“Ask a North Korean” is an NK News series featuring interviews with and columns by North Korean defectors, most of whom left the DPRK within the last few years.

Readers may submit their questions for defectors by emailing [email protected] and including their first name and city of residence.

Today’s question is about sexual orientation and gender identity in North Korea.

Joshua Kim (a pseudonym) — who was born and raised in North Korea and lived there until he defected in 2019 — writes about acts of physical affection between men in the military, so-called eunuchs who don’t conform to strict gender expectations and more. 

Got a question for Joshua? Email it to [email protected] with your name and city. We’ll be publishing the best ones.

Late at night, with everyone fast asleep, someone approached my bed and lay beside me. Lifting the blanket gently, they fumbled around my body in search of something. Then the hand slid into my pants. Once in place, it moved quickly. 

This is something I experienced many times at the hands of one person during my time in the military. But my experience is not unique; many of my peers also experienced the same thing. We could not come forward because the perpetrator was a member of the secret police.

Usually, he would act kindly toward those around him, and was not particularly authoritative. Those who happened to have slept near him all experienced his advances at least once. That person had a wife and children in high school, but in the military, where men gathered and lived together, he seemed to act on the desires he was unable to fulfill at home. 

SAME-SEX INTIMACY

When I first came to South Korea, I was asked a very particular question by the National Intelligence Service. It was a question that I did not understand, and when I asked the officer the same question, he responded awkwardly.

He asked me how many men in the North Korean army were in same-sex relationships. While asking the question, he showed me a photo of two soldiers standing guard at a barbed wire fence along the Demilitarized Zone, holding each other. 

I, too, had many experiences like the soldiers in the picture. In North Korea, it is common for people of the same sex to hold hands or to stand shoulder to shoulder. 

But this is not a matter of sexual attraction. If they had felt sexually attracted to one another, they would never have held hands: It wasn’t typical at all for North Koreans to date someone of the same sex.

The North Korean government has not made any policies against sexual minorities because it would never acknowledge that such sexual minorities exist in the DPRK.

The scene at the border I described above can be seen as a type of same-sex intimacy that happens frequently where men live together in North Korea. These kinds of relationships also include things like men sleeping while holding each other in the barracks they share. But those embracing each other would, at least in most cases, not consider themselves as in same-sex relationships. 

Now in South Korea, I have several friends from the DPRK. After I’d been here for about a year, I happened to experience something embarrassing. I had had dinner with my friends and was walking to the subway station to get home afterward when a car approached from behind. 

Without a thought, I grabbed my friend’s hand and pulled him away from the car. But my friend suddenly looked embarrassed and snatched his hand back from me. At the time, he explained that holding hands with someone of the same sex might make people around you misunderstand that you were in a relationship. He told me not to do it again. 

EUNUCHS AND SEXUALITY

In South Korea, there are couples who are in same-sex relationships and also transgender people. Not so long ago, I didn’t understand them at all. But I came to understand that there are people with different sexual orientations and gender identities, and I saw the efforts they put into living their best lives even if they might struggle. If I think about it in this light, I can see that there are also such people in North Korea.

In the DPRK, people who do not act in accordance with traditional roles are called “eunuchs” (고자), a demeaning term. In the village I lived in, there were just over 90 households (around 500 people), among which I recall three people who were known as eunuchs. 

The fact that I still remember now that there were exactly three such people shows the extent to which they were treated as completely different. They could not even marry.

In North Korea, it’s not hyperbole to say that 99% of men get married, even if it takes them a long time. Marriage is seen as an essential element of life, and even those who are known as eunuchs tend to live together with women. 

However, their lives together do not appear to go smoothly. It is uncommon for people in the DPRK to get divorced or remarry, but at least in my experience, I have never seen anyone known as a eunuch live together with a woman for a long time. 

Due to the nature of the North Korean system, individual thoughts and views are completely ignored. Since you receive a one-sided education at the behest of the Workers’ Party, there is no environment where you can freely assert yourself. 

Sexual behavior is one of the most important human instincts. But the DPRK regime believes that embracing these instincts will have a significant impact on the North’s idiosyncratic ideological system. 

A small example of what I mean is that the most severe punishment for consuming or distributing foreign media is reserved for adult films. Anything that shows too much skin and could sexually arouse, even women’s miniskirts, is strictly banned. As adult films are the epitome of sexual entertainment media (유흥문화), they are tightly controlled.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why people in North Korea don’t even dare to think about their sexual orientation or exploring a nonconforming gender identity. 

Sexual expression seems to be at the very top of freedom of expression. Although South Korea is said to have freedom of expression, you still make the news if you wear a bikini on city streets. 

Of course North Korea is beyond description. Most people in the DPRK have no idea about the existence of homosexuality or transgender people, and even if they were to hear about it, they would almost certainly not be able to understand it.

Edited by Alannah Hill and Bryan Betts