“Frogs don’t remember when they were tadpoles”: searching for love in South Korea’s “cyber gay ghetto”

Abstract

This paper examines the contradictory role of the Internet in shaping the cisgender gay male community in the non-liberal and communitarian context of South Korea. Despite its global status as a cultural powerhouse with one of the world’s most networked economies, Korea is notorious for its strict regulation of gender roles and sexual conduct. Since the mid-1990s, its gay population has utilized the BBS (Bulletin Board Service) and the Internet to evade familial surveillance and forge discreet gay lifestyles. Nonetheless, challenging the liberatory discourse of the Internet associated with the worldwide phenomenon of “queer globalization,” this technology is now contributing to the mutual estrangement of gay men from each other and the broader Korean society. Not only do they have to jump through the hoops of each other’s reified sexual preferences to connect with the community organized as a neoliberal market, they have to contend with the pressures of conforming to a hetero-masculinist culture based in the overlapping structures of family, work, and military that remain hegemonic in South Korea. Unable to suture this gap between a Korean family-based reality and a white Euro-American gay lifestyle promoted on the Internet, many gay men become stranded as “small tribes within a cyber ghetto.”