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Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thiland. Edited by PETER A. JACKSON and GERARD SULLIVAN. Binghamton, NY.: Harrington Park Press, 1999. xviii, 237 pp. $19.95 (paper).
In Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys, veteran scholar of Thai homosexuality Peter A. Jackson and co-editor Gerard Sullivan introduce us to recent work by seven other Western scholars. The volume, which grew out of a 1995 conference on homosexuality in Asia, brings together "a series of case studies of contemporary forms of male and female homosexuality and transgenderism in Thailand" (p. 1). Significantly, the book signals a turning point in studies of Thai sexualities, as scholars new to the subject or fresh from graduate school apply novel theoretical approaches and contest longestablished orthodoxies.
The book is organized around three groups of homosexual and transgendered people (identified in the title), and therefore lacks a singular theoretical or methodological unity. Hans ten Brummelhuis focuses on Thai kathoey ("lady boys") and their migratory careers in Amsterdam, Meghan Sinnott examines tom ("tom boys") in lesbian relationships, and four authors (Prudence Borthwick, Graeme Storer, Malcolm McCamish, Jan W. De Lind van Wijngaarden) partially or entirely focus on male sex workers ("rent boys") in a variety of locales. Peter A. Jackson, Prudence Borthwick, and Stephen O. Murray address gender-normative...