Bad girls

Gays need more protection from women, according to gay rights activist Natee Teerarojjanapong (นที ธีระโรจนพงษ์).

Some women are just so crazy over gays' good looks and graceful manners that they are prepared to trick them into marriage. Some even get them drunk and try to have their way with them.

Natee wants a law change to allow gay men to seek legal redress when they have been 'tricked' into marriage, or 'raped' by women.

The National Legislative Assembly is contemplating bills, proposed by the Justice Ministry, which would give men the right to sue women who rape them. Natee wants the lawmakers to include a provision for gays as well.

A provision already exists in law for a woman to sue a gay man whom she says has tricked her into marriage, when the husband shows signs of actually preferring men. The change would give each partner equal rights to sue the other.

The changes sought by the ministry also give a husband the right to seek damages from his wife's boyfriend, should she be seeing someone on the side, and the hapless husband find out. Until now, the law has only allowed women to take legal action against philandering husbands with second wives (mia noi).

Natee's utterances are confusing. Sometimes he sides with women, sympathising with them that some gay men would trick them into marriage to disguise their own gay identity. This was the excuse he gave for publishing a humorous handbook recently for women on how to identify 'aaeb' men (เกย์แอ๊บแมน, or gays hiding in the closet).

This time he wants protection from women who are so crazy over gays that they would abandon their normal senses to try to trick into marriage people whom they know are unlikely to love them in the way that men and women normally do.

Since Natee went on television to urge the changes, posts have started appearing on the Pantip webboard from readers who wonder if they heard him correctly. Why would gays want such women? they ask.

One poster said a friend of his works at a business in town, where most of the staff are gay, or kathoey. One gay guy there has two girlfriends, one of whom is in the process of marrying him.

Both the women know he is gay, but do not care, or perhaps even prefer him that way. Gay men, apparently, show more consideration towards women, are more handsome and have better grooming than straight men. Put simply, girls like them, because they look and behave just like girls themselves. Or so the theory goes.

But Natee is talking about cases where men have been forced into marriage, such as where the woman has made herself pregnant with a gay man, having sex he did not want. It sounds far-fetched, but presumably he knows of such cases.

One woman poster at Pantip suspects that deep in their hearts, women who are ba-crazy over gays, and try to get hitched to them, know it probably won't work. However, they live in hope.

Another poster said that, according to one psychiatrist pronouncing on the subject, women in this category do not necessarily want sex, or children, just friendship. They tend to have a good education, job, income - in short, all the requisites for marriage, which for some reason they do not want.

The question has to be asked: are straight Thai men really that bad?

Postscript: Natee says he backs the changes which the Ministry has put forward, according to a report in Kom Chad Leuk newspaper. He says gays are at risk from so-called 'fag hags', and that gays who end up marrying them unwillingly lose opportunities in life. The law changes being contemplated in the name of equality between the sexes are a step in the right direction, which could one day result in lawmakers approving gay marriage, he says.