Talk:Roy Tan

Draft article for Dear Straight People (August 2016)

Education:

M.B.,B.S., Ph.D.

Occupation:

General Practitioner.

Hobbies/Interests:

Documenting Singapore's LGBT history, LGBT activism, reading, creating 3D computer graphics artwork, music.

Aspirations:

To archive and write the most comprehensive account of Singapore's LGBT history. To work with the community to achieve 100% LGBT equality in all aspects of life. To become an accomplished 3D artist. To compose an album of Singapore LGBT-themed music.

Something interesting about you not many people know about:

I love naturism - it is a great social leveller. Deprived of the accoutrements that confer status, it is well nigh impossible to tell a prince from a pauper. Naturism also returns one to a more primal and essentialist state, thereby providing a welcome respite from the artifice of society.

Any other personal details you want to share:

I am 58 years old. As such, the development of gay spaces and the LGBT community in Singapore parallels the course of my own life as I have experienced all the salient events of gay history first-hand.

I believe that polyamory is a viable and even psychologically healthy relationship structure. One has to develop a certain level of maturity and mastery over one's baser emotions like jealousy, anger and possessiveness to achieve success in the arrangement.

Interview Questions

1. When did you first experience same-sex attraction?

I knew I was attracted by men's physiques at the very young age of 5 years when my parents brought me regularly to the swimming pool for a dip. I would stare in fascination at the men walking around in the changing room, especially at their bushy pubes and large genitalia - appendages which I noticed I lacked as a child.

Later on, when I attended school from Primary 1 onwards, I always had a best friend in class which I would become strongly attracted to, physically as well as emotionally. After we struck a deep friendship, we would proceed to explore each other's bodies when the occasion was appropriate in a very innocent way, mainly out of curiosity. I had no inkling at the time that it was a sexual interaction. The close bond between us would inevitably blossom into love.

Although it was apparent since young that I was drawn towards males, I assumed that when the time came, I would also become sexually attracted to women, find a girlfriend, get married and start a family. Little did I realise that I would not develop a corresponding fascination for women after reaching puberty as I had imagined. Instead my obsession for the same gender grew even stronger as the surge of testosterone coursed through my body in my teenage years.

During pre-university and National Service, my circle of straight friends, including my best friend whom I was intimate with, all started to have girlfriends. Just so not to feel excluded, I wooed a girlfriend of my own and we did indulge in the occasional kiss. She was rather envious of my closeness to my best friend and would wonder why we spent so much time together. She used to ask, "Why do you always listen to him?" I didn't have the heart to reply, "Because I love him more than you." I was emotionally attracted to her, though, but the bond did not extend into the sexual realm so the feelings I had for her were a pale shadow in comparison to the all-encompassing love I felt for my best friend.

2. How was it like for you growing up as a gay person in Singapore?

I rarely felt lonely as a child and a teenager because of my intense relationship at every stage of school with my best friend, who was always also my classmate. As I progressed from primary to secondary school and then pre-university and National Service, the person whom I considered my best friend would change but the intensity of the relationship and the love I felt was the same with each new, unique person.

Even though I thought that every one of my best friends was so different from the ones that came before, looking back now and especially after a gay acquaintance pointed out the fact in my middle-aged years, they all actually fell under the category of "twink". I had never heard of this subset of the gay community when I was young, but being more enlightened currently, I suppose I needed to have a classmate who embodied the typical characteristics of a twink before I could be beguiled enough to want to be best buddies with him. The main problem about my relationships with my best friends in school was that even though we shared carnal pleasure, none of them identified as gay and they all got married to women later on in life.

As I transitioned into adulthood in the late 1970s, I began to feel isolated as my then best friend became less comfortable about our gay relationship and pulled away. Without the Internet or any publication containing comprehensive information about the gay community, I did not know where to look for other homosexual men apart from the well known Pebble Bar, which was actually a mixed environment, not conducive to meeting strangers and not really my kind of scene. I ventured down to Bugis Street late at night on several occasions in an attempt to meet others like myself because it was a world-famous transgender venue. During that era, there was a conflation and confusion in the public mind between transwomen and gay men, with many thinking that they were one and the same. I did not meet any gay men in the bright, rambunctious drinking section of Bugis Street where the transwomen were attracting all the attention but did come across lone cruisers in the dimly lit and more dingy surrounding areas like Malabar Street. However, I was too inexperienced and afraid to approach them and strike up a conversation.

It was fortuitous that I chanced upon a Straits Times article one day which reported on the police investigation of public complaints about young boys holding hands at night at Hong Lim Park. My gaydar perked up instantly and I headed there to take a look. When I arrived, I saw dozens of men, many of whom were young and handsome, walking around the periphery of the park on the footpaths. I knew I had finally found what I was looking for and felt elated as well as relieved. Hong Lim Park became my favourite haunt over the next few months.

One fateful day, close to midnight, I approached a handsome, aloof, young man loitering around the foot of the now-demolished Hong Lim Shopping Centre, a cruising hotspot after 10pm which was located right next to where the contemporary police station stands. He was later to become my very first boyfriend after discovering the existence of a local gay community and also the first to identify as gay. (He is actually more of a bisexual.) Anyway, he was eminently street-savvy and had a huge circle of gay friends plus an extensive knowledge of all the gay rendezvous in Singapore. Acting on his information, I explored these places in the coming months.

The venue that struck me the most was Marmota disco, on level 2 of Kallang Leisuredrome. When I first stepped though the entrance, I was overwhelmed at the site of over a hundred homosexual men filling the joint with many gyrating energetically on the crowded dance floor. I almost fell to my knees and cried. My fears of being alone and not finding another gay person to spend my life with dissipated immediately. It was the first time I felt a sense of community. The next few years were spent making up for lost time in getting to know my community and I became a regular at all these venues.

It was unfortunate that I broke up with my first boyfriend while I was studying in London. We had a misunderstanding during a long-distance telephone call and I could not apologise appropriately because of the distance divide. However, we remain very close friends to this day. I try to maintain good relations with all the boyfriends that I have ever had. The love that we shared can never be obliterated and we can always replay the sweet memories in our minds.

I met my second boyfriend, who is still with me 30 years on, while on a vacation break from my studies in the United Kingdom. I approached this gorgeous man seated at the bus stop along Cecil Street, next to the foot of OCBC Building late one night. I had spotted him walking around Hong Lim Park several weeks before and was absolutely enraptured by his beauty. I was overjoyed when he agreed to accompany me to a coffee house to have a drink and a tête-à-tête. I sent him home after midnight and planted my first kiss on his lips before saying goodbye. The rest is history.

3. How was your first coming out experience like?

It was fortunate that my parents, who are now both deceased, were Buddhists. More accurately, they believed in the typical Chinese syncretism of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. As such, they never told me things like homosexuality was a sin or that I would go to hell if I slept with someone of the same gender. They did, however, expect me to get married to a woman and produce children.

I did not proclaim to my family in so many words, "I'm gay" but via my actions and relationships, there could have been no doubt in their minds that I was. As such, I get the impression that "coming out" is more of a Western concept than an Asian one as most of my gay friends similarly have never uttered the same declaration to their parents. Their families matter-of-factly and tacitly accept their same-sex relationships without anyone having to preliminarily announce and attach a label to their sexuality.

Regarding my friends, I was quite closeted to my straight pals in university, perhaps because I was rather insecure in an environment of undergraduate machismo and did not want to be looked down upon by my peers. I did try to give them the impression, though, that I was bisexual to improve palatability - the proverbial "bi now, gay later" syndrome. But after I found out that there was a sizeable gay community in Singapore and that it could provide me with more emotional nourishment than my straight friends ever could, I broke off all contact with my heterosexual social circles and devoted my energies towards forging gay ones. So coming out was never an issue after that juncture because the vast majority of my interactions came to be with LGBT people.

The only straight people I meaningfully engaged later with were the relatives of my boyfriends who, luckily, were sufficiently accepting of our relationship.

I used to be relatively out at work in my former company, but after encountering harassment by the parents of my colleagues entreating me to get married to a woman, I felt it was a gross invasion of my privacy and subsequently refrained from talking about my private life during working hours.

I came out to the general public and the world when I registered with the National Parks Board to hold Singapore's first gay pride parade at Hong Lim Park in late 2008, soon after the government liberalised the use of Speakers' Corner for protests and demonstrations. The news was first published online on an American LGBT website called PrideSource by well known journalist Rex Wockner who was following the discussion of the planned event on the Singapore gay news list (SiGNeL). It was later reported in The Straits Times and The New Paper after local journalists got wind of it. The pride parade later morphed into Pink Dot after my friend Dominic Chua and I elicited the help of Stuart Koe, the then CEO of Fridae, in rustling up influential stakeholders with the relevant skill sets and media contacts to organise and boost grassroots support for the event.

4. How did your family respond to your sexuality?

When I was in my twenties and thirties, I had a relatively high sex drive and whenever my boyfriend was too indisposed to keep me company, I would go cruising with his permission at places like Hong Lim Park and its environs in the Central Business District or at Fort Road beach. I very often brought men home to spend the night with. If my parents happened to be in, I would introduce the person I was with to them. My parents were unfailingly polite and welcoming. They never ever asked me questions like "Where did you meet him?", "What does he do for a living?" or "What is your relationship with him?"

After the introduction, my newly found buddy and I would lock ourselves up in my bedroom and pass an intimate night together. The following morning, we would emerge to have breakfast with my parents who remained as cordial as they were the night before.

An interesting anecdote is that on one occasion when I brought a fair, skinny boy named Danny home for the night and was going down on him in my bedroom, my father peeped through the keyhole to see what we were up to. When I suddenly opened the door to go to the toilet, my father quickly stood up sheepishly from his crouched, spying position and walked away. The following morning, we all engaged in polite banter at the breakfast table, omitting any mention of what he saw us indulging in the night before.

When I went to the UK for almost 4 years to study for my Ph.D. in the mid-1980s, my then boyfriend stayed with my parents in their house in Singapore. I think they grew to love him more than they did me because he helped them a great deal with sundry chores and chatted with them over dinner on a daily basis, in contradistinction to my taciturn and self-absorbed behaviour with my own folks at home.

However, till her dying day, my mother never relinquished the hope of seeing me get married to a woman and begetting her grandchildren, even as she was accepting of my homosexuality.

5. How and why did you get into Singapore's activist scene?

In the mid-1990s, the Internet began to penetrate into Singaporean homes on a large scale because the technology was getting more affordable. Prior to that, it had been the preserve of university academics, government departments, large companies and computer geeks. My access to the World Wide Web when I was working as a lecturer at NUS put me in good stead to be an early adopter and seek out gay-related bulletin boards and discussion groups when they first became accessible to the general public.

Singapore's pioneering gay activist, Alex Au, the main motive force behind People Like Us (PLU), set up the Singapore gay news list (SiGNeL) in 1997 to reach out to the wider gay community and as a discussion platform for LGBT issues. I jumped at the chance to contribute to the ongoing dialogue. Members, affectionately called SiGNeLlers, would also post local and international LGBT-related news by copying and pasting the articles and their links. As the years went by, I became more and more avid at posting these items and eventually became SiGNeL's most prolific archiver.

Prior to the mid-2000s, I was content just to be an armchair activist. In fact, I never joined the sporadic SiGNeL social gatherings organised by PLU members like Miak Siew and Kelvin Wong. I styled myself after Marvel Comics' The Watcher, a celestial being who would faithfully compile knowledge on all aspects of the universe without getting involved in or influencing any of them.

It was only in early 2004, when Alex Au organised a meeting at The Substation as a prelude to PLU's second registration attempt as a society that I made the effort to venture out of my cyber comfort zone and actually attend an activist-inspired talk. I felt that I had something unique to contribute which other PLU members did not possess - a competence in the then nascent consumer digital video technology which was prohibitively expensive for the man-in-the-street. My salary as a university lecturer enabled me to spend a small fortune on Amiga computers and video cards. I remember buying a video card in the early 1990s that could not even digitise an analog video stream. All it could do was grab a digital still frame from the analog video signal and it cost over $2000! I had recorded a television news clip of the then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong's announcement in Time magazine in 2003 that henceforth, openly gay Singaporeans would be employed in the civil service and burnt it onto a CD which I intended to show at the meeting because Alex Au was interviewed in the clip.

My savvy in digital video technology also spurred me to record the various events of the inaugural IndigNation organised by PLU in 2005 in response to the government's banning of Fridae's Nation parties held at Sentosa. I felt strongly that the effort of activists in holding LGBT talks would go to waste and disappear into oblivion if they were not proplerly documented on video, in addition to written articles. When I had compiled a considerable number of Singapore LGBT-themed videos, I started my own YouTube channel which deals specifically with these issues. The number of these videos has now ballooned to almost 800. I regard the documenting of LGBT history as an essential part of activism.

I suppose I was thought to be more of an activist after I registered to hold Singapore's first gay pride parade at Hong Lim Park in 2008. I would have been more than happy if Alex Au had decided to organise it but Alex said that he did not want to "dignify tokenism" and that a proper pride parade should take place along a main road instead of in the confines of a park with all sorts of restrictions. Since I considered establishing a precedent to facilitate the future organisation of LGBT events at Speakers' Corner of the utmost importance, I decided to register the pride parade myself. Soon after, I was also invited to deliver Singapore's first outdoor LGBT speech at Hong Lim Park.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac1OR41dmtM

In 2010, the People's Association allowed members of the public to form their own contingent and march in the Chingay procession. I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity for making it a mini-pride parade. So I and my friend Kim, who was dressed in only a pair of skimpy shorts and adorned himself with pink wings and a feather tiara, formed a "contingent", waved a rainbow flag and marched along with the other official groups. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was in the audience of 25,000 people and he was shocked when he saw the two of us. The compere also drew the audience's attention to our march. Unfortunately, probably out of fear that there would be an even bigger gay contingent the following year, the People's Association henceforth disallowed the public from marching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhyNDtvoKiA

6. What motivated you to start documenting Singapore's LGBT history?

LGBT people are Singapore's "invisible" community. Unlike race, language and religion, our demographic is not reflected in national census data and it is very difficult to tell, just going by appearances, exactly who is LGBT or what percentage of the population we constitute. To have our needs and aspirations adequately met by the government and by society, we have to come out and be more visible. A community needs to have a credible historiography to record its progress and setbacks or else we will forever remain invisible and sidelined.

Ever since my early teens, I have been an avid reader of whatever LGBT-related news would appear in the local press. The very first article to deal substantially with Singapore's LGBT community was a groundbreaking four-part series entitled, "They are different", published in 1972 in the tabloid of the day called "New Nation" (no connection with the current satirical website). The articles made me realise that there were other people like myself and the stories elicited praise and gratitude from many gay Singaporeans. The investigative reporters later followed up with an exposé of the lesbian community.

I realised that if these clippings, which were so few and far between, were compiled instead of just being read and then thrown away and forgotten, they would form a very helpful ongoing narrative of our culture and history. The gay community would no longer be a faceless entity and could discern the trends that were shaping it. The arrival of cheap personal computers and scanners made it possible to digitise the articles and store them in a form that would not deteriorate with age, unlike newsprint.

The advent of prosumer videocassette recorders (VCRs) was a great boon to my documentation efforts. I could now record any Singapore LGBT-related news or movie clip off television broadcasts. One of the first experiments at introducing gay characters into local TV dramas was in a 1992 Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) production on Channel 8. It was a daily serial entitled "锦绣前程" (translated by SBC as "A bright tomorrow") starring popular actor Li Nan Xing as the main protagonist. Li portrayed a handsome, masculine, struggling model who was the love interest of a stereotypically effeminate gay man, played by actor Lin Yi Sheng, hopelessly enamoured of Li's male beauty and bent on seducing him.

Unfortunately, VCRs were analog machines and the tapes were notoriously prone to the buildup of mould which would render them almost unplayable. That is why the invention of affordable consumer digital video cards which could be slotted into computers was such a welcome development and greatly facilitated my documentation and preservation efforts.

Seeing my collection of articles and videos grow gave me a great sense of progress and spurred me on to keep at it. I also have hoarding tendencies so my hobby was eminently in line with my quirks.

7. What were some of the challenges that you faced in trying to keep Singapore's LGBT history alive?

Singapore's LGBT history is kept going by intrepid activists and organisations that lobby for change. Government policies and LGBT events in other parts of the world also influence the course of our history. There can never be an end point and our history will perpetually be alive because we are always creating new things.

The main challenge in documenting news and video reports is copyright violation. News agencies obviously want their articles to be paid for and not disseminated freely. In America, one can plead "fair use" of their articles if one does not try to make money out of sharing them. In Singapore, there have only been a handful of cases where agencies prosecute people for cutting and pasting text, screengrabbing or scanning articles without buying them. So far, I have not encountered any problems in this respect and I note that bloggers continue to indulge in the practice. In any case, most of the articles get taken offline after a certain period so if I do not save them, the information would be lost forever and that would be to nobody's advantage.

Another challenge is to be consistent in archiving and not to miss important articles. This becomes an issue when I take a long holiday. I am sure technology will come up with bots in the future to relieve the burden of having to archive relevant news articles manually. Websites being taken down, hard disk crashes or natural disasters are other factors that can destroy the information I have collected so it is imperative that the records are backed up in more than one location.

8. What's something surprising about Singapore's LGBT history that millennials today would be shocked at?

Prior to the early 1970s, men were not allowed to dance with other men, even in gay bars! This was especially so with establishments located in the city area. The police would harass the managements of these bars if members of the public complained. Nightspots like the iconic Pebble Bar, located on the ground floor of the now-demolished Hotel Singapura InterContinental along Orchard Road, even had to put up signs saying, "No man and man dancing" to discourage their patrons from doing so. That is why Singapore's first gay "disco" was located way in the outskirts of town, in the unlikely venue of a seafood restaurant at Punggol Point. Gay nights fell on Sundays because straight people had to work on Monday morning so business was slow on this day of the weekend. The management came up with the brainstorm of allowing homosexuals to dance on Sunday nights to drum up more business...and it worked because there was such a pent-up demand. However, people only came to know of the place via word of mouth and it was not widespread knowledge even in the gay community that the place existed.

Before 1999, there was no gay sauna in Singapore. Spa aficionados would have to fly to Bangkok to savour the experience. Locals were happier when the first gay sauna in Johor Baru, named "Ryu" (Japanese for "Dragon"), opened at Pelangi Complex. However, they would still have to charter taxis and traverse the Causeway to get there with their friends. The first local gay sauna was Spartacus, located at 69 (the unit number may be humorous but not intentionally chosen) South Bridge Road. Initially, owing to police harassment, its proprietor, Max Lim, had to put up signs saying "No obscene acts allowed". Patrons would obviously ignore the sign and do what they liked surreptitiously but after the police visits became more infrequent, the signs were taken down.

9. Having lived through Singapore's LGBT history, what are your thoughts on the local gay rights movement?

The LGBT equality movement continues to gather momentum. There are more activists now than at any other point in Singapore's history and their number will relentlessly increase - Singaporeans' level of education keeps rising and more people are willing to come out and be vocal about the unfairness we face.

Nevertheless, each activist has his or her own idea regarding how best to lobby for change. The general consensus is that the gentle, non-confrontational approach works best in Singapore, in view of the fact that we have a rather authoritarian government that does not like to be pressurised publicly and is afraid losing face should they concede. However, local gay history is peppered with instances of more in-your-face Western-style activism which may not have garnered broad grassroots support but which arguably did yield results.

The first was Josef Ng's performance art event "Brother Cane" at Parkway Parade in 1994. Ng he pulled down his briefs, snipped off his public hair and whipped bags of red dye on slabs of tofu to protest the police entrapment, imprisonment and caning of gay cruisers at Fort Road beach. Even though Ng's act infuriated the government and resulted in the banning of performance art in Singapore for a decade, it did highlight the issue in a very dramatic way and police entrapment using handsome decoys eventually stopped.

The next was Dr. Chee Soon Juan's illegal speeches and protests at Hong Lim Park, epitomised by the iconic photograph of himself and his sister being encircled by hordes of policemen. It was largely Chee's efforts that led to the liberalisation of Speakers' Corner in 2008 for protests and demonstrations.

The third is human rights lawyer M. Ravi's constitutional challenges, first against Section 377A and second against the workplace discrimination of LGBT people after openly gay manager Lawrence Wee was dismissed by Robinsons. The latter case was fought on the basis that Article 12 of the Constitution guarantees fairness for all Singaporeans under the law.

On the other hand, one momentous victory, that of allowing transgender Singaporeans to change the gender stated on their identity cards post-operatively was done in a very subtle, behind-the-scenes way, by activists enlisting the cooperation of eminent gynaecologists like the sex-reassignment surgeon Prof. Shan Ratnam and academic psychiatrists to persuade the government to announce the seminal change in parliament without much fanfare. No public petition was organised, which would probably have led to a vociferous counter-petition from the opposing camp.

As you can see, different strategies work in different situations so no one approach fits all. In my opinion, if you feel that your trajectory is correct, pursue it wholeheartedly regardless of what other activists advise.

Sometimes, even without lobbying by activists, the government decides on its own accord to make Singapore more gay-friendly. This was eminently exemplified during the Asian financial crisis which stretched from 1998 to the mid-2000s. In the depths of the economic doldrums, the then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong announced in Time magazine in 2003 that openly gay Singaporeans would henceforth be employed in the civil service, even in sensitive positions. One particularly homophobic minister even said that Singapore would do "whatever it takes" to attract talent, and that included allowing gay saunas, bars and dance clubs to flourish and employing openly gay foreigners that had the professional skills Singapore needed.

That is why I am one of the few activists that favour the Pink Dollar and economic approach to agitating for LGBT equality. Economic growth is the raison d'etre of the PAP. The citizenry are willing to put up with stifling laws and regulations only if they are sweetened by economic wellbeing. Once we are mired in a prolonged recession or even depression, Singaporeans may turn to an alternative political party for solutions. So it is imperative for the incumbents to keep the economy humming, and one way of doing this is to make Singapore more gay-friendly.

10. What advice do you have for gay youths living in Singapore today?

Be optimistic about the future of LGBT equality in Singapore, even though the status quo may seem quite depressing, for example, the retention of Section 377A and the censorship of positive portrayals of LGBT people in the mainstream media. Singapore does not exist in a cocoon and we do not have the privilege of living in an ivory tower, especially if we want to remain an economically vibrant nation. Developments in other parts of the world are influencing and abetting our eventual achievement of equality. Gay marriage has been legalised in numerous countries in the West. Once an Asian counterpart like Taiwan follows suit, it will trigger a chain reaction and the dominoes will fall. LGBT talent flows to where it is most welcome in a "flat" world. If Singapore wants to retain and attract gay talent, she has no choice but to make her society more LGBT-friendly.

Live your life authentically as a gay person. If being your true self can change even one person's opinion about LGBT people for the better, your contribution to the community is as significant as that of any prominent activist.

11. What do you think is the biggest misconception straight people have about the gay community?

The negative misconceptions are that the gay people are promiscuous and lust after everyone of the same gender, cannot contribute to the future economy which requires more children to be produced and harbour a sinister agenda to convert everyone in society into a homosexual. Nothing could be further from the truth. We contribute to the economy and are one of its most innovative segments. We take care of our parents and relatives. We yearn to have stable, long-term relationships with loved ones who typify the characteristics we admire, not just any Tom, Dick and Harry. Many of us want to start our own families via adoption or surrogacy. Advances in medical technology like induced pluripotent stem cells and cloning are making more assisted reproductive options available. Alleging that people can be "converted" assumes that everyone is bisexual and can be attracted to either sex, depending on upbringing and indoctrination. This is a fallacious understanding of psychology as evidenced by the Kinsey scale which demonstrates that sexual orientation lies along a spectrum. Individuals at either extreme of the scale are fully heterosexual or homosexual and cannot change. It is only people in the middle of the spectrum who are essentially bisexual and have the ability of veering more towards on or the other side.

On the opposite extreme, there is also the stereotype that we are all talented, with high disposable incomes and few responsibilities. This view can be equally damaging as it downplays the real struggles that the less privileged members of the gay community encounter in their daily lives.

12. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I am basically introverted and a diehard pacifist by nature. However, one aphorism I heard that had a profound impact on my life was, "You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you!"

I learned painfully that even though you may want to conduct your life quietly without impinging on others and respecting everyone's freedom to pursue their own goals, there are pernicious, hegemonistic forces in the world that seek to prevent you from living as you see fit and to destroy everything you have built. So, whether you like it or not, you have to learn how to fight for your rights and your own space. Sometimes we need to keep running just to stay in the same spot and struggle not to get elbowed out of whatever little space we have.

Another truism I heard which I was hitherto naively ignorant of was when I watched a Tamil movie and the actress bemoaned to her starcrossed lover, "Society is jealous of people who are happy." It was an epiphany for me! I suddenly realised the reason for all the enmity other people felt towards me. It was jealousy at my so-called privilege of being a basically happy individual. It was not because of my wealth or social status as I encountered this animosity even from others who were immensely more well off than myself. When friends ask me, "What makes you happy?", I am puzzled at the question because happy is my default state. More relevant would be, "What makes you unhappy?". I think the same applies to homophobes who hate openly gay people. The former regard the latter as leading authentic, carefree, hedonistic lives whilst they themselves often struggle against the yoke of their own closeted homosexuality.

It is not sufficient that we merely tackle homophobia. For enduring effects, we have to demolish the oppressive triumvirate of homophobia, nudophobia and sexophobia as each of these bastions of prejudice are mutually reinforcing. Singapore has evolved into her current puritanical state because at the critical point of our independence, economic development was paramount and yellow culture had to be stamped out to build a "rugged society" focused mainly on work and not leisure. Now that we are in the affluent First World league, the rules of the game have changed. Equal rights, diversity, tolerance, creativity and a vibrant entertainment economy are what put a nation in good stead to compete with the rest of the world.

Even if LGBT activism were to be snuffed out completely, I am confident that we will still eventually attain equality in the future because of the relentless progress of technology. When mankind attains the singularity where artificial intelligence exceeds that of the human brain, robots will become an inorganic life form capable of reproducing itself without human intervention to beget ever more intelligent future generations of themselves. Sexual reproduction and, as a corollary, sexual orientation, will be a peripheral consideration in the macrocosm of existence. Read any book on futurology and you will not find homophobia or discrimination against LGBT people to be an issue in the predicted civilisation of the future.