Thai Buddhist Accounts of Male Homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s
Author(s)
Jackson, Peter Anthony
Abstract
The belated attention which was given to the AIDS epidemic in Thailand by its government and public health officials in the late 1980s emerged at the same time as homophobic discourses were also slowly gaining in number. Based on references to homosexuality in the Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism, it is concluded that the scriptures are home to widely differing opinions. The traditional view holds that homosexuality lies outside the individual, or ‘in old karma,’ while the less tolerant view opines that this is a product of an individual’s previous life, or his own supposedly immoral acts. Reformist Buddhist thinkers have chosen to adopt the latter view.
