This personal essay teases out the homophobic colonial legacies that continue to bind Singapore and the United Kingdom.

published in

daikon* Issue #5: Summer 2018 / Migration → issuu.com <https://issuu.com/daikonzine/docs/summer-migration>

Excerpt

At a dinner party in Buckingham, I meet an elderly British man who, on learning that I’m from Singapore, tells me he was stationed there with the British navy in the 60s. He winks and asks me if I know about Bugis Street, a part of town infamous at the time for its transgender sex-workers and licentious foreign sailors. The number of times I’ve been asked this question.

I don’t answer him. But I start to think about my father, himself a sailor in his youth, a man descended from immigrants from Hainan Island in Southern China. 

I think of a little factoid the colonial historian Mary Turnbull once turned up about how, in the mid 19th century, fair-skinned, good-looking boys from Hainan Island were shipped over by the British to serve as prostitutes for other Chinese workers and possibly British settlers. 

I think about fluid East Asian attitudes towards queer desire, how Hainanese men in particular were known for their femininity, their openness towards homosexuality. In French Indochina, Chinese houseboys, many of them Hainanese like me, were known as “ambassadors of sodomy”. In Singapore, the Chinese houseboys who served the British were overwhelmingly Hainanese. We were known for our cooking, the gentleness of our approach. 

I think of the frissons and desires that must have sprung between masters and servants in those dank, sweaty tropical houses; forbidden issuances left out of the history books.

I think about how much of the fetish for other skin must have been learned in the fetid, unequal crucible of the colonial encounter.

There is much in common between the man on Grindr seeking smooth-skinned, submissive bottoms from Far East Asia, and a certain Charles Baker, the early 20th century gentleman traveler and cocktail enthusiast, who writes, in his description of the Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel:

“When our soft-footed Malay boy brings the 4th Sling and finds us peering over the window sill at the cobra-handling snakecharmers tootling their confounded flutes below, he murmurs 'jaga baik-baik Tuan' . . . or 'take care master' as it means in English. The Singapore Gin Sling is a delicious, slow-acting, insidious thing.”

I think of these spiritual inheritances from long-dead queer ancestors, a queer history recorded as forgotten lovers, censored names, inscriptions on the heart and imagination.

The closing of Singapore gay night club, Play, occasions a meditation on the high-highs and pitfalls of queer dancing, romancing, and loneliness in the city.

published IN

Poskod.sg, Singapore, 2015

Excerpt

The first time I saw strobe lights was at Play. That’s probably not true. But the first strobe lights I truly remember, green lasers that burned themselves into the back of my head, were at Play. They back-lit a man dancing in that way gay men dance: beautifully, with self-conscious un-self-consciousness. I was entranced. It was before the club updated its light fixtures, back when it was dark and truly seedy, and all I could see was that shadowed mass dancing in his little hotspot like a junked-up Green Fairy, dancing for what seemed to be hours in my liquored judgment. It was probably only one song. I never saw his face. And in a blast of chemical haze from a cheap smoke machine, he was gone.

In a similarly entrancing way, Play the Gay Club and Bar, has gone. A few weeks before it shut down its Tanjong Pagar Road premises (saying this suggests there will be another premises), there was a shocking social media announcement, met by disbelieving, mournful hashtags. The space has most likely been ceded to an upscale restaurant—one of several encroaching on the area from Tras, Duxton and Ann Siang—that offered double or triple the rent. In a dignified manner, in Play’s final weekends, those who cared snaked around it to pay tribute. Old hens and cocks turned up for one last claw-scratch on the storied dancefloor, the boi bois and ger gers chanted and perspired inappropriately to the end, the bar ran out of alcohol, the front of house nonetheless charged cover, the lights came on, and a week later, it was all gutted, fetid queer trace elements flung out to compost in the seedy Tanjong Pagar streets.

An interrogation of gay male body culture, shot through with personal reflections on shame, self-worth, and fat politics. 

published IN

Poskod.sg, Singapore, 2015

Excerpt

There is, to my mind, a gay man’s debutante ball, except it’s quite DIY. Leisurely, at one’s own pace, coming out can be awkward or beautiful, ostentatious or quiet, but it’s a ritual all the same. I was wearing a black shirt, I remember, and I was introduced by my best friend, learned in the ways of gay principalities, to the bars, to the clubs… that district at Tanjong Pagar where men wear tight shorts and hold hands and make out in public, where, in 2008, the air was electric with glances exchanged over traffic crossings, with Top 40s music, with a gurgling of men.

There was for me a sense of breaking through thresholds: between in and out, gay and homosexual, lonely and not, me and you. I’d been gay before 2008, for sure, but that night, I started to learn that being gay works for many people in a much more abstract sense than simply loving men. It’s an energy, a buzzing, silent nomenclature: in Tanjong Pagar, people spoke in clothing, in hairstyles, in the company they kept, in the glances they gave, in the glances they received.

If gayness is a language, it’s a language I’ve never been fluent in. I’ve found that this is because it’s often a language spoken through bodies, and some bodies negotiate it better than others. In a world composed of images, one body in particular rules over it. It is the gym fit body, that perverse paradigm which so commands the gay imagination.