East and West Confusions

No one links "Eastern countries" (China, Japan, Pakistan, etc.) with "homosexuals" in their minds. It just seems absurd. Yet, in China, homosexuals make up 3-4% of the population; that's at least 50 million people! (See the Rubin Article) Traditionally, it was accepted in the elite classes of China and Japan for the rich to take young boy lovers; homosexuality was even institutionalized among the Samuari and Monks of feudal Japan. Also, in Pakistan, rich Pashtuns often kept young boys as lovers, even when they're married, and it has a lucrative nightlife in its major cities involving male prostitutes that is causing some concern for human rights activists.

Maybe part of the reason why westerners have trouble imagining homosexuality flourishing anywhere else but in the western hemisphere is that most homosexuals in the East do not (or at least did not) consider themselves gay.

When westerners say gay, they are refering to an entirely separate race of people who for some strange biological reason, or by the corrupt influence of the Devil (which ever you believe), are solely attracted to the same sex as themselves. They can all be identified by a set of common behaviors (gay men are effeminate, fashionable, gay women are butch, etc.), organize gay pride parades, and are overall strange, alien, and can never be fully accepted by common folks like the rest of us.

Well, Eastern homosexuals don't consider themselves different. Traditionally, homosexuality in the East has been viewed as just another type of human sexuality, perhaps a less desired one, as they produce no children, but is nothing that deviant that would result in the forming of entire homosexual communities.

More often then not, the Western stereotype of gays do not apply in the East, although this is changing, and has been changing for the last 150 years as the West - especially the United States - established its dominance and influence overseas.

I find this sad; if the western cultural takeover had not occured, then Eastern societies could have eventually developed a much more tolerant and gay-friendly society, given the history there of tolerance. It could have, perhaps, even served as a model of lasting cultural acceptance for the United States. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And changes in the East are unlikely any time soon, because even if their culture becomes more open to homosexuals (as indicated by the growing popularity of gay parings in Japanese anime), their governments still remain strictly conservative, so political progress seems unlikely.