This book tells the stories of three men who constructed a “magical reality” for dissenting views of manhood in Southeast Asia. It examines the connections between gay men's struggle for public voice, representations of manhood in colonial and nationalist imagery, and the deployment of sound, light, and rhythm as a communication strategy to achieve resistance and social change. The book blends narrative journalism's focus on specific people and their histories with academic inquiry about masculinity and its expression. The homosexual German artist Walter Spies created representations of Bali a ... More

This book tells the stories of three men who constructed a “magical reality” for dissenting views of manhood in Southeast Asia. It examines the connections between gay men's struggle for public voice, representations of manhood in colonial and nationalist imagery, and the deployment of sound, light, and rhythm as a communication strategy to achieve resistance and social change. The book blends narrative journalism's focus on specific people and their histories with academic inquiry about masculinity and its expression. The homosexual German artist Walter Spies created representations of Bali as an aesthetic paradise in the 1930s, when a generation saw the end of colonial empires in two world wars. He contrasts his representations of the Asian male body with those of the Aryan male created in his homeland. A Thai best known as Khun Toc lived when the decades of nationalism that follow World War II bring new economic development and social turmoil in Bangkok. In the 1980s, he forged an erotic magical reality at a famous gay establishment called Babylon, fusing ideas about manhood that explore themes of Thai male sexuality which stretch to the 1920s, when the country was ruled by a king who promoted Western ideas of monogamous heterosexual romance while resisting marriage and surrounding himself with male comrades. A Singaporean named Stuart Koe, born in the 1970s, lived when that island's government began to train its citizens to create an “intelligent paradise” from a deft use of computer technology.