The subcultural gender identities and communities that gay and les have created across the decades are now interfacing with emerging VNGO work around LGBT human rights. In 2008, VNGOs began to bring together the resources of long-standing foreign aid and Vietnamese gay and les volunteers to publicly advocate for LGBT human rights domestically and globally. Four VNGOs based in Hanoi led entirely by Vietnamese researchers began LGBT projects over the course of a few years, most significantly in campaigns for same-sex marriage in 2012. These VNGO projects have garnered significant financial support from United States, Swedish, and Canadian international development agencies. These VNGO projects deliberately use a ‘human rights’ framework in their advocacy to garner international development aid, moving away from a longer history of HIV/AIDS advocacy or a US-influenced ‘civil rights’ framework. VNGO LGBT projects include organised collaboration with Vietnamese news reporters to create more positive and accurate media representation of homosexuality, social networking spaces for parents of gay and les and, most recently, same-sex marriage equality. These Vietnamese LGBT human rights projects use social scientific research and strategically deployed psychomedical expertise in the media to change public perceptions about homosexuality and transgenderism. This VNGO work co-exists with and draws on the social capital of gay, les, and transgender community members and leadership in order to advance internationally recognised LGBT human rights work.
These VNGOs have introduced new language around gender and sexuality in the interest of LGBT human rights advocacy. The global LGBT human rights movement consists ofinternational organisations, such as the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, international documents which articulate LGBT human rights on a global scale, such as the Yogyakarta Principles and the United Nation’s statement concerning rights around sexual orientation and gender identity (see Sanders in this volume), and the proliferation of what is becoming a global aesthetic of LGBT rights, such as the rainbow flag, pride parades, and international conferences. Vietnam is one among many developing countries which are partaking of this global movement’s resources, political language, and global aesthetic. Two key political constructs that animate the global LGBT human rights movement are ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity;’ and advocates argue that all have universal rights with respect to freedom in sexual orientation and gender identity. These two constructs have become universalised, packaged, and circulated in the acronym ‘SOGI’ in recent years. VNGO researchers actively educate Vietnamese news media on homosexuality using translations of terms such as ‘sexual orientation’ (xu hudng tinh duc) and ‘gender identity’ (b’an dang gidІ). This work is strategic, political, and aims to redefine cultural norms around gender and sexuality in Vietnam, using the momentum and clout of the global LGBT movement.
In the early years of these VNGO projects, Vietnamese news reporters attended large and staged events, such as conferences and art exhibitions, in order to report on LGBT organising in major cities across Vietnam. Their reporting pushes back against the homophobic tone that otherwise dominates Vietnamese media reports on sexuality. At these events, VNGO researchers, LGBT activists from overseas, and other Vietnamese celebrities and prominent figures present information about ‘SOGI’ or global LGBT human rights. Some gay and les web forum leaders also present major accomplishments or events in their respective communities. News reporters go on to report about these events, distributing new and positive representations of LGBTs in Vietnam. VNGOs have also developed a social networking group for parents of LGBTs, the first gay pride parades in Vietnam in 2012, an LGBT flashmob, and several conferences around safer sex. VNGO projects focus on combating social stigma in the mainstream, as opposed to providing social services for LGBTs or otherwise reaching gay and les for internal community support (Newton 2012: 246—303).
Some of the challenges that VNGOs face in conducting LGBT human rights work point to the problem of the global political and economic disparities which already exist in development work and human rights projects around the world. The global LGBT human rights movement has not adequately examined the efficacy of the universalisation and globalisation of ‘SOGI’ in representing ‘human rights’ around the world. I found ideological clashes between Vietnamese translations of the Western term ‘SOGI’ in recent years and the existing Vietnamese gender/sex construct gidi tink (Newton 2012: 174—210). My analysis of interviews, news articles, and other media showed that gidІ tink had four uses: biological sex or social gender (man/woman), sexuality generally as in the case of ‘sex education’ [giao duc gidi tink], sexual orientation (heterosexual/ homosexual/bisexual), and in the les community, les gender (B, SB, and fem). I argue that ‘LGBT’ is also a fundamentally sexist political construct, insofar as it forces under one umbrella the protection of sexual rights of a multiplicity of genders at the expense of a framework which recognises women’s subordination within patriarchy in collaboration with homophobia. VNGOs have struggled to recruit and garner the support of les since the work began in 2008. Some of this difficulty arises from a longer history of VNGO work around HIV/AIDS and men who have sex with men (MSM), which facilitated greater community trust with gay men. However, the political agenda of ‘LGBT’ work in Vietnam has yet to create true coalitions with the longer standing women’s rights projects. In this way, les easily fall through the cracks of both LGBT and women’s rights development work. The NGO structure of international development work and the political universalisation of constructs like ‘SOGI’ lie at the heart of many global political hierarchies that the LGBT human rights movement perpetuates.
Conclusion
From the Le Code prohibitions of sodomy and self-castration in the 1400s, to Xuan Dieu’s homoerotic poetry in the 1930s, to same-sex marriage debates in 2012, the histories of homoeroticism in Vietnam are continually being transformed. Secondary resources on Vietnamese histories of homoeroticism showcase a complexity of individuals who transgressed sexual and gender boundaries, and laws that reveal much about how gender and sexuality were constructed in relation to a patriarchal and classed social order. Analyses of the Vietnamese state show the complex way in which criticism of homosexuality and nationalistic campaigns intertwine to indirectly create an environment of political homophobia. Homophobia is also demonstrable in Vietnamese institutions of the family, psychomedical expertise, and popular discourse around homosexuality as a ‘Western disease’. Despite multiple sources of homophobia, gay and les communities thrive, organising socially and politically. Recent Vietnamese NGOs face complex problems, however, in attempting to incorporate these existing gay and les community networks in the global LGBT human rights movement.
Future cultural studies or discourse analysis of homosexuality in Vietnamese popular culture could enhance the academic research highlighted in this essay, especially analysis of the growing body of fiction on the lives of Vietnamese gay and les. It is neither my claim nor the claim of the historical analyses cited here that homosexual or transgender identities as we understand them today have necessarily always existed in Vietnamese society. However, the impetus to organise debate around what is considered ‘normal’ gender, sexuality, or erotic life in Vietnam has been apparent in most historical periods. Individual and community gender and sexual crossings in Vietnam’s history are a part of a universal human imperative to social life, especially in terms of the interconnection between human beings, in the perpetuation of any civilisation.