GREEK LOVE IN SIAM
Little, if anything, seems to be known about Greek love in Thailand (as Siam first became known in English in 1939) before the twentieth century, when the accounts of various foreign visitors show they found it easy to have sexual relationships with local boys, sometimes with the knowledge and approval of the boys' families, and that they noticed no social disapproval. The highly libidinous English writer Somerset Maugham, whose sexual passions were strongest for youths in their late teens, first stayed Siam in 1923 and remarked that “the Siamese were the only people on earth with an intelligent attitude about such matters.”[1] Roger Peyrefitte in Notre Amour (1967)[2] and Parker Rossman in Boys for Sale (1969) and Sexual Experience between Men and Boys (1976) recorded some of the experiences of the more truly boysexual. Gary Shellhart wrote a novel, Kite Music (1988), about a young American boy-lover teaching in Thailand in 1967. Sounding autobiograpical, and clearly written by someone deeply familiar with Thai culture, this probably offers the best insight into Thai attitudes surrounding Greek love before the advent of mass tourism.
One might suppose Greek love would have flourished in Thailand, considering both the tolerance of it Thailand had in common with most of the Far East, and her adhesion to Buddhism, which meant that large numbers of boys passed years living in monasteries as novices under the care and mentorship of monks forbidden female companionship. Kite Music does in fact portray one deep love affair between monk and novice that had transformed typically into a close lifelong friendship.
However, the lack of evidence suggests Greek love never featured much in the popular imagination. The key to this may be the strong tradition of katoey, adult male transvestites who, amongst other things played the female parts in Siamese popular drama, in the same way boys did in Shakespeare's England. It has often been observed that homosexuality involving transsexuals has historically been its most common form apart from Greek love, but the two forms have rarely flourished side by side. Katoey probably go back a long way. Siamese culture was heavily influenced by the Khmer Empire, to which Siam had belonged until 1238, and where katoey were recorded in 1296-7.[3] They existed at any rate by 1867, as “Anna Leonowens”, British royal governess of the King’s children until that year, wrote of encountering them within the walls of the royal palace:
Here were women disguised as men, and men in the attire of women, hiding vice of every vileness and crime of every enormity—at once the most disgusting, the most appalling, and the most unnatural that the heart of man has conceived.[4]
To whatever extent there were in fact love affairs between men and boys in the country, confirmation that Greek love had not caught on as an idea in latish-twentieth century Thailand comes from the only Thai source known to us for pre-1993 attitudes, the letters to and from "Uncle Go Paknam", a newspaper advice columnist for homosexuals. Two of these concerned Greek love and bore its hallmarks: both concerned boys of fourteen and men, who, according to the boys' accounts, genuinely loved them, and they were patently asymmetric: the men took the dominant roles both sexually, pedicating the boys, and in looking after them. Yet despite this, Uncle Go, with exceptional knowledge of homosexual practice in Thailand, showed in his replies not the slightest awareness of a distinction between Greek love and androphilia.
The first known law restricting Greek love in Siam was one of 1903 making all male and female homosexuality illegal as part of King Chulalongkorn's efforts to modernise Siam by promoting European values. As the law was apparently never once enforced against anyone, it might be more accurate to say it was intended to dupe the two colonial powers who had gobbled up all of Siam’s neighbours into believing she was “civilising” herself without need of annexation by them. Chulalonkorn’s will as an absolute ruler had to determine policy and he had not imbibed the Christian bigotry of his frightful, aforementioned governess: besides fathering seventy-six children by his nine consorts and 145 mostly-teenage concubines, he also, during his ground-breaking and carefully planned tour of Europe, visited Wilhelm von Gloeden, the photographer famous for his sensual photos of nude local boys, at his studio in Taormina in Sicily.

The dropping of the theoretical prohibition of 1903 from the Penal Code in 1956 (at a time when the country was incidentally subject to its harshest right-wing dictatorhip ever) was thus hardly noticed. For the next forty-three years, any restriction on sex between men and willing boys was at worst theoretical: ambiguous wording in the legal clause on the age of consent for girls (raised from 12 to 13 in 1931 and from 13 to 15 in 1987) left open the question of whether it applied also to boys.[5]
The fast rise of mass tourism to Thailand in the 1980s radically changed the situation. Laidback local attitudes to sex added to generally warm hospitality led to the country gaining an almost unique reputation for sexual adventure among global tourists, an unusually gentle and fun-driven form of prostitution being offered by the young and beautiful of both sexes that was at first found appealing by foreign men in general. As this period coincided precisely with that in which severe repression of Greek love was rising in North America and western Europe, the main sources of tourism, boysexual visitors reacted in much the manner of the earliest European visitors to Tahiti two centuries earlier. Their attitudes and behaviour and, above all, their euphoria, are perfectly captured in A Dangerous Love (reviewed here), the lively memoir of Stephen Nicholson, an English music teacher who began visiting the country in 1986 and was so enraptured that he immersed himself in the language and culture in order to get closer to the boys.
Such successful escape from the misery imposed by its new dogma was hardly what the child sex abuse industries of the tourists’ homelands had in mind and the end of the Cold War meant the end of restraint in bullying third world countries to adopt the mores of the anglophone countries. Nemesis soon therefore followed. A carrot-and-stick approach to the Thai authorities, already embarassed by the excesses the tourist boom had occasioned, soon led to harsh new legislation which effectively outlawed sex with anyone under eighteen, the theoretical age of consent firmly set at fifteen in 1993 for boys as well as girls being supplemented by laws brutally punishing such things as “taking minors from their parents” for sexual purposes (even when the parents had encouraged the taking). Mutually lucrative alliances between NGOs and local police to coax and milk foreign funding for suppression were soon effective in ending the boy sex scene for foreigners, whilst amongst the mostly bemused local population, the new legislation tended thereafter to operate simply as a useful new vehicle for occasional blackmail.
[1] Wayne R. Dynes (editor), Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (Garland, 1990) II p. 1289.
[2] “In the Far East,” Peyrefitte was asked by his boy lover in the translation by John Stefan (page 25), “are there boys everywhere there ready to make love?" – “Boys and girls,” replied Peyrefitte, who visited Bangkok in 1962 according to his biographer Antoine Deléry (Roger Peyrefitte, le sulfureux, France, 2011, p. 219).
[3] Zhou Daguan, A Record of Cambodia, The Land and Its People, translated by Peter Harris (Bangkok, 2007), Chapter 6.
[4] Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (London: 1870) p. 94. Her description is in tune with the persona of a prim lady that she adopted, but the mendacity, plebeian and (in Victorian terms) unsavoury background of Anne Owens, as she was really called, was exposed by W. S. Bristowe in his biography of her son, Louis and the King of Siam (London, 1976) pp. 23-31.
Owens’s disgust at katoey does not seem ever to have been shared by Siamese heterosexuals, who seem rather to have regarded their antics as sanuk (fun). Such. for example, was the public attitude in the 1970s, when the Minister of Defence won the national contest for best female dresser. This would have provoked a very different reaction in most other countries of the time.
[5] Its application to boys was finally ruled out in a court case soon before the clear, new repressive legislation of 1993.
Comments
If you would like to leave a comment on this webpage, please e-mail it to greek.love.tta@gmail.com, mentioning in the subject line either the title or the url of the page so that the editor can add it.
Comments powered by CComment