Tu Lien cemetery in Hanoi suburban usually lays in silence, but today it looks quite different. Two darkly dressed men are standing and crying in front of a grave. A circle of a dozen policemen surrounds them. The men sometimes stop crying to chat. They do this again, then again, surprising curious onlookers.

But soon the strange actions of the two men become clear: a few metres from the grave, there is a camera focusing on the actors. The cameraman and the director are shouting directions and giving orders.

A film is being made here.

It is the 11^th part of a television series, Criminal Police, derived from the best-selling novel Mot The Gioi Khong Co Dan Ba (A World Without Women), written by Bui Anh Tan, which attracted considerable attention when it was published, as it was the first ever Vietnamese novel to touch on the issue of homosexuality.

The two men at the grave are the main actors. They play brothers facing a serious calamity: the younger brother declares his homosexuality, shocking the family so severely that his father drops dead. The older brother, in a furious rage, expels the younger from the family home.

Time passes, and the brothers do not reunite until shortly after the death of their mother. The older brother takes his younger brother to visit their mother’s grave, in the closing scenes of the film, which follows the family over a period of two months.

Touching a sensitive subject

Homosexuality is a taboo in Vietnam. The public do not accept it and usually don’t want to form friendships with gays or lesbians. People cannot understand how two men or two women could possibly be in love. It is a foreign concept for them, and they automatically reject it. In Vietnam, to label someone a gay is to dishonour them.

Although there are not any exact statistics on the number of homosexual people in Vietnam now, as affirmed Dr Le Vu Anh, the Dean of Hanoi School of Public Health, people learnt from the media that the main group is among artists. “It may be that artists are famous people, who expose themselves easily; they are very open to new ideas,” said Dr Anh.

Homosexuality exists as a social phenomenon, which has grown quite quickly in Vietnam in recent times. Naturally, everybody has their own opinion of the development.

Dr Anh explained this phenomenon; “Our cultural background makes it difficult for us to accept it, which is contrary to natural law. In fact, some countries in the world admire it, and homosexual people can live peacefully and even marry each other. But Vietnam is far different: here, homosexuality is still something unwanted”.

“Homosexuality exists in our society, we can not change that by force. I think that besides accepting the mainstream culture as standard, we must educate people who are thinking of acting like gays even though they are not”.