Gaysia Read online

  Praise for Gaysia

  ‘Benjamin Law has put together a book that at first glance starts as a sexy romp through Asia, bringing him to the gay hotspots coming into consciousness, in what he calls the gayest continent on earth. It’s the truth, of course, based on census figures in this most populous area of the world. Law digs deeper though, bringing us far under the surface, giving us keen observations on emerging gay rights issues in these regions, along with the poignant contrasts and issues that tourism of all kinds brings, destroying paradise even while lifting countries and destinations out of poverty. Of Asian extraction, Law also straddles two worlds—he is a part of the cultures he is seeing, and yet not, as a native-born Australian. Law has achieved what seems the impossible in Gaysia: a sensual, enjoyable read, full of titillation, at once part of the gay travel circuit, yet deep with sociological observations along with a clear understanding of Asian history. Whether you’re planning a trip to Asia, an armchair tourist, or merely curious, Gaysia is a book you should add to your collection.’

  —Michael Luongo, editor of Gay Travels in the Muslim World

  ‘Gaysia is Brisbane-based Law’s first attempt at book-length journalism and it consolidates him as one of the most surprising and entertaining voices in Australian non-fiction writing.’

  —Weekend Australian

  ‘Law is a very funny writer.’

  —Andy Quan, blogger and author of Slant

  ‘Law comes across as not just fun to be with, but sensitive, quick to empathise, sharp-eyed and, well, extremely nice.... Gaysia is focused, observant (within its own limits) and often thought-provoking in a refreshingly upbeat way.’

  —Robert Dessaix, Monthly

  ‘Benjamin Law is a really good writer and Gaysia, a book exploring homosexuality and its reception in Asia, is a fantastic book.’

  —Readings.com.au

  ‘This is investigative journalism carried out with style, empathy and unflinching honesty.’

  —Emma Perry, artsHub

  ‘Gaysia is one of the most entertaining and truly wonderful non-fiction books I’ve ever read.’

  —Georgia Dixon, Under the Stilts

  ‘Law has an incredible talent for storytelling, and the anecdotes told to him by his diverse cast of interviewees are as riveting and illuminating as his own first-person accounts.’

  —Ramona Ketsuban, blogger

  Copyright © 2012, 2014 by Benjamin Law.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, Inc., 2246 Sixth St., Berkeley, CA 94710.

  Cover design: Peter Long

  Cover photo: Tammy Law

  Text design and illustrations: Peter Long

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-053-7

  First published in 2012 by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd, in Australia.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  INDONESIA

  THAILAND

  CHINA

  JAPAN

  MALAYSIA

  MYANMAR

  INDIA

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Scott Spark

  FOREWORD

  AN OLD TIBETAN PROVERB says that on every journey, you must die once. The person who returns should not be the same person who left. I invite you to travel to Indonesia, Thailand and China, to Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar and India with an observant and sensitive explorer as your guide. It will be an adventurous trip in which you meet the moneyboys of Bali, the ladyboys of Thailand, the hidden gay Internet of China, the Chinese gay ghosts and their homowives and the grand gay celebrities of Japanese television in a country that pretends to have no other kind of LGBT person. You will be befriended and taken around with Christian and Muslim fundamentalists who claim to cure homosexuality. And yes, they have been named after and trained by American fundamentalists and the folk at the Christian ex-Gay organization called NARTH. The extreme poverty and rampant AIDS in Myanmar will open your heart in sadness. And you will get to know the inspiring activists of India, gay and straight, along with a gay swamiji who thinks that being gay is sick and must be cured. There is a theme of fear and self-hatred here—that runs throughout the world—but it is balanced out by the Queer Azaadi Mumbai Pride Parade, the biggest queer event in the world’s most populous democracy.

  There are a lot of ingredients here, but they are blended together with a rare skill: over-the-top beauty pageants, sacred in their depth of feeling for lives lived truthfully, no matter how difficult it can be; religious institutions and persons, profane in their betrayal of that which is best in us; dangers and gay celebrations; an exotic itinerary through seven of Asia’s (and the world’s) most interesting countries; a fast, fabulous, funny, sad read of life, love and the great gay happening world of Asia. Cheers to the future! And to your guide and friend through Gaysia, Benjamin Law.

  Aaron Allbright

  Author of The Land Near Oz: Two Gay Yankees Move to New Zealand

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS IS A WORK OF non-fiction. For brevity or clarity, the chronologies of some incidents have been condensed or altered. Some names have been changed to protect the identities of people or organisations.

  The meaning and usage of the terms ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ vary between countries, communities and individuals. In this book, ‘transgender’ generally refers to people who express their gender in non-conforming ways through behaviour, dress and appearance. ‘Transsexual’ refers to people who have undertaken hormonal and/or surgical procedures to physically affirm the sex with which they identify.

  The choice between the names Myanmar and Burma – and the names of the country’s former capital (Yangon and Rangoon, respectively) – is subject to debate and often contested. Usage varies among countries, and even among news organisations within the same country. (In the United States, the New York Times and Reuters use ‘Myanmar’; the Washington Post and Time magazine use ‘Burma’.) I have used Myanmar for several reasons, including the burgeoning democratic reforms that took place shortly after I left the country, and the fact that every local person I spoke to called their country ‘Myanmar’.

  INTRODUCTION

  OF ALL THE CONTINENTS, Asia is the gayest. Deep down, you’ve probably had your suspicions all along, and I’m here to tell you those suspicions are correct.

  Let’s do the maths. Of the world’s ten most populous countries, six of them (seven if you count Russia) are in Asia: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan. Across the continent are close to four billion people, making Asia home to the majority of the world’s people. So doesn’t it stand to reason that most of the world’s queer people – lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and transsexual folk – live in Asia too, sharing one hot, sweaty landmass and filling it with breathtaking examples of exotic faggotry? I would think so.

  Perhaps I’m biased. You tend to reach for massive generalisations after spending nearly a year skipping between seven Asian countries, sitting backstage with Bangkok ladyboys prepping themselves for beauty pageants, chatting to Tokyo’s celebrity drag queens, marching in the heat with Mumbai’s fierce queer rights activists, listening to the testimonies of Melaka preachers who claim they can heal homosexuality, and hanging out with Bali’s moneyboys and the old foreigners who hire them.

  But in 2009, Time magazine ran a majo
r story, ‘Why Asia’s Gays Are Starting to Win Acceptance’. It was an interesting piece about globalisation and a region in flux, one exploding economically but still wedded to strict religious and cultural traditions when it came to sex and marriage. The story started in Nepal and moved through developments in China, Japan and India, and argued that when it came to gay rights, momentum was building.

  ‘If nothing else, people aren’t denying the existence of homosexuality anymore,’ said one commentator. ‘The Asian social institutions and beliefs that often stood in the way of tolerance – religious conservatism, intense emphasis on marriage and having children, cultural taboos against openly discussing sexuality – are weakening.’

  Was that true? Eventually, I would discover nothing is ever so straightforward, especially in Asia. Some countries embraced their transsexual people, but didn’t care for lesbians. Other countries didn’t hate homosexuals as such; they just didn’t really get them. Some celebrated transsexuals but denied them basic rights; others didn’t mind if you were a gay man, just as long as you married a woman.

  I might have been Australian, but I was ethnically Asian too. For me, it was time to go back to my homelands, to reach out to my fellow Gaysians: the Homolaysians, Bi-Mese, Laosbians and Shangdykes. I would journey through their cities by foot, plane, cross-country train, bus, rickshaw, trishaw, tuk-tuk, taxi, motorcycle, scooter and a utility truck that was originally designed to carry livestock. I would experience the deathly cold of Haridwar, get drenched in Bangkok’s downpours and feel my face melting off in a Beijing heatwave. I would contract heat rash, whooping cough and dehydration from Indian food poisoning so intense that, by the end of it, I saw the eye of God. (From what I remember, it was brown.)

  Asia is a big place, a sprawling and intoxicating mix of landscapes and languages. Where to start? I decided to begin where most Australians did: taking it easy on the Indonesian island of Bali, leisure-filled paradise and island of the gods. But first, for reasons you will soon understand, I would have to get naked. Very, very naked.

  INDONESIA

  In which we travel to Bali and stay in establishments catering to foreign homosexual nudists, and encounter various local moneyboys and the men who love them. Things we learn: (1) how to roster several international boyfriends at a time; (2) sometimes sex work ain’t so bad (you get a motorcycle!); (3) every man in Bali – at least according to one local – is a slut.

  WE COME TO BALI after reading Eat, Pray, Love, but most of us just come here to eat, drink and fuck. We come for the nasi goreng and Bintang, the towering Kuta waves and luxury resorts, the ten-dollar spa treatments and surf lessons. We come to scuba-dive, bird-watch, elephant-ride and monkey-gawk. We come to trek through sun-drenched rice paddies and find our inner selves at yoga retreats, or have foreign strangers drunkenly fondle our inner selves after too many drinks.

  Holiday budgets don’t matter in Bali. If you’ve ever felt poor, come to Bali just for the feeling of going to an ATM and withdrawing a million of something at one time. One million rupiah will get you around 100 US dollars, which will yield a week’s worth of food and drinks on this island if you’re smart. Here is a currency so devalued and littered with zeroes that shops give breath mints when change gets impossibly small.

  Bali itself is also small – on the right roads, it takes just over three hours to drive across the island – but it manages to cater to every imaginable urge and need. For gay visitors, those needs might include clothing-optional, male-only resorts, gay night clubs, drag performances, go-go boys, 24-hour house staff, nude sunbathing spots and a cute Indonesian moneyboy you can fuck until you’re utterly spent and walking like a duck. It’s rumoured that there is a place near Denpasar airport where you can go for a special eight-hand massage, where two men massage you while another two masturbate each other for your visual pleasure, and all for a cheap, cheap price.

  It wasn’t always like this. In a single decade, Bali’s gay scene went from almost nothing to being the premier hotspot for fabulous homosexuals the world over. If you were a foreigner, especially a bulé – a Caucasian Westerner with pockets presumedly lined with cash – you could buy anything you wanted. Or anyone.

  A lot of the gay bulés in Bali ended up where I’d been invited to stay: Spartacvs Hotel, a men’s-only nude resort in the beachside tourist area of Seminyak. What started in 2007 as ‘the only Hotel in Bali dedicate [sic] to those who enjoy an alternative lifestyle’ had become the region’s only exclusively gay resort that provided a 100 per cent clothing-optional environment. Women and children weren’t allowed and neither were ladyboys. It said so on the sign as you walked in.

  Everything about the place made me nervous, not just the clothing-optional thing but also the purposeful misspelling of Spartacvs with a V instead of a U (apparently the V made it more edgy). There was also the email I’d gotten from the owner who had invited me to stay. When I assured him I didn’t have a problem with public nudity – looking back, maybe I was trying to convince myself – he responded by simply saying: So I might get to see you naked around the pool, hmmm nice.

  The driver who picked me up from Denpasar airport was Ketut, a big-toothed, goofy-faced guy in his early thirties. Ketut had worked at Spartacvs since it opened and he’d been promoted over the years from simple housekeeping duties to admin and management. Working at Spartacvs was a good job, Ketut said, but getting there every day was a killer: a two-hour drive and another two back, sometimes in traffic that refused to budge.

  Like most of the male staff at Spartacvs, Ketut was straight. He was also local, while most of the other workers had moved from Java, Jogjakarta or Sumatra to find better jobs in Bali. Some of Ketut’s friends knew he worked at a nudist hotel for gay men, but his parents didn’t. Guests were usually naked, he said, but staff remained uniformed the whole time. I asked Ketut whether the male guests ever hit on him, and he giggled and squirmed, knowing it was unprofessional to answer.

  ‘Noooooo,’ he said. Then, after some encouragement, he said it actually happened pretty regularly. Ketut’s approach was to turn them down gently with a boyish laugh and give his standard response: ‘Yeah, but me straight!’

  We laughed. ‘Is it weird to work at a place like Spartacvs?’ I asked. ‘I mean, every day you’re surrounded by naked men …’

  ‘No! Because I enjoy! Is no problem!’ He paused. ‘Maybe at first, was little bit …’

  He trailed off.

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Yeah!’ he said, grinning. ‘But now, is fine!’

  Ketut’s funniest memory of working at Spartacvs took place within the first few months of the resort’s opening, when three naked foreign men had hooked up poolside in broad daylight, completely going for broke, fucking each other in front of the staff and all the other guests, doing – as Ketut put it – ‘jiggy-jiggy’.

  It was the first time Ketut had ever seen anyone have sex in public, much less a gay threesome of foreigners. Spartacvs’s Indonesian staff had quietly watched the live sex spectacular from discreet vantage points with their hands over their mouths, curious and happily scandalised by the ways of Western men. Stuff like that didn’t happen too often at Spartacvs, Ketut said, to my relief and – if I was completely honest with myself – slight disappointment. It was as if I’d been told about a terrifying natural phenomenon – a volcano exploding, a blood-coloured lunar eclipse – that happened once every few decades, then discovered I was probably going to miss out on seeing it.

  When we arrived at Spartacvs, a doorman rolled my suitcase through miniature Jurassic Park gates, and across a stone walkway hovering over a pond filled with koi. Past a small concrete modesty wall, a lush poolside landscape of baby palms and frangipani trees opened up, framed by clusters of two-storey bungalows. Naked middle-aged men lazed around the pool, their bodies spread out on deckchairs. They looked up at me sleepily. I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, but I had never felt so clothed in my life. A couple of men wore one-inch-on-the-hip speedos, but eve
ryone else went nude. Penises were every where. And these penises weren’t just attached to humans, but also appeared as sculptures and decorations: penis-shaped ashtrays and cement water features in the shape of erect phalluses. Timidly, I smiled and politely waved.

  The atmosphere was a cross between a relaxing island getaway and a marine zoo, with everyone lounging around like so many seals – or walruses, depending on the body. Most were over fifty and nearly all were bulés, except for a lone sixty-something Japanese guy who was skinny and completely hairless from the neck down, roasting his skin in the sun to a rich shade of gravy brown. From his deckchair, he smiled at me though John Lennon sunglasses (the only thing he was wearing) as he continued to oil himself with the loving intensity of someone polishing their favourite boot.

  Gary, Spartacvs’s owner – the one who had encouraged me to get comfortable and naked, hmmm nice – was a super-friendly bald Australian who was fifty-nine years old and had a generous barrel-shaped body. Gary’s accent was thick, the kind that comes with spending most of your life driving giant, 25-metre-long trucks between Australian towns. When Gary first started holidaying in Bali in the mid 1970s, he wasn’t openly gay. He had originally come here with a straight travel buddy who liked to surf. When he was by himself, Gary would try looking for something gay in town, but all he encountered were droves of female prostitutes.

  Then in the late ’90s, Gary came back to Bali and fell in love with a local guy he had met on the internet. Around this time, he also met a British entrepreneur who pitched the Spartacvs idea to him: a proper hotel that could fit between twelve and twenty-four men at a time, exclusively gay, targeted at foreign homosexuals. The British guy would take care of the logistics – there was already a failed family resort on the market that would be perfect to renovate – so all Gary needed to do was supply the money.