Singapore LGBT Encyclopedia Media Archive

The Singapore LGBT Encyclopedia Media Archive (SLEMA) is a repository of media reports on Yahoo! Groups relating to Singapore LGBT issues. It was set up by Roy Tan in July 2014 for interested stakeholders to read and post articles dealing with Singapore LGBT history and culture.

For many years since the late 1990s, Tan had been archiving all relevant material on SiGNeL, the Singapore Gay News List. From its inception, SiGNeL had been a subscription-only site where one needed to submit a request to become a member and wait for it to be approved before one could read its articles and post comments. In contrast, SLEMA has intentionally been made public so that even non-subscribers may peruse the information it contains. This greatly facilitates using the posts uploaded as references in media, blog and wiki articles.

Tan initially intended SLEMA to serve as a backup for the news reports archived on SiGNeL. However, after SLEMA was established, Tan posted all material only to this news list to avoid a tedious duplication of effort.

Tan was spurred on to set up SLEMA because of the waning interest of SiGNeL's moderators in clearing posts, resulting in considerable delays. This was partly because active debate on the news list had dwindled considerably towards the mid-2000s. SiGNeL was created by Alex Au as a discussion platform for People Like Us, gay activists and interested members of the LGBT and mainstream communities. Therefore, it was not envisioned as an archive and Tan felt that a dedicated repository of Singapore LGBT-related news would better suit his aims. 

=See also=
 * SiGNeL
 * Singapore LGBT organisations

=References=
 * The Singapore LGBT Encyclopedia Media Archive (SLEMA) on Yahoo!Groups:.

=Acknowledgements=

This article was written by Roy Tan.