Introduction

Around 95 per cent of Thailand's population is Buddhist. Of the 25 young men in this study 20 were Buddhist; 4 were Muslim and 1 was Christian. I had expected that including young men from the south and the northeast in the study would lead to a certain variety in terms of interpretations of homosexuality that could partly be derived from the young men's religion. However, the four Muslim men in the study seemed to be Muslim in name only; they hardly ever went to the mosque or attended other religious services or events. They were recruited from Phuket, Pattalung and Nakhon Sri Thammarat, which are provinces where only a small percentage of the population is Muslim. For security reasons, I was unable to recruit men in the four ‘troubled provinces’ in the south of the country, where Islam has a much stronger role in everyday life and where life for a young homosexual man is likely to be very different. The influence of Islam on the development of the sexual subjectivity of young same-sex-attracted men could therefore not be studied in sufficient depth and detail in this study.

This short chapter will look at the role that Buddhism and the concept of karma played in the young men's explanations of why they are homosexual.

Buddhist Theories about Love and Homosexuality

What does Buddhism have to say about sex and love? The Theravada Buddhist concept of love is called metta, meaning compassion, giving, caring, which lay Buddhists do by gaining merit in the form of giving alms or money to the monastery as well as to fellow laypeople in need. Apart from this term, there is a Thai word for love in the more worldly sense: rak. This form of love has multiple meanings, as it includes the loving ties between mothers and children (Mulder 2000), love for the nation, as well as romantic love (Klima 2004).

Buddhism generally does not have a lot to say about lay love or sexuality. In contrast to many other religions, sex per se is not considered a sin, except, of course, for Buddhist monks and nuns. Sex and love are considered as forms of attachment, similar to craving material possessions or craving food.