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You have to question the meaning of ‘progress’ when a TV channel in Singapore gets fined for showing a gay couple, writes Cyril Wong.
One step forward, two steps back. That’s Singapore for you, in a nutshell, in terms of its evolution of gay rights and freedom of expression – you have to live here to appreciate it.
When our Prime Minister made a speech on the topic, he said, “Gayness is something that is mostly inborn, some people are like that, some people are not. How they live their own lives is really for them to decide. It’s a personal matter”. But he also told us that the law banning sex between men stays.
Most Singaporeans are too conservative to accept such a radical, legislative change, he reiterates.
But a fact remains: like Bangkok, Singapore is a thriving gay hub in Southeast Asia with our numerous clubs, pubs and saunas. The government acknowledges our delightful presence and obligingly closes its huge, proverbial eye. The authorities have publicly announced that legal action against consensual sex between adult men in the bedroom will not be enforced.
Then something like this happens to remind us gay folk that not all is fine and dandy in this paradoxical country of passive-aggressive oppression and pseudo-openness: our Media Development Authority (MDA) fined Mediacorp S$15,000 for allowing us so-called “conservative” Singaporeans a glimpse of a day in the life of a gay couple and their adopted baby.
MDA claims that the home and decor show, Find and Design, “normalises and promotes a gay lifestyle”, and, of course, we can’t possibly want that, can we?
Censorship is a bundle of contradictions in our beloved nanny-state. Oddly, we get The Ellen DeGeneres Show every weekday evening on Channel 5, which, in my opinion, normalises what it means to be gay better than any movie or soap opera I have ever seen; just to watch Ellen be Ellen – happily self-deprecating, smart, fun-loving – encourages any gay person watching it to know that one can live a carefree and fulfilling life as a homosexual.
So what if on the same day of the MDA’s announcement, a segment of Ellen’s show in which she condemned the shooting of a gay student in school, was censored by the authorities?
Jokes implying that being gay is okay are banned, but jokes making fun of gays are allowed. That is the rule of thumb, it would seem, in the private rooms of the Board of Film Censors (part of – who else – the MDA). In the larger and more generous world beyond these hate-inspired, regulatory offices, people like us are carefully loving one another and achieving all kinds of success in the realms of business and the arts, both locally and globally.
Ten years ago, you would never have heard our heads of state defending homosexuals in public. Things are changing, albeit slowly. The fight is only beginning, and the likes of small-minded – and often inanely religious – women and men who sit in their darkened offices all day figuring out how to undermine the gay cause, only go to show that there is something to undermine, a rising wave of ecstatic voices that can only grow stronger every year.
Cyril Wong is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored with Terry Jaensch. He is based in Singapore.
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