ABSTRACT
In 1981, two stories made the Indonesian mass media headlines within a week of each other, blaring the news about a lesbian arrest and a lesbian marriage. The fi rst couple to make the news, Aty and Nona, had run away together. Because one was a 15-year-old student and thus below the age of sexual consent, her parents claimed that their daughter had been kidnapped, so the police arrested the older woman, a well-known 21-year-old singer from Jakarta. The news story recounted how the two women had promised each other to be together forever (Tempo, 1984a ). Only a week later, the news of a lesbian couple’s wedding appeared in the same weekly magazine (Boellstorff, 2005 ). 1 The news report compared the couple, who were in their twenties, to a bride and groom: “Jossie, 25 years old, looked handsome in a blueish [sic] white suit with a fl owery red tie, and Bonnie, 22 years old, looked prettier than ever in her long red gown” (Tempo, 1984b , p. 5). The news was a turning point for lesbians and gay men in Indonesia. Until that time, mass print media had been mostly silent about gays in Indonesia, despite the attention given to the growing international lesbian and gay movement.
