This essay was part of the publication ‘Minor Infelicities’ (2021), published by Post-Territories Ujeongkuk.

It’s been about a year now since ‘Queer Frequency: No. 1’ was performed by bela, Stefan Gosiewski and Haryung Lee  as part of Minor Infelicities at Ujeongkuk in Seoul. The play takes the form of a series of recovered transcripts and notes from a pirate radio broadcaster known only as Clotho. The piece purports to take place in a future where non-heteronormative sexual and gender expression have been outlawed, and those deemed to be outside of the boundaries of the “normative” have been banished or exterminated from the body of the “State”. 

It is never clear whether Clotho is indeed a single character, or indeed a collective, speaking at different times, different locations - and in fact, each “broadcast transcript” is geo-tagged, indicating an always fugitive modality. 

 The play was performed against the backdrop of the so-called ‘Itaewon Cluster’ of COVID-19 infections, where the city of Seoul saw a surge of infections centred around a number of nightclubs in the Itaewon district, particularly in a number of larger commercial gay bars. This, followed by a frenzy of unfavourable media attention, led to a sweeping demonization of the LGBTQ community, particularly among Korean’s conservative Christian right. Going into the performance, we were terrified at the prospect of the show becoming another virus-spreading event, and worked hard to keep numbers low, and maintain social distancing despite the venue being quite a small one. Perhaps owing to the disappearance of safe spaces for LGBTQ in the city (and certainly in part due to many of the performers being prominent faces within the underground scene) the play, and the show as a whole, attracted significant attention within the community, with artists and celebrities in attendance at the premier. After the performance, I heard from many friends and members of the community who had been present how the experience felt like the brief opening up of a safe space, especially one that wasn’t centred around hookup culture or alcohol, and one in which pain, trauma, healing, but also aspiration and ideals could be expressed. 

Protest in front of Government House, Bangkok 2020, Photo courtesy of the author. 

As I returned to my home base of Bangkok after a period of pandemic-restriction induced exile, I continued to reflect on the layered and nuanced vision of resistance ‘Queer Frequncy No. 1’ espoused.  2020 saw the largest protests since the military coup that brought Prayuth Chan-O-Cha to power in 2014. While the movement had begun in the fall of 2019, it was dampened by the imposition of COVID-19 restrictions at the beginning of last year. As the pandemic escalated elsewhere, Thailand quickly brought its own outbreak under control, largely through the efforts of local organizations, as well as strict border controls, and by mid-April, became one of Asia’s coronavirus success stories. The easing up of restrictions in the country created a window of opportunity for the movement to resurge, and the first half of the year saw growing gatherings in the streets of Bangkok, followed by other cities. The movement in its current form really took off however, with the news of the forced disappearance of Thai dissident activist-in-exile, Wanchalearm Satsakit. Satsakit was in exile in Cambodia after being charged under Thailand’s lese-majeste laws when he was abducted, the latest in a series of adbuctions of activists-in-exile around the region. His last words spoken over the phone to his sister “I can’t breathe”, caught the imagination of the younger generation in Thailand, with its echoes of the killing of George Flyod earlier in the year in the USA. The hundreds who had been gathering in the streets grew to hundreds of thousands, and demands for an overhaul of the government and a re-examination of the laws shielding the royal family from criticism began to grow. This was met swiftly by violent retaliation from the government, who used watercannons and tear gas, to attempt to disrupt the protests - which were resisted using ingenious methods, most iconically with the use of inflatable rubber ducks as shields. The rubber ducks then became the symbol of the movement, leading at one point to them being banned by the government. This, of course, did nothing to deter the frustrated population, the rubber duck became ubiquitous, appearing on everything from t-shirts to motorcycle helmets. 

Protest in front of Police Headquarters, Bangkok 2020. Photo courtesy of the author. 

 LGBTQ activists have been front and centre of the political movement here in Thailand, espousing a broad-based intersectional approach. Collective such as ‘Bad Students’, a group of middle and high school students from school across Bangkok, and around the country, highlighted the issues of LGBTQ students, particularly trans* students, whose identities and expressions are systematically repressed in educational institutions around the country. Under the guise of a militaristic culture with its fair share of toxic masculinity, the abuse of LGBTQ youth has been normalized in such spaces. It’s little co-incidence that one of the most successful horror series to come out of Thailand in recent years, ‘Girl From Nowhere’, focuses on Thailand broken education system, and enacts revenge fantasies against many forms of systemic abuse. The Bad Students Collective created bonds of solidarity with movements for the rights of sex workers, of trans* performers, for the right to access to safe abortions and to better sexual healthcare, often campaigning for these issues in the spaces of the protest. In collaboration with the Bad Students, Free Youth and similar groups, drag queens organized calls to action, occupying the centre of the city, and mobilizing for rights of the people and sexual minorities. 

 Perhaps one of the most iconic protests of the movement was one held last October, on Silom Road in Bangkok, organized by the Free Youth Group. Incensed by the news that swaths of taxpayer money would be used to promote  HRH the Princess Sirivannavari’s fashion line, the group called for the occupation of Silom Road, familiar to LGBTQ travellers as a gay hub of the city, as a ‘People’s Runway’. Performers, musicians, artists filled the long thoroughfare, playing music, singing songs of protest, mocking the powerful. Through the centre of the street, was the long runway, filled with drag performers impersonating the ruling elite of the country, as the crowd cheered on. As rain began to fall, the protest turned into a party, an exuberant celebration of resistance. A student protester who had allegedly impersonated HRH the Queen was later arrested under Article 112, which criminalizes criticism of the royal family, during the Runway event. These arrests have grown ever more frequent as the increasingly nervous regime attempts to hold onto its grip on power, with activists constantly being rounded up and thrown into detention. The movement, however, continues, with joy, and with anger. 

Pride + Democracy Protest flag, at a protest on Silom Road, Bangkok, 2020. Photo courtesy of the author. 

 LGBTQ people, while freer in Thailand than in many other contexts around Asia, have a long way to go in terms of the recognition of our rights and our need for self-determination. Many countries on the continent inherited colonial laws used to govern the diverse gender and sexual expressions that the European colonizers encountered here, such as the Article 377 of the Indian constitution, or the Article 377A of the Singaporean constitution. In these cases, the law prohibits “sex against nature”, interpreted to mean homosexuality, and is used to target LGBTQ people, sex workers and those of diverse sexual expression. In Thailand, on the other hand, which had never been directly colonized by any European power, the question of legality recognition of LGBTQ identities and their protection has a more complicated history. As the historian Thongchai Winichakul describes in his seminal ‘Siam Mapped’, Thailand enacted upon itself a form of self-colonization, which he terms ‘crypto-colonialism’. This move towards ‘crypto-colonization’ harks back to the rule of Rama V, King Chulalongkorn, who sought to “modernize” Thailand, which in practice meant the implementation of a Western-style form of government, social standards, and expression. This notion of “nation building”, of course, necessitated an enforcement of more Western style gender roles and norms of sexual behaviour. This attempt at ‘crypto-colonization’, was fundamentally a move to maintain the power of the reigning elite in the midst of complex, shifting geopolitics. Through the Cold War, with the rising Communist movements in neighbouring countries, this model of ‘crypto-colonization’ became tied further into the self-image of the nation, and with a strongly-militaristic culture.  Thus, we understand the process of LGBTQ liberation within this context as being intimately and innately tied to unpacking of this process of decolonization. It is not possible only through the enactment of legislation by a military dictatorial government whose foundations are built on a framework of oppression, but rather, through a fundamental dismantling of such hierarchies. The terms of belonging have long been set by those who, within the context, benefit from such oppressive regimes: queerness must thus set out the terms for its own belonging.

Stage for discussion around sexuality, LGBTQ issues and sex workers right at a protest at the Democracy Monument, Bangkok, 2020. Photo courtesy of the author. 

 It is with this question that I come back to Queer Frequency No. 1. In their rejection of the state and its mechanisms, Carlo provides multiple points of entry for an alternative imagination of queer belonging. In their rejection of assimilationism and respectability politics, exemplified in the play by the “assimilated gays”, they point to the fundamental contradictions of demanding recognition and protection within regimes that are designed to enact control on queer and other dissenting bodies. This signals a need for more imaginative forms of belonging, beyond those afforded by legislative changes. This is not to say that legislative changes are not important in and of themselves, but rather that they must be thought of as interims, as part of a longer undoing of the complex structures that produce these situations of oppression to begin with. It is not enough, for example, to accept legal amendments that make provisions for gay marriage, but rather to rethink notions of marriage, of family, tied as they are to inherited notions of property, of lineage, to imagine more queer ways of producing relations, of solidarities, affinities. 

 Carlo proposes a mode of evasion as a form of resistance, evasion in language, through the use of architecture and space. We see this in Clotho’s always fugitive actions, always shifting, always using coded language (and encrypted radio waves) to disorient and confuse those for whom a message is not intended. Fugitivity is a space of imagination. It occupies the liminal space between what is and what is yet to be brought into being. It weaves contingency into every act of becoming. It produces forms of relationality that always shape-shift, transform, open up, move under or over or around, in ways that are fundamentally queer. 

 Finally, in Carlo’s call to run to the forests in the play, one finds resonance with Jack Halberstram’s idea of the ‘Wild Beyond’, in his essay ‘The Wild Beyond: On and With the Undercommons’, which serves as an introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s ‘The Undercommons’. Halberstram gestures to this wild place as that space of imaginative plenty where the potential to imagine a world otherwise might emerge, It is that space that has always been fugitive from the powers that produce structures of oppression to its own ends. The wild beyond is thus the space for a radical queer thought. It is joyous, dark, seething energy that runs just beyond the grasp of these regimes of oppression, and yet seeps into its every nook, cranny and crevasse. It dances and laughs wildly, it parties in the rain, it loves and doesn’t love freely. It is from we might be able to imagine another form of queer belonging.