ABSTRACT

Thio’s (2007) parliamentary speech, for instance, not only described gay sex as being akin to ‘shoving a straw up your nose to drink’ but also went on to discuss sexual practices such as ‘rimming’, ‘bare-backing’, and ‘bug-chasing’. The speech was also rather indulgently peppered with words and phrases like ‘morally bankrupt’, ‘noxious social consequences’, ‘ape the sexual libertine ethos of the wild wild West’, ‘gender identity disorder’, ‘promiscuity’, ‘sexual exploitation’, ‘perversity’, ‘pernicious’, ‘hedonism’, ‘narcissism’, ‘sexual licentiousness’, ‘culture of lust’, ‘liberal fundamentalist crusade’, ‘a Titanic fate’, ‘sexual predators’, ‘morally deviant’, ‘slouch back to Sodom’, ‘degrading’, and ‘vile and obscene invective’. Typically, part of their strategy was to claim that the antirepeal lobby represented a ‘silent majority’ of Singaporeans, in this way simulating a moral consensus on the intolerance of gay lifestyles and denial of gay rights in a ‘traditional’ and ‘conservative’ Asian society. In the same speech, for instance, Thio argued, ‘We should not be subject to the tyranny of the undemocratic minority who want to violate our consciences, trample cherished moral virtues and threaten our collective welfare by imposing homosexual dogma on right-thinking people. Keep 377A.’ And, though their rhetoric was generally to ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’, the anti-gay lobby could not resist scapegoating the figure of the homosexual and not just the gay activist. Parliament took the side of the anti-repeal lobby and kept 377A intact. By doing this, the government appeared to have appeased the conservativeChristian-dominated anti-repeal lobby and also, through such an action, contributed to the discourse of a traditional conservative majority in Singapore that is not yet ready for changes that are too far ahead in the liberalization trajectory. What is interesting – in fact, puzzling to many – is that the government also publicly reassured local and foreign gays in Singapore that the law, while it remained in place, would be inoperative. This odd result might be seen as an example of the kind of pragmatism that has come to characterize Singapore’s governance and policymaking practices (Tan, 2012), where the government attempts to balance its need to placate a conservative constituency with the contrary economically driven demands of securing Singapore’s pre-eminence as a cosmopolitan node of the global economy.