Soon after resigning myself to the immobility of where I stood, I noticed someone who used to be a customer of the gay sauna I once ran, sitting near the front of the bus. He was holding a folded-up stroller, so evidently there must be a child somewhere. However, given the limited visibility from my position, I couldn't make out which of the other people around him were related to him. In any case, I was too far from him to say hello and as he had not noticed me, I left it at that.

10 minutes into the journey, two toddlers near where I was made themselves obvious. The little girl didn't like to be held on her aunt's lap, wanting to be with her mother instead. That meant that the mother had to exchange the boy she had been holding for the girl. A minute later, the boy wasn't happy and wanted to be exchanged back.

And so the two children had to be passed back and forth through the rest of the journey to pacify them, in the process nudging other passengers here and there. So distracting were they that I forgot about the former customer at the front of the bus.

Then as the bus entered the housing estate and approached a popular stop where generally many passengers would get off, someone waved to me from the rear of the bus. He had just got up from his seat and was making his way to the exit near where I stood.

He was the customer. But hadn't he been sitting at the front of the bus? Why is he coming up to me from the rear?

I did a double-take, turning to look towards the front of the bus, and to considerable surprise, I saw the stroller-holder. He too had got up from his seat and was making his way towards me and the exit, together with another woman and a child.

Oh, they're brothers! They looked so alike, I had never realized they were two persons, two different patrons of the sauna.

At the same time, from the movement of the two restless children, the aunt and the mother, I realized that all of them made up a large family group, now readying to alight. From their body language and "papa, hold boy-boy's hand", I could tell that the younger man, who was coming up from the rear of the bus, smiling and waving at me, was the father of the two kids.

When the brothers had converged on the centre of the bus where I and the exit were, the younger one said to his brother in Cantonese, "Do you recognize him?" ("lei yingdak hoei ma?"), indicating me.

Of course the brother did, and we exchanged greetings.

Then the bus pulled to a stop and the whole family, 2 men, 3 women, 3 kids and a stroller, got off.

* * * * *

Both these guys were regular enough at the saunas for me to sort-of recognize them (though not well enough to distinguish them), and they to recognize me, though I never knew their names. I remember that they, or at least one of them, used to come with a bunch of friends.

So what do we have here? Two brothers who both frequented gay saunas, not sneakily, but quite openly with friends. They obviously knew that the other was going to the saunas too, but they never went to the same sauna on the same day, which was why I had never seen them together and never realized that they weren't the same person. That suggests some degree of coordination on their part.

Yet they were married, with children too, but even in the presence of their wives, they both acknowledged me, when clearly the only reason for them recognizing me was a very gay one, tied to their sexual socialising. They could have pretended they didn't see me, but they – at least the younger one – made the first move to wave at me.

What would they tell their wives if the women asked them who I was, and how they knew me?

I don't know, but they both seemed so relaxed about it, whatever the answer was, it wasn't a problem. It certainly didn't seem like a deep secret, not something that might jeopardize their marriages. And that they're so relaxed about it suggests a social climate within their demographic class that is quite different from the simplistic picture of a disapproving, unaccepting "conservative" majority.

* * * * *

How do we square this with the belief that the less-Westernised section of Singapore's population is "conservative"? (And the fact that the brothers spoke to each other in Cantonese indicated that they belonged to this demographic).

In fact, this incident shows how the West's dichotomies, firstly of attitude, i.e. "conservative/disapproving of homosexuality" versus "liberal/gay-friendly", secondly, of self-identification, i.e. straight versus gay, and thirdly, of (opposite-sex) married versus unmarried, sit poorly on reality here.

I would be loath to put any labels on these two brothers; equally on their family attitudes. This example suggests that anyone who wishes to theorise about "conservative Asian values" should check his simplistic Western-rooted analyses at the door. Any theory about contemporary Chinese attitudes to homosexuality must be able to explain the behaviour I observed.

(And many others have observed similar situations, so my example is not unusual)

* * * * *

One big fan of the "Asians are conservative" formulation is the Singapore government. They use it to justify bans, censorship and the law criminalising gay people.

A good question to ask is, what do they know about Asian attitudes to homosexuality, particularly among the more "traditional" segments of our population?

Our cabinet ministers are disproportionately drawn from a certain kind of elite of our society, often educated in English, with further education in the West, with many of them being staunch Christians. It is common knowledge that some of them are of the born-again kind.

The attitudes they hold towards homosexuality are, not surprisingly, informed by Judeo-Christian ideas, sometimes extremely so (i.e. of the Jerry Falwell variety), but for reasons of political positioning, they cannot admit it. More likely they don't even realise it. They flatter themselves to think they represent the typical Asian, and that their views on homosexuality are typically Asian views.

The truth may well be that they are projecting their Westernised ideas, and the simple dichotomies that those ideas are based upon, onto the demographics they claim to speak for. It's only unchallenged power that sustains their illusion that they know Singapore.

© Yawning Bread