Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand offers methods that will help social workers, researchers, and students create HIV/AIDS intervention services for gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals in or from Thailand. Many of these methods can also be used by practitioners or HIV/AIDS educators in North America and developing countries to address issues of culturally diverse clientele. In response to Western and Thai sexuality studies that fail to accurately represent the diverse sexualities of Thailand, this book discusses and describes certain factors that need to be taken into consideration when developing intervention programs. Demonstrating how cultural and social factors influence services, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys will help you provide clients with effective and relevant services. Drawing attention to Eurocentric ideology that may hinder cross-cultural collaboration for Thai-Western service provisions, this book offers you information that will help you understand how cultural, political, and economic systems shape sexuality and gender roles in Thai society. Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys provides you with the necessary knowledge for providing successful services, including: how Thai sexualities are identified by examining the meaning of terms such as “toms” (masculine Thai lesbians), “dee” (feminine-identified women who have relations with other women), “kathoey” (males that dress like women and wear make-up), or “lady boys” (transsexual or transvestite males) how Thai society actually defines ”having sex” and recognizing the differences from Western connotations of sex to effectively teach individuals about the risk of HIV/AIDS ways Western views of confidentiality and privacy differ from Thai views in order to understand why individuals hesitate to get tested for or seek counselling about HIV/AIDS the relationship between occupation and sexual identity in movies and magazines that reveal how sexuality is characterized in Thailand the unique social identity of “toms” and how Thai society labels what is masculine and feminine reasons for hiding sexual identity, such as rejection, fear of stereotypes, and having a relationship that is viewed by society as wrong and meaningless protecting commercial sex workers (CSW) from infection by developing culturally appropriate interventions One of the only books to address HIV/AIDS issues of gay and transgender individuals in Thailand, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys will help you increase awareness about HIV/AIDS and create successful intervention programs for clients.

Many foreign observers of the "Land of Smiles" are familiar with a narrow range of gender relations and sexual practices in Thailand, from the fanciful portrayal of 19th-century harem life in The King and I, to recent media coverage of sex tourism and AIDS. Yet serious study of patterns of sexuality, femininity, and masculinity in Thailand is relatively new. This book is a rare collection by scholars from around the world and across social disciplines who are tackling these issues. The essays urge the reader to look beyond fantasies of Thailand as an "oriental sexual paradise" or "land of sexploitation" to historical and contemporary forms of gender and eroticism. Studies of the changing opinions and practices among villagers and urbanites, the creative expressions of novelists and aristocrats, and the concerns of early women's magazines and recent AIDS-prevention campaigns, reveal the extraordinary diversity of debates about gender and sexual issues in 20th-century Thailand. Avoiding simplistic approaches to gender studies and sexuality research, the authors discuss how interpretations of gender roles, marriage, and intimate relationships differ between men and women; cultural regions; Thai and immigrant Chinese communities; and heterosexually and homosexually active groups--as well as between residents of Thailand and their foreign observers. By questioning accounts of Thailand as a place where gender is fluid and sexuality is free, the book unravels the complex processes by which Thai men and women understand themselves, appealing to both general readers and scholars of Thai society. Peter A. Jackson is fellow in Southeast Asian history at Australian National University. Nerida M. Cook is lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania.

Key discussions and valuable contributions on different aspects of sexual and reproductive health among young people are brought together here in one single volume.

It closes with the rise of the sex-workers' rights movement and "sex-positive" feminism, and a realistic look at the true risks and rewards of prostitution in the present day. Love for Sale spans a wide historical swathe armed with a lively wit and no-nonsense grasp of sex that recalls Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae."--BOOK JACKET.