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Prefatory Note Alex Au Waipang has been a gay activist in Singapore since 1993, when he began working with the then newly formed People Like Us, a gay and lesbian rights group with which he is still associated. Using business to push the envelope for gay issues in Singapore, he was also the main shareholder in a gay sauna that operated in the city-state from 2000 to 2005. Among Singaporeans in general, however, Au is bestknown for Yawning Bread (www.yawningbread.org), a web site that has been on-line since 1996 and that has a reputation for fiercely independent commentary on social, political, and gay issues. For some two decades, Au has observed the gradual evolution of gay life and the gay scene in Singapore, occasionally as the centre of public attention himself. Over these same two decades, Au has also been in love with Thailand—for a few years, literally, with a Thai boyfriend—and has also become familiar with the evolution of the Thai gay scene through frequent visits since the late 1980s. In this chapter, Au reflects on the role that Bangkok’s gay scene has played in the emergence of gay identity, community, and gay politics in Singapore. All informants’ names have been changed at their request. “To speak of Bangkok was to speak of being gay,” Stanley, a lawyer and frequent traveller to Bangkok, said. Those were the times, in the 1990s, when many felt it was impossible to be gay in Singapore. Self-preservation dictated a habit of closeted silence among Singaporean gay men, imposed more rigorously every time a fresh report appeared in the city-state’s newspapers that homosexual men had been arrested and sentenced to imprisonment, or subjected, even, to flogging. Until 2008, Section 377 of the Singaporean Penal Code prescribed a sentence of up to life imprisonment for “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. Even today, Section 377A of the revised Penal 9 Speaking of Bangkok Thailand in the History of Gay Singapore Alex Au Alex Au 182 Code criminalizes “gross indecency” between two males, a term that covers a wide range of erotic acts, even if they are consensual and conducted in private. Section 377A provides for up to two years’ imprisonment. With these and other politically convenient laws, the government went about its task in the 1980s and early 1990s of trying to eliminate homosexual behaviour in public. Until 1994, the police regularly sent decoys into parks and back alleys to entrap men cruising for sex. The names, occupations, and even faces of those charged were splashed in the local newspapers. The Sunday night gay disco—it moved from place to place through the years—was frequently raided. In one well-recorded instance in May 1993, many partygoers who could not produce identification were hauled off to spend the night in a police lockup and had to call their families to the police station to bail them out. Since Singaporean law does not require its citizens to carry identification at all times, such detention amounted to unlawful harassment. This, however, was just one of many similar cases of the institutional homophobia that was the constant backdrop of Singaporean gay men’s lives in the second half of the twentieth century. Cruising and even mixing with other gay men in a known gay bar was an activity fraught with danger. Large numbers of Singaporeans with homosexual inclinations stayed away from the city’s few gay venues, especially if they had good jobs that they would never want to risk. Probably even larger numbers denied to themselves that they were homosexual or bisexual. Between a social climateofdisapprovalandsilenceontheonehand,and,ontheother,government censorship that filtered out any positive representation of homosexuality from abroad in the local press, Singaporean gay-identity formation was stillborn. Yet, by the 1990s, Singapore was already a middle-income country, with the prime minister at the time, Goh Chok Tong, painting a vision of Singapore attaining a “Swiss standard of living” within ten years. Increasing numbers of Singaporeans had the wherewithal to travel abroad; however, a complex set of factors went into their choices of destinations. Going to the West brought status, but it was also more costly. For those who were already gay-identified and whose idea of erotic beauty was based on the Caucasian model, the allure of San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Sydney was irresistible. The majority of Singaporeans, however, were either only vaguely aware of the reputations of Western gay capitals or...

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