Customer Reviews

Gays and Lesbians in Asia and the Pacific: Social and Human Services

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As the title suggests, this book juggles three balls: 1) social services, 2) gay men and lesbians, and 3) the Pacific region. As you can guess, there is probably little writing out there. So I am pleased that the editors compiled this work. However, there is a way in which this book scratches the surface and may seem too brief to take seriously.

You can tell that the editors worked hard to balance opposing dynamics. Some say that gay studies books fail to account for other dynamics. In this book, most chapters start out by describing the economy, history, and other broader issues in a nation before they speak of gay men and lesbians involved. The highly academic sections may frustrate everyday readers. However, most chapters quickly move to the easy-to-understand points. The chapters are well-written, but they are rather short compared to so many other books, including those in gay studies.

Altman, Manasalan, Foucault, and many others have written on the tenuous nature of a gay identity and community. You can see that intensely here when comparing the Pilipino male chapter to the Australian lesbian one. Pilipinos debate whether to use the term "gay" or an indigenous term, whether to focus on or marginalize gender-benders, whether to use English or an island language in materials, whether to party or to protest, etc. The Australian lesbians interviewed strongly identified as lesbian, loved that term, and found solace in other lesbians more than their own parents or children.

What the chapters all have in common is only the region of the world in which they are located. In so many ways, this book was really just two paltry pieces glued together. The white, Westernized, developed Australia has little in common with the yellow, developing, formerly colonized Asia, even as Australia takes in a growing number of Asian immigrants. There is a way in which this book still renders homosexuality as a "Western phenomenon" by focusing so much on Australia. To have one country represent more than half of the chapters is not really diverse. Further, it is great that lesbians are included, but there is only one chapter on them. This may feel like tokenization to some readers. Further, Asian lesbians almost never come up at all in this work. To the book's credit, socioeconomic class comes up often. This was refreshing as an American reader whose country members often falsely believe that "everyone is middle-class." The chapters' contributors are a diverse mix of Asian and white, female and male.