the hook-up
The cheap and anonymous Internet has been a great enabler of gay culture,
say the authors of 'Mobile Cultures'
By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Sep 12, 2004,Page 18
Mobile Cultures
Edited By Chris Berry,Fran Martin and Audrey Yue
306 pages
Duke University Press
Early in this collection of essays on what the editors call "new media in
queer Asia," one of the contributors remarks that what Stonewall was to
the gay US, the Internet has been to gay Asia. It's an interesting
thought, and will come as no surprise to anyone who's ever taken a glance
at Taiwan's profusion of lesbian/gay/queer (l/g/q) bulletin boards, chat
rooms and the like. What is even more surprising is that the data
collected for the book's chapter dealing with Taiwan was collected
between August 1997 and January 1998. Even greater proliferation has
taken place since then.
Of course not everywhere in Asia is like Taiwan. But even in conservative
Malaysia, Internet users are effectively subverting the original
intentions of the founders of Cyberjaya, the country's envisioned hi-tech
crossroads, and using the Internet for personal contacts almost on the
scale of Taiwan or Japan. India, too, is covered, where cyber-cafes serve
to combine anonymity with cheapness, and Vietnam gets a mention on the
basis of a certain Ho Chi Minh City coffeeshop that's said to evoke on
Sunday mornings San Francisco's Castro district.
There's no doubt that Taiwan is at the forefront of both hi-tech usage
and gay awareness. A whole chapter is given over to Taiwan-born media
artist Shu Lea Cheang and her digital sci-fi porn film I.K.U.: A Japanese
Cyber-porn Adventure. This artist is described here as a "trickster agent
of digital capitalism," and her film, simultaneously erotic and
perplexing, is characterized in the following manner. "Ultimately, I.K.U.
severs the cumbersome tentacles of the wired 90s' cyborg entity and
initiates the body as a gigabite hard drive, self-driven by a programmed
corporate scheme."
As a friend of mine likes to say: "Is that so?"
This book will be less useful to those who actually know and use these
sites than to those unaware of their existence. The time-lag between
research and publication is unfortunate (the latest date I could find
even in the book's footnotes was 2000), but nonetheless if you don't know
what MOTSS BBS are ("member of the same sex bulletin board systems") and
want to find out, this book would be one place to start.
For the rest, who would have thought that there was a Thai Web site
called xq28.hypermart.net -- named after the scientific identity of the
supposed gay gene -- let alone that it seeks to promulgate an acceptance
of homosexuality within the parameters of Buddhist orthodoxy (on the
grounds that a man who pursues his own goals without disturbing others is
a moral being)?
Not that everything's gay-friendly even there. One non-gay contributor is
recorded as expressing the view that the site is a good one as it will
help gays meet each other, and so prevent them marrying women and
spreading their "faulty gene" through the rest of the population.
The book's main omission is any real discussion of China. None of its
authors appears to know much about gay uses of the Internet there, and
it's a pity. Even Hong Kong is largely absent. The editors admit this in
their introduction, and express the hope that more analysis will emerge
soon.
Gay Asia, as many of these authors argue, is not by any means a duplicate
of gay America. One highly instructive chapter, for instance, looks at
the popularity in the West of Japanese comics called "june" (pronounced
ju-neh). Few of their many non-Japanese fans can understand a word of
Japanese, and as a result their guesses at the plots are often woefully
off-beam. In one example, a Westerner understood a story as being about a
young boy who meets an older man, comes off drugs, then is abandoned, but
later happily meets up again with his former partner through a
prostitution agency. The actual story turns out to involve the secret
child of a famous actress who is likely to die after being hospitalized
in childhood with mental illness. He meets an older man through his
doctor's gay brother, and eventually dies a romantic death in the home
and the arms of his older admirer.
Japan generally provides much absorbing material for these academic
analysts. The existence of a huge female audience there for boy-love
stories is only one case in point. Beautiful young deaths (as in the
instance above) are also a national specialism. The implication of youths
too perfect ever to grow up has, of course, its parallels in the West,
but even so the emotional tone and the kind of interest aroused --
yearning for one's own lost youth in the West, whimsical and aesthetic
fascination in Japan -- are very different.
Also strikingly different are some Japanese sexual fantasies, as
witnessed here by a few small-scale reproductions from comic strips.
Views from inside the body outwards appear to be particular favorites
with these artists.
There are many variations across the region. One writer states that his
interviewees in Indonesia were unlikely to be on-line because 90 percent
of them earned US$60 a month or less. The Internet provides contacts, but
only if they have electricity (and, even less likely, access to a
computer). And in Singapore, described as a modern state with strongly
puritan characteristics, much attention is given to a gay Web site with
the seductive name "Yawning Bread."
Cellphones are also included in these writers' briefs but don't get much
attention. The editors regret the absence of any analysis of Manila's
unique gay text-messaging argot in their pages
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