Akha woman waiting for tourists

I wouldn't be moved. I had no intention of gawking at other humans as if they were zoo exhibits. It was bad enough that we -- a group of nine in a minivan on a day trip to the Mekhong River and the Burmese border -- had been brought to the Akha hill tribe village, with the van parked smack in front of thatched stalls selling trinkets and beads. Akha women dressed in their traditional costumes were quick to approach us.

"If you don't go on the walk, you stay here to wait for the group," the tour guide said. So be it. It was the principle of the thing. I would not pay to demean myself further.

Eventually, two from the group signed on to the "long neck" detour and off they went while I walked briskly away from the Akha souvenir stalls towards their fields and back villages. I intended to grab some photographs of what hopefully might be scenes a little closer to real life, though there wasn't much time or daylight left, it being nearly 6 pm already.

More real: An Akha guy returning to village from work in a nearby town.		More real: Akha children climbing down a slope to the playground.

Twenty minutes later, I saw the two coming back. "So quick?" I remarked.

"Yup, done," the guy from Wales said.

"So, what did you see?"

"Just more souvenir stalls."

* * * * *

A few days ago, there was an article in the Bangkok Post about how the Thai government was refusing to allow the Kayan to emigrate.

New Zealand is asking Thai authorities to explain why it has refused to let a group of Kayan "long-necked" refugees from Burma to leave Thailand to start new lives.

New Zealand agreed two years ago to accept two families of Kayan people -- whose women traditionally wear a number of brass rings around their unnaturally long necks -- as refugees, but Thai authorities will not give them exit visas.

According to a BBC report from the area in Mae Hong Son province on Wednesday, it is suspected that the families are being kept in Thailand because of the central role they play in the local tourism industry.

The BBC said three Kayan villages close to the Burmese border were a major lure for foreign tourists and quoted a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as saying, "It's absolutely a human zoo."

Kitty McKinsey said some 20,000 other Burmese refugees had recently been allowed to move to third countries, but Thailand was not letting a group of 20 Kayans who had been accepted as refugees by New Zealand and Finland leave. 

-- Bangkok Post, 29 January 2008, Exploited for Tourism?

It is alleged that the Thai government wants to safeguard the country's tourist dollar earnings and this is the reason why they are barring their relocation. A similar story appeared in the Australian newspaper The Age [2].

* * * * *

The funny thing is that some people seize every opportunity to do the same. To themselves.

Barely 48 hours earlier was the Gay Pride Parade, the high point of the International Lesbian and Gay Association's conference program in Chiangmai, Thailand. Some of my colleagues in the Singapore delegation had already murmured their disapproval. I too didn't really want to be part of it, knowing full well how it would turn out, but I said to them, "We may disagree, but we chose to come to this conference and we should do our part. What would others think of Singapore if we didn't?"

It should be said that, the parade aside, the conference sessions themselves were highly informative, and the networking we managed will prove useful in future. However, like wearing beads and brass rings, some LGBT people seem to think that a flamboyant parade is an essential part of gay cultural identity. And so a parade there had to be.

Leading off the procession were a drumming group, probably straight guys hired for the job, closely followed by a phantasmagoria of men and women in heavy make-up, either underdressed to suggest hypersexuality or overdressed in ways fit for the operatic stage.

Even worse was the inclusion of contingents from massage parlours. You don't know whether to laugh at the scenes of their employees, some of whom might be straight, in fancy dress (turbans, anyone?), or reel from the association of gay pride with commercial sex.

(Not that I have anything against commercial sex -- on a willing buyer, willing seller basis. I am all for sex workers' rights. But that is a different debate from the question of gay equality.)

To top it all, the planned route took us through the Night Bazaar area, a stretch of Changklan Road thronged with tourists and lined with stalls selling stuff that no sane resident of Chiangmai would ever want. Thus the gay pride parade ended up as one more curiosity overlaid on the nightly spectacles of a tourist trap.

This is not to say that there is no place for a pride parade. There is, but it must be one with a clearer message about the issues it seeks to address, and it must engage with a resident, not tourist, population in a way that is more than mere entertainment. Unfortunately, parades have wandered too far from the angry demonstrations of the early days when marchers took their grievances to the streets and engaged in debates with onlookers. "We will not suffer in silence" was the point of the exercise. "We have enough pride to speak out for ourselves" was where the notion of "pride" came from.

Straight participants marched in solidarity, and weren't there because they were paid to be gong-beaters. Gay participants were there because they wanted their voices heard, not because they wanted their costumes seen.

Doubtless, some will accuse me of internalised homophobia. They'd suggest that I might be ashamed of the feminised side of gay masculinity (and vice versa). The point of gay pride, they'd say, is to get the population used to varied images of sexual representation.

Fair enough, if indeed it is representative. I have nothing against transgenders and cross-dressers (straight and gay) being part of the parade, provided cross-dressing is what they do in their normal lives. But to call on foreign participants -- which the Chiangmai organisers did -- to dress up in ethnic finery while the Thais did their best with sequins, feathers and high-heeled shoes, was to go out to create an artificiality that worked against the very raison d'être of a pride parade. It would only serve to reinforce the idea that gayness is only costume deep, not something intrinsic to our personhoods.

The other argument used is that organisers should not impose mainstream dress standards on parade participants. If some participants want to flaunt their exaggerated sartorial taste, why stop them? To do so would be no better than mainstream society imposing heterosexual manners and norms on gay people. Even short of setting dress codes, this argument is extended to say gay participants themselves should not express disapproval of costumery, because such disapproval is tantamount to peer pressure to conform.

This kind of thinking is naivete bordering on foolishness. The fact is the media love such images. You can have a thousand marchers in T-shirts and jeans with only a handful of men in drag and you can bet your holy rosary that the next day, it's a picture of the drag queens that will make the pages. 

And worse, for the next few years, every story about gays will be accompanied by that one picture disinterred from the newspaper's photo archive.

There is a case for managing one's public image, especially in societies that have not yet gotten used to diversity, or where the media tend to serve political conservatism or blinkered populism. When a society and its media are far more used to multiple, competing images, then perhaps going overboard for one parade will not have serious long-lasting effects. But in places where people have never even met a gay person before, or where the prevailing rhetoric is one of gay people as freaks, to then go down the street looking like freaks is hardly the smartest thing to do.

© Yawning Bread