Tin Soe was just four when he realized he was different to other boys in his neighborhood, but growing up in conservative and army-ruled Myanmar he struggled to be accepted as gay by his relatives.
“My granddad’s sister said that if I became a monk my sexuality would change. So I was a monk for three months, but my sexuality never changed,” the 30-year-old said, asking for his real name to be withheld.
A repressive mix of totalitarian politics, religious views and reserved social mores has kept many gay people in the closet in Myanmar.
Photo: AFP
Gay men have developed their own language as a “gaylingual” code to both signify and conceal their sexuality, said Tin Soe, who now works on HIV/AIDs prevention in Yangon.
“We want to be secret and we don’t want to let other people know what we are saying. We twist the pronunciation,” he said.
It’s a world away from Thailand, where a lively gay and transsexual scene is a largely accepted part of society, which — like Myanmar — is mainly Buddhist.
“More Burmese are traveling to Thailand and see things there,” a 34-year-old working in Myanmar’s tourism industry said. “But here gays are still looked down on, in a certain category.”
Homosexuality is often linked to local religious beliefs about karma in Myanmar, Tin Soe said.
Many believe “we’re gay because we did something in a past life, that in a past life I committed adultery or raped a woman, but I don’t believe in that,” he said.
“It’s not like Iran where they are killed, but gays are a strange story in this country,” he said.
Traditionally, the only area where non-heterosexuality has been openly embraced is the realm of nat, or spirit worship, a form of animism that is intertwined with Buddhist beliefs.
Flamboyant and effeminate spirit mediums take center stage at popular nat festivals throughout the year, but their acceptance has also served to reinforce certain stereotypes of gay people.
Same-sex relations are technically criminalized by a colonial penal code, and while this is no longer strictly enforced, activists say it is still used by authorities to discriminate and extort.
“They use it as an excuse to make money and harass people, but they don’t bring the cases to court,” said Aung Myo Min, an openly gay Burmese exile and director of the Thailand-based Human Rights Education Institute of Burma.
He said there were numerous instances of sexual violence and humiliation of gay people in public.
“Many cases are not reported because the victims keep silent out of shame and fear of repercussions,” he said.
In Myanmar, broaching any kind of anti-discrimination or human rights issue is hugely sensitive.
“The man who starts to ask for rights in the gay community will be sent to prison,” a Yangon-based HIV/AIDS activist in his 50s said.
The Internet offers a forum for gay men to meet, deemed safer than public cruising: Tin Soe met his boyfriend on Facebook, for example, but he said many were afraid to put their photos on gay Web sites.
In light of such discretion, raising public health awareness isn’t easy.
In some areas, such as the big cities of Yangon and Mandalay, as many as 29 percent of men having sex with men are HIV positive, according to a report last year by the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS.
“We have a lot of activists in this country, but we can’t campaign very openly. We will have a workshop in a hotel, but without big posters and loudspeakers. We do it low profile,” Tin Soe said.
While lesbianism is also largely hidden in Myanmar, Aung Myo Min said it was more acceptable to the militarized and macho culture, in which many fail to differentiate between homosexual and transgender people.
“The woman who wants to be a man is excusable,” he said.
A 52-year-old in Yangon said things had improved since his teenage years, when “people would use sling shots against us,” but he warned there was still a long road ahead to a truly tolerant Myanmar.
“We want to be like Thailand, where gay people have equal chances,” he said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not