Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys

Book excerpt: Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand offers methods that will help social workers, researchers, and students create HIV/AIDS intervention services for gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals in or from Thailand. Many of these methods can also be used by practitioners or HIV/AIDS educators in North America and developing countries to address issues of culturally diverse clientele. In response to Western and Thai sexuality studies that fail to accurately represent the diverse sexualities of Thailand, this book discusses and describes certain factors that need to be taken into consideration when developing intervention programs. Demonstrating how cultural and social factors influence services, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys will help you provide clients with effective and relevant services. Drawing attention to Eurocentric ideology that may hinder cross-cultural collaboration for Thai-Western service provisions, this book offers you information that will help you understand how cultural, political, and economic systems shape sexuality and gender roles in Thai society. Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys provides you with the necessary knowledge for providing successful services, including: how Thai sexualities are identified by examining the meaning of terms such as “toms” (masculine Thai lesbians), “dee” (feminine-identified women who have relations with other women), “kathoey” (males that dress like women and wear make-up), or “lady boys” (transsexual or transvestite males) how Thai society actually defines ”having sex” and recognizing the differences from Western connotations of sex to effectively teach individuals about the risk of HIV/AIDS ways Western views of confidentiality and privacy differ from Thai views in order to understand why individuals hesitate to get tested for or seek counselling about HIV/AIDS the relationship between occupation and sexual identity in movies and magazines that reveal how sexuality is characterized in Thailand the unique social identity of “toms” and how Thai society labels what is masculine and feminine reasons for hiding sexual identity, such as rejection, fear of stereotypes, and having a relationship that is viewed by society as wrong and meaningless protecting commercial sex workers (CSW) from infection by developing culturally appropriate interventions One of the only books to address HIV/AIDS issues of gay and transgender individuals in Thailand, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys will help you increase awareness about HIV/AIDS and create successful intervention programs for clients.