Starting with the right to party

"National Day Party" was neatly printed on the front of the card. If you turned the card over, it looked as if the ink seeped through, such that the letters showed up on the reverse:

Kelvin noticed it first. He did a double-take, and checked the front of the card again. No, it was deliberate. A clever little tactic. The mirror image was printed on the reverse, except that it wasn't exactly a mirror image. If you haven't noticed it yet, look again. Closely. Letter by letter.

By such tiny steps, the gay movement in Singapore creeps into visibility, always acutely conscious that it is a subversive force. Ten years ago, no one would have dared. We had one bar reputed as a pick-up joint for white tourists and one disco which held a gay night once a week, but both were known only through word of mouth. Then in the mid-nineties, competition got serious. A number of new bars opened and the Sunday disco became plural - two places at the same time - and moved to rather bigger places too. For a brief while, there were three discos even. To stay in business, advertising became necessary. Flyers and cards were printed and handed out, with images of divas, buffed torsos or half-peeled bananas, secret codes for the gay community. But no one thought it safe to put G, A and Y together.

So in a way, that little card marked another milestone, even if all the courage we had didn't get us beyond the reverse printing. And to hold the event on August 9, National Day, added a delightfully petulant twist.

"It's going to be packed," Kelvin said presciently, "so we should be there somewhere between 10 and 10:30."

We reached the building by 10:15, and were almost dumbfounded by the long queue in front of it. There were something like 200-300 people, a long tail curling out of the front entrance and lift lobby onto the street pavement. None in our group had ever seen anything like this before. Not at 10:15, certainly. We hesitated for a moment, but with no better alternative, joined the queue. It would take us 45 minutes to snake our way to the ticket desk. That would be plenty of time to watch and knit some observations together.

* * * * *

Perhaps 98% of the people in the queue were male, and relatively young men too. Almost all appeared to be locals, you could hardly spot a tourist among them. Some 90% or more were Chinese -- and I asked a few queue-mates why that might be so, but didn't get any answers. I guess it was too academic a question for the occasion. More than half had obviously dressed up, in a style that says Gay anywhere in the world. To an accustomed eye, this was definitely a queue of very gay men, for what must be without doubt a gay men's event. The question was, how many of the passers-by along busy Scotts Road saw that?

This being Singapore, probably the majority did not. The media in Singapore blocks out any mention of gay life (only homo deviancy allowed) to the extent that in general, heterosexuals here would have no clue about gay icons, gay dress and gay speech. Dan was just remarking to me the other day, for example, how confusing it was in Singapore that the straight guys were so often in gay dress, while in the West, the distinction remained clear. I can only ascribe that to the straights' blindness to "gayness". All they see are other young men dressing fashionably, and they just follow suit. They don't realise that the peers they are emulating are dressing that way because of their gay identity. So here's a simple test: the greater the cross-over in gay fashion, the greater the society's ignorance about matters gay.

But there were three instances -- not that I was watching the passers-by all the time -- when I was sure that we were noticed for what we were. Interestingly, all three were women.

The first instance involved a Caucasian couple in their late 20s or 30s, probably tourists. When I first noticed them, they were just standing around looking a bit lost. Then the husband approached our group, by then progressed to about halfway in the queue, and asked, "er, excuse me, what's this queue for?"

My friends replied, simultaneously, "It's for the disco inside."

"Oh, that means we can get into the shopping mall without queuing up?"

"Ya, sure."

"Thanks."

They went past the queue and into the building. But while he was making his enquiry, I noticed the wife looking left and right, around the crowd, and then as they walked off towards the building entrance, she smiled. My intuition told me she said to herself, "Oh, I see....."

A few minutes and a hundred passers-by later -- Scotts Road is a busy street -- a middle-aged couple walked past. The man looked straight ahead, and walked straight ahead. The wife slowed down and surveyed the crowd. Her eyes rested on a few guys, one by one. She wasn't looking at the crowd as a whole, she looked at selected individuals, and from the amount of attention she gave to the guys she looked at, it was obvious that she found them unusual.

It wouldn't have been difficult to find the 200-300 of us unusual. Beyond the fact that many were dressed up for the occasion, we weren't standing passively in a queue. We were laughing, chatting, touching, greeting new arrivals with hugs, and roving up and down the queue catching up with friends. It was a very sociable queue. If the lady had even an average ability to read body-language, she'd be able to figure out that this crowd was firstly, some kind of community and secondly, a gay one at that.

The third woman was younger. She was walking behind her boyfriend, but the two of them had to negotiate their way through the queue. After getting through, they walked parallel to the queue for a while, and that was when she looked sideways and realised what kind of people (!) they had just come so close to. She instinctively hurried two steps forward to her boyfriend, to reach out and hold him by his upper arm. She pulled herself closer to him, as if for protection. The boyfriend remained oblivious to the crowd, and (now, what are we supposed to read in that?) oblivious to her.

Were we such a threatening crowd? Well, I guess, to some, we must have been. That evening on that stretch of the street was one of the rare occasions when homos outnumbered hets in a public space. If people can find even one homosexual person a threat, what of a few hundred of us? And these few hundred were not exactly hiding their sexuality, a few were even flaunting it, but all were to some extent proud to be part of an unabashedly gay community.

* * * * *

What a distance in gay-pride this group has come! From the anonymous groping of forbidden flesh in dark steam rooms by deeply fearful married men, from the wrenching lies of pretend-girlfriends by nobody-must-know closet-cases. In its place here was a group that was queuing up to enjoy their gayness, that had no fear standing in a gay line out there on a street. No worries about work colleagues, cousins or neighbours accidentally walking by. Gay men openly lining up for the gay disco.

We should bear in mind though, that they're still a small minority of the homosexual population of Singapore, although not as small as 200-300. That was merely the number in front of the ticket desk at any one time. Altogether, there were easily 1,500 people in the disco inside, maybe 2,000, crammed 4 to 5 persons per square metre! Sweaty back against sweaty back.

"This is just completely mad!" David shouted, as he squeezed past me through the human gridlock. "Mad! Mad! Mad!" but laughing through it all.

Among the 2,000 were a few who were in a gay crowd for the first time in their lives. An hour earlier, all they knew were a handful of other gay friends, mostly crouching as low in the closet as themselves. But now, under the strobe lights, on that Mad! dance floor amidst a thousand others, something was blown away from their lives. In that club was a hurricane of senses. No longer were they a solitary leper in a disapproving world. In here, they had at least the shared hypnosis of a mindless colony, the false bravado of a throbbing tribe. At least while they were inside.

After the night was over, would they retreat into the same shell as before? Never completely. Having been with 2,000 others of the same kind, even if they didn't know any of them, would have opened a window one could never quite close again. One does not yet belong, but the crushing defeat of thinking oneself to be a lonely anomaly, would from then on be seen as a liftable burden. If only temporarily. And instead of being all by himself, there is the chance of finding new loyalties, and the comfort of a substitute anonymity within this crowd.

At what point does clubbing become politics?

Stonewall, now looked upon as a watershed in the gay movement, was after all the name of a New York bar, and the event that made the watershed was the spontaneous resistance against police harassment one balmy evening in 1969. It wasn't planned as a gay liberation riot. It was just tempers snapping when the authorities just wouldn't let people be.

So by a very pale comparison, if we look carefully at that August 9th evening, every little act was an act of politics. They were private decisions; they weren't made for any political reason, but they had the effect of politics. The organiser who decided to hold the event, the decision to put G, A and Y together, the 2,000 individual decisions to flock there, the phone calls to friends to say, hey come along, will ya? the willingness to queue up on the street, the attitude that I'm gay and I'm going to be visibly gay even on the street ... all these in the end were political. You probably have heard the famous saying, "The Personal is the Political".

Through human history, minorities have struggled to be free. Some have begun their quest by demanding the right to vote, the right to choose their husbands or the right to speak their mother tongue. I wonder though, what it means when, in terms of broadbased participation at least, the gay movement begins by invoking the right to party.

© Yawning Bread 

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