Gay Asia: Look into Past

In East Asia same-sex love has been referred to since the earliest recorded history. Early European travelers were taken aback by its widespread acceptance and open display. None of the East Asian countries today have specific legal prohibitions against homosexuality or homosexual behavior.

Homosexuality in China, known as the pleasures of the bitten peach, the cut sleeve, or the southern custom, has been recorded since approximately 600 BCE. These euphemistic terms were used to describe behaviors, but not identities (recently the Chinese society adapted the term "brokeback," duanbei, due to the success of Chinese director Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain). The relationships were marked by differences in age and social position. However, the instances of same-sex affection and sexual interactions described in the Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, or Story of the Stone) seem as familiar to observers in the present as do equivalent stories of romances between heterosexuals during the same period.

Homosexuality in Japan, variously known as shudo or nanshoku, terms influenced by Chinese literature, has been documented for over one thousand years and was an integral part of Buddhist monastic life and the samurai tradition. This same-sex love culture gave rise to strong traditions of painting and literature documenting and celebrating such relationships.

Ancient Asian painting

Similarly, in Thailand, Kathoey, or "ladyboys," have been a feature of Thai society for many centuries, and Thai kings had male as well as female lovers. While Kathoey may encompass simple effeminacy or transvestism, it most commonly is treated in Thai culture as a third gender. They are generally accepted by society, and Thailand has never had legal prohibitions against homosexuality or homosexual behavior. The teachings of Buddhism, dominant in Thai society, were accepting of a third gender designation.

Among many Middle-Eastern Muslim cultures, homosexual practices were widespread and public. Persian poets, such as Sa’di (d. 1291), Hafez (d. 1389), and Jami (d. 1492), wrote poems replete with homoerotic allusions. The two most commonly documented forms were commercial sex with transgender males or males enacting transgender roles exemplified by the koceks and the bacchas, and Sufi spiritual practices in which the practitioner crossed over from the idealized chaste form of the practice to one in which the desire is consummated.

In Persia homosexuality and homoerotic expressions were tolerated in numerous public places, from monasteries and seminaries to taverns, military camps, bathhouses, and coffee houses. In the early Safavid era (1501-1723), male houses of prostitution (amrad khane) were legally recognized and paid taxes.

A tradition of art and literature sprang up constructing Middle Eastern homosexuality. Muslim — often Sufi — poets in medieval Arab lands and in Persia wrote odes to the beautiful wine boys who, they wrote, served them in the taverns. In many areas the practice survived into modern times, as documented by Richard Francis Burton, Andre Gide, and others.

In the Turkic-speaking areas, one manifestation of this same-sex love was the baccha, adolescent or adolescent-seeming male entertainers and sex workers.

In other areas male love continues to surface despite efforts to keep it quiet.

The prevailing pattern of same-sex relationships in the temperate and sub-tropical zone stretching from Northern India to the Western Sahara is one in which the relationships were — and are — either gender-structured or age-structured or both. In recent years, egalitarian relationships modeled on the western pattern have become more frequent, though they remain rare.

In many societies of Melanesia same-sex relationships are an integral part of the culture. Traditional Melanesian insemination rituals also existed where a boy, upon reaching a certain age would be paired with an older adolescent who would become his mentor and whom he would ritually fellate over a number of years in order to develop his own masculinity. In certain tribes of Papua New Guinea, for example, it is considered a normal ritual responsibility for a boy to have a relationship in order to accomplish his ascent into manhood. Many Melanesian societies, however, have become hostile towards same-sex relationships since the introduction of Christianity by European missionaries.