By Caleb

While it is good to know that PLU has not given up the fight for

existence (!) and registration, I do not feel that PLU represents my

interests or in any way speaks for me. To me, in fact, registration of

PLU is secondary since homosexual intercourse has not been

decriminalised in Singapore. By attempting to be a gay

pressure/interest group while not first fighting for decriminalisation

strikes me as ridiculous. There is nothing to represent / lobby for if

the group you claim to represent has no legal rights in the first

place.

Indeed just this week a Safe Haven concert organised in support of AfA

has been banned on the grounds that a concert in which the main

performers were a gay couple would be 'promoting a homosexual

lifestyle' and thus illegal. This is not only untrue, it also displays

the usual lack of consistency in their policy towards such things. I

mean why not ban TNS's Top and Bottom or WildRice's Asian Boys Vol 2.

Indeed why not ban that Kids at Work show hosted by Chua Enlai? And

anyway the fact that the main performer is gay has absolutely no link

with the show promoting homosexuality. By this reasoning shows

featuring straight hosts have the effect of promoting heterosexuality.

But anyway as for the rest of the Balaji saga, I hope these extracts

off noconceptofliberty.blogspot.com will suffice:

As most of you should know by now, as part of the government's

attempts to kiss and make up with the moral majority (although

arguably they are in fact a minority, albeit a well-educated,

middle-class and therefore vocal one) in order to smooth the way for

their grand casino plan, a lot of anti-homosexual noises are now being

made. The noisiest mouthpiece so far has been the good doctor Balaji,

who recently claimed that Nation 04 was behind last year's rise in HIV

infections. This is in addition to other noises he made in the recent

past about gay bath-houses and saunas being a hive of unprotected and

therefore HIV-prone sex. Except, of course, he seemed to focus much

more on the fact that the sex was gay, rather than that it was

unprotected. This, I presume, will be the prelude to banning the

Nation party this year, which will then be paraded around as the

government's guilt offering to the abovementioned moral

majority/minority.

Of course, in this case, Balaji would probably be gagging to point out

that it is not so much a case of morality as of public health. That

may be so, but clearly the lack of a sensible way forward on the issue

of HIV/AIDS in the gay community here is at least partly the result of

the criminalisation of gay sex. That Action for AIDS had their safe

sex booth at Nation 04 closed down by the police on the grounds that

all gay sex, safe or not, is illegal and therefore promotion of safe

(gay) sex is illegal -- which was true, but only in a most twisted,

legalistic way -- is perhaps only too obvious an indicator of this.

Beyond that, and more importantly, there is the basic fact that trying

to engage with a community whose very existence is technically illegal

is most unlikely to result in constructive dialogue and will

inevitably fall into mutual mistrust, hysteria, and acrimonious

incrimination. This new concern with HIV/AIDS among gays in Singapore,

if concern it truly is and not merely a tool of cynical demagogic

manoeuvring, should wake the government up to the fact that their

'don't ask, don't tell'/'criminalisation-as-moral-appeasement' policy

is untenable. It is time to speak with one voice on this matter, not

with one underground voice targeted at AIDS interest groups and

another, sanitized, voice to some abstract public which is too

conservative/polite/whatever to hear of such naughty goings-on.

Decriminalisation now is of prime importance because we need to hear

open, informed and disinterested views on this issue, not lobotomised

anti-gay propaganda, and most of all we need to hear gay men and women

speak up without fear about safe sex, the problem of AIDS and indeed

about the myriad possibilities of gay life beyond sex.

Which brings me to the Other Side Of The Coin. Many gays are well

aware of the dangers of barebacking, especially if one keeps multiple

sex partners. Yet they persist in their insouciance and indifference

to basic safe sex measures. (Importantly, though, this is 'many', not

'all'. I think that there is a not insignificant number of young and

less-educated gay men who are much more uninformed and are therefore a

prime and unfortunate target for bareback-fetishists. But really, this

merely brings us back to the Wolfenden report and my previous point.

It is precisely this group which is 'specially vulnerable' and which

is constituted of the 'young' and 'inexperienced'; therefore it is

precisely here that the law must act to protect them, not by

continuing to criminalise homosexual acts, but indeed by allowing for

proper and value-neutral outreach and education programmes by removing

the current barrier of hypocritical criminalisation.) They accept and

indeed embrace a gay culture which has turned them into lobotomised,

superficial, sex-obsessed, gym-enslaved, catty indentikit robots,

where having unlimited and preferably unprotected sex with an

unlimited number of similarly tanned and muscular 'MSM' is considered

the very paragon of a good life and is indeed their only conception of

a good life for a gay man. In an important sense, therefore, those who

are active in 'the scene' here must look to themselves first if they

want to find the origins of the recent spike in HIV infections among

gay men -- a phenomenon that AfA had already warned about last year.