Natalie Newton
Introduction
Xuan Dieu (1916—85) is perhaps one of the most prolific and well-respected authors in modern Vietnamese literature, authoring over 450 poems and short stories. Hoai Thanh, a fellow poet and founder of the Vietnamese New Poetry movement in the 1930s, once called Xuan Dieu ‘the prince of love poems (ong hoang cia tho tink)’. With subtle eloquence, Xuan Dieu’s poem ‘Love of Men’ also blatantly showcases the homoerotic themes that course through a number of his poems: ‘Never mind an old story retold for a latter day, / oblivious to the sight of rouged lips and gaudy garbs, / and with nary a bargain they loved one another / in utter disregard of heaven or hell’ [Ke chi chuyen tru’o’c vo’i ngay sau/ Quen gio moi son vo’i ao mau / Thay ke thien du’o’ng va dia nguc / Khong he mac ca, ho yeu nhau] (Dieu 1938). Nguyen Quoc Vinh (1998) argues that Xuan Dieu and several of his contemporaries wrote about male homoerotic desire indirectly through sublimated metaphor, allegory, or literary autobiography. Nguyeen traces what he calls a ‘pattern of displacement’ in representations of male homoeroticism in the writing of acclaimed authors. Huy Can (1919—2005) was Xuan Dieu’s life-partner and fellow writer in the New Poetry Movement. Tran Huy Lieu (1901—69) wrote about his homoerotic experiences during Vietnamese communist revolutionary struggles in a posthumous prison memoir Love in a dark jail [Tinh trong ngu’c toi] (1950). Nguyen Duc Chinh, one of the leaders of the Vietnam National Party during French anticolonial resistance, displaces homoerotic desire for his fellow inmate named ‘Tho ’ and poet Tran Huy Lieu in the docu-novel Letters from Ройїо Condore [Thu’ Con Lon] (1937). To Hoai (1920—) writes about his homosexual encounters with Xuan Dieu during the French colonial resistance in his memoir Disty Sand on Somebody’s Footsteps [Cat bui chan ai] (1991). Ho Tru’o’ng An (1938—) is openly gay and writes about his homoerotic desire toward his childhood friend Khu’ ong Hu u Vi in his memoir A Blie-Moon Realm of Memories [Coi ky u c bang xanh] (1991). The bleeding-heart romanticism of these authors’ writing echoes across decades to the everyday choices that Vietnamese homosexual, bisexual, and transgender men and women face today. Many have begun to publicly advocate for LGBT rights for the first time in Vietnam, ‘in utter disregard of heaven or hell’ (thay ke thien dong va dia nguc), as in Xuan Dieu’s poem.
In summer 2012, Vietnam caught the eye of the international media as talk circulated that it might become ‘the first Asian nation to legalize gay marriage’ (Ghosh 2012), but the actual
picture is much more complex, as we shall see below. The spotlight on Vietnam under the international LGBT rainbow shocked many who associated the communist party-led nation with religious and human rights abuses after the American War ended in 1975. Xuan Dieu’s homoerotic displacement and coded language is now overshadowed by online photographs of happily ‘married’ Vietnamese gay men (locally termed gay) and women (les) who model upstanding citizenship and cry out for equal rights.
In this chapter, I provide an overview of five central themes. First, I provide historical perspectives on Vietnamese same-sex sexuality and gender crossing. Second, I examine the socialist Vietnamese State’s treatment of homosexuality and transgenderism more contemporaneously. Third, I look at homophobia in contemporary Vietnamese society across social, cultural, and medical institutions. Fourth, I briefly overview gay and les responses to homophobia in terms of subjectivity and identity formation and community organising. Finally, I contextualise Vietnamese non-governmental organisations’ (VNGO) work around LGBT human rights in the last few years. I piece together a narrative from secondary sources, as well as my ethnographic research on Vietnamese female homosexual community formation in Saigon in the years 2006—10 (Newton 2012).
The most common term in formal written and spoken Vietnamese for homosexuality’ is dong fink luyen ai (‘same-sex love’). This noun first appeared in Dao Duy Anh’s pioneering French Vietnamese Dictionary (Pkap Viet TV Dien) in 1936. This Vietnamese term’s linguistic predecessor is the Chinese term, tongxing lian’ai (^ttfSS), which has a neutral connotation or is sometimes used as a ‘medical term denoting sickness and pathology’ (Zhou 2000: 2). Fran Martin and Larissa Heinrich argue that Chinese categories ‘like woman (nuxing/nuren), man (nanxing/ nanren), homosexual (tongxing’ai/tongxinglian), and heterosexual (yixing’ai/yixinglian) trace their genesis back to the indigenisation of Japanese and western sexology and gender concepts during the Republican period’ (Martin and Heinrich 2006: 8). In Chinese and Vietnamese, the term refers to same-sex eroticism, as opposed to homosexual identity. Huashan Zhou explains that tongxinglian’ai is a ‘pervasive vulgarization’ (2000: 3) that continues to be used to describe same-sex homoeroticism as a pathology, moral offense, and sociopolitical symptom of the degenerative effects of globalisation. The Vietnamese parallel term dong tink luyen ai is sometimes used in the context of the Vietnamese Communist State’s indirect regulation of homosexuality as a kind of ‘social evil’ (te nan xa koi). In both languages, subsequent modifications of the term refer to various gender/sex identities, for example, ngudi dong tink (homosexual), nguVi dong tink nam (homosexual male), and ngudi dong tink nu (homosexual female), nguVi lucng tink or ngudi song tink (bisexual person), ngu’di ckuyen doi gidi tink (transgender person), and ngu’di di tink (heterosexual person).
Contemporary Vietnamese derogatory slang reflects a stigmatisation of gender ambiguity or non-heterosexual sexuality: ai nam ai nit (‘half man, half woman’ referring to cross-dressing spiritual shamans), xang pka nkdt (‘petrol mixed with oil’ referring to homosexuality of two genders that are not supposed to mix, like when mixing petrol and motor oil), or ki fi (‘hi-fi cassette tapes’ that have two sides to denote a bisexual who ‘flips’ in attraction toward men and women). The most common derogatory slang term for homosexual is pe-de (often pronounced be-de), derived from the French term pede, meaning a person who engages in pederasty (adult male homosexual relations with pubescent boys). Likewise, the Vietnamese slang term for lesbian is also derogatory, o-moi, which denotes a carao or pink shower plant (Latin: cassia grandis). Gina Masequesmay explains that carao fruit consumption resembles cunnilingus (2003: 124, 133, note 8). In order to combat some of these negative slang terms, Vietnamese NGOs have also proliferated translations of international LGBT terminology, such as ‘LGBT’ (used in English in Vietnamese media), ‘sexual orientation’ (xu ku’dng tink dutc), and ‘gender identity’ (bcrn dang gifti). These translated and borrowed terms are not necessarily shared by Vietnamese gay and les, or the Vietnamese diaspora. Considering the historical abundance of derogatory terms to describe homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism, it is perhaps ever-more significant to recognise the proliferation of terms used by self-identified gay, les, bi, and transgender (ngu’di chuyen doi gi&i tinh) individuals in Vietnam.