Michel Foucault demonstrates, inter alia, two concepts pertinent to being queer in Singapore. Discipline and Punish (1995) uses Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as a metaphor for post-industrial civilization. Much like surveillance cameras in stores that prevent theft even though they may not even be switched on, a single warden at the centre of the panopticon, hidden from the prisoners’ view, can watch over many inmates, installing fear and docility in them as they are never sure when they are being watched. The visibility of modern civilization, of having to study and work, of having a Facebook account, joining Facebook interest groups...

It is unusual that the government of Singapore, known in all other respects for its hard-headed rationality, should admit that official policy in a matter of public concern is “messy” (Channel News Asia, 2009); a state that has to be tolerated because it is the best that can be done under the circumstances. And that is precisely what the government has done in the context of the enforcement of the now famous, or infamous, section 377A of the Penal Code which criminalises an act of “gross indecency” between males “in public or private”, punishing such an act with up to...

In his comparison of Malaysia and Singapore, media scholar Cherian George (2006) noted that public discourse in Malaysia is much more vibrant and activist-oriented, correlated with democratic participation and grassroots social movements (Weiss, 2006). In contrast, public discourse in Singapore is somewhat muted and tame. Cherian George argued that this difference is not due to a stronger or more authoritarian State in Singapore that sets out-of-bound markers on speech; it is due to the poverty of civil society networks. There are not many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Singapore concerned with social issues such as human rights and social injustice. Many...

In this chapter, I shall examine gay life experiences in another fundamental pillar of Singaporean society—the military. Since 1967, all able-bodied male citizens are legally obliged to serve their National Service (NS) upon reaching the age of 16½ years. Enlistees perform a minimum of two years’ full-time duty, followed by ten more years in the part-time reserves. NS aims to instill national loyalty despite Singapore’s severe geopolitical vulnerabilities. Both the universality of NS and the transmission of national values make NS a prime citizen-making site. Gay men must also serve NS as homosexuality does not excuse them. How then...

Lesbians in Asia have come under scholarly attention within the study of non-normative sexualities. This is due to the theoretical insistence on including accounts of non-Western sexualities and sexual identities that disrupt hegemonic Western practices and meanings as embodied by the globalised lesbian and gay subject. Understandings of sexuality, as this claim goes, have been dominated by Anglo-American images of the ‘out’ gay person with a fixed and unitary identity who has access to particular sexual rights and freedoms. This conception casts sexuality as an autonomous and anterior aspect of identity, and at the same time, elides the different meanings...

Alex Au has described the regulation of queer rights and cultural expression in Singapore as being unpredictable, even arcane, in nature. He writes of “reading the tea leaves” (Au, 2007b): of attempting to extrapolate from official pronouncements the range of queer identities, spaces and behaviours that will be tolerated by Singaporean state managers. Au is just one of many commentators to identify the opaque nature of the Singaporean authorities’ response to queers’ claims for social space, legal reform and cultural visibility within the Singaporean polity. Scholarship on queer Singapore has identified how the regulatory and policing powers of the Singapore...

Where could a young gay adult go to meet like-minded people in Singapore in the 1970s? This was the predicament the author of this chapter found himself in, in an era when there was no ready information available on the subject. The situation may have been vastly different for his street-savvy counterpart who lived in the vicinity of an area where homosexual men would congregate nocturnally for social, as well as sexual, intercourse; or another gay person who had already built up a nexus of friends who could clue him in on the hotspots where such activities took place.

But...

When one reads the story of Anna forty years after it has been published, one wonders what has become of her today. One very much hopes that she has found and remained with the woman who loves her. Uncannily, if the word ‘nation’ is substituted for ‘woman’ in the same statement, national love for homosexuals becomes equally a kind of waiting, waiting to be loved by the nation. Alluding to such an appropriation, queer theorist Sara Ahmed believes that inter-personal “love may be especially crucial in the event of the failure of the nation to deliver its promise for the...

To map the film history of queer sexualities in contemporary Singapore cinema is to articulate the artistic struggles, negotiations, compromises, and persistence of filmmakers and producers in a conservative cultural and political environment that often resists or actively works against queer representational presence. A quick scan of the historical, political, and cultural factors will help crystallize how difficult the conditions have been and continue to be for this cultural phenomenon. Firstly, the contemporary Singapore film industry is a comparatively young one. For, according to film historians Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde, “Singapore’s film revival began in 1991” (Uhde and...

The recent banning of Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right starring Julianna Moore, Annette Benning and Mark Ruffalo sparked off a furore in the Singapore Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual (LGBT) community.¹ The most talked-about movie at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and the winner of the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival, the movie combines comedic surprise with scenes of poignant, raw emotion of a richly drawn portrait of a modern, urban lesbian family.

Nic and Jules (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) are married and share a cosy suburban Southern California...

On a warm evening in August of 2007, I made my way through the congested bylanes of Chinatown towards my familiar haunt, the Backstage Bar, one of Singapore’s openly gay nightspots. I had been spending several evenings a week there in that it afforded me an easy way to network with openly gay men and most visits usually yielded at least one potential interview subject. I climbed the darkened stairway and entered the small smoke-filled room, decorated with old Broadway and film posters, took a seat at the main bar, and ordered a drink. Almost immediately, a Malay man in...

In 2001, the inception of the Singapore-based gay web portal, Fridae, created a buzz in the local gay and lesbian community.¹ Unlike the now delisted and then more ostentatious PlanetOut and Gay.Com which peaked alongside the dotcom bubble and queer commodity boom, Fridae sported a more subdued, and what some would hail, an understated design interface. With a logo and slogan on one end of the headbar championing the empowerment of ‘gay Asia’, and a series of polysexual animated stick figures on the other, the greyish blue tone of the homepage was minimalist and stylish. It had none of the...