Learning about LGBTQ tourism in Thailand

[AlexCan]

Hello everyone,

I am new on this forum, and not exactly sure if I can post this here.

I am presently doing a research with KU Leuven University on LGBTQ tourism in Thailand. The goal of my research is to better understand what LGBTQ tourists do when in Thailand, encounters with local Thai LGBT community, how the traveler felt about the perceptions of Thai people regarding homosexuality, etc. The final purpose if to understand is LGBT tourism can influence more friendly LGBT policies from government in Thailand.

To do that, I need your help. If you have some time, I would love to be able to have interviews (it can be through phone or written depending on your preference) regarding your personal experience as LGBT tourists in Thailand, or as LGBT Thai person.

Let me know if you are available / interested. It is highly appreciated. Unfortunately research on LGBT issues are very rare in the academic, and I hope we can raise knowledge on the subject.

Cheers!
Alex

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[Marc K]

Hi Alex,

Sounds like an exciting research area. I am sure you are aware of the few books which have been written on this topic. I don't have the citations handy but would be happy to try to dig them up for you if it would be helpful.

As for the research area itself, since I am a professor, I will say what I tell all my graduate students:

1. Keep your research area narrow, focused and clear. From your message about it was not clear what you would like to study.
2. Develop hypotheses which you want to test in your research. Is your null hypothesis that you don't really believe Thailand is welcoming to LGBTQ tourists even though it might tolerate them? Or ...? So what are you hypotheses?
3. As for interviews with forum members, these need to be rather structured (vs. "free form chats") if you actually do want to collection conformable data from the respondents. Have you developed at least an outline of your interview strategy?

Thanks and good luck!
Marc

PS I miss the chocolateries, patisseries, friteries, gaufreries of Belgium! Yumm!

[a447]

Welcome, Alex!

That's a very interesting area of research, and given our clientele, you've probably come to the right place for information.

Your first 5 posts are moderated and you are unable to send or receive private messages during that time.

I hope you end up publishing some of your results here in the future.

[pong]

Hi+sawasdee. Could you first metnion what studies you have seen already. there ARE-in english, mostly from Australia, though they are partly quite dated-from before the www periods. It would also interest me if you do only TH or other countries in ASEAN-area or even further away-the notorious ones for such forms of tourism (think Brasil, currently Colombia, etc.). You may want to contact the ILEA-archives (or so, I am too old to keep up with that ever changing letters all the time) info-bank at Amsterdam OBA.
Who is the responsible prof there at KUL?
Personally I think to be quite familair with doing such studies (for the licenciaat?) and understand they may take years to come to some form of publication.
En blijf (blaaf op vlaams?) gezond.
PS besides this there are still 2 other functioning fora on Gay TH, though many, many of he posters/readers here also post/read on those. They are gayguides/forum and gaybuttonthai (mostly centered on Pattaya).

[AlexCan]

Hello and thank you all for your answers.

Indeed, there are more and more studies on LGBT tourism in general (even though this number stays little). But the ones on Thailand date back from quite a while. My research focus only on Thailand, but it would be interesting to do comparisons between different countries once more has been published.

As for my research area, I focus on the impacts of LGBT tourism on both the local community (micro) and the policies on a national level (macro). I was hoping to get more interviews before developing my hypotheses. I did develop an outline for semi-structured interviews, if some forum members would be interested into partipating in such interview please let me know. At this stage, these interviews aim to understand your experience as a gay tourist in Thailand as, your perceptions, encounters with locals, etc. No need to be a specialist on the subject.

Cheers!
Alex

[sglad]

Hello everyone,

I am new on this forum, and not exactly sure if I can post this here.

I am presently doing a research with KU Leuven University on LGBTQ tourism in Thailand. The goal of my research is to better understand what LGBTQ tourists do when in Thailand, encounters with local Thai LGBT community, how the traveler felt about the perceptions of Thai people regarding homosexuality, etc. The final purpose if to understand is LGBT tourism can influence more friendly LGBT policies from government in Thailand.

To do that, I need your help. If you have some time, I would love to be able to have interviews (it can be through phone or written depending on your preference) regarding your personal experience as LGBT tourists in Thailand, or as LGBT Thai person.

Let me know if you are available / interested. It is highly appreciated. Unfortunately research on LGBT issues are very rare in the academic, and I hope we can raise knowledge on the subject.

Cheers!
Alex

Welcome to the forum.

Perhaps you can tell us a bit about your personal and academic background and whether you've been to Thailand and, if you have, the length of time you've spent there and the kind of experiences and interactions you've had with the locals and tourists. This will help us to get to know you better and understand your work. I can't imagine not being not the ground in Thailand for this kind of research as there are ethical issues at stake.

What is your research for? An honours thesis, a masters dissertation, a PhD, a short journal article, a long journal article, an edited book, what?

You also need to provide a definition of what you mean by LGBTQ tourism? The presumption is that LGBQT tourism is different from...err...straight tourism? And are you assuming that there is homogeniety among the individual L G B T Q components when it comes to their tourism objectives and goals? Are you talking about sex tourism? I can tell you off hand that while Thailand is popular with LGBTQ tourists, the majority are not there for the sex trade but are there for the sun, the sea, the food, the temples, the shopping, the spas, pop Buddhism and spiritual healing and last, but not least, the drugs. Not that different from non-familial straight tourists when you think about it.

If the target of your research is older white gay sex tourists - leaving out the LBTQ and younger gays in your data gathering - then you've come to the right place. In my three years on this forum, I've discovered that the majority of its participants go to Thailand to have relatively cheap and available sex with Thai men young enough to be their sons and grandsons. I'm not judging but just putting it in context for you. And some of them like it so much that they've decided to move there to become sex tourists all-year round. Are you going to include this latter group in your research too?

As you're planning on conducting interviews I'm assuming that your research is qualitative. This is going to be a monumental task requiring a lot of time for the interviews and their transcription (as opposed to just filling up a questionnaire). And are you seriously expecting to influence policy with your findings? Do you have any idea how the government works in Thailand? Firstly, any fact finding or impact assessment would have to be at their behest. In other words, they will invite you if they think you're famous AND pliant enough (ie willing to corroborate outcomes that they already have in mind). Secondly, in order to influence policy, you need to present QUANTITATIVE, not qualitative data. In plain English, they want to see NUMBERS, huge convincing numbers, not a few interviews from a very niche and dying group.

One last thing. I'm curious as to why you're doing this now, when the world is changing very quickly and tourism is probably the last thing on most people's minds. Or are you perhaps just feeling things out to see where you can go with this?

[AlexCan]

Hey sglad,

The present research is for a masters dissertation, but also serves as ground for a PhD starting in a few months. I've been in Thailand a few years ago for tourism only, and I was supposed to be in Thailand now to conduct the field research. Unfortunately, I had to postpone my fieldtrip in the country because of the Covid. And this is the reason why I'm using this forum. I would have preferred to conduct field research, but instead I am using interviews with people in Thailand and will complement with a fieldtrip as soon as possible.

As for the content of the study, it is indeed a qualitative research. I didn't say that I was planning of influencing policies. What I what to find out is rather if LGBT tourism could influence policy. In the sense that LGBT tourists are such a important market that is sough off by many organisations and government, I'm researching if it is the case for Thailand. Is LGBT tourism some sort of pink washing in Thailand? In the sense that the marketing campaigns are great, but there is not much rights given to LGBT people (even though it is not illegal either, some sort of invisibility).

As for what specific I use within the LGBT is more the LGB. I did not include trans because I think that it is a very specific field that deserve a specific analysis. As for gay / lesbians, indeed there are strong differences since both gender and sexuality influence our travel patterns. Most of the literature focus on gay male and most respondents that I found at the moment are men as well.

As for the demographic covering the research, I do not have an age specific. However, I am focusing on Western tourists. The reason for that is to understand how Western understandings of gayness influence the Thai notions of gayness. Few studies have showed some transformations of local LGBTQ communities accross the world because of globalization of tourism. However, I do not cover specifically sex tourism. Some studies have shown that gay men indeed have more sex in holidays than straight people, but my analysis is not centered on sex tourism specifically, even though it can be a part of the travel experience.

Hope this helps getting a clearer idea of my research.

[sglad]

Morning, Alex.

Thank you for the clarification and expansion of your original post. It does make things a bit clearer. You have some interesting ideas and I appreciate the fact your research is still at a preliminary stage and you will narrow your focus once you have more data. How long is a master's thesis at your university (number of words)?

I think you've come across a couple of research gaps with the pinkwashing idea and the impact of western tourists on the local LGBTQ community. Personally, I don't think the Thais are guilty of pinkwashing in the Israeli sense but they have a tendency of suppressing any democratically elected government that comes up and the military has been accused of human rights abuses particularly in the deep south. Perhaps pinkwashing is also used to cover up a largely feudal, class-ridden society where social mobility is still very difficult and local attitudes towards gays are ambivalent and dependent on class, economics and even ethnicity.

Just beware of the tendency of western academics (and tourists) to extract and extrapolate what they see in the fleshpots of Thailand, mash it up with some pop Buddhism, and then turn it into some general principle which they then apply to the gay Thai population as a whole.

Sorry, it's almost 8 AM here and I need to attend to my partner who's just come home from the hospital. Talk later.

[latintopxxx]

sglad, like your input, clearly you are familiar with Thailand...just one ques, what do you mean by israeli pink washing??

[sglad]

sglad...just one ques, what do you mean by israeli pink washing??

They want all cocks circumcised.