BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand kicked off the LGBTQ+ community’s Pride Month celebrations Saturday with a parade, as the country is on track to become the first in Southeast Asia to legalize marriage equality.
The annual Bangkok Pride Parade Can filled one side of a main road with a colorful parade for several hours in one of the Thai capital’s busiest commercial districts. Pride Month celebrations are endorsed by politicians, government agencies and some of the country’s largest business conglomerates, who have become official partners or sponsors for the celebration.
Ann “Waaddao” Chumaporn, who has organized Bangkok Pride since 2022, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that she hopes the parade “can be a platform for everyone to shout what they want and express who they really are.” .”
Waaddao believes that Thai society has changed a lot from a decade ago, and the issue has now become a fashionable social and business trend.
Thanks in part to her work, a marriage equality law that would grant full legal, financial and medical rights to spouses of any gender could become a reality sometime this year.
But public celebration of gender diversity hasn’t always been so popular in Thailand, despite its long-standing reputation as an LGBTQ+-friendly country.
The first major community celebration in Thailand was held over the Halloween weekend of 1999 and was called the ‘Bangkok Gay Festival’. It was organized by Pakorn Pimton, who said that after seeing Pride parades during his overseas travels, he wanted Thailand to have one too.
It was difficult to organize such an event at that time, when Thai society was much less open, he says.
“Everyone told me, even my friend, that it would be impossible,” he said in an interview with AP.
Organizing such an event in a public space requires permission from the authorities, and that didn’t go so smoothly for Pakorn, but he eventually succeeded.
Pakorn said some police officers treated him well, but there were others who gave him dirty looks or reacted negatively. He remembered hearing an officer say, “Why do you even have to do this? This katoey…”
‘Katoey’, whose rough equivalent in English would be ‘ladyboy’, is generally used as a swear word against transgender women or gay men with feminine appearance, although the word has now been reclaimed by the community.
After receiving the permit, Pakorn, who was then actively working in show business, said he tried to contact television stations for advertising and finding sponsors for his project, but they all turned him down.
“There were no cell phones, no Facebook, nothing. There were just posters I had to put up in gay bars,” he said.
That’s why, Pakorn said, he was astounded when he saw thousands of people, not only Thais but many foreigners, take to the streets of central Bangkok for that first celebration, wearing colorful and eye-catching costumes, holding balloons and dancing on beautiful floats.
The event received attention from both domestic and international media as both Thailand’s first gay parade and one of the first in Asia. It was described as energetic and chaotic, not least because police did not completely close it off from traffic, allowing protesters, dancers and floats to push their way through moving buses, cars and motorcycles.
Pakorn organized it for several more years, but eventually stopped.
Only recently has the political meaning behind the term “Pride” gained much importance during the event, said Vitaya Saeng-Aroon, director of an advocacy group Diversity In Thailand.
Previously, there weren’t many organized LGBTQ+ communities participating, “so there were no messages in the parade. It became a party just for fun,” he said.
Now the parade has a more political tone because the celebration is organized by people like Waaddao, who have long worked to raise awareness about gender equality and diversity.
For her part, Waaddao said she was inspired to organize the parade after participating in the youth-led pro-democracy protests that sprang up across the country in 2020. She said she had previously conducted her advocacy work primarily in conference rooms. but those protests convinced her that street action can also advance a political agenda.
Although the pro-democracy movement lost momentum due to the coronavirus pandemic and repression, Waaddao decided to continue the fight for equal marriage and gender equality, ushering in a new era for Pride activities in 2022.
That was the year in which several bills for marriage equality or registered partnership were submitted to Parliament. Although no law was passed during the government in power, a marriage equality bill sponsored by the current government is expected to pass its second and third readings in the Senate later this month , the final legal hurdle before it receives royal assent and becomes law.
