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A few years ago, I had a conversation that went like this:
LostSoul: I accidentally slept with a guy, I thought he was a girl.
JY: Yeah, I hear stories about that all the time.
LostSoul: The thing is, I can’t get her our of my mind. I want to see her again. Does that mean I’m gay?
JY: It doesn’t mean you’re gay. It just means you like fucking guys.
I think the Thai audience was more open-minded about that sort of performance than a US audience would have been. I wonder whether a similar act has even been attempted in the States.
There has to be discussion in Thai circles about the complexities of modern sexuality. In America, for example, there’s long been the question of what pronoun to use when referring to, say, a RuPaul drag queen (many prefer “she,” although as Eddie Izzard points out, plenty of transvestites “fancy women” and would prefer to be referred to as “he”). Is your Thai good enough to make sense of the sort of language the judges were using when addressing, and talking about, the performer?
By the way, that judge on the far left (from our point of view) reminded me of Korean pop singer Kim Geon-mo.
What a talent, really very natural and pleasing to watch and listen to. Kevin is right….Thai people are way more relaxed about sexual orientation than people are here and you could tell that the audience was both impressed and delighted by the performance. Nice.
That’s the thing, it’s not as complex here because it’s accepted… The majority of discussions I hear center around why. In fact, many of the people around here say it’s fashionable to appear gay or cross dress, especially for students. All I can say is that in the humanities, male students are outnumbered more than five-to-one in their classes (and maybe even twice that depending on the class), and a significant number of them do not appear to be content dressing as men.
Actually, my Thai isn’t good enough to pick up on the nuances, but I could understand most of what they were saying. There’s a roughly translated transcript here:
http://www.asylum.co.uk/2011/03/15/video-transgender-singer-with-two-voices-thailands-got-talent
Oh, and one of the Koreans I lived with at my university dorm yeeeears ago was a big Kim Gunmo fan. He told me Kim was the “Korean Stevie Wonder.” Sometime later, I found out he had absolutely no idea who Stevie Wonder was, so I made up a story about a poor black Mormon living in Korea singing for Reverend Moon… I’m sure the propagation of that story greatly helped Korea-US relations.