Tainted Love

IIt's been a queer couple of weeks one way and another. It was all too depressingly predictable that the next target for jackbooted monotheistic types, after minority faiths, women and liberals, would be homosexuals. Our old chum, Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring (which is an anagram of 'A Blistering Mufti' by the way) was once again in the vanguard with some highly enlightened Tweets about sin, gays and AIDS.

This tired old American born-again, AIDS-as-God's-curse idea doesn't even work at the basic level of logic, owing to the fact that the rates of AIDS amongst female gays is virtually zero, much less than it is among heterosexuals in fact, owing to the nature of that particular beast with two backs. But since when have the world's religious dogmatists ever been troubled by the bothersome need to be logically coherent?

Then of course, the 2010 Q Film Festival was picketed by FPI types who are perhaps just a little bit too suspiciously enraged in their firebrand fervour. One suspects, in Freudian terms, unconscious motivations. Here’s an analogy for you. The medical researcher slicing up animals and the antivivisectionist picketing outside his clinic stand, at the level of conscious ideology, in opposing camps. At an unconscious level however, both may be fascinated by the same acts. I leave you to draw the parallels dear reader.

In fact, I was invited to the closing of this year's Q Film Festival down at Fx Plaza last weekend. Alas though, possessing, as I do, a clockwork mouse instead of a brain, I turned up at Ex Plaza by mistake. Determined to thoroughly queer myself up though, I went one better by getting an alternatively inclined friend of mine to drag me along to a local gay bar for the evening.

And so, last Saturday night, I donned my best leather chaps and found myself stepping across the threshold and into the stygian darkness of Kota's most notorious gay club. I immediately headed for the safety of the bar and, as I ordered up a manly bottle of Bintang, my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I surveyed all before me.

The club was not, in essence, any different from any other nightclub that plies its trade around that neck of the woods. The same teenybopper-on-speed 190 beats per minute Dangdut-techno fusion sounds were shredding the PA system and the dance floor was packed with sweaty young blades all smoking like the Marlboro man in front of a firing squad. Elsewhere, the AC systems dripped water on my nose and barely dented the suffocating humidity, whilst swinging a cat (or even a saucy Richard Gere gerbil) would have presented a major challenge.

It was hardly an outrageous tableau of bacchanalian decadence and debauchery though. In fact, it all seemed to me to be considerably less racy than many of Kota's straight discos, as there were no private karaoke rooms available on site for people to get up to any clandestine mischief making or construction of human ‘daisy chains’.

Two stereotypes of the gay man persist in society. The first is the blouse wearing, Cher listening, limp wristed but essentially harmless caricature, checking surfaces for dust with his index finger. One dimensional for sure but not as bad as the second, more ideologically and religiously driven stereotype, namely the louche, depraved pervert who preys on the young and corrupts the innocent. In this conception, homosexuality is a disease to be cured or eradicated. Well, if being gay was a disease, then I for one would be using it as an excuse to get some sick days off work. “Are you coming in today Simon?” “No, sorry, I’m still feeling queer.”

Could an increasingly religious mindset tip Indonesia into this second stereotype? I'd hate such a future to befall the guy that my friend and I chatted to last Saturday at the club. This polite young chap confessed that despite being gay, he hoped to get married and have children one day. Clearly guys such as this are as much a product of Indonesian society as they are gay culture.

My Western chum was slightly incensed however. "Even the gays here want to have ten kids! My God, isn't Java over populated enough without gays chipping in as well!" Fair point I thought and I'm also not sure that attempts by homosexuals to live the heterosexual nuclear family dream often pan out that well. 

I finished my beer and sloped off to the rest room to drain my spuds. I have to admit to feeling a slight sense of trepidation at this point and I stared rigidly at my mobile phone, pretending to be deeply absorbed in a text message as nature took its course.

 It happened though folks, it happened. In one frozen moment a rogue paw had reached around and had given my family jewels a friendly squeeze. I looked around and thankfully our over familiar bon viveur had already vanished. No name, no phone number and only a rather unusual introductory handshake to remember him by. I'm telling you folks, romance is most definitely dead.