...Tom Boellstorff Copyright © 1999 by Duke University Press 1999 THE PERFECT PATH Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia Tom Boellstorff Jna 1997 ad for Ciputra Hotels that appeared in the Indonesian national airline’s in-flight magazine, a smiling Balinese dancer...

..., and cultures — that is, as a nation self-consciously forging an Indonesian iden- tity across distance and difference. Indonesians who self-identify as gay and lesbi — terms clearly derived from English and linked with a Western internation- alism — seem to belong to the scale of the global...

..., languages, and cultures — that is, as a nation self-consciously forging an Indonesian iden- tity across distance and difference. Indonesians who self-identify as gay and lesbi — terms clearly derived from English and linked with a Western internation- alism — seem to belong to the scale...

..., and cultures — that is, as a nation self-consciously forging an Indonesian iden- tity across distance and difference. Indonesians who self-identify as gay and lesbi — terms clearly derived from English and linked with a Western internation- alism — seem to belong to the scale of the global...

..., and cultures — that is, as a nation self-consciously forging an Indonesian iden- tity across distance and difference. Indonesians who self-identify as gay and lesbi — terms clearly derived from English and linked with a Western internation- alism — seem to belong to the scale of the global...

..., and cultures — that is, as a nation self-consciously forging an Indonesian iden- tity across distance and difference. Indonesians who self-identify as gay and lesbi — terms clearly derived from English and linked with a Western internation- alism — seem to belong to the scale of the global...

... and disparate subjectivities.14 Although queer is not used (yet) in Indo- nesia, it is available to Indonesians via the Internet and at the queer interna- tional conferences they attend.15 In a transnational world there are no borders or neat boundaries that contain particular words. Nor, as Ruth Vanita...

... KKLGN (Working Group for Indonesian Lesbians and Gay Men) has groups in about eleven cities.’ Films and novels with gay themes have begun appearing, especially in east Asia.’ Thailand has the most developed gay infrastructure in southeast Asia, including a Thai gay press (clearly not aimed...

... from other national contexts such as Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, and Spain, where same-sex marriage (as opposed to civil union) has been legal- ized — or from places like Indonesia, where the idea of same-sex marriage brings forth from gay and lesbi Indonesians a range of reactions, many...

.... A Coincidence of Desires opens at night in an Indonesian park. Here men who call themselves gay in the Indonesian sense of the term and who are also aware of the term’s use outside their national borders mingle and gossip and share the stories of their lives (1, 8). Boellstorff, using...

... romantic and erotic relationships among 186 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong that follow the “principle of hetero- sexuality” (39) by pairing off women in masculine (tomboi) and feminine (femme) couples. Sim’s conclusions...

... of research on Indonesian gay, male-to-female (MTF) transgender (waria), and lesbian (lesbi) cultures, Tom Boellstorff writes, “A frequent Western misunderstanding is that gay tourism or international gay organizations have played a significant role in the translocation of ‘gay’ subjectivi- ties...

...” (beauty) take on culturally specific meanings for Filipino gay men and examines the reso- nances, dissonances, and contradictions between uses of gay versus bakla, a Fili- pino term that (very roughly in the manner of Thai kathoey or Indonesian waria) signifies a kind of effeminate male, male...

... of Indonesian slaves were cross-pollinating with the tongues of various French, German, and especially Dutch sailors and settlers, combining and creolizing to form what later emerged as Afrikaans. To accomplish this in practi- cal terms (and thankfully not succumb to the extreme...

... for Gordon and Breach’s refusal to print Daymond’s pornographic piece. Censorship in some parts of Southeast Asia is, I gather, entirely routine. And it sometimes makes international news: in a widely reported incident in 2002 the Malaysian, Bangladeshi, and Indonesian govern- ments banned an issue...

... of understanding of masculinity/gender, he entirely missed the Indonesian tombois (as well as children) who may have been watching the cockfights with male friends or adult relatives. In light of these gaps, what at first appears to be a highly normative “het- erosexual men’s space” (Filipino seamen...

... located within a similar framework, have situated the process of archival research within the savory rhetoric of consumption. In her theoretically rich Along the Archival Grain, Ann Stoler, referring to an early twentieth-­century novel about colonial Java’s rising Indonesian nationalist movement...

... subjects,” tongzhi or comrade subjectivity in rela- tion to Chinese postsocialism, and most recently, Lucetta Kam’s study of Shanghai lalas, who negotiate multiple spheres of “public correctness.”25 Similarly, other works on Indonesian tomboys across islands in the archipelago and Thai toms and dees...

... in South Beach, Miami, in 2005. The twelve- thousand- foot gallery space is divided into many smaller sections that included Indonesian (Ethnographic African and Thailand, Fetish and Masturbation, Domina- tion, and, in adjacent rooms, Gay and Lesbian (see fig. 1). Scholars of civic museums...

...; in Croatian, homo­ seksualnost; in Czech, homosexualita; in Danish, homoseksualitet; in Dutch, homosexualiteit; in Estonian, homoseksuaalsus; in Finnish, homoseksuaalisuus; in Hungarian, homoszexualitás; in Indonesian, homoseksualitas; in Italian, omoses- sualità; in Japanese...