Same-Sex Marriages Mulled

Central Vietnam 2009

 
An Asian country is considering whether to allow same-sex couples to marry or legally register and receive rights

It will be the first country in Asia to do so.

Guess which one?

It is surprisingly not even from one of my short list, either. I had thought it would come out with the name of Thailand, or other hardnosed-looking Asian ones, instead of Vietnam! It is not uncommon to see westerners, Europeans from Germany mostly, boldly squire showing off their young (Thai) swains around outlying islands and famous sightseeing spots. And I heard so much about high-profile, American/Thai couples mostly, which I had happened to come across some, gay weddings going on just about almost everywhere in Thailand. None of them received legal rights though.

Maybe it is just me. Let me know if I am wrong. Perhaps gay men in Thailand are too long-settled for current public tolerance to push the ever-widening boundaries enjoyed by many in many areas already.

Never before have I seen such an outcrying front-runner, in Asia, of polarization between Third World and Western hopes and dreams of LGBT.

I just still can not bring myself to comfortably believe in it. Vietnam merely seems like a gay awareness country to me after all.

How long has it been brooding to go this far in the Vietnam scenarios, I wonder? Very interesting. It might prove difficult to enact eventually. Neither offense nor my usual pun intended, but I really felt like a slap in the face, hard and loud, simply out of least expectation.

Update news on August 5, 2012 

Vietnam's first gay pride parade has taken place in the capital Hanoi, the communist state, with dozens of cyclists displaying balloons and rainbow flags streaming through the city's streets.