Despite multiple sources of homophobia and lesbophobia across Vietnamese society, gay and les social networks, subjectivities, and communities still thrive, historically and contemporaneously. Bi and transgender individuals do participate in gay and les networks, but they are tightly intertwined with the dominant gender-segregated communities of gay and les. Bi women do not necessarily collaborate collectively with bi men; likewise, transgender men and women primarily associate with separate homosexual communities, or in some cases, completely pass in the heterosexual mainstream. Medical doctors Elliot Heiman and Cao Van Le (1975) published early research on the ‘transsexual syndrome’ of one individual in the Vietnamese countryside who was male-bodied, non-homosexual, and lived and worked as a woman in her village.
Heiman and Le specifically differentiate between their transsexual subject and Vietnamese spiritual shamans in the Mother Goddess religion (dao Mau), called dong co, who are popularly understood as homosexual men who traverse gender in attire and personification during religious healing rituals (len dong) (Nguyen 2007). Several scholars debate the necessarily homosexual or transgender identifications of dong co male spiritual leaders on the grounds that feminine attire is essential for males in rituals which honour maternal figures and goddesses featured in the religion (Fjelstad and Nguy~n 2011: 137). Ritual participants are tacitly aware of the homosexuality of most dong co, but view sexual orientation as unconnected to the divine calling to mediumship or ritual practice (Norton 2006: 72), or that len dong rituals offer a complex way to fulfil filial and social obligations when a male medium has presumably socially unacceptably high levels of feminine spiritual energy within the Mother Goddess cosmology (Endres 2006: 89). By contrast, Vietnamese popular music singers like Cindy Thai Tai and Cat Tuyen publicly disclose their histories as male-to-female transsexuals, complicating the nationalistic discourses around ‘good womanhood’ in Vietnam. Very little is written about female-to-male transgenders, whom I have found to primarily associate in les and women’s circles, not among transgender women or gay men. More research is necessary on bi men and women, gender-traversing spiritual mediums, and transgender communities in Vietnam.
Few scholars have explicitly written about contemporary Vietnamese gay subcultures. Heiman and Le briefly discuss a luxury restaurant in downtown Saigon which gay men frequented in the 1960s (1975: 90). Marie-Eve Blanc (2005) argues that homosexual men suffered a loss of social status in Vietnamese society in the twentieth century, especially exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic. Blanc tracks an elaborate lexicon of terms in the gay male communities in Hanoi which describe gender expression, sexual behaviour, and levels of disclosure. Bong kin (‘closed shadow’) is a slang term that refers to homosexual men who may pass as heterosexual due to their masculine gender, also implying their relative secrecy about their sexuality. Bong lo (‘open shadow’) or bong lai cai (‘feminine shadow’) refer to effeminate men whose gender expression implies openness about their homosexuality. Nguy~n Quo’c Vinh discusses how the modern slang term bong (‘shadow’) for gay men originated in relation to gender-crossing spiritual mediums, whose ‘shadowy spirit’ allowed them special access to cosmic channels (1998). In Saigon, weekly drag shows, Sunday brunch gatherings, charity events in various provinces across the Vietnamese countryside, and an abundance of other social gatherings bring together hundreds of men, across all sectors of society.
In contrast, women’s homosexual networks are fewer, although perhaps as complex in terms of gender and sexual subjectivity. Few scholars have written about Vietnamese female homosexuality, none in a sustained historical analysis. VNGO reports primarily focus on narratives of contemporary lesbian victimisation and isolation (Khuat et al. 2009; Nguy~n et al. 2010; Bui et al. 2010). I have studied how les appropriate Saigon city space to do community organising that is often ‘hidden in plain sight’ (Newton 2012: 211—45). I argue that the form and the content of les social organising on les webforums and in urban space are intimately intertwined with the ways that leaders promote community values and form identities across these social domains. The differences between les community organising and other VNGO work demonstrate some of the challenges and fundamental political hierarchies that the global LGBT human rights movements perpetuate when these global human rights movements incorporate the developing world into their NGO structures, political rhetorics, and financial structures of sustainability. Les across all sectors of society, including a few in government offices and several couples who were raising children together, lived with varying degrees of disclosure about their lesbianism in their circles of work, family, and friends. Transnational networks among Vietnamese diasporics who participate in les web forums provide some funding for projects and social connections in
Vietnam. However, the vast majority of les social organising is led and implemented by les in Vietnam.
Central to the social complexity of the les community today is the evolution of subcultural gender subjectivities around a kind of ‘butch-femme’ system. Butch-femme is a complex lesbian gender system where women align themselves along masculine or feminine gender identities within a same-sex erotic partnership. Butch-femme does not simply imitate heteronormative gender, but reconfigures elements of normative masculinity and femininity within any particular society in an explicitly lesbian context. In recent years, the innovation of Vietnamese les is a three-gender system, not just a gender binary. The Vietnamese les gender identities B, SB, and fem were transliterations of the English ‘butch’, ‘soft-butch’, and ‘femme’. These genders proliferated beginning in the late 1990s, when the Internet first appeared in Vietnam (Newton 2012: 192—7). SB, however, is understood as a third, in-between gender, not necessarily an outgrowth of ‘butch’. Vietnamese les also differentiate between ‘hard SB’ (SB ейng) and ‘soft SB’ (SB mem), among a plethora of other modifications of the three root genders. Older les in my research shared stories about a two-gender masculine/feminine system in the 1980s and 1990s, prior to B, SB, and fem (Newton 2012: 195, 191-201). Les gender diversification points to a complex community relationship with the three identities as distinct, especially in relation to a triangulation of gender and sexual desires across partnerships.