ABSTRACT
Small, ambitious Singapore has a well-deserved image as a “nanny state”: an aggressively paternalistic but popularly-supported government maintains tight control over state and society. With a population of only around 4 million, threefourths of it Chinese (Government of Singapore 2001: 4)2, the island nation has prospered extraordinarily since independence in 1959, reaching the world’s highest ranks in terms of socioeconomic status. A key component of the government’s economic strategy has been development of the labor force, including propping up declining birth rates among the educated middle class through a raft of incentives and threats targeted mainly at women (see Heng and Devan 1992; Kwa 1993), as well as discouraging nonprocreative sexual practices – though these policies are justifi ed also in the name of social conservatism. As such, a pronouncement by Singapore prime minister Goh Chok Tong in a July 2003 Time magazine interview seemed anomalous. Goh announced that his government would henceforth allow gay men and lesbians to hold even sensitive government positions, so long as they disclosed their orientation (Elegant 2003). Homosexuality is regularly condemned as discordant with Singapore’s “Asian values” and homosexual acts remain illegal, even if those laws are seldom enforced. The threat of punishment and social stigma has been presumed to leave gay or lesbian civil servants especially susceptible to blackmail, and thus barred from certain posts.
