Shine's whole trailer looks amazing, but I'm already so excited by/interested in this one shot of Apo's character, Trin.
The book that he's reading is the 1965 work Toward an Understanding of Homosexuality by Dr. Daniel Cappon.
Dr. Cappon was a professor of psychiatry who worked at the University of Toronto. Here's what the preface of his book says:
There are no homosexuals -- only people with homosexual problems. The idea of a third sex is as antiquated as the last century. No person with a homosexual problem, however extensive or deep, is merely an aberrant creature, a totally pathological specimen. Such a person remains, first and foremost, a person.
However, according to the a site covering the history of Lesbian and Gay liberation in Toronto (LGLC), many of Dr. Cappon's works also include the argument that homosexuality can be cured. For instance,
In 1968, during an address to the Ontario College of Family Physicians he stated that eighty percent of homosexuals who seek professional treatment are helped, and half of these are cured. In 1973, Cappon participated in a debate on homosexuality on CBC radio, where he warned that homosexuals were dangerous because they attracted others to homosexuality. In October 1973, Cappon wrote an article entitled 'The Homosexual Hoax: this aberration is not a right' and generated a great deal of negative response.
I've been reading Sanchai Chotirosseranee and Atit Pongpanit's amazing chapter on the "Thai Film Archive and Early Thai Queer Cinema" in The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas recently, which talks a lot about how the 60s were important time period in terms of queer history in Thailand.
In the 1950s, the Thai press began reporting extensively on cross-dressing kathoeys. Because of these new normalized forms of gender difference between masculine and feminine, there has been a notable rise in the creation of gender and sexual identity categories in the mid-1960s. These new categories...emerged in public discourse and become the basis of new homosexual and transgender identities and cultures’ formations in various Thai cities, particularly Bangkok.
Jackson (2003) further points out that in the 1960s, Thai physicians and psychologists began to draw upon Western biomedical discourses to negatively address the issues of cross-dressing and homosexuality as “abnormal” and “deviant” (pg. 530)
In the trailer, Trin is asked by a student why foreign-educated intellectuals rely on Western theories to explain everyday life. Later, he's then shown reading a book that features Western ideas/medical discourses surrounding sexuality- the one by Dr. Cappon.
It's possible that these sections are disconnected, but I'm really excited by the idea that the series is going to grapple with topics related to sexuality, Western influence(s), and politics- perhaps separately, but perhaps maybe all together.
I'm so excited for the show just from the brief shots that have been shown in the trailer- I'm really looking forward to seeing the different ways that they touch on so many different topics!
