His name means bravery, and that’s what it took for Nguyen Van Dung to talk about life in “the third world” — a reference in Vietnam not to poverty but to the gay and lesbian community.
At age 41, he has decided to lay bare almost everything in a tell-all diary called Bong, a slang term for homosexuals, written by two local journalists after more than 300 hours of taped interviews with him.
Dung is sure many people here won’t like his memoir, which has triggered both praise and criticism for its often explicit recollections of sexual adventures and relationships with other men. But Dung says it was high time to try to change attitudes in Vietnam.
“I don’t want to be famous,” he told reporters. “Being famous means being notorious, and the price you pay is high. But to achieve my goal, I had to sacrifice my privacy. It wasn’t easy. It was a fierce struggle for me.”
Very few gay people publicly come out in Vietnam. Homosexuality is still a largely taboo subject in the communist, traditionally patriarchal country, long ruled by Confucian mores and Buddhist beliefs.
The book had a modest first print run of 2,000 copies. But the fact that it was published at all is considered by many here a sign of changing attitudes and greater tolerance.
Many gay men, Dung says in the book, have struggled with deep shame for not meeting societal expectations — marrying, building a family, taking over the house, caring for their ageing parents and producing male offspring.
“If you were born gay,” he writes, “no matter whether you are a man or a woman, you were born at a bad time, on a bad day, in a bad month, in a bad year, under a very bad star.”
“If there is the so-called next life, I beg God to let me be an ordinary man or an ordinary woman, whatever gender it may be, but to be as normal as other people. It seems a very simple dream, but for me and my friends being normal is impossible,” he writes.
The word “bong” can mean shadow or silhouette and is sometimes used as a derogatory term for homosexual males because it suggests they are mere “shadows of normal men.”
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS