People Like Us: Sexual Minorities in Singapore (review)

142Book Reviews PeopleLike Us: SexualMinorities in Singapore. Edited byJoseph Lo and Huang Guoqin. Singapore: Select Publishing, 2003. 149 pp. People Like Us: SexualMinorities in Singaporeis a book so right on time that it might have in fact arrived a little too eatly. Like the fabulous party guestwho comes at the time stated on the invitation only to find himself or herselfthe first person thete, but who shrugs offthe embarrassment and sets about helping the host, the book appears just as Singapore seems ready — but not too ready — to think but not talk about alternative sexualities. The book is thus likely to find itself in the midst of a cautiously receptive atmosphere, even as it will work hard to make that milieu even more welcoming. After all, it was just recently that the Prime Minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, revealed to the Asian edition of Time magazine that his government now permits a certain amount of gay culture — or at least businesses (bars and saunas) — to exist and even flourish, and has also silently begun allowing "gay employees into its ranks, even in sensitive positions" (Elegant 2003, p. 36). Such good news cannot, however , be receivedwithout red flags. One reason to be sceptical is that this new governmental policy — at least as Time interprets it, rightly or wrongly — is mostly framed in the economic context of Singapore's desire to attract more "foreign talent". "The change in policy", the magazine notes, is "inspired at least in part by the desire not to exclude talented foreigners who are gay" (ibid.). But what is more eyebrowraising about the news item is that, while the ending of woikplace discrimination against gays and lesbians is presented as no big deal, talkingabout the policy — and about gay and lesbian lives and cultures — is still something to be wary of. Thus, while the policy has been implemented , it has been done "without fanfare ... to avoid raising the hackles of more-conservative Singaporeans" (ibid.). As far as the Singapore government is concerned, therefore, homosexuality might be fine; the entry ofhomosexuality into public discourse in Singapore, however, is still a mattet for some caution or reservation. In this light, this collection ofessays, edited byJoseph Lo and Huang Guoqin, is an important one precisely because it attempts to create a Book Reviews143 space for such discourse. The book takes its name from, and is an initiative by, People Like Us (PLU), a Singaporean gay and lesbian group that existed in its strongest and most tangible form between the years 1993 and 1997. Because a raison d'être ofthe group was its desire for a place in civil society, PLU's final achievement (the submission of an application to the Singapore Registrar ofSocieties, requesting that the group be officially recognized as an organization) was also the reason for its demise (when the application was turned down; for a record ofthis application process, see the essay "Copernicus Revolution in PLU" [pp. 132-37 ofthe volume], and "BriefHistory"). This book now represents another of the group's legacies. As co-editor Lo details in his Introduction, in January 1999, several members ofPLU organized the "Millennium Project Forum" to discuss the place ofthe gay community in Singapore. Consisting oftwo closed-door sessions — one titled "Rights, Responsibilities and Civil Action", and the other "Identity, Consciousness andValues" — the forum has finally been transcribed, and these transcripts form the fitst two parts of this book. Rounding off the volume is a third section, "The Voices of the Sexual Minorities", which attempts to document aspects ofSingapore's fledgeling gay histories. This third section is a little haphazard, as even its catch-all name might suggest: it includes reprints ofessays that originally appeared in the PLU newsletter, several academic and analytical articles, a couple ofmore personal and proclamatory essays, and interviews with various gay Singapore artists. Even though it is the most random of the thtee sections, the third probably contains the strongest work. William Peterson's "The Queer Stage in Singapore", one of the essays in this section, undertakes the important task of recording the history of Singapore's "pendulum of liberalisation and repression" (p. 87) through a survey ofgay characters and diemes in Singaporean plays. Petetson...