and homosexual identities in Thailand, with a range of new nouns entering the Thai language to denote new forms of sexual and gendered being. These new identities include the bai (from 'bisexual') or seua-bai (Literally: 'bi-tiger', denoting a masculine bisexual male), the gay-king (denoting an active and presumed masculine homosexual male) and the gay-queen (denoting a passive and presumed feminine homosexual male). Since the late 1980s an intermediate category between the gay-king and gay-queen has also come into being, the gay-quing, whose identity is marked by his sexual versatility. All of these new terms draw on English sources, but they have been playfully reformulated within the Thai linguistic and sex/gender systems to mark distinctively Thai configurations of male gender and sexuality. ......

 

Full article

http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/...96/Jackson.html


I found this when surfing around the net. I have never heard of a Gay-Quing so it's amusing. I usually run in terror from the excessive intellectual erudition

of Peter Jackson's writings but this one is OK if you absorb it in small bites.

[Guest BKKvisitor]

On my first trip to LOS, I inquired of the bellhop if he was gay. "No, I man," came the reply. Nevertheless, it turned out that he was "available."

 

If he had read his Jackson, he would have told me that he was "gay king." But as we all all know, real men don't read.

 

Although I eventually figured this out without Jackson's help, I agree with wowpow that this bit of insight is entertaining.