It’s 11 p.m. and my friend and I are squashed into a
corner of a smoky Hanoi drinking establishment. Aqua’s “I’m a Barbie Girl”
thunders from the vintage sound system and a lady-boy is dancing on the pool
table. It feels like we’ve been catapulted back in time.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve always been a huge Aqua
fan. In fact there was that time at the European Music Awards after-party back
in 2000 when the bald man took quite a shine to me – pardon the bad pun — but
that was long ago, far away, totally offline and off the record.
This Vietnamese mosh-pit of singlets and sequins,
smoke and sweat known as GC Bar isn’t the most comfortable venue I’ve ventured
into, nor is it likely to pick up any safety awards anytime soon.
There are electrical wires protruding from the walls
and the Seventies silver twirling apparatus appears to have malfunctioned and
come loose from its chain.
Putting aside our fears of imminent electrocution or
death-by-disco ball, we can’t help but enjoy ourselves.
Bars like this – where gay, lesbian and transgender
people can sock back a few drinks openly – would have been unthinkable in
Vietnam just a few years ago.
This was the country that a decade back described
homosexuality as a ‘social evil’ perpetrated by ‘depraved foreigners’, along
with prostitution and drug use.
This is also the nation that a month ago set in
motion debate to become the first Southeast Asian country to legally recognize
same-sex relationships.
Things are changing very quickly in this part of the
world.
Vientiane, Laos, has its own equivalent of Hanoi’s
GC Bar. It’s called GQ, is roughly the size of a small corner store, and
features epilepsy-inducing strobe lights and about six dance tracks, speeded up
to make even Madonna sound like a chipmunk and repeated every 30 minutes on
high-rotation. But, what the hell, it’s a start.
Phnom Penh’s scene has been going for a while. One
of its original bars, Blue Chili, is doing a roaring trade. Admittedly, it took
them a while to grasp the concept of “inclusion” and when I visited with
Australian friends a few years back we were politely informed “lesbians must
sit in the upstairs section.” Fortunately, I’m told they’ve since scrapped this
segregated seating set-up!
Hanoi, Vientiane and even Yangon, Myanmar, held
their first ever pride celebrations this year. Granted, none was on the scale
of Sydney Mardi Gras or San Francisco or New York Pride.
But in Southeast Asia, dykes don’t roar down main
roads on motorbikes, nuns don’t dance and no-one shouts for equal rights.
In fact, no-one ‘shouts’ about anything. In this
part of the world, the GLBT revolution is a quiet one. But it is a revolution,
nonetheless.
And the driving force has been online, through
social media, via Internet sites that have gradually built up a presence, a
following and grown to become extremely influential.
I’ve spent the past week or so contacting the main
ones, including fridae.com, Yawning Bread and Utopia, minus about four days
when I succumbed to a horrid stomach bug followed by a major Wi-Fi crash, which
combined have left me feeling isolated, impotent and flaccid as well as
gastrically challenged.
But too much information, Craig. So, what have I
discovered?
At the risk of being branded a total blog-tease, I’m
still sifting through the enthusiastic responses to the questions I sent out
and it’s been suggested I “shorten my posts” and “make them more frequent.”
So sorry to leave you hanging – oh dear god, did I
really just write that? – but you will find out in part two, coming soon, I
promise, “No more excuses, no no, ‘cause you’ve heard them all before, a
hundred times or mooooooorreeeeeee……”
Stay Tuned!
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