Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East

Benjamin Law considers himself pretty lucky to live in Australia: he can hold his boyfriend's hand in public and lobby his politicians to recognize same-sex marriage. But as the child of immigrants, he's also curious about how different life might have been had he grown up in Asia. So he sets off to meet his fellow Gaysians. Law takes his investigative duties seriously, going nude where required in Balinese sex resorts, sitting backstage for hours with Thai ladyboy beauty contestants, and trying Indian yoga classes designed to cure his homosexuality. The characters he meets - from Tokyo's celebrity drag queens to HIV-positive Burmese sex workers and Malaysian ex-gay Christian fundamentalists to Chinese gays and lesbians who marry each other to please their parents - all teach him something new about being queer in Asia. At once entertaining and moving, Gaysia is a wild ride and a fascinating quest by a leading Australian writer.

Benjamin Law is the author of The Family Law and a frequent contributor to frankie magazine, Monthly, and QWeekend. His work has been published in Good Weekend, Cleo, Crikey, Griffith Review, and The Best Australian Essays. He lives in Brisbane, Australia. Like Huck Finn, Aaron Allbright was born in Missouri and grew up on the banks of the Mississippi. He spent three years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone before traveling overland through other parts of Africa for a year and crossing the Sahara twice. Later, he called Saudi Arabia (eight months) and France (four years) home. In Paris, he was a member of the Union des Artistes and acted at the Duncan Theater in the Rue de Seine and at the Theatre de l'Atelier in Montmartre. He and his spouse trekked extensively in the Himalaya before settling in Orange County, California. For the past seven years, they have lived in New Zealand with two cats, two dogs, sheep, cows and a donkey named Don Quixote. The Land Near Oz is his first memoir. Aaron Allbright has degrees in Russian Area Studies, Russian literature, and linguistics and has taught in Sierra Leone-West Africa; Saudi Arabia; Paris; the University of California Irvine; and was a tenured professor at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, CA. Gaysia "The resulting travelogue is packed with highly entertaining anecdotes about a grab bag of subjects, from tagging along with the finalists in a Thai transgender beauty pageant to suffering near-apocalyptic digestive troubles in Mumbai." —PASSPORT Magazine "Benjamin Law spent nearly a year skipping between seven Asian countries, sitting backstage with Bangkok ladyboys before their beauty pageants, talking to Tokyo's superstar drag queens, marching in the heat with Mumbai's fierce queer rights activists, listening to Melaka preachers who claim they can heal homosexuality and hanging out with Bali's moneyboys and the foreigners who hire them." —Creative Loafing Tampa