Balaji needs to deal with government homophobia

source: my own letter to the Straits Times, not published.

Despite the initial uproar, I intuited that Dr Balaji meant well, as obvious from ST Insight "Aids message to help, not stigmatise gays".

Clearly, there is a troubling trend in HIV figures, and clearly, much more has to be done to eliminate the threat of Aids.

Where I disagree with Dr Balaji is in the way he too easily excuses his own government from doing more in view of the need to heed others' moralism, and expects the gay community to take up where the government leaves off.

Efforts to combat ignorance and behaviour that lead to risky sexual practices cannot succeed in isolation from more general attitudes that seek to deny the worth of gay people. It is a point that gay activists like myself have yet to succeed in convincing him about.

Dr Balaji said he was seeking gay "champions". Well and good. But what if these champions want to form an avowedly gay organisation to raise funds and address the issue? Will the government refuse to register such a group just as they refused to register People Like Us?

Recall what happened to the champions from Action for Aids who set up a booth at the Nation 04 party to distribute information and free condoms. The police came and insisted they close the booth and stop distributing condoms, probably because it was construed as "promoting homosexuality".

One of the prongs of any campaign will involve trying to get people to stay in faithful relationships rather than sleeping around. What role models are there for longlasting gay relationships? Is our media too shy about featuring gay couples openly, or do they fear that if they do so, the censors will come down hard on them?

One of the excuses used by officials to snip any positive representation of gay lives is that homosexual sex is still a criminal offence (even though policy is not to enforce the law). Shouldn't we get rid of the law before it obstructs the health prevention objective?

How many companies equally invite same-sex partners of their employees to their annual dinner and dance? Does our civil service do so now that gay civil servants are not pariahs? This is one way of promoting the visibility of faithful gay relationships, thereby raising the perceived value of monogamy over promiscuity in non-preachy ways. No doubt, many organisations will say there'll be no takers for such invitations because their gay employees are all in the closet, but then we should ask why they are in the closet. What kind of homophobic climate do we have that people can't feel safe to be out?

These are just some examples of the ways by which the overall social and regulatory framework must be factored in and rectified if we want to be effective in our mission.

On a separate note, I was also concerned about the way the Insight article spoke of MSMs and gays as if they are synonymous and separate from the "mainstream". They are not synonymous. Many people who identity as "straight" -- many of them are married -- are behaviourally bisexual; that is, from time to time they have sexual relations with other males. They are straight MSMs. Thus there is a lot of overlap between the gay and straight communities.

This is to remind us that if Aids gets out of hand among MSMs, it will spill over. We cannot expect to keep our society moralistic and homophobic and think that the general population is safe. And Dr Balaji will not get his job done unless he starts dealing with the institutional homophobia of his government.

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