Vietnamese laws and State media campaigns aside, the everyday lives of gay, les, bi, and transgender people (ngudi chuyen do-i gidi tinh) are perhaps more affected by the environments of homophobia and heterosexism across institutions such as the family, the ‘science’ of sexuality in medicine and psychology, and nationalism and racialised identity formation. Across cultures, heterosexuality is instrumental in the maintenance of patriarchy and the heternormative family in reproducing the ‘race’ and ‘nation’. Within this construct, homosexuality and transgenderism undermine the family power structure in terms of gender crossing, disturbing male dominance and female subordination, and perpetuating non-reproductive sexuality and non-heterosexuality. Recent research discusses the ways in which lesbophobia is intertwined with gender role expectations around biological reproduction and gender double-standards around sex (Khuat et al. 2009: 255—306). Homophobic responses include so-called corrective rape oflesbians to ‘turn’ them heterosexual; forced heterosexual marriage of young women (Bui et al. 2010: 11—15), and house arrest and isolation of young lesbians as a way to ‘re-domesticate’ them (Nguyen et al. 2010). Confucian expectations for patriarchal order also limit the range of men’s norms of masculinity, sexuality, and gender roles. These sociocultural expectations for men and women are central in the maintenance of a broader culture of homophobia and heterosexism in Vietnamese society.
Vietnamese newspaper advice columns have also featured the opinions of medical doctors and psychologists who have written about homosexuality as a disease of the body, a genetic disorder, hormonal imbalance, or mental illness. Vietnamese medical and psychological professionals do not currently incorporate the World Health Organisation’s ICD-10 protocol on homosexuality, which removed it as a mental illness in 1990. One of the most outspoken medical doctors who has written on homosexuality is Dr. Tran Bong So’n, who has authored numerous sex educational books, pamphlets, and online news articles. In his advice column ‘Knowing who to ask’ (Thiic mac biet hoi ai), Dr. So’n writes this about homosexuality:
Homosexuality belongs to a class of deviant behavior (instead of man-woman, woman-man, we have man-man, woman-woman) and it can be categorised along with other ‘philias’, rare ones, such as: gerontophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia… Because of this, in [South Vietnam] before 1975, this phenomenon [homosexuality] was called ‘homo-philia’, not ‘love’ or anything like that. (Tran 2000)
Vietnamese popular press, sex educational material, and current Vietnamese medical text books consider homosexuality a disease (benh hoan), unnatural (trai tu nhien), or a sexual/gender inversion (sai lech), or as Dr. Son writes above, a kind of sexual deviance comparable to other sexual ‘philias’, including non-consensual sex with minors. A medicalised perspective of homosexuality frames it as devoid of emotional affinity, moral consideration for social behaviour, and certainly not an identity.
Homosexuality is also stigmatised as a ‘Western disease’ in popular consciousness, as well as in political debates about Vietnamese nationalism. Ironically, however, it was Europeans who first said that homosexuality was a Vietnamese disease, specifically during the colonial period. Frank Proschan (2002) details claims by French colonial officials, medical doctors, travellers, and missionaries during the late 1800s that Vietnamese opium dens in Saigon were ‘infecting’ Frenchmen with syphilis through pederasty and prostitution. The French claimed that Vietnamese women were so ugly with blackened teeth from betel nut chewing that this ‘forced’ colonials into engaging in homosexuality under the influence of opium. A French surgeon with the pseudonym Jacobus X recorded the most detailed compendium of Vietnamese gender and sexuality on record during the French colonial period, where he claimed that pederasty and sodomy ‘became part of the manners of the Annamite people long before the conquest by the French’ (Proschan 2002: 618—19). Homosexuality is seen as a racialised threat in contradictory ways, on the one hand by the French, who tried to conquer and divide the Vietnamese people through their medicalised homophobia and treatment of syphilis in opium dens, and by Vietnamese, who cling falsely to an idea of the heterosexual purity of the ‘race’.