BangkokPost.com
The usual suspect is one of those moisturised males in fashionable clothes. If he uses an eye cream, wears an earring, and shops at street markets generally frequented by female shopaholics – or if in a restaurant he orders a item that’s somehow deemed girlish, such as a vanilla ice cream with red jelly, or a pink cocktail – he pushes his case beyond reasonable doubt: society, especially women, will conclude that the guy’s gay.
“But is it that simple? Are these behaviours the tell-tale signs that a man’s not a real man?” says Yongyuth Thongkongtoon, director of the new gender comedy Gang Chanee Kab E-Aib, also known as Metrosexual. “People have come up with these theories about how to spot a closet case, but I think there’s a sense of paranoia in all of it. Can appearance and ‘suspicious’ behaviours define what a person really is? Take me, I use hand cream, and I go shopping for cosmetics with my wife, does that say who I am?”
Director Yongyuth Thongkongtoon awaits the release of his fourth feature.
Detecting the Little Mermaid among sturdy stallions is the keystone of laughter in Yongyuth’s new film, but the director, whose previous features include the two Iron Ladies movies, stresses that his film is raising a more complicated question regarding sexuality and social values. The terms coined to define a character – gay, homosexual, metrosexual, ladyboy, katoey, toot – only seem to make things fuzzier, and Yongyuth believes that what is simply a man’s habit and taste may now be taken, rightly or wrongly, as an indicator of his sexual orientation.