Then
in late April, Mr. Jang published an autobiographical novel, “A Mark of Red
Honor.” In the book and during a recent interview, he described his experiences
as a gay man growing up in the totalitarian North, where the government
maintains that homosexuality does not exist because people there live with a
“sound mentality and good morals.”
His
struggle continued even in the capitalist South, where he said he felt like a
“double alien”: a North Korean refugee who was also gay.
“In
North Korea, no ordinary people conceptually understand what homosexuality is,”
said Joo Sung-ha, who attended the elite Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang,
the North Korean capital, in the 1990s and now works as a reporter for the
mass-circulation South Korean daily Dong-A
Ilbo . “In my university, only half the
students may have heard of the word. Even then, it was always treated as some
strange, vague mental illness afflicting subhumans, only found in the depraved
West.”
While North Korea has no laws explicitly prohibiting same-sex
relationships, it is not shy about expressing its homophobia. Last year, for
example, it said that Michael D. Kirby, a former Australian judge who led a
United Nations investigation of human rights
abuses in the country, was “a
disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of
homosexuality.”
“When the subway was crowded, I sat on Seon-cheol’s lap, and he
would hug me from behind,” Mr. Jang said. “People didn’t care, thinking we were
childhood friends.”
THE
two were separated in 1976, when they joined the military at age 17, where close
physical relationships became a matter of survival.
“In winter, when soldiers were given only two threadbare
blankets each and little heat, it was common for us to find a partner and sleep
hugging each other at night to keep warm,” Mr. Jang said. “We considered it part
of what the party called ‘revolutionary comradeship.’ ”
“There was a lot of sexual abuse, like groping at night,” a
former North Korean military officer, Choe Jong-hun, told Chosun TV, a South
Korean cable channel, in August. “But we later found ourselves having new
recruits lying beside us.”
In
Mr. Jang’s front-line unit, he said, officers and senior soldiers bribed him
with apples and food to lure him into their blankets. After performing nighttime
sentry duty in a snowstorm, he said, he would find comfort “in the bosom” of his
favorite platoon leader. From across the border, propaganda broadcasts from
South Korea enticed the cold lonesome Communist soldiers to defect, promising
“meat, monthly leaves and pretty women.”
Mr.
Jang was discharged from the military in 1982 after contracting tuberculosis.
Back in Chongjin, he worked as a wireless communications official at the port.
In 1987, he wed a mathematics teacher in an arranged marriage.
“Most gay men in the North end up marrying whether they like it
or not, because that’s the only way they know,” Mr. Jang said. “On the first
night of my marriage, I thought of Seon-cheol and could not lay a finger on my
wife.”
After years of childless marriage, the couple heeded
relatives’ pleas and saw a doctor to make sure there were no physical problems.
There were none. Mr. Jang filed for divorce but was denied one. His wife also
appealed to him to stay, fearful of losing her teaching job. He re-established
ties with Seon-cheol, who returned from the military, married a nurse and had
two children.
The two friends occasionally visited each other, and
their wives let them sleep together, thinking it was a habit from their
childhood. one such night, Mr. Jang slipped out of the blanket he shared with
his wife and crawled to Seon-cheol’s. But he said his friend did not respond and
kept snoring.
“It
was then that I realized that my life was a prison and I had no hope,” he said.
“I wanted to fly away like a wild goose. I also wanted to set my wife free from
loveless marriage.”
In
the winter of 1996, he swam across an icy river into China. After looking in
vain for 13 months for a passage to South Korea, he slipped back into the North
and crawled cross the border into the South in 1997. He was one of only a
handful of defectors to make it across the mine-strewn frontier. His defection
made headlines.
IN
South Korea, officials eventually released him after he spoke of his troubled
marriage. But Mr. Jang still did not fully understand his sexual orientation
until he read an article about gay rights in 1998. It showed pictures of a
same-sex couple kissing and two naked men in bed, and it reported that there
were gay bars in Seoul.
“It was as if lights go on in my world,” he said.
But
Mr. Jang’s transition to life in South Korea has been rough. In 2004, a gay man
who promised to be his partner absconded with all his savings. Around this time,
he also learned that three brothers and a sister in the North had died after the
family was banished from their village after his defection.
A
North Korean d efector who had known Mr.
Jang’s family in the North said his wife was also expelled from the village, but
was later reinstated. The defector spoke on the condition of anonymity because
he still had family members in the North.
Mr.
Jang makes a living cleaning a building in downtown Seoul from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Not an easy life, he admits, but far preferable to his life in the
North.
“There are many homosexuals in North Korea who live a miserable
life without even knowing why,” he said. “What a tragedy it is to live a life
without knowing who you are.”