Queer political activism in Asia has a genuine capacity to change public attitudes, to institutionalize queer-friendly bureaucratic procedures, and to see the enactment of legal measures that provide a basis for guaranteeing equality of opportunity and freedom from discrimination. However, queer political activism may achieve these successes under both authoritarian and democratic governments. While the emergence of modern queer worlds seems to require a civil society that is at least partially autonomous, a relative degree of press and media freedom, and a market unfettered by moralistic interventions, there is no direct relationship between Western-styled political democracy and the growth of new LgBT cultures and communities in Asia. Democratically elected governments that respond to moral panics may institute conservative anti-queer policies, while unelected governments seeking to construct an image of legitimacy may court LGBT support. Thai queer activists have achieved some degree of success by avoiding direct association with, or support for, any individual political player or form of government. This continued to be the case in the confrontations, at times violent, initiated by yellow-shirted opponents and red-shirted supporters of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2008, 2009, and 2010. In the closing years of the decade, LGBT activism took a back seat to the much larger and at times bloody political contests that polarized Thai society.
In Thailand’s highly volatile and unpredictable political environment, where the fortunes of any given politician or political party may change overnight, LGBT activists have advanced their cause by carefully avoiding tying their rainbow flag to the mast of any political grouping. Instead, significant effort has been put into building strategic alliances with queer-friendly media figures, reporters, and bureaucrats, with the last at times able to maintain comparatively stable policies and administrative arrangements in government agencies despite almost constant and polemically intense political instability.
The view that Thailand has lacked LGBT “political” activism until relatively recently in part emerges from a Eurocentric misperception of what constitutes queer politics. Given the long history of political instability in Thailand, Thai queers have put considerably more energy into lobbying the bureaucracy and counteracting negative media stereotyping than in lobbying politicians, whether they be elected members of parliament or military appointees. When Thai LGBT activism is seen in terms of the fields of local power that are most immediately amenable to the influence of Thai queers, rather than through Western conceptions that equate queer politics with engaging legislatures and changing legal statutes, Thailand is revealed as having a considerable history of queer engagement with and resistance to the forms of institutional power that have negatively affected the lives of lesbians, kathoeys, and gay men. In this, Thai queer NGOs present a microcosm of the much larger development of extra-governmental civil society organizations and movements in Thailand over the past two decades. When governments have been paralyzed or, as so often, in crisis, progressive social movements have turned to the mass media, the Internet, and sympathetic scholars, public intellectuals, and bureaucrats to build coalitions that have at times achieved real successes—despite, and not because of, governments.
Peter A. Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century Boom,” in Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights, 2011
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