377A

I suppose people who I work for don’t read this blog I hope but even if they do this doesn’t really have anything directly to do with them.

I’ve never been a homophobe. Yes I definitely wouldn’t one of them to hit on me or rape me or whatever, but I don’t think it is wrong. I have never understood their arguments. You can get swayed by your visceral reactions to them but I believe what they do is their business, and is furthermore harmless. So I’ll be unambiguous about my stand: 377a is wrong. I am acquainted with around 5 gay people, and I see them as being harmless although it is true that they are probably more promiscuous than straight people.

The government defended its decision to keep 377A, saying that the majority of people in Singapore are still unable to accept homosexuality. I thought that was a bunch of crap until I started talking to people. Well, they’re right. I’m a little surprised to be finding myself surrounded by homophobes but there you go.

When I choose to be an engineer, I did that because I believed that engineering is an honest vocation. You don’t transfer $100 from point A to point B and keep $1, which is basically what a lot of banks do. You don’t take a piece of shit and dress it up so that people want to buy it which is what advertising (or policy making in the government) is all about. OK, everybody does dressing shit up to some extent but we don’t do much of it. However engineers are a fairly judgemental bunch. (This is itself a judgemental statement but what the heck). Are we to be surprised that a fairly large proportion of terrorists turn out to be engineering graduates? No. So here I am, surrounded by homophobes.

Next best thing is to try and figure out what goes into their minds.

“We have a certain set of values that we believe in. We uphold morality.”
OK, fair enough. But everybody has values, even people like me. What happens when values conflict with each other? Do we err on the side of the traditional? There is this tendency to do so. It is very ingrained in the Chinese culture. The young defers to the old. The ordinary folk defer to authority. There is no need to think so much.

Is that alright? But a lot of terrible things have happened in Communist China because people placed all their trust in Mao Zedong. I regard unquestioning obedience as being an extremely dangerous set of values to have in general. The most recent and extreme manifestation of this was the Cultural Revolution. And it must be said, I believe the Cultural Revolution would not have happened if people didn’t generally have values like this. It is part of our culture to have relatively unquestioning obedience to authority and that’s quite unfortunate.

“But there is no use talking about right or wrong otherwise you will never hear the end of the story”

Now this is something that is very interesting. This tells me that this guy thinks that the reason why you shouldn’t condone homosexuality does not have anything to do with whether something is right or wrong. People posit that there is something called “morality” which is somehow different from ethics, which says whether something is right or wrong. It is much more important to live your life according to the conventions of the society around you, rather than whether something is correct or not, or does harm to the society.

It is ironic that this guy is part of a team whose brief is to drive change in the corporation. But that is not surprising because we know that human beings are not by nature internally consistent.

I’m wondering if that is the way that Singaporeans think. It is not right. Nominally Singapore is a democracy, and there are values that are associated with being a democracy. It means that people participate in debating issues, rather than leave the “important people” to deal with the issues. It requires that much of the populace is educated. Normally this is no problem, but given what the education system is like, I am not fully convinced that the average Singaporean is taught, or is even encouraged to think for himself.

This attitude leads me question what is the real reason why Singapore purports to be a tolerant society. I do not believe the values of multi-culturalism in Singapore are the fundamental ones. Rather, the real reason why we want to be tolerant of each other is that we want to avoid ethnic strife and conflict. The true fundamental Singaporean value, thus, is expediency. We became a multi-ethnic society not through choice, but because it was inevitable. And so we manage, we lived with it. Having people of different backgrounds in our country almost makes us a better society, but in the end, not quite. We don’t ask too many questions of our neighbours. Do not poke our noses in each other’s affairs. Do not be rude. Just let the status quo be. If you do not like something, maybe you will get a kindly listening ear somewhere, and after that, often without anything being done to solve the problem, we know that we just have to “move on”. Shut the fuck up and don’t ask so many fucking stupid questions.

“homosexuality leads to a degradation in morals”

I’m not going to straight off disagree with this because it is not an obviously wrong thing to say. On the face of it, there is no reason why sticking your dick into somebody’s ass instead of somebody’s pussy is immoral, other than that some people find it disgusting.

There is one approach which is not a frivolous argument, however. Homosexuality is in some ways a threat to the traditional nuclear family structure. But the nuclear family is not so traditional. It wasn’t always that you had a couple being the head of a household, raising children in the same house. You used to have communes in China, like those places that you see in the movie “Kung Fu” (and I start to have an idea of where they got the idea of the HDB flat from). You used to have all the members in an extended family living in the same house.

A gay couple, though, are unlikely to have children, unless they are adopted from China or from an orphanage. But I suppose it would take a fairly open minded parent giving up a kid for adoption to allow them to get adopted by a gay couple. A few of us will never get used to the fact that when Daddy and Mummy were younger they used to fuck each other every night. So can you get your mind around the fact that Daddy and Daddy are fucking each other in the ass every night? But Johnny Cash sang in “A Boy Named Sue” of a father who would give a guy a girl’s name, just for kicks, so a fairly warped mind would do it just for fun.

The “standard model” for human life: just as you were brought up by parents who made great sacrifices for you, one day you will have children and do the same. Being a parent makes you a better person (although I personally know a few exceptions). The carrying out of parental duty is good training and the rearing of good children, and the moulding of them into good citizens of societies, is your gift to society. (I know that a few Palestinians are proud that their children will blow up a few Israelis up one day, but that is still consistent with the idea that your children will carry your way of life and your values, or part thereof, into the next generation.)

Society is built up of such bonds between people. The family is the basic unit of society. After that, bonds between people, and bonds between families. Your connection to your family is in a way a large part of your connection to society.

For some, a deviation from this whole package is a threat to society. Is this a valid viewpoint? Maybe. People - and I include gays in this view the gay lifestyle as one endless party / sex orgy. Perhaps there is something deeply abhorrent about this lifestyle. All good citizens should become parents so that they can spend most of their free time getting on their children’s asses for not studying hard enough.

But I do not think that homosexuals are all like that. I think that for many gay people they are condemned to a whole life of bachelorhood. This is not necessarily a bad thing – a few homosexuals do rise to the top of the corporate world because when compared to their straight peers who have families they can focus on their careers.

I also believe that a few people are bisexuals, but they choose homosexuality because it is a carefree life bereft of responsibilities. This is unfortunate and I would criticise this but not really a good enough reason to criminalise sodomy.

“We, as a society do not accept homosexuals. / The minority shouldn’t be telling the majority how to live our lives”

The human brain is wired in such a way that they have this conception of “us” and “them”. Human beings are by nature very tribal animals. It is simply an offshoot of our natural propensity to classify and order objects and people in order to make sense of this world, so we cannot avoid this. People who belong to our tribe are always “better” in some respect that somebody from the other tribe. There is this knee jerk hostility towards people of other categories. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sectarianism are all offshoots of this human tendency: since it is rooted in something as basic and fundamental as our cognition of the world around us, all these hateful tendencies will never be quelled.

For the majority, there is always going to be some incomprehension and hostility about homosexuals. Most people don’t belong to that tribe, and especially when your differences have to do with such provocative aspects like sexuality, there is going to be a somewhat explosive hostility towards them.

Singapore is in some ways has a very strange attitude towards minorities. The protection of minorities is deeply enshrined in our national values. Malays and Indians have the same legal status as Chinese, even though this does not automatically translate to socio- economic status. We pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion. Some people have included creed. Even if nobody treats the pledge as seriously these days, for the simple reason that nobody treats the concept of the nation as seriously these days, this is significant.

But we know that just because we are one united people regardless of race, language and religion, we are not one united people regardless of political affiliation. We know that if we probably will be detained without charge if we should pull whatever quote unquote Marxist conspiracies, even though we are just organising some NGOs. We know that the press has one set of protocols for covering PAP politicians, and another set for covering opposition ones. We also know that we are not one united people regardless of sexual orientation.

The argument that the minority cannot determine what the majority says is a specious one. We do not outlaw Indians and Malays, but somehow we are still able to outlaw homosexual acts. The argument that homosexuals are imposing their lifestyle on straight people is also rather crazy. In what way are you going to have to change your behaviour in the presence of homosexuals? Maybe you will cut down on the gay jokes, or maybe you won’t even have to. I will still be able to buy FHM. Maybe I will feel strange when I see a guy ogle over another guy (I’m trying to avoid the q word here) but I should be able to shut it out of my mind.

There are some issues that should be raised. It is a fairly recent phenomenon that a lot of us are living in diverse societies. What does it mean for us? It is always easier to live in a society where everybody is similar. It is always easier to identify with people who are similar to yourself. To be sure, living with a lot of strange people does make life more varied and stimulating, but not always more harmonious and happy.

The government wants to not rock the boat. Actually I can understand this. Singapore is going through a lot of changes. I don’t know why the government has opened the floodgates to immigrants to such an extent that they have now. I can understand that they want to manage all the foreigners that they have here without having to deal with gay rights at the same time.

I’m not going to completely reject Confucianism. I don’t think that it is completely wrong. There has to be a basis for society. People need some common values, and family is one of the strongest bonds between people. Confucius would claim that family ties have to be strong, but I don’t know what he would say about homosexuality. On one hand knowing him to be one of the most conservative thinkers around I expect him to disapprove. But then again with his emphasis on the cohesion of society I don’t expect him to cast them out either.

People have written books on the “Great Sorting”, where American society is being more segmentised, because they have the ability to either move house to towns where the prevailing culture is more reflective of their own values. Otherwise they spend a lot of time on the net befriending people whose values are more similar to their own. Paradoxically, even as the world becomes more diverse and varied, each community becomes more homogenous – and as a result, more divisive and conflicted. People talk less about a “nation” or a “society” and instead we have a landscape of conflicting interest groups engaged in perpetual war with each other. If we are made too aware of differences between people, this can cause people to slowly disengage from society, and it definitely has an impact on the cohesiveness of society. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the USA, which is one of the most diverse of countries, also has one of the most individualistic cultures. This is a dark side of the utopian concept of multi-culturalism that is not very often explored.

Actually I think that this is one reason why people should accept gays in society. We certainly do not want them to form special villages with a siege mentality and cause society to fragment even further.

I may be quite westernised but I am not uncritical of the way they think. I think that when they are so individualistic, they are also being quite myopic. I used to be like them – very distrustful of “society” or “the system” until it occurred to me that people distrust society mainly because they do not understand how society works. Then, what’s there to be proud of not understanding society? You cannot protect an individual’s right so much that he becomes immune from all criticism of his behaviour. In any given social setting, at any one time, somebody will lose and another person will gain, but it is fair if you believe that over a long time, things will balance themselves out.

So while I think that these people should get their gay rights, and I would condone them talking publicly about it in order to raise some awareness, you have to draw the line at people flaunting it in your face. I believe in being different because you are different, but I don’t believe in being different for the sake of being different. People sometimes want to show that they accept gays in order to assert their moral superiority, that’s a bit too much.

Alternatively there is the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy where you don’t ask people if they are gay, just befriend them and don’t think about it. Sometimes we Chinese don’t like to confront issues head on. Just live and let live. It is a quantum mechanics, where the answer to the question is not a “yes” or “no” until you measure it, and the act of measuring something will force the issue into being “yes” or “no”. There is some wisdom in this approach, but it is still not as ideal as everybody accepting everybody else.

“Homosexuals should not be serving in the SAF.”

I think we can agree that the military attracts a lot of macho people. There was this big storm with Bill Clinton who came up against Colin Powell and company when he proposed that there would be gays in the military. The backlash was so intense that in the end he settled for a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Still, this gave a lot of ammunition to his critics who would for a long time afterwards point to this as proof that he was not a good leader.

A SAF guy I spoke to was vehemently opposed to homosexuals in combat. He is probably a homophobe himself which in Singapore probably not a big deal. His argument was that homosexuals do not make good officers. He probably doesn’t know his history. Homosexuality was prevalent in the Samurai elites in Japan. Alexander the Great, one of the greatest generals of all time, had a gay lover. In Athenian Greece, there was a company of gay people, the Theban army, who had a reputation for being one of the bravest fighters, because nobody wants to be a pussy in front of your gay lover.

Still, he had some valid points. If Singaporeans do not accept homosexuality, how can they accept gay person as a leader in a combat situation, where trust is something that will determine success or failure, life or death? Anyway the main thrust of this argument that homosexuality is not acceptable because convention does not accept it, is dealt with above.

We may or may not see homosexuals in combat, but maybe this is not as much a pressing issue about whether it is acceptable in civilian life.