Editor's note: Malaysia-born and Singapore-bred Shinen Wong is currently getting settled in Sydney, Australia after moving from the United States, having attended college in Hanover, New Hampshire, and working in San Francisco for a year after. In this new fortnightly "Been Queer. Done That" column, Wong will explore gender, sexuality, and queer cultures based on personal anecdotes, sweeping generalisations and his incomprehensible libido.
Within the past decade, police have raided, harassed, and arrested gay individuals, organisations and private parties, all across Asia, with documented cases of raids in Taipei, Ho Chi Minh, Aceh, Kuala Lumpur, Guangzhou, Singapore, Mumbai, Bangkok, Quezon City, and Kathmandu, among many others. Most recently, police raided four gay venues in Penang. In many cases, those detained are sexually and/or physically abused in custody by power-hungry, homophobic police officers. In almost every circumstance, media reports on these raids around Asia feature images of those arrested covering their faces to protect themselves from being shamed by the media. International LGBT and human rights organisations often slam both the government-sanctioned police actions and the media coverage that are implicated in the abuse of our human rights. The recent raids in Penang to "weed out vice activities" are part of this history. In the language employed by Malaysia's The Star newspaper, we are likened to weeds, that we need to be "weeded out" to discriminate between the fruitful (heteros) from the weeds (homos). We are the enemy within.
On government control of sex
Governments, of course, have every reason to regulate people's sexuality. The most obvious reason is for population control. China, for example, has a "one-child" policy, in which couples are penalised for having more than one child. This has had the consequence of reducing the impacts of over-population, especially in the more dense urban areas of China, where this policy is more strictly enforced. Sex, as we know, is not always benign. Sex can and often does have consequences. People contend with unwanted pregnancies, raising ethical concerns about the viability of abortion, or else the financial burden on mother and society in raising an ill-conceived child. Sex can lead quickly to disease/infection, a burden on people's bodies and on health industries. Sex is also used as a weapon to hurt others, such as in rape, domestic violence, etc. Sex, to many people in power, is therefore an extremely dangerous freedom. Governments feel that they must allocate resources to regulate the freedom of sexual expression, in order to curb chaos. Sex is fitted within the specific restrictions of the cultural, geographic, religious and economic concerns demanded by specific countries, nations, or tribes. This theory accounts, at least in part, for differing laws and social attitudes regarding such issues as maternity/paternity leave, marriage rights, monogamy/polygamy, abortion rights, condom availability, homosexual expression, transgenderism, sex work, and bar-top dancing, among so many other issues.
However, this still does not explain the near universal phenomenon of police raids on gay establishments in urban cultures around the world. We know these are not isolated events. There is something extremely suspicious about the intermittent frequency with which our lives, our bars, our saunas, our clubs, our friends, and our homes, are raided, strip-searched and brutalised.
Urbanisation and changing gender/sex roles
Many countries are fast becoming urbanised with huge waves of population movement from rural and agricultural spaces to urban spaces to find work. As a result, gender roles and norms are becoming disentangled from traditional ideas of sexual propriety and practice. Having babies seems more and more like a "choice" or at least an "option" that some folks can make, rather than a necessity for farm labour. With increased mechanisation and technology, agriculture itself is being revolutionised to increase efficiency and productivity with a decreasing need for the menial labour provided by having many children, so it takes fewer people to create more food for more people.
Some of these changes in gender roles include an average increase in the education of women, which frees women to make more choices about their bodies and their sexuality outside of the purview of men, taking up positions of leadership, owning property, and inspiring self-determination. With the increased economic power of women in industrialised societies, feminist advocacy has ensured that contraception/latex barriers are getting cheaper and more easily accessible. This frees both women and men from the typical association of sex with pregnancy, and more people can have sex with less fear of the consequences of disease and spread of infection. Advances in medical technology in the area of treating sexually transmitted infections are symbolic also of the scientific industry's commitment to this freedom. The average age of (heterosexual) marriage is increasing. People are having children far older than their predecessors. Thus, many industrialised societies are fast becoming "individualist" cultures, freeing up people's incomes to spend on individual desires. A more 'pleasure-centric' sexuality and economy is emerging. More people are likely to explore previously latent desires, and to conceive of sexuality as a recreational pleasure outside of the roles and responsibilities of aggressive heterosexual reproduction. This applies both to straight folks and gay folks.
With the new modern ethic of individual freedom, governments are under threat of losing their citizens' loyalties because of international/global mass media technology, such as television, radio, and Internet, which blur the meaning of citizenship. New forms of sexual expression are being brought into people's living rooms through television and the Internet, from foreign films and inter-cultural mixing. This further solidifies our sense of the arbitrariness of our own culture's norms of sexual expression. In response, governments of nation-states resort to fostering extreme patriotism in their citizenry, and linking the rights of citizenship with 'normalising' sexual behaviour. They invest in media censorship, look to archaic laws to interpret and police contemporary behaviours, or else dream up entirely new doctrines to curb our enthusiasm (ex: accusing homosexuality as a symptom of "Western decadence").
Homosexuality, of course, has always existed in all cultures, even before mass media brought "Western decadence" to our living rooms. Homosexuality has been expressed differently from culture to culture across time, with differing rules, and with differing levels of acceptability. In modern or modernising societies, however, homosexuality has been scapegoated as symbolic of the evils of rapid social change wrought by industrialisation. We are a threat to the basic economic unit that sustains our globalising world, the reproductive nuclear family, and hence, a threat to what many people consider the basis of modern civilisation. Our "alternative" social units and gender/sexual expression expose the redundancy of sex wedded to procreation, and threaten the very fabric of our societies that, by definition, need to reproduce themselves in order to survive. This accounts for the fear that homosexuals are "recruiting." This fear is rooted in straight society's inability to conceive of a culture that generates itself outside of a model of procreative reproduction.
Ironically, though gay urban culture may originally have come from a need to express individual desires, this has transformed into a collective identity, in the form of "gay and lesbian" identity. We believe that we have shared ideals and concerns simply because we have similar sexual desires. In other words, we now have a word not just to describe what we do, but who we are. This has been an important shift in the history of our world. Because gay and lesbian identity was originally predicated on the criticism of traditional male-female heterosexual gender norms, it is no surprise that our community also includes bisexual and transgender individuals; we all share a collective distaste toward the restrictive laws and ideals that curb our most authentic expression in our new world order. Our identities are crucial to communicate our shared ideals and to generate genuine political change. With government and cultural suppression and restriction of our desire and our love, we have been stewing our rage and anger for a very long time.
Police raid the Stonewall Inn, NYC
On June 28, 1969, our rage exploded in the incident that has now come to be known as the Stonewall Riots, an icon in the history of global LGBT politics. During that time, the Stonewall Inn was a bar in Greenwich Village, NYC, that catered to the most disenfranchised in our community, from cross-dressers/transsexuals, to butch lesbians, hustlers, homeless youth, and effeminate gay men, among many others. It can be said that the bar attracted and was home to the "queerest of the queer."
That night, the police came and raided the bar. At first, it was the usual routine, with several patrons willingly giving themselves up to the police, covering their faces against the police taunts and insults as they were hauled out of the Inn and handcuffed. However, the mood that evening was beyond tense. Soon, a butch lesbian started to struggle and yell out at the policemen who had handcuffed her too tightly, and during the scuffle, she incited everyone to "DO SOMETHING!"
In the 1960s, police raids of gay/queer establishments in NYC was commonplace, but on this fine summer night at the end of June, the patrons at the Stonewall Inn were weary from having seen their community been raided, sexually harassed, raped, and silenced for too long by the police. Upon being exhorted to DO SOMETHING!, the Stonewall patrons spontaneously rioted against their captors. Beer bottles, glasses, garbage and bricks were thrown and smashed against the antagonistic police. The patrons, along with sympathetic passersby, turned into a mob. Almost everything in the Stonewall Inn was smashed into pieces, as the communal rage against the police had finally detonated. And we were, for an evening, united, all of us, the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender folks, the 'freaks,' and the homeless youth. The police, of course, had not expected this confrontation. They were used to a more quiet compliance, or else a lone hysterical individual who would struggle in vain to break free, only to be faced by the look on her friends' faces, shamed and defeated. But not tonight.
Within a few years, gay groups started forming all across America and around the Western world. This incident at the Stonewall Inn was frantically debated and covered all over American media, startling and offending as many as it inspired, catalysing the many legal and cultural changes that are thought to be more commonplace in Western democracies. For the first time, mainstream society saw queer faces, our hands not over our faces to cover our shame, but in the air balled up into fists, with eyes that stared back with militant rage, tearful and desperate for freedom, and with voices that spoke our truth.
Chin up to save face
And yet even today, in bars and clubs around the world, most especially in modernising Asia, I see my brothers and sisters continuing to cover our faces in shame as we are hauled away by the police, and I cringe so hard, with so much anger, knowing that these are my governments, in countries I have grown up in, in the continent of Asia from which my racial identity derives its name, with people who could have been my friends. I resent how our governments continue to terrorise us, hurt us. I resent how we must cover our faces, as our arrests bring us back into the fold, where we must remain invisible. Business as usual.
My freedom today as an individual is partially as a proud descendent of the incredible hard work that has made up the cultural tapestry of Asia, from the farmers who work the rice paddies and harvest the grains that fed me, to the legacies of the Buddha, Confucious and Lao Tzu that characterise the spirituality of my ancestry. From my great (great) grandparents who sailed on crowded boats along the coasts of the continent on the Pacific Ocean from China bringing only their memories to Southeast Asia, to the people who built the land that was to be called the Lion City in which I would spend my childhood.
But I am also a descendent of the work spun by the velocity of change that occurred after the display of our discontent at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. I do not see that our sexual identities have to be bound by the rigid superstructures of ethnic or national demands. I see that change is already happening for us, such as in the virtual space of fridae.com, in which gays and lesbians can talk to each other with our explicit displays of desperation, horniness, self-loathing, self-empowerment, loneliness, camaraderie, love, lust, rage, and debate that the Internet enables. But while we have certainly made much progress, and the Internet as a whole has been a hub and even a safety net for liberating us to connect with each other in relative physical safety, many of us still live under governments that abuse their power and try to control our bodies.
I long for the day when we are sick and tired enough of this harassment, when we are sick and tired of our religions and our governments turning against us, when we are sick and tired enough of being told who we can and cannot love. I long for the day that we are all proud of who we are and know that we are not alone, when we will proudly proclaim that what we do with our own bodies will be solely under our own jurisdiction. And when we are next handcuffed, when cameras flash their pornographer's gaze at our bodies stripped of our dignity, we will have the courage to just stop covering our faces, look at our captors directly in the eye, and speak, "We are not ashamed!"