Part 3: A gay trip down memory lane in Singapore

Hi guys, I started writing about the history of gay Singapore as part of part 2 but realized that this was so interesting that it really deserved to be part 3 all by itself. So in part 3, I shall talk about what gay life was like in Singapore  way back before we had the internet and why the internet had |huge impact on the gay community in Singapore. As S377A is repealed, I think it is important for us to look back at history and review what happened in the decades that have passed. 

I am old enough to remember life before the internet, that made such a huge difference to the gay community because it enabled us to access so much more information about what it means to be gay. Back then, one of the most common misconceptions was that being gay meant you wanted a sex change, that you were a woman's trapped in a man's body. Now that's something totally different, when a person wants a sex change, that's called being transsexual. I remember back in 1996 when I came out to my parents and spoke to a family friend whom I shall refer to as Mrs Lee (not her real name), she really wanted to help but she was one of those older Singaporeans who didn't understand the difference between being gay and transsexual. Mrs Lee had a young brother who had a sex change and she told me that it was because her father was a really nasty man who would get drunk, visit prostitutes, gamble and get up to all kinds of crap - Mrs Lee's mother decided that she couldn't do anything about the situation, this was way back in the 1960s but she decided to tell her two children everything. From a young age, Mrs Lee's mother would say things like, "all men are bastards, you can't trust men". Mrs Lee thought this led to her brother bring brainwashed about wanting to become a woman, because their father was such a terrible role model that her brother eventually had a sex change to make sure he could then avoid becoming a man. Thus Mrs Lee told me that I wasn't gay because her brother (now her sister) used to like putting on skirts, trying on women's make up and was fascinated with ladies' high heel shoes whilst I did none of the above. Nope, I have no interest at all in women nor do I ever want to be like one - I am simply a man who likes men. 

However, many people like Mrs Lee didn't think it was possible to be gay and masculine at the same time. A Singaporean woman of her age simply had very little exposure to the full array of gay culture that one can experience in the West. Some of you may have heard of Bugis Street - today, the area is full of modern shopping malls but in the period from 1950 to the mid 1980s, the area was famous for "Ah Quas" (a Hokkien term for an effeminiate gay man). You would find both transsexuals (men who were seeking gender reassignment) and transvestites (men who simply dressed up in women's clothing) at Bugis Street and whilst there were some cabaret type shows which were popular with tourists (in particular, with the white sailors from the UK, Australia and New Zealand), there was also a lot of prostitution going on as well in the Bugis Street area, but these prostitutes were either transsexuals or transvestites and not women. This came to an end in the mid-1980s when the whole area was bulldozed for redevelopment. Thus for people like Mrs Lee who grew up in Singapore in this period, their only reference to any kind of gay culture would be the kind of shenanigans which took place on Bugis Street, characterized by gay men who dressed as women to prostitute themselves to foreigners. There wasn't any kind of visible masculine gay men in Singapore back then because if they were that masculine, then they would have slipped under the radar and "passed for straight", that meant that people like Mrs Lee wouldn't even be aware that these masculine men were actually gay and that enabled them to remain quite comfortably in the closet then since people like Mrs Lee would just assume they were straight if they weren't effeminate like an 'Ah Qua'/Pondan at all. 

You have to look at the local words for 'gay' in Singapore and they all refer to a kind of effeminate gay, as if all gays were effeminate. I have already introduced you to the Hokkien word 'Ah Qua' (sometimes spelled as Ah Kwa or Ah Gua) which is a derogatory term, so back when I was in school, if there was a boy in the class who was weak, bad at sports, played with dolls, liked perfume and would cry under duress, then he would be labeled an Ah Qua or a sissy, because boys were not supposed to cry and crying was a sign of weakness - that you were not manly and tough. Ironically, I've come across loads of boys/men over the years who are weak and might have been labeled Ah Qua but they are not gay per se, they have no desire to have sex with another man. There are two words from Malay which more or less mean the same thing too: Pondan and Bapok. Both words to refer to a transvestite, an effeminate gay man who dresses up in as a woman, though like Ah Qua, it is generally used to insult any boy/man who deemed to be effeminate or a sissy. Yes you get the idea, back in the day, Singaporeans really hated guys who were effeminate, it was such a taboo to be a sissy and such guys would be bullied relentlessly, most people would just assume that they must be not just gay, but a woman trapped in a man's body and possibly seeking a sex change. Mrs Lee even suggested that there must have been something wrong with these Ah Quas' sex organs, that it was a serious medical condition that left them unable to perform sexually as men because their sex organs malfunctioned or were deformed and that was the cause of their lack of testosterone, thus leaving them rather effeminate and woman-like, so Mrs Lee even suggested that they needed injections of testosterone.

That was why I confused the heck out of Mrs Lee - I wasn't effeminate, I was good at sports and if I may be blunt, she even asked me about my genitalia. I am happy to report that everything is working fine in that department and in fact, I am above average in that department as well. I have never had any desire to put on women's clothing and thus I was nothing like Mrs Lee's brother (now her sister). That was why Mrs Lee insisted that I was not gay, that I simply haven't met the right girl yet and when I do, I will fall in love and everything will work out right in the end. In her head, she simply couldn't picture a remarkably ordinary man like me being gay as I wasn't an Ah Qua, a Pondan or Bapok. What was life like in Singapore for gay men before the internet came along then? Well there were basically three options for them - the first was to leave Singapore and move to a more liberal country and settle in a place like New York, London or Sydney where they could have gay relationships more openly whilst their parents were told that their sons were simply 'working abroad' to further their careers. Some would have done the complete opposite and gotten married (and have children) because they bowed down to pressure from their families and society. It wasn't uncommon for gay men to be forced into marriages like that, some would cheat on their wives from time to time with other men, whilst others tried their best to adjust to their new roles as husband and father. Then there is the third option which is the low-profile gay man: he would appear publicly as 'straight and single' and never talk about his personal life. So if you asked him if he was gay, he would definitely deny it - at least he would not marry a woman to try to convince you that he was definitely straight and not gay. 

So how can a gay man marry a straight woman, you may ask? Well that's been happening a lot for so many years, you'd often hear of stories like this gay man in Malaysia being forced into a marriage to please his parents as he was afraid that they would cut him off and leave him penniless. So he married some uneducated woman from a village who didn't ask too many questions every time he would have to go to Kuala Lumpur 'on business', but of course it was non-stop gay sex every time he got to the capital city. As for producing children, I can only suggest that these men just turn off the lights, shut their eyes and use their vivid imagination when doing the deed. I knew of this case when this man, we'll call him Roger - he came from a religiously conservative family so he didn't know much about relationships and sex when he got to university, that's when he met Rose and they got drunk at a party together - the next day he woke up with a terrible hangover and realized that they had sex. A few weeks later Rose missed her period as she was pregnant, so Roger decided to do the responsible thing and married her despite the fact that they were still young university students. Roger's marriage with Rose was difficult from the start - they had barely known each other before Rose got pregnant after that fateful night at the party and by the time they realized that they weren't right for each other, it was already too late and more to the point, he was gay. But Roger didn't have a happy childhood so he felt morally obliged to be a good father to his child despite the fact that it was clear that he wasn't in love with Rose. Roger eventually came out to Rose and her reaction surprised - she said, "oh yeah, I knew all this time, but you are very a good father to our son, so I didn't want to complain." Thus they are still a family in Singapore today but Roger is now seeing men (with Rose's permission). 

Hence it would be relatively easy for men choosing the third option to stay in the closet if they are not effeminate, at least nobody would assume the are gay. In fact, there's yet another Malay term used to describe the gays who are so effeminate they simply cannot hide the fact that they are gay: it is pecah lobang in Malay, though Chinese people tend to mispronounce it as 'pichiak lobang' and pecah is a loan word used in Hokkien as well, where it retains the same meaning but is pronounced more like pichiak. I am afraid it is such an offensive way to describe a certain aspect of gay sex that I shan't translate it. The less offensive way to describe it is a Chinese proverb: 纸是包不住火的 ('paper cannot wrap fire' - you  cannot hide a fire by wrapping it with paper as the paper would just burn) - hence this is a saying used to describe a situation where something is so extremely obvious for everyone to see there is just no way of denying it, such as when a gay man is so effeminate, there's no point in trying to convince others that he might be straight. In the West, there are both forms of gays: the masculine ones and the effeminate ones. That's logical to me as a gay man: I like men, I like masculinity, so I shall embrace the object of my desire by becoming my own vision of what I find most attractive. I remember in 1997 when I had first stumbled upon the works of Tom of Finland - in his illustrations were highly stylized homoerotic art where all the men were extremely, over the top masculine and celebrated certain icons of masculine heroes. His illustrations captured precisely, exactly what I liked about men and my reaction to that was yeah I wanna be like that. And more to the point, in Tom of Finland's erotic art, these highly masculine men were having sex with each other and there was the total absence of the 'pecah lobang' variety of effeminate gay men. Tom did a lot of his work in the 1950s to 1970s, before porn production came along so his illustrations were a projection of his vision of gay masculinity. 

You see, back in Asia, the assumption that there must always be a 'man' and a 'woman' even within a same sex relationship when that's simply not the case in the West. More often that not, you're going to see two masculine gays in a relationship and in some cases, you also see two effeminate gays in a relationship. The ways sexual chemistry works between two men can be very complex, once you eliminate the need to copulate a certain way in order to produce an offspring. But the problem in places like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand is that the works of Tom of Finland, along with other adult and gay media content from the West never made it this far East and thus I remember my frustration when I first arrived in the UK to find that most British gays made the assumption that there was no such thing as a masculine Asian gay - that the gays from South East Asia were all extremely effeminate, passive and were either transsexuals or transvestite. I knew that was the stereotype in Singapore but it irked me to realize that this stereotype that become truly international. I remember running into two extremely effeminate Thai gays in France around 2000 - I simply turned and walked the other way to get away from them as quickly as possible but I remember feeling conflicted: my first thought was, "it is because of people like you that people in the West think of us Asian gays as effeminate freak shows, don't you have any self respect at all?" Then immediately, I was shocked at how extreme that reaction was - after all, if I had walked past a 'straight-acting' masculine gay Asian guy, then I would have just assumed that he was straight. If those two effeminate gays were French and white, I probably would have just ignored them - as it would not be a reflection on me. 

By that token, things haven't really changed that much in that effeminate gays still bear the brunt of homophobia given that they are more evidently gay whilst the masculine gays can easily slip under the radar and pass for straight as they have done all these years. The only difference is that masculine gays are now quite happy to openly declare to the world that they are gay rather than use their masculinity to 'pass as straight'.  Let's take Singapore's biggest Onlyfans porn star Titus Low, he is a good example of a masculine gay - he isn't effeminate, he is very well built and muscular and there's no hint of femininity at all in the way he portrays himself online. This simply replicates what we see in the gay porn industry: the most popular and successful gay porn stars are all very masculine: they have big muscles, they are well endowed, they are handsome and are all 'straight-acting': that's a term to mean that their demeanor would allow them to 'pass for straight'. I won't include any hyperlinks on this but just feel free to do a search on Google if you're curious. Effeminate gay porn stars do exist but they are hardly popular nor do they achieve much success in an industry which views them as vastly inferior and unattractive. As a gay man, at the risk of pointing out what must be very obvious, allow me to make the clarification: I like men, it is that masculinity that turns me on and gets me horny. I don't like women, by extension of that, I wouldn't get turned on sexually by a man who is effeminate. If that was what I liked, I may as well just find a real woman if this kind of femininity did turn me on but obviously, it doesn't. In the West, there is a sexual hierarchy amongst gay men where those who are most masculine in appearance are considered the most attractive and the "pecah lobang" gays are considered the least desirable - yes they face a lot of discrimination even from their fellow gays. 

Unfortunately, this is a lose-lose situation for the gays in Singapore. If you're effeminate, then you will be subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, bullying and abuse for being "pecah lobang". If you are masculine, then your reward is the privilege to retreat deep into the closet and pass for straight - that is hardly a prize. The situation is somewhat better in the West though far from perfect: so we have gay politicians who have come to represent the respectable, acceptable face of being gay and of course, they are completely masculine and could pass for straight. Most voters would put aside the issue of the gay politician's sexuality as they look like the other straight male politicians. Sure there are some more flamboyant gays who are popular on the entertainment scene like Elton John, Boy George and Adam Lambert but they are still the exception: take Elton John for example, he was once married to a woman and had achieved an incredible level of global fame before he came out as gay - thus with all that success under his belt, coming out as gay didn't really hurt his fame and popularity much. Another famous gay singer who went through that same process was Ricky Martin - he capitalized on his good looks and had achieved so much success globally before coming out as gay in 2010. He started his career in the Latin American music scene and it would have been nearly impossible to market a gay singer to that market because of the homophobia there. However, if you were a young singer who was effeminate and openly gay like Australia's Sheldon Riley, then the odds are stacked against you from the start, even though Riley was trying to make it in an industry that was more gay-friendly than most - there are so few young and openly gay singers like Riley today. 

I feel bad for gays who do fall into the "pecah lobang" category; for most men, they either like masculinity or femininity - if you like masculinity, then you're gay and you wanna have sex with other men. If femininity turns you on, then you're straight and you then go on to have sex with women. Thus being somewhat androgynous, falling in between the gap of masculinity and femininity would limit your appeal to a society where people have viewed this issue through this simplistic dichotomy of masculinity vs femininity. On gay dating apps like Grindr, you would quite often see people write things like "no fems" on their profiles to make it very clear that they don't like effeminate men and that they only want to chat to masculine men. Thus the gays who are in this "pecah lobang" category face a double whammy: they are discriminated against by both straight and gay people alike. Some years ago, I had a neighbour who was in this category: he usually wore women's clothing and was very fond of strong perfumes - you would smell him long before you could see him. I suppose he was a transvestite, and life was hard for him. He was attacked and robbed twice when he was returning home at night; thus he claimed that the neighbourhood wasn't safe and he was going to move. I had lived there for 12 years and had no problems whatsoever with crime - it was obvious that it was his appearance as a transvestite that made him a lot more vulnerable to such attacks. I didn't want to tell him to stop appearing so effeminate and gay because I don't think he could even if he tried; it was one of those "you can't wrap fire with paper" situations, that's just the way he was. I didn't have a solution for him - I knew he's always going to face a lot more danger than me. 

It is so easy to find other gay people in Singapore today thanks to technology, just log onto an app like Grindr and it will show you the profiles of registered users near you. Otherwise if you prefer something a bit more old fashioned, you can also visit one of the many gay bars in town like Tantric or Dorothy's. But what did gays do to find each other before the internet and these gay bars? I got to know an older gay man back in my army days in the 1990s and let's call him Jay (not his real name). He told me about a group of friends who called themselves the 姐妹帮派 ('the Sisters' gang') - it was so hard to find good friends who were gay back then, so naturally when you made a gay friend, you made an effort to nurture that relationship. The people in the Sisters' gang were a group of mostly Mandarin speaking older gays, the majority of whom were considered fairly effeminate - the core group met during their army days but other 'sisters' were invited to join along the years. They would organize activities like renting a beach chalet at East Coast Park and having private parties there, away from the prying eyes of the public and create that safe space where they knew that the other people in the room were all gay and wouldn't judge them if they were effeminate. When I asked Jay if there was any sex at those parties and he said, "no you don't have sex with your sisters. We were family, that'll be like incest. You would have sex with other men, then come back and tell your sisters about it at the next party. Besides there was always the fear and paranoia about being with other gay people so if you did nothing wrong, then the police couldn't arrest you even if they raided the party. These parties were the only time some of these sisters really felt like they could be themselves." 

Jay told me quite a lot of stories about the Sister's gang, some were funny, others were tragic. He told me about this larger than life character whom they addressed as 'Mummy' - he was this older gay who would have to step in and break up the fights when the younger sisters quarreled. Jay told me about this incident when one of the younger sisters called Johnny brought his new boyfriend to a party and that boyfriend was so handsome, he was an Indian guy and suddenly everyone instantly switched from Mandarin to English just to be able to speak to him. Johnny caught another sister trying to give this hot Indian guy his phone number and so when Mummy heard about this dispute, the two sisters were hauled up in from of her and Mummy was judge, jury and executioner in that court. There was this weird dynamics of power where these two sisters were bitterly fighting but still respected the authority of Mummy in the gang. All this may have sounded like a scene out of an old 1980s Hong Kong movie about the triads, but actually what I am describing here is a gang of 'pecah lobang' gays in Singapore from the mid-1980s. Johnny accused that other sister of creating an atmosphere that was predatory, the Sisters' gang was supposed to be a safe space, not where you had to watch your back. The other sister disagreed, saying that he wasn't trying to steal Johnny's new boyfriend but felt that he had the right to make a new friend at the party and that his intentions were innocent. Like a judge, Mummy called the very handsome Indian boyfriend to testify and he assured Johnny that even if he chatted with the other sisters at the party and took all of their phone numbers - thus Johnny had absolutely nothing to worry about and so at least that story had a happy ending. 

Thus the Sisters' gang had a mission to create a safe space for the Sisters and Jay told me this story where a new sister who was (in his words) "super pecah lobang" and his name was Rambo. Even Mummy struggled to keep a straight face as it was the 1980s, everyone had seen the popular Rambo movies - the name Rambo evoked this super macho action hero from the famous films. Furthermore, this Rambo had a really strong Chinese accent and thus pronounced his name is Lambo instead. Thus Mummy got curious, why did he pick the name Rambo after having watched the movie? Well, there is a Chinese tradition whereby you pick a name that would communicate a quality you want your child to have, so if you want the child to be strong, you would use the character 强, if you wanted the child to be intelligent, you could use the character 聪 and if you wanted your child to be brave, you would use the character 勇. Thus if you were a super 'pecah lobang' gay who was sick and tired of being bullied at school for being an effeminate sissy, then you'd call yourself 'Rambo' to try to live up to that name and be a lot more masculine. Mummy contemplated for a while at that story and told Lambo to be proud of whom he was and he didn't have to try to be the Rambo of Singapore especially if he couldn't pronounce the R in Rambo. It was not as if Rambo was on his birth certificate anyway, so Mummy gave Lambo a new name: Lamborghini - the name of the Italian sports car. It was flashy, it was somewhat pretentious but at the same time in conjured up an image of opulent luxury and Italian sophistication. It was a lot more gay than Rambo. Lambo cried and embraced Mummy when he was 'christened' Lamborghini so Jay explained, "most of us still called him Lambo anyway as it was short for 'Lamborghini' - but finally, he found a safe space where he could be himself without trying to be Rambo."

I told Jay that I felt sorry for the Sisters' gang because it is one thing to sit around and feel safe when showing off your beautifully manicured nails without worrying that anyone is going to call you a girly sissy or a pecah lobang gay but what gays really need is a safe place to have sex as well. After all, I am a gay man because I want to have sex with other men and that was the one thing the Sisters' gang didn't provide - Mummy wasn't running a knocking shop where gays were having loads of sex. Instead, what Jay had described to me was an almost G-rated version, sanitized version of a gay party where the gays got together and had these very innocent picnics at East Coast Park. Jay assured me that the sisters were indeed having plenty of sex back then. "There were guys who did it at the toilets of Plaza Singapura, others were even garang enough to go cruising at Fort Road beach. Then we would get these married guys who would call us over when they had the flat to themselves. I remember having a regular Sunday afternoon session with this married man - he would drop his wife off for her classes at the gym and take his kids to tuition after lunch, then he would have approximately one and a half hours to have sex with me before he had to go pick up his wife and kids afterwards. Sometimes we would also pick up tourists and foreign businessmen and go back to their hotel rooms for sex; if you have money then you can always get a hotel room in Geylang for a few hours and nobody would ask too many questions. Oh there was plenty of gay sex back in the 1980s, it was almost the thrill of doing something so forbidden  that made it even more exciting. We didn't need more sex with the Sisters, we just needed a place to feel safe, to feel that sense of belonging and acceptance which we couldn't get from all our sleazy trysts - I couldn't get love from the men I slept with." 

Mind you, this conversation took place in the mid-1990s, when Jay was reminiscing about the 1980s. I do wonder what Mummy, Jay, Lambo, Johnny and his handsome Indian boyfriend are doing today. I have managed to track down Jay on Facebook but his profile had gone completely inactive and it looks like he hasn't used Facebook in a long time. Jay and Lambo were in their 40s in the 1990s, hence they would be in their 70s today and Mummy would be around 85 years old (if he is still alive). What would they make of the repeal of S377A? I looked at all the media reports of the repeal in Singapore and the people pictured in those news reports are all young, as if older gays didn't exist at all. I would be very interested to hear what older gays in Singapore have to say about the issue, especially if they have lived through the 1970s and 1980s, when it was far harder to be gay back then. After all, it is not like gays were something that found its way to Singapore in recent times like iPhones, Bubble Tea and H&M stores - gays have been around for an awfully long time. Heck, if you wanna go back even further to the last century, Singapore had a serious gender imbalance as the majority of the migrant workers from places like China, India and Malaysia were all men - thus these men had two options to find sex: they could either pay for female prostitutes or they could just turn to each other. However, as these migrant labourers were often very poor, they often couldn't afford to pay for these prostitutes in Singapore who were in short supply and thus commanded a high price. Thus even in the very early days of Singapore, there was already plenty of gay sex happening amongst our forefathers and somehow, none of that gay history appeared in any of our textbooks when looking at those early days of Singapore; nope, they have just created a gigantic blind spot to hide all that gay sex.

So guys, I was going to write part 4 to focus on life in the mid-1990s, that's when I did live in Singapore as a gay man during my army days, but I decided to park that aside for now as one of my readers has sent me a link to a blog post by a Singapore who is vehemently anti-gay and is angry that the PAP has taken this step to repeal S377A. Whilst I want to refrain from personal attacks, he has failed to present a convincing argument and most of it is based on a deep hatred of gays. So we'll revisit gay life in Singapore back in the 1990s at some stage in the future but I don't want to be guilty of being stuck in my liberal echo chamber, so let's deal with what this gay-hating Singaporean has to say. So please stay tuned, akan datang! As always please leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts, many thanks for reading.