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  Runaway Lesbians in Cambodia

  Posted Friday, August 22, 2008 4:49 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Doing research on something else entirely, I came across this item in the Phnom Penh Post's police blotter for August 22, 2008 (today):
  

  MOTHER SEPARATES RUNAWAY LESBIANS
  Oun Malis, 35, and Toucha Tith Thida, 25, a lesbian couple with Oun Malis in the role of the husband, were separated by one of the girl's mothers in Takhmao, Kandal province on Monday. The women met when they both got jobs as security guards just over a year ago. Before the couple fell in love, Toucha Tith Thida married a Korean man who later left her to return to Korea. Toucha Tith Thida's mother tricked the girl into coming back home by telling her that her husband had returned from Korea and wished to see her. Oun Malis has told Toucha Tith Thida that she will kill herself if she does not return to her within a week.KOH SANTEPHEAP

  Now, I don't know any of the facts here. My heart breaks for these two, if all this is true. We would have called this "baby dyke drama," once upon a time, had it happened here in the states. But the context is obviously very different—why in the world is this in the police blotter, of all things?—so I can only wonder what's going on.
  

  But it reminds me of a spate of runaway lesbian weddings in India a few years ago, in which young adult women ran away from home to be together, marrying in informal ceremonies. The surprise was that, when the families went to the police to try to break up the couples, the police or the judge would side with the young women. It was part of a shift in attitude toward gay rights, I learned in 2005 from Aditya Bondyopadhyay, a fearless and amazing gay rights organizer based in India (who risks violence there, as well as in his work in Pakistan and Nepal). I will write to Aditya to find out more about what's going on in Cambodia, but he may not know. If any XX Factor reader happens to know something, please send it along.
  

  Filed under: lesbian, LGBT rights

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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