Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

2. The Global Asian Queer Boys of Singapore

91 2 THE GLOBAL ASIAN QUEER BOYS OF SINGAPORE From Bali to Singapore, the transmogrification of the classic white man/brown boy configuration into the postcolonial father-state vis- à-vis its gay citizenry presents a conceptual iteration of the dyad with its own erotic, juridical, and performative spells. This “twist” involves unlikely bedfellows, the Singapore father-state and partying gay boys, intertwined in queer positions that are sometimes fabulous and sometimes bizarre. For both parties, these are often compromising positions that have a set of requisite, if also incriminating, role-play: the state is an unctuous but also leering patriarch, while gay men with sizeable disposable incomes are wild, promiscuous boys performing for him in rainbow gear. The dyad, to put it bluntly, is now ramified in the cultural policies, national legislature, and queer theaters of a postcolonial Asian city-state, particularly around issues of homosexuality. The global asian queer boys of singapore 92 This inextricable twosome has a long history, and is allegorical of the colonial coupling of yesteryear. Even as the differential power and erotic adjustments of this postcolonial scenario are unique for the dyad, the queer encounter of the Singapore father-state and its gay populace is curiously conjugated by the tropic spells of the dyad in new form. It is embroiled in the “magic” of religious, commercial, and state action at once catholic, contradictory, and world making for local queers. In other words, the queerness of the colonial dyad is regenerated as a complex of disciplinary and neoliberal sexual logics in a postcolonial and transnational site. And with that move from early-twentieth-century Bali to contemporary Singapore across the Java Sea, brown boys have also turned into global Asian queer boys. The global Asian queer boy, or the native boy in transnational drag, is the trope at the heart of this chapter. Using Singapore as a test site, this chapter examines how the boy references colonial legacies in global/local iterations of erotic power play afforded by the tropic positions constituting the dyad, and thereby extends the book’s assembly of queer reading practices of performance in the Asias. That is, the spell of the boy’s exotic sexuality differently staged through queer scenarios vis- à-vis the Singapore father-state, like the brown boy on display for the colonial, serve as critiques of discursive formations about Asian (auto) exotic and erotic positions. These positions are tied to the state’s as well as the boy’s peculiar places in the transnational world. On the Singapore Sling Performance is particularly useful for parsing the dyad’s impact on the sexual and representational politics of queer Singapore in national and transnational terms. It provides a critical vocabulary for the myriad spells hovering over local gay men as global Asian queer boys and abject homosexuals simultaneously. This peculiar Asian encounter and its postcolonial politics are vividly found in the country’s English-language gay theater, a major venue of the boy’s new middle-class struggles. By the new millennium, the curtains are completely unfurled for the Singapore boy to come out with a paradoxical aura of sexual charge, commercial viability, and abjection by the state. From the pink stages of state-funded theaters, global city blueprints, and gay saunas, bars, The global asian queer boys of singapore 93 and parties to a public pushback campaign by the local Christian right wing against the “homosexual agenda,” queerness is seemingly ubiquitous , rising to a level never seen in public consumption, visibility, and debate before 2000. If one were to spotlight the boys sashaying their hips on the semiotic catwalks of Singapore’s queering, one would see them swishing to one side as fabulous theatrical stars with their tops off, and then to the other side as sodomite-criminals caught in flagrante delicto with their pants down. I am referring to the saturation of queer theater and widely disseminated images of its often shirtless or naked male leads, on the one hand, and the retention of the colonial-era statute 377A (criminalizing consensual sex between men), on the other hand. More than just a sideshow, the global Asian queer boy’s movements on this tropical island are closely watched by politicians, censors, audience members, and religious activists, who view his pelvic thrusts and hip action—whether they be flouncing, sapless, or seductive—as part of the country’s economic, cultural, and moral destiny. He is strapped, so to...