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Introduction As a young, gay-identified Filipino who first visited Bangkok in 2002, my initiation into the gay life of the Thai capital came with a visit to the globally famous sauna, The Babylon.2 The images that played in my mind at the time overwhelmed me: the multi-storey building in Mediterranean-style and incorporating a hotel, gym, pool, restaurant, theme/fantasy rooms; an organized business operation that employed upward of twenty individuals. I had entered a highly urbanized Asian metropolis exposed to global cultures that seemed to have embraced Western-style, gay-themed business establishments in multiple sites across the city without resistance or hostility from the Thai public or opposition from the Buddhist clergy. I was struck by the number and variety of gay saunas across the city, as well as the other visibly vibrant and flourishing gay businesses that thrived with the support of local patrons and Asian and Western tourists, offering gay men multiple sites for interaction and networking and avenues for sexual contact. To someone who had grown up in a relatively conservative Christian environment in Manila, Bangkok was a gay Mecca. In the years I spent studying Bangkok gay spaces and the performances of Thai gay identities, working towards an M.A. thesis, I came to know more about the lives of Thai gay men and to realize that, for them, Bangkok was not the gay paradise I thought I saw (see also Jackson 1999a). While conducting my fieldwork, my interviews with Thai men who frequent gay saunas and other gay venues revealed how adventures in these places were not as unimpeded as I had initially thought them to be. My research revealed that my informants spent considerably more time in the sauna than in any other gay-oriented venue. They told tales of how they met men in the saunas, the different ways they solicited sex with other sauna patrons, the various negotiations over sexual acts to be 5 Encounters in the Sauna Exploring Gay Identity and Power Structures in Gay Places in Bangkok1 Nikos Dacanay Nikos Dacanay 100 performed, and the differences between one sauna and another. But while saunas had become places where informants formed networks of friends and acquaintances and organized other gay-oriented activities, they were also places where gay men had experienced rejection and alienation because of their class or ethnic background, body type, or gender behaviour. After following the activities of my informants closely, it became evident that the gay sauna, and other gay-oriented venues in Bangkok, are highly mediated sites. The movements in and around gay saunas are structured not only by temporal and spatial factors but are also mediated by Thai cultural discourses related to class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. However, while their navigation and interaction with men in these places were framed by strong mediating factors, my informants were nonetheless able to find ways to circumvent these structured places and spaces. Within these complex processes, conceptions of the self as gay are performed. In this chapter I consider the relationship between the structures of power inherent in the movements in gay places and spaces in Bangkok and the performances of gay identity. The constituted images and reputations of The Babylon and Farose, the two gay saunas that are the main focus of this study, point to the power structures operating in these contested and constructed sites. I argue that, for my informants, being gay was fundamentally related to the histories of personal accounts of sexual and non-sexual experiences in and between these places, the voyages and movements becoming, as it were, a ground for performing the gay self. In this study I caution the reader about the different systems and logics of gender and sexuality in Thailand. In the West, “gay” often carries political connotations, usually implying self-regard or pride in one’s sexual and gender orientation. In Thailand, as in other parts of non-Western world, the use of the word “gay” is informed by social and class positionalities and culturally discursive constructs of sex and gender. According to Jackson (1995), some men in Thailand identified themselves as gay as early as 1965. Morris (1997) proposes that this gay identity, including Thai lesbian identity, points to a fundamental shift in cultural paradigms, from the traditional Thai system of three genders to a Western discourse that posits a sexual binary.3 Because I am conscious that the word “gay” carries Western connotations of sexual-identity politics, which I cannot presume...

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