33, human rights/LGBT activist
ETHNICITY: Kachin
BIRTHPLACE: Kachin State, Burma
INTERVIEWED IN: Chiang Mai, Thailand
The first time we met Knoo Know, he was walking around a room full of flip charts and other supplies left over from a long day of conducting human rights training sessions. Knoo Know has worked as a human rights trainer for the past six years. He co-founded a Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) rights training program, which uses LGBT rights as a lens and metaphor for larger democracy and peace issues in Burma. Born in the jungle in Kachin State, Burma, Knoo Know was the son of a famous general from the Kachin Independence Army, an ethnic opposition army. Knoo Know described his childhood as an internally displaced person (IDP) and the numerous times that his family and several hundred other Kachin people had to flee their homes because of Burma army (Tatmadaw) offensives into their territory. In 1986, Knoo Know’s father sent him to town to begin formal schooling. For security reasons, he was told to change his identity and never speak of his family or his life in the jungle.
I was born in a village in the jungle called Balawng Kawng on September 4, 1977. The only thing my mother told me about my birth was that my father had to deliver me. Since he had previously worked in the KIA medical group, he knew how to do it.11
At the time, there was a war going on between the Kachin ethnic group’s armed independence organization and the Burmese army, the SLORC.22 My father was a soldier in the Kachin Independence Army. He was a guerilla and my mother was a schoolteacher. My parents met when she served as a teacher at the KIA 1st Battalion.
Altogether, there were six children in my family. I am the fourth son. I have one younger brother, one younger sister, two elder sisters, and one elder brother—but he already passed away. When I was very young, we stayed for a few years in the area where I was born. It’s in Kachin State, close to the China–Burma border. I don’t really remember what it looked like.
We were internally displaced people. We had to move from village to village because the SLORC soldiers pursued us and burned our villages down. They were doing this because these villages were supporting the KIA with food, and also because some villagers were related to KIA soldiers. At the time, we didn’t call them SPDC; they were SLORC.
When I was four or five years old, the KIA assigned my father to a new post in western Kachin State, with the KIA 2nd Brigade. So we spent several months traveling westward through the jungle to the Hukawng Valley. My memories of that time are not very clear, but I do remember passing burning villages. There were maybe two or three hundred people in our group, but I’m not sure because I was really little.
The SLORC army was always following our people. Sometimes the SLORC sent a plane to watch the jungle in the morning, so all of us had to stop cooking and put out all the fires. The KIA soldiers wouldn’t even allow us to dry our clothes because then the SLORC might know where we were hiding. Most of the area where we lived was said to be under KIA control, but since we always had to run away it wasn’t really under KIA control. I think it was under the control of both armies.
While we were traveling to the Hukawng Valley, we usually stayed in one place for four or five days, and then we would get news that it wasn’t safe, that the SLORC was getting close. Then we would move to another place, and maybe we would stay there for two days, or maybe ten days. Then we would move again.
We usually heard that the SLORC was coming maybe three to five days in advance, but sometimes it was only four or five hours. When we heard they were coming, we didn’t take very much from our house. We had a lot of bamboo in our environment, so we didn’t need to carry the materials with us to rebuild our house. My family mainly took food, like grains, and if we could carry it, maybe we would kill a chicken that we had. We couldn’t carry many clothes. It was just important that we brought a jacket, a shirt, and a small blanket.
And then we ran. While we were running, everyone was shouting and the older people were crying. I helped carry things, but I was very small. Most of the time I was just playing around and very happy because we were going to new places, and I was accustomed to moving around.
Most of the time, we had to keep walking for ten days or two weeks before we found the most secure place to build a new camp. It always depended on whether or not the SLORC was still following us. Sometimes we had to move at midnight because a KIA spy would inform us that the SLORC was getting very close.
If we arrived at the next camp early enough in the evening, we built our huts then. But if we arrived at night, we would just put up a plastic sheet as a cover and stay there. The next morning we would find bamboo and leaves to build our small huts. Everyone helped each other build.
We had to move locations all the time. Sometimes people talk about their hometown, right? They say, “Oh, I miss home.” I don’t have that kind of feeling. Which place is my hometown? I don’t know. Since I was very young, my family was moving around, but at least we were together.
THE FIRST TIME I HEARD GUNSHOTS
After a few months, we arrived in the Hukawng Valley. We stayed in the jungle outside the township, near what the Kachin call the Danai River—on the Burmese map it’s called the Chindwin River. My father was put in charge of the KIA army battalion based in Hukawng Valley.
Our group made another village in the jungle, and my family built another house. There were maybe around one hundred households in our village. Everyone lived in huts. I don’t remember what the area was like, but my sister told me that there was forest all around when we arrived.
We lived there for almost two years, but we had to run away from our village twice during that time because the SLORC came.
The second time we ran is unforgettable for me. It was around 1985, and I was about eight years old. My father was on the front line fighting with the SLORC in the Pagan area, very far away, and my mom also had to go there. But they couldn’t bring us children there because of the fighting. One of our relatives, who was about fourteen or fifteen years old, was taking care of me and my younger brother, who was three or four years old. She was still very young and she didn’t know how to take care of us. She was really bad—she beat us every day!
At the time, I was playing with my friend at the river when we heard gunshots. A woman came over to us and said, “The SLORC is coming! You have to take everything. Run!” I was shocked and afraid, so I ran directly to my house because my younger brother was there. The whole village was running and everyone was in shock—we didn’t hear that the SLORC was coming in advance. The KIA soldiers had heard the SLORC was coming from the east, so many of the KIA soldiers went east. But the SLORC soldiers were actually coming from the west.
We heard the dogs barking and more people shouting that soldiers were getting close to our village, so we had to do everything as usual—grab everything we could, pack our things, and run into the jungle. But that time we didn’t have my mother there, and the girl who was taking care of us had disappeared. My aunt lived near our house, but she had to take care of her sons and her daughter. I was really afraid of the gun sounds. I didn’t know what to take. I ran into the kitchen and I put rice and salt in a big bamboo basket—rice is important, and if you have salt, you can cook anything. I tried to catch a chicken but I couldn’t. My little brother didn’t know what to do. He was in shock, so he just stood there watching me. I took my brother and we ran.
We were both really afraid. Everybody else had their families, so it was really hard for us. I think that was the first time I’d heard gunshots. They were so close, and it felt like everyone was going to die. We ran to the riverside and people were lining up to get on the rafts. There were long lines, and we just followed the older people.
Everyone had to cross the river on a bamboo raft. Some KIA soldiers were near us, giving us reports on the SLORC. “They are getting very close,” they would say. After we arrived on the other side of the river, we could still hear the gunshots—dun dun dun dun dun—but we were safe. From there, we walked for about three or four hours. I was carrying the big bamboo basket on my head, and it was very hard for me to walk.
When we arrived deeper into the jungle, I realized that I had put barely any food into the basket, only clothes. I took all the things out of my basket. The clothes were useless—torn shirts and cloth. We couldn’t wear any of it. Maybe when I was gathering the things, I was in shock and I didn’t pay attention to what I was taking.
That night, some older people let us stay in their hut because my brother and I could not build one ourselves. We both cried at night because we missed our mom.
After we’d been there for a day, my father came on his horse. He said he was worried about the two of us. He came to make sure we were fine, but he didn’t say much. I was crying, “Ahhh, help me! I don’t have anybody. There’s nobody to take care of us. Please come stay with us.” But he had to take care of all of his troops so he could only stay for a few minutes. He said the SLORC was getting very close so he had to fight them back with his troops.
Two or three weeks later, my father came back again and stayed for just a night or two. He saw that another KIA general was taking care of our group, so he felt okay about that. Then he left again, but I think he was also really sad to leave.
My brother and I couldn’t do anything, so we were just crying alone. And then maybe two or three hours after he left, we got used to it because it’s been like that since we were very little. My father was not very present in our family—it was like he was a guest. Sometimes my little brother didn’t remember him, and he would say, “Oh, this man has come back again? Oh, this man is leaving again.”
A BLACK POOL
After one month, the SLORC had left and we returned to our village. But it wasn’t like, “Oh, the SLORC is gone now, so let’s all go back together.” We had a method where four or five expert KIA soldiers had to go to the village first for two or three days to assess the situation. Some of them checked for landmines, and then they marked the areas where it was safe to walk. After the experts checked the whole village, then maybe two or three families would go first. But it was still very dangerous. After the first group of people returned to the village, we always heard something like, “One woman went to the toilet and she stepped on a landmine and was killed.”
The whole village had been burnt black; it was like a black pool. You could see dead cows and pigs—they’d even killed the fish in the Danai River. The river was famous for having many species of fish, and it was very easy for us to get fish to eat. Our house was right near the river, and when my mom was cooking dinner, I would go fishing while she was cooking the rice. I could easily get three or four fish; the whole village caught fish like that. But when we returned to the village that time, the first thing we heard was that the SLORC had exploded mines in the river to kill everything.
I never used to think about that time in my life very much, because it was really scary for me. I still don’t want to think about it; it’s really hard.
WE HAD TO ACT LIKE STRANGERS
My father was a very famous guerilla among the Kachin people. He served as head of KIA military intelligence from about the late ‘80s until the early ‘90s. Most Kachin people supported the KIA, although some people were afraid of them. They had very strict policies at the time; some people told me that if you did not support them, they said you were a traitor, that you were on the Burmese side. They did terrible things to you if you were suspected as a traitor.
Because my father was a famous guerilla in the KIA, my grandparents and all of my father’s siblings were forced by the SLORC to leave Kachin State and live in Pyin Oo Lwin and Mogok, near Mandalay, where the government could monitor them more closely. When my parents returned after that month in the jungle, I only stayed in our village for about ten days, and then I left to live with my grandparents in Pyin Oo Lwin. My father wanted me to study there, because we didn’t have a school in the jungle.
My older brother and my second-oldest sister had left our family first; the next person to go was my oldest sister. Then it was my turn. We had to leave separately like that because it was very dangerous for us that our father was a KIA commander. My mother cried again and again as each child left.
It was 1986 when I went to live in Pyin Oo Lwin; I was eight years old. When I traveled there, it was the first time I had ever seen a train or a car. Two of my sisters and my brother were already living at my grandparents’ house, along with our auntie and uncle and many other relatives who had moved there. There were maybe fifteen cousins living there; it was like a dormitory. When I saw my siblings, I had to act like we were strangers. We all had to lie about our names and our pasts for security reasons. My uncle told me that I couldn’t even tell my cousins where I was really from. My siblings and I pretended to introduce ourselves to each other, and then we ran to the back of the house and talked. After that we would sometimes secretly meet after midnight, when everyone else was sleeping.
At that time, our grandfather had to go to the police station frequently to explain about my father’s actions. Whenever there were some activities in Kachin State relating to my father and his fighting against the SLORC, the SLORC made my grandfather go in and they questioned him about it. Sometimes they even put my grandfather in jail. My grandmother said they were trying to get my grandfather to tell my father to stop his behavior. They threatened that if my father did not stop his actions, there would be big problems for the entire family.
The SLORC secret police were always watching us. Sometimes other Kachin people came to our house pretending to visit, but they were really sent by the SLORC to spy on us.
We always had to remain in Pyin Oo Lwin because the SLORC didn’t want my family to travel and try to contact my dad.
It was really difficult to go from living in the jungle to living in the town, and I cried every night in the beginning. I couldn’t talk to anyone about my experiences living in the jungle, because my family always reminded me that I would have big problems if I did. I soon realized that nobody would change my situation, so I had to get used to it.
My aunt, my father’s eldest sister, also lived with us in the house, and she was very strict. She would beat us terribly, maybe because she was really afraid of our family’s situation with the SLORC. I hated her rules and we would fight with each other all of the time
Despite our hardship, most of my family, including my grandfather, supported my father. My grandfather would invite all of his grandchildren into his room and we would secretly talk about Kachin history and the Kachin struggle against the Burmese military. My grandfather told us about how there were groups of Kachin people fighting within the British army during the colonial period, and about how the British favored the Kachin over the Burmese. The KIA formed to fight for an independent Kachin State. The British used to encourage the Kachin people to fight for independence, but now that’s changed.
My grandfather was always telling us these kinds of stories about my father and the Kachin struggle for independence. He’d say, “Knoo Know, your father is doing great things.” But when I was little, I didn’t want to listen to my grandfather’s long speeches. I always got sleepy.
Our grandfather died in 1990, when I was about thirteen. It was very sad. He died because someone we didn’t know beat him in the street. He didn’t die there right away; he passed away four or five weeks later. There was a rumor that the beating was done by someone from the SLORC, but we don’t know that for sure. We reported it to the police, but they didn’t do anything. When my grandfather died, my father was away on the India–Burma border fighting the SLORC. It was his last battle.
After the KIO started ceasefire negotiations with the SLORC in 1991, we were allowed to leave Pyin Oo Lwin. For the first time in five years, we could talk openly to our brothers and sisters, and I went and saw my entire family in Kachin State. I was so happy to see my parents, but at first it was like they were strangers.
I only stayed one month with my parents, and then I had to go back to school. My siblings and I didn’t want to go back because we were really afraid of our aunt there—sometimes she beat us badly. I went to visit my parents every year in the summer for two or three months, after exams finished in February or March.
I THINK HE HAD BEEN OUT OF HIS MIND
I started to fight with my father when I was about sixteen. I would always quarrel with him, complaining about how we had no money for university and how our family was always separated. My brothers and sisters were very quiet and polite, but I was not—I always spoke against him and questioned the things he did. I wanted to study again in the city. I told him it was his responsibility to give me money to study, but he could not.
While I was spending the summer with my parents in Kachin State in 1993, my father started taking me to the military camp with him because he wanted me to join the army. I was sixteen at the time. One day I realized he was planning to take me to the military recruitment center to force me to join the KIA, so I made a plan that night to run away. There was one truck that always carried food rations from the market at the China border, so I escaped by hiding under the sheet that covered the food.
When I got back home, I told my mom about my father’s plan and she became really angry. The next day my father said, “I am so crazy, I almost did something really bad to my son.” I think he had been out of his mind.
Ever since I was a child, I’d always been really afraid of war and violence. My brothers were always wearing soldier clothes, because they wanted to become soldiers and protect their people. Sometimes the soldiers would take out all the bullets and let the children play with their guns. One time, a soldier accidentally left a bullet in the gun and gave it to our neighbor to play with. The boy gave the gun to his mother and asked her to play with him, so she shot the gun and the boy was killed. I was really afraid of guns after that experience, and I never played with them. Most of the time, I played with girls; maybe that’s why I wasn’t close to my father.
RUNNING AWAY TO RANGOON
I ran away from home many times because of my sexuality. I was about seventeen years old the first time I ran away to Rangoon. I was so confused about my sexual orientation. I had no information, I didn’t know what to do. I hated gay people, and I didn’t want to become that kind of person. I really didn’t want to become a homosexual, so I had internal conflict. I didn’t dare speak to anybody about it. I didn’t want to go out with boys, so sometimes I went out with women.
I realized my sexual orientation when I was maybe seven years old. I knew I was attracted to men, but I was conflicted inside. I used to play with girls and sometimes I would put on tanaka, but I didn’t actually want to go out like that, like a woman.33 When I was a teenager, it was very difficult for me because I would see a man dressed like a woman and I thought, Should I wear that? Should I live like a woman? So I tried it, but I wasn’t comfortable like that—I didn’t want to be like that.
My feelings were very confused at the time. I wanted to study music, but we don’t have music colleges or music subjects in Burma. I also wanted to learn English and study in an international school, but my family had financial problems at the time. I went back and forth between Pyin Oo Lwin and Rangoon; I would run away, and then my sister would come to Rangoon after a month and bring me back to my aunt’s house, but then I would run away again a couple of months later.
In Rangoon, I was hanging out and trying to become a professional singer. Since I was very young, I had sung in the church choir and received many prizes. While I was in Rangoon, I sometimes performed solos. Sometimes I would get a gig to sing with my friends, and sometimes I would sing at the karaoke bar. The shop owner would pay me a little money, and sometimes I’d get a few tips.
I sang a lot of English songs. When I was in Pyin Oo Lwin, I became familiar with a lot of English songs because my grandfather didn’t like us to play Burmese music in the house. We’d get many pirated CDs and DVDs on the China–Burma border.
I liked to sing easy songs, like oldies, but my favorite music is R&B. I like the divas like Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige. A lot of songs in English have something for me to think about. Sometimes I listen to them when I’m feeling down, and it gives me courage. Some of Christina Aguilera’s songs give courage to LGBT people, so she’s one of my favorites. Listening to English songs is also one of the ways that I learned English.
In Rangoon, I tried many times to make it as a professional signer, but I failed. I met with a music producer who promised to make a record with me, but after one, two, three months passed, it didn’t happen.
While I was in Rangoon, I had a lot of problems. I didn’t have any relatives there so sometimes I would stay with someone who I thought was my friend and after a month I’d realize they were a night bird (a student who occasionally does sex work). So I’d move to another friend’s place, and maybe they were using drugs. So I also used drugs sometimes. I didn’t have anything to eat, I was eating only mohinga, a type of Burmese food.44 I would just have one meal for the whole day. It was really bad.
CEASEFIRE
When the KIO and the SLORC were discussing the ceasefire in 1991, my father was not involved in the talks because he was a fighter and he didn’t want the ceasefire. The KIA is the military arm of the KIO, which is the political organization. The new leader of the KIO didn’t have as good a relationship with my father. I think he was afraid that my father would seize power because he was very strong inside the KIA.
In 1994, the KIO signed an official ceasefire agreement with the SLORC. After the KIO agreed to the ceasefire, the KIO authorities let my father take a rest because of his health conditions. My father had to go to the hospital because he had shrapnel from a mine stuck in his head from a battle. We asked the KIO many times to help pay for the surgery, but they didn’t give us anything at the time.
My father became a drunk, staying at home and drinking twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he was like a crazy person, maybe because he had trauma from being in battle. It was a bad situation.
When he got drunk he would always say to people, “Are you going to accept the ceasefire? What about my soldiers who died for Kachin State on the front lines? Are you going to pay for that? Your only goal is to make this agreement—if we had known that, we wouldn’t have fought, wouldn’t have died.” The former soldiers always thought they would get independence and now they couldn’t; maybe that’s why he got depressed. There are many soldiers like my father who didn’t like the ceasefire.
That was a very difficult time for our family. My father was taking leave for his health, and we had no money. I was still in school, but I eventually had to go back to my home in Kachin State because we had no money to support ourselves.
WHAT MY FATHER ALWAYS TAUGHT ME
I was really confused and angry about my family’s situation—my older brother had become addicted to heroin just after the ceasefire and died when he was just twenty-one. My sister couldn’t finish college. In September 1997, I had a big yelling fight with my dad. I blamed him for many things, all because we had no money.
“You sacrifice your life for the Kachin people, for your revolution, but what do we have right now? You can’t leave the house. We don’t have money. Nobody is taking care of us. And now my brother has passed away. The whole family is messed up.” He didn’t respond to anything.
It was really bad; I shouldn’t have said all those things. After our fight, I left for Rangoon again, and that was the last time I saw my father.
My father passed away in November of 1997. I was in Rangoon when I got a phone call from the pastor giving me the news. I really wanted to go home, but I didn’t have any money; nobody helped me at first. Two days later, a relative gave me the money. But when I called my sister, she said it wasn’t necessary to come back because he was already buried. The ceremony was already finished. My father was buried in Laiza, where he died with one of my brothers by his side.
Because my father was very famous in our area, many, many people went to his funeral. Our family didn’t have any money for the funeral, so we borrowed it from other people. Afterwards, we were almost 300,000 kyats in debt and we had to sell my father’s rings in order to pay people back.55
After my father passed, we were in a really difficult situation. Because my mother had never worked independently while my father was in the KIA, she didn’t know how to run a business or how to take care of us. My elder sister hadn’t finished college, and the rest of us were still studying, but my mom didn’t work. I was sad and worried for the future. And then another feeling came—anger. I was really disappointed with the KIA.
Last year, when my mother got sick, the KIA supported her treatment. My mother has a lot of health problems because she gave birth to five children in the jungle.
After the ceasefire, my father always told me to never become a soldier, but that I should still work for our people.
THEY WERE BLIND
After high school, I went to college for almost three years. I haven’t finished yet because I had some issues there. I wanted to study music or English, but there weren’t many options. For most Kachin people, the only opportunity to study English or politics or something like that is the theological college. I also thought that I might be cured from being gay if I went to theological college and studied religion. So in the year 2000, I started at Kachin Theological College in Myitkyina.
I went to the theological college for general studies, but I left after two and a half years. The gay and gender equality issues in Christianity were a huge problem for me. Sometimes they didn’t allow people to speak about women’s issues on the campus, and women weren’t allowed to speak about gender equality in church. Sometimes the people there weren’t friendly, and they said that a man who acts like a woman could not become a priest or a pastor. Sometimes there would be hate messages in the professors’ lectures, so I eventually decided to leave the school. I didn’t have any problems with my friends, just the leaders.
When I was still in college, my friends from outside college and I started a group that met independently outside the college—we called it our “reading club.” We wanted to do something to change the conventions; living there was not good. They were blind and we wanted to open their eyes. I attended my religious classes while going to these meetings secretly.
Our reading club would secretly get books from outside of Burma on subjects like democracy and the rule of law. One of us would secretly keep the book in our house and spend the day alone reading it. Then, that night, we’d pass it to the next person. There were six or seven people in our reading group. Sometimes we met at one of the members’ houses, or sometimes we met in the church.
We had this kind of routine for two or three months and then we started to connect with people outside of Burma who were doing human rights and rule-of-law work, including giving trainings about the constitution. We started to meet these people in Laiza; Laiza is an area under KIA control, so we were able to do these things with protection from the KIA.
In 2002, our group met with someone from a human rights organization that is based in Thailand. They were going to do a human rights training program in the China–Burma border area, so we went to participate. That training was the first time we heard about human rights.
It was also the first time we learned that our country had a constitution, and that we have no rule of law in Burma. After that training, we realized many things that we weren’t aware of before. I started to realize that even if I could not take action against the authorities, I could start teaching people about their human rights. I had been a Sunday school teacher since I was nineteen, so I knew how to teach people.
We met with the director of another human rights organization after that training, and our group decided to attend some more human rights trainings.
When I first missed school to go to the human rights trainings, my friends wrote a letter to the school administrators saying that I was sick. But starting the second semester, it became a problem because I had missed so many classes. I didn’t fail my exams, but two professors had problems with me. There was a policy in the school that none of the students were allowed to be involved in politics.
The academic dean called me into her office to discuss the situation. She didn’t accuse me of anything, but she told me that if I continued going to school there, there would be a big black mark in my educational history—I would be recognized as a politically active student. Since it’s a theological college, students are supposed to become pastors, not politicians. If you were a politically active student, the SPDC might start watching you.
Another reason I had to drop out of school was because I joined so many human rights trainings in Laiza, and some of the trainings were really long, like five or ten days.
MY LAST CHALLENGE TO GOD
When I was twenty-four, my mom and sisters asked me to marry a certain woman. At that time, I had an inner conflict with my religion and my sexuality. It was a big problem. If my religion had said it was okay, I would have accepted my sexual orientation.
While I was at the theological university, I prayed so many times for my sexual orientation to change. But after the third year, I dropped out. The people there didn’t know I was gay, but they thought it, and they said things about how being gay was wrong. I was really depressed then; I tried to commit suicide once, but it didn’t work.
One day I went to a prayer mountain in Laiza, and I prayed from morning to night.
“Give me an answer. If you are really God and really love me, please tell me why I’ve become like this. If Christianity doesn’t like gay people, why am I gay?” I prayed like that and said I needed an answer by evening time. This was my last challenge to God. So I prayed, prayed, prayed, and in the evening, the answer was in my head.
Okay, I thought, this is what I am. This is what God wants, for me to be gay. I felt that if He didn’t give me an answer, it meant it was okay to be gay. It was very clear to me suddenly, and I felt amazing. So that’s when I decided to come out.
But I realized that before I came out, I had to apologize to my whole family first. I had treated them badly when I was running away from home and staying in other places, and I had dropped out of college. My whole family was really upset when I dropped out. They didn’t know what was happening to me—they didn’t want me to get hurt.
It’s our family tradition that if we do something bad to someone in the family, we wash that person’s feet. So I went to buy three towels—two for my sisters and one for my mother—and then I boiled some water. Then I called them into the house and brought them to sit on the bed, with their legs over the edge of the bed. They were all surprised. My mom said, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?” I just rubbed their feet, washed them, and talked. “I did a lot of bad things, so please forgive me.” They asked me, “Why have you been acting like this? You’re very strange nowadays. You’re a good person, but why have you become like this?” So I told them then that I didn’t want to marry that woman. They were just silent, shocked. “Why?” they asked.
“I don’t like women.”
Then my mom asked, “So what do you like?” And at that moment, my elder sister grabbed me and cried. She knew what I meant. I told them I would never marry a woman in my whole life, that I liked men. Everybody was crying, and they said, “Why didn’t you tell us before? It’s not a problem with us!” And my sister said, “You are my brother still. My brother.” They were all saying it was fine, it was okay. My whole family was really supportive. It wasn’t a problem, and they weren’t angry. Before that, sometimes I didn’t even want to look at my face in the mirror. But everyone loved me. After coming out, I felt like I had escaped from a really bad place. I began to see myself in a more positive way.
RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITY
After I left the theological university, I continued working with human right groups underground and attending trainings. Soon after that, in 2002, our youth group received an invitation from a human rights organization to attend an internship program in Mae Sot about democracy and constitutions. I signed up and went to Mae Sot in 2002 to take the human rights training course.
In the course, I had to learn so many things about what has happened in our country. I knew about the Kachin situation, right? But I did not know about the other states. The first time I heard about Karen refugees was when I arrived in Mae Sot, on the Thailand–Burma border. I didn’t know that Karen people were also fighting against the SPDC. When I heard the stories of other ethnic groups’ struggles, I thought, “Wow, it’s the same as us.” I had already been in that kind of situation, so it didn’t seem very strange to me. But one thing that is different between the Kachin State and Karen State struggles is that the KIA took a ceasefire, but the KNLA has not.66
It has been eight years since I first went to Mae Sot, and I am still here in Thailand. Now I am working as a human rights trainer.
THEN IT COMES TO THE DETAILS
I enjoy being a human rights trainer, but I never thought about how difficult it would be to do the trainings. I train many different kinds of people. It’s been mainly migrant women whom I train about women’s rights. I’ve also done many trainings with members of different ethnic groups from Burma, and a lot with the refugee community. I have also done LGBT rights trainings with non-LGBT people. I discuss topics like basic human rights, gender concepts like, “what is gender,” women’s rights, and LGBT rights. The topics I discuss depend on the requests I receive.
Generally, when we discuss human rights, everybody accepts the basic concepts. Everybody likes them. But after two or three days, it comes to the details.
Many ethnic people want human rights for their people, not for others. If in the middle of a discussion I say, “Let’s talk about our opinions about other people’s rights,” they will say, “No.” They especially don’t accept freedom of religion, the idea that you can choose your religion or have no religion at all. It always becomes a big quarrel, because they say that the concept of human rights comes from Western cultures, and that human rights will destroy their cultures. It’s very challenging.
I had a big quarrel, a big debate once. We had a workshop where we had to draft a state constitution with several different ethnic groups. They proposed first that the head of state for Kachin State must be a Kachin person, he must speak Kachin, and he had to have stayed in Kachin State for twenty years, something like that. It was a mixed ethnic group, but I was the only one against it. Some of my Kachin friends even got angry, saying, “I will kill you when you arrive in Kachin State.” I said, “Let’s think about reality. In Kachin State, I will not vote for a Kachin leader who is not going to do good for the Kachin State, who is not educated—even if he is Kachin. But if there is a Shan or Burman who lives in Kachin State and wants to do good for Kachin State, I will accept him whatever his ethnicity is.” But the others didn’t like this.
This is one thing I started to realize when I attended that first training in Mae Sot. We were discussing human rights, democracy, the constitution—many issues during three months. There were many different ethnic groups there—we had Shan, Mon, Karen, Kachin, and Burman. But I realized that even though everyone was talking about human rights, each ethnic group was only interested in human rights for their own ethnicity. They just want to put their own nationality as the priority. When that happens we have to change our method, use another strategy, maybe another activity, so that they can see other people’s rights are also important.
That’s just one example. We had other kinds of discussions and debates like that in the training. That’s why I was thinking, We’re talking about human rights, but we’re not really looking inside these human rights. I started studying human rights much more deeply because of this.
I also come from a very strong ethnic nationalist background, you know. When I was a child I didn’t understand why the government army would follow us. The elder people told us that they would kill us, that they hated our ethnic group. So I really hated Burmese people when I was little. I didn’t want to have Burman friends until I was maybe twenty years old. But my father would tell us not to hate Burmese people.
It’s bad that many elder people keep telling their children about the old stories—I mean, it’s good that they are keeping the history, but not when they are manipulating their children’s minds to hate other ethnic groups. That kind of teaching is really the worst. I don’t think it’s only in the Kachin community, it’s in the other ethnic groups too. Everybody knows that the SPDC does bad things, but they have to speak about the state system separately from race or ethnicity. They should speak about them separately, but they don’t. They stereotype other ethnic groups. That’s why I think education is very important in our area, in our community. Otherwise, people start to automatically believe that all Burman people will do something bad to them. It really becomes their belief.
My father always reminded us not to hate Burmese people. He proved himself by doing what he said. When he arrested Burmese soldiers, he didn’t kill them. Sometimes, he brought them to our house, fed them, healed them, and released them again. I think that’s why my whole family doesn’t have a problem with the Burmese ethnicity; many Kachin people in our community didn’t like us because of this.
When I talk about human rights, I always, always talk about responsibility too. Some other educators and facilitators will only talk about human rights, but it’s very important to me that I always discuss rights and responsibility in my trainings. I tell them, “If you have this right, then that other person also has this right. So you have to take responsibility for that other person’s rights as well.”
Two years ago, I worked for the gender and women’s rights program as the assistant coordinator, and then as the program coordinator the following year. As a man, it was a challenge with the Burmese community. The women’s groups were always joking about a man doing women’s rights work, and they would laugh in front of many people and say, “Oh my god, how are you going to do that? Is that going to work?”
One of the reasons I started working on women’s rights and gender issues was because of my mother’s experience. My mother’s life was very hard. She sacrificed a lot for her family and she gained very little. When my father was away, my mother had to do everything. Everything. And she really wanted to stay with her children, but we had to live apart.
THE FIRST BARRIER
The first barrier I encountered whenever I was doing any activity was being gay. People would discriminate, and they didn’t want me there. Even if I was talking about ethnic issues, the people in the group weren’t comfortable.
One time, the facilitator raised the issue of gay people from Burma. Everyone said, “No, no, no—we will kill them. We don’t accept gay people.” So I just kept silent and didn’t talk about that issue. I didn’t say anything during that training. This was a group of people all doing human rights training, and they all said “No way” about accepting gay people.
That’s why I started to do the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender human rights program. It is a big challenge because many Kachin people are very conservative Christians. Kachin guys tell me, “You could be very useful working for all the Kachin people, but you are doing LGBT rights, such a useless issue. We’re talking about and fighting for human rights while you’re talking about this useless LGBT rights issue.”
Many of my friends know about my father and they say, “Your father was very brave and he sacrificed for the people. Now you’re doing this useless gay issue.” I answer them by asking my own questions. “Do you know how hard it is being a gay man? Or dealing with the way men treat gay people?” They don’t have any idea. I told them that I’m committed to working for all the people of Burma, not only for the LGBT people.
I usually discuss basic human rights concepts before LGBT rights in my trainings, because then they will learn about concepts of equality and that all human beings are born free. After two or three days talking about human rights, we begin to discuss gay rights; then they can understand that gay people are included in these concepts. But it’s very challenging.
I don’t know much, firsthand, about the experience of LGBT people in Burma, because I came out publicly after I arrived in Thailand. When I was inside Burma, I was homophobic, tense and suspicious—I didn’t like gay people because I wasn’t secure with myself.
The most visible gay group in the Burmese community is the transgender people. Most people in Burma believe that being gay means you are a crossdresser—a man who wants to become a woman, or a woman who wants to become a man. So they don’t believe that I’m gay because I’m not wearing women’s clothes.
It’s very easy to find transgender people in the Burmese communities in Rangoon and Mandalay. Most of them are marginalized in the community, often poor and uneducated, but there are also some very famous and rich transgender people. I think most of the celebrity hairdressers and makeup artists are transgender, and some of them are very popular, rich, smart, and talented. But they’re not interested in politics, in rights, in LGBT issues. Right now, I’m trying to get in touch with them.
General discrimination in Burma is the same toward all transgender people. Everyone will shout at a transgender person walking down that street—shaming them or calling them different names. This is normal. I wasn’t thinking about my sexual orientation when I was about twenty-one, but by the time I was twenty-four I understood that I didn’t want to be transgender. When I wore a skirt or a dress, it was very uncomfortable for me. Sometimes I put on lipstick, and it was okay at first, but I didn’t like it after an hour or two. Many young gay men in Burma have the stereotype that if you love a man you must act like a woman—this is the wrong concept. That’s why I have to do a lot of education in the community.
At one of my trainings, I met a transgender person who took hormone pills and now has big breasts. After I finished the training, he said, “I’m so disappointed with my body.” I said, “What’s wrong?” and he said, “I didn’t know gay men could live like you—I thought that to love a man, I had to be a woman. That’s why I tried to become like a woman, but now I don’t want this body.”
It’s been getting better over the past ten years for the community of gay men in Burma. We have a lot of social networks, for example.
I’ve never heard about other programs like ours, but inside Burma they have sexual health and HIV/AIDS education for gay men. Just this year we set up one Burmese LGBT networking group for LGBT rights, and we have eight networkers inside Burma.
We have four or five people working in our LGBT program, and two of my assistants are also gay. Our friends support us—they distribute our publications to LGBT people inside Burma, and if I’m doing a training session in Burma, they will organize for the community to attend.
Maybe one day we can remove Section 377, the sodomy law that we inherited from British colonial times. It still exists in Burma, and it makes “unnatural sex” an offense; if you commit that crime, you can be sentenced to prison for ten years. The SPDC said they haven’t practiced this law for a long time, but since the law still exists, they could use it if they wanted to. It’s a problem because many police officers know the law still exists, so they can harass the transgender community a lot by arresting them or interrogating them at their houses.
Just last week, my best friend called me on the phone and said he understands my feelings now. He said he met with a young boy who was sixteen years old, and he asked if he knew Knoo Know. “Oh, the faggot from Burma,” the boy said. Then my friend got really angry. Now he really understands why I am working on this issue.
BOTH GOOD AND BAD
One thing I want to say is that because I have experienced a lot of human rights abuses in my life, the experiences are like a fuel for my future work. I think my childhood had a big impact on what I chose to do. Sometimes I blame my father, but in the end, I see that it’s the whole system, this government, that impacted my life. So basically, I think this is what I can do for that right now. That’s why I chose to do this kind of work. I come from a situation of conflict and human rights abuses, so these themes are not new for me.
My organization is also trying to educate people about the meaning of elections in preparation for the 2010 elections inside Burma.
I don’t accept the constitution and the election. I don’t agree with them. But this is another window, a door. I hope the election will provide some opportunities. I think they are giving some space for political groups who want to do something, but the space is very tight.
It’s very difficult to say what I think of the KIA–SPDC ceasefire; it’s hard to express articulately. My opinion is that the ceasefire is both good and bad. It is good because we are not at war and civilians aren’t being killed anymore. People can now travel safely. But on the other hand, the KIA didn’t have a good strategy when they took the ceasefire, so some of the areas like those that my father controlled have now fallen into the hands of the SPDC. Corruption among the KIA officers is huge—it’s not surprising, since they spent almost their entire lives in the jungle with no money and no good facilities, and then the SPDC gave them the chance to do different kinds of business after the ceasefire. Now they have a lot of nice cars and they stay in nice buildings. They are not thinking about the past and about how many soldiers have been sacrificed.
I will not stop, no matter what. I want to see all people equal in our community and also in our Burma in the future. That’s what I live by.
1 Kachin Independence Army (KIA) is the armed wing of the ethnically based Kachin Independence Organization (KIO). The organization has been in armed rebellion against the Burmese state since the 1960s, signing a ceasefire agreement with the regime in 1994. For more on Burma’s civil wars, see the “Armed Resistance and Counterinsurgency” as well as the “Ceasefire Agreements” sections of the appendix.
2 Framed as a caretaker government, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) has remained in power since the 1988 coup. In 1997, they changed their name to the State Peace and Development Council. See appendix pages 463-465 for further detail.
3 Tanaka is powder that many women and children in Burma wear on their faces. It is said to be good for the skin and a natural sunscreen.
4 Mohinga is a fish broth noodle soup that many consider the national dish of Burma. Though ingredients vary, it often contains rice noodles, fish paste, banana leaf stems, fried onions, and boiled eggs.
5 Approximately US$300.
6 The Karen National Liberation Army is the armed wing of the Karen National Union. They fight for autonomy for the Karen people within a federated Burma. Starting in 1949, the war between the KNU and the Burmese army is the longest-running war of the post–World War II era. For more on the KNU, see the “A Brief History of Burma” section of the appendix pages, 460-461.