Overview

"This book depicts gay paradises in Southeast Asia and the men who created them. It studies the obstacles gay men have faced in securing a voice as citizens, and how they used images of paradise in Bali, Bangkok, and Singapore to create a sense of refuge, construct homes for themselves, and dissent from typical notions of manhood and masculinity. For gender studies and Southeast Asian studies, it provides a ""queer reading"" of Walter Spies, a gay German painter who in the 1930s helped turn Bali into an island imagined as an ideal male aesthetic state. Secondly, the book provides a historical account of the absorption of Western notions of romantic heterosexual monogamy in Thailand during the reign of King Rama VI and the resistance to those notions expressed through an architectural paradise called Babylon founded by a Thai known as Khun Toc. Finally, it describes the ""cyber-paradise"" of Fridae.com created by a young Singaporean named Stuart Koe. Collectively, the study examines the pursuit of sexual justice, the ideologies of manhood they challenged, and the geographic and online spaces they created."

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9789888083244

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An innovative, highly readable, nonfictional account of masculinity and gay male sexuality in Southeast Asia since the early 20th century... Highly recommended. Choice 9/1/12

The last years of the Qing dynasty were a time of rumors, adventures, and mysterious opportunities for the polyglot inhabitants of Beijing. The memoir written in 1911 by the self-styled 'Princess' Der Ling, lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager between 1903 and 1905, has always presented baffling problems concerning accuracy and interpretation. Imperial Masquerade is an ingenious rethinking of the available evidence, and presents an absorbing account of how Der Ling survived at Court, and what it must have been like to work for such a formidable ruler. -- Jonathan Spence The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon Mountain

Author Information

Gary L. Atkins is a professor of communication at Seattle University in the United States. A literary journalist and scholar, he specializes in gay media and communication issues, as well as in freedom of expression law. His previous book, Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2003 and received numerous accolades for its scholarship and quality of writing.

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