Pop star Elton John exchanged "I do's" with David Furnish in a small media frenzy in Windsor, England. The following evening, even ChannelNewsAsia, our local TV news broadcaster, carried footage of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair saying he wished the couple well, and that he was proud that Britain had taken this progressive step of legalising gay partnerships.

For Singaporeans, we're just happy to see that gay-affirmative words and images aren't censored altogether.

In cinema news, Brokeback Mountain began creating its own media frenzy in the US in December too. Besides collecting critical accolades, the movie may well gain a following among straight females and their reluctant husbands. If so, it is likely, henceforth, to impact to a degree on the gay debate in America.

For Singaporeans, we're just happy to see that our film reviewers are free to write about the movie and that it is likely to reach our cinemas in February.

These two headline events sketch out the progress made in the West. One represents the advances on the political and legal front, the other on the social and media front.

But most of us partake of entertainment news with care. It has a tendency to be shallow, perhaps a little pinker than other news, and we know its concerns seldom reflect the harsh realities of life the average American or Briton faces.

What more of life in Asia?

Here, the struggle continues. Here the issues we deal with are very basic: that of life and liberty. With rare exceptions, we can hardly see when our governments and justice systems will deign to give unbiased consideration to questions issuing from sexual orientation. We may not even have the luxury of dreaming about that since every now and then, we have to rush to the frontlines when bureaucrats and police forces take matters into their own hands, making arbitrary decisions based on their personal prejudices and misplaced ideas of law and order.

In Beijing

Some intrepid activists organised a Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival in Beijing, scheduled for the weekend of 16 – 18 December 2005. It was to comprise films, exhibitions, plays and seminars. Originally, the venue was an arts studio in the intellectual northwestern part of the city where the leading universities are located.

However, just before it was scheduled to open, word filtered through that the government -- it's not clear which level of government -- was going to shut it down, and so the organisers moved it to On/Off, a gay bar. But even that didn't work, for the police too learnt of the move and sealed off the bar on the Friday the festival was supposed to begin.

See news reports in Police call halt to China's first gay cultural festival.

Officially, China has no law proscribing homosexual acts, and since 2001, homosexual orientation has ceased to be included in the psychiatric manual as a mental disease.

Yet the nature of authoritarian governments is such that leaders and their minions act more on their compulsive instincts than on the basis of what is in the rulebooks. Anything spontaneous that they themselves did not bless tends to be seen as a threat to their controlling authority.

Coupled with ignorance and attitudes inherited from the early days of westernisation of Chinese culture, homosexuality and gay identity are quite high up among things that authoritarians fear. We all fear the unknown. We fear even more the unknown that is spreading and organising itself autonomously.

This doesn't mean that top leaders gave the order to crack down on the Beijing festival; possibly it's some junior or middle level official in the Beijing municipal government acting preemptively, second-guessing more senior leaders.

But whichever way it is, it's back to the drawing board for the Chinese gays and lesbians, just days before Elton John would wed.

It least there were no reports of arrests. Maybe the fact that homosexuality isn't illegal in China counted for something.

In Lucknow

The homosexuals in the city of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, were not so lucky. The Times of India reported that on 4 January 2006, Indian police arrested 4 men in a "picnic spot", and through subsequent searches and interrogations, found names, addresses and telephone numbers of 50 more Lucknow residents. There was the suggestion that the men were caught in a compromising position, thus justifying their arrests. However, see the box at right.

The newspaper published the names and occupations of the 4 unlucky guys. TV crews were at the police station where they were taken, and when one of the arrested men tried to snatch away a journalist's camera, the journalists beat him up!

India criminalises homosex through Section 377 of its Penal Code, and this gives the police a relatively free hand to harass and humiliate gay people even if there isn't enough evidence to prosecute successfully.

The media may adopt the policy that anyone arrested is news and feel free to print or broadcast their names and faces. However, this degree of publicity by itself may mean social death, family ostracism and the sack from the job, a fact that editors either do not seem to realise, or refuse to be responsible for.

After all, homosexuality is a disgusting vice, isn't it? Why should we be humane towards subhumans?

The arrests in Lucknow and the disclosure of their names and faces mirror what happened in Singapore not too long ago. In 1993, a series of decoy operations were mounted by our police in the bushes off Fort Road. Many of those arrested had their names and faces in the newspapers too.

Earlier that same year, the police busted Rascals discotheque on one of their gay Sunday nights. They were so heavy-handed, it was quite clearly intended as harassment rather than routine checking of club licences. See the article The police raid at Rascals disco

This sounds rather similar to the way the Beijing police acted, doesn't it?

Lest you think that in Singapore, we've put a wee bit of progress since the dark days of 1993 and that things today are not quite as bad as Lucknow or Beijing, may I request readers to refer to the article Four persons arrested in a sauna let off with warnings? That police raid took place in April 2005. Nor should we forget that the Snowball and Nation parties were banned in 2004 and 2005 respectively.

A different arrest

But perhaps there is a God in Heaven after all. The day before the Lucknow arrests, another arrest took place half the world away.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lonnie Latham, a senior pastor and a member of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee, had the good sense to proposition a plainclothes policeman sent on a decoy mission. He was promptly arrested and booked on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness.

He was caught in an area where male prostitutes were known to operate.

Latham was not just any pastor. He was one of the leaders of the largest protestant denomination in the United States, with a reported 42,000 churches. The Southern Baptists are known for their anti-gay ideology and political lobbying. They believe that homosexuals can turn heterosexual "if they accept Jesus Christ as their savior and reject their sinful, destructive lifestyle." Latham himself had spoken out against same-sex marriage.

His arrest did not make anywhere as big a headline as Elton John's (sinful, destructive?) same-sex marriage. That's because over the last 30 years, in the US, there have been so many anti-gay ideologues caught cruising for homosex, that one more case is not a big deal anymore. I have mentioned the cases of Michael Johnston, John Paulk and others in the article Ex-gay ministries and the cures that don't work.

Every few years, some high-profile person from that hysterical lobby group is caught with his pants down, figuratively speaking. It would be patently laughable if their politics had not ruined so many others' lives and happiness.

This tawdry history raises the question of what the anti-gay campaign and its associated conversion therapy program really represent. Are their arguments and promises of cure truly a product of rational thought and proven results, or are they manifestations of their own insecurities and self-hate?

Yet there is no denying that despite such perverse groundings, the anti-gay lobby is a powerful one, often riding on the coat-tails of religion too.

So all these events in the last few weeks only go to show that while fabulous weddings and a good cry in the cinema may be nice to have, there's still a lot of work ahead if we want a truly just, equal and enlightened world.

© Yawning Bread