Benjamin Tausig: "Bangkok after Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies"

American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco lived and worked in Thailand, for a while during the Cold War, as a reprieve from American racism and homophobia. In addition to physical safety, Rocco found great professional success as an expatriate musical laborer in Bangkok. From 1964 until his murder in 1976, he enjoyed a vibrant second act in Asia as an in-demand nightlife pianist. During those dozen years, however, systems of sex and gender expression, as well as racial identity, underwent profound discursive shifts in the neocolonial contact zone to which Thailand played host. The U.S. looked to Thailand as a regional bastion of anti-communism, infusing it with transformational sums of military money and developmental expertise. In turn, Thailand adjusted its social codes as an accommodation to American patronage. Rocco lived his last decade in the rough swells of this geopolitical convergence.

Maurice Rocco's years in Bangkok can help to illuminate a slow but profound shift in definitions and valuations of race, sex, and gender identity in Thailand. His murder, which occurred precisely as American troops began to withdraw from the country, was a tragic reflection of this shift. His intersectionality was a remarkably complex one, entailing not only Blackness and gayness but also farangness and (in central ways) musicality. This talk traces this complexity through a wealth of primary sources and interview evidence. But the talk cannot fully untangle the threads of Rocco's identity. Rather, we will sit with the messiness in the story, viewing Rocco's years in Bangkok from several analytical vantages, in an effort to consider how musical beings lived, worked, and sometimes perished in the rough epistemological currents of transnational labor during the Cold War.