Fridae

In an extraordinarily erudite article in the New York Times, January 1, 2006, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher teaching at Princeton University, said the sea change in the way Western societies have come to regard homosexual persons is not a "story about reasons." It is a "perspectival shift."

"[O]ver the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people."

In effect, telling people why they should accept gay people in their midst had less to do with the outcome than just having gay people in their midst.

"I don't deny," he wrote, "that all the time, at every stage, people were talking, giving one another reasons to do things: accept their children, stop treating homosexuality as a medical disorder, disagree with their churches, come out.

"Still, the short version of the story is basically this: People got used to lesbians and gay men."

One can quibble with some of the finer points he made, but he is essentially right. However, let's get the quibbling out of the way first. It's true that almost all homophobia against gay males, on closer inspection, is an outgrowth of heterosexual distaste for the very thought of homosexual intercourse, but it also arguable that homophobia against lesbians sprout from different roots. One seldom sees the same, visceral distaste for lesbian sex as for gay male sex. Instead, I would suggest that lesbians are subconsciously seen as disobedient to male superiority and the submission that is expected.

The other tiny thing some readers may have noticed is that talking about coming out was included among the less important reasons for the attitudinal change. This may strike some people as odd, for if gays and lesbians had not come out, how could the getting used to them have taken place?

Yet, he's also right. Very few gays and lesbians came out because they weighed the reasons for and against and then decided to do so. They came out when they themselves became used to being gay and lesbian, when they themselves got used to seeing other, happily out, gay people.

The foregoing aside, there are two questions that spring to mind from Professor Appiah's comments.

Avoiding Confrontation
If there is truth to the belief that many Asian cultures place a high value on discretion and privacy, are gay men and lesbians in this region more likely to remain in the closet and avoid the topic of sexuality in any conversation? If so, do the public in these countries get less opportunity to "get used to" gay people?

Indeed, many have remarked that Asian cultures put a premium on avoiding confrontation and this induces a certain degree of self-censorship. Western societies, particularly American, are less tortured about being frank and on occasion, "in your face."

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But is this true? Or are we being too essentialist? Alternatively, are we looking at communication through the prism of Western culture? Perhaps Asian individuals are able to communicate just as effectively their positions, albeit in ways more subtle than other societies, but that also must mean that other individuals around them are able to pick up these subtle signals. In other words, people can know that one is gay, without one ever saying so, and so long as there is that knowledge, the "getting used to" can still proceed apace.

Yet, unspoken knowledge can have consequences different from spoken knowledge. One must necessarily ask whether the former is less demanding that a contradiction to one's worldview be resolved. Too much subtlety may also mean deniability.

Insufficient Condition
The other big question is how visibility and being thought of as people rather than sexual miscreants translate to acceptance and legal equality. Prof Appiah didn't dwell on this since it wasn't the main point of his paper. He merely remarked that a perspectival change was crucial in the process.

But the experience of transgenders in so many Asian societies would suggest that while it may be a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one. In many Asian societies, transgenders are quite visible, and others around them are habituated to their presence. In addition, if one looks at the semantics of these societies, they are incontestably thought of as a people apart.

Yet for all the centuries of visibility, they're nowhere near full acceptance or legal equality.

Clearly, it seems then that societies, and the state institutions that serve to manifest their ideals, need also to have some kind of bias towards according people legal equality and rights, whenever they see any group as a people. It's easy to forget that this is nowhere near automatic. Too many Asian states and societies allow discrimination against minorities, whether defined by race, religion, physical impairment or any number of ways, not least gender.

Just because you're human doesn't mean you should be treated humanely.

Well-known examples include the way Korean communities are treated in Japan, and how Muslim minorities are treated in Thailand or Cambodia. At the same time, Muslim Malaysia has just passed a law further reducing the rights of Muslim women.

The habit of thought that gives rise to such behaviour is that of seeing the world as an hierarchy. Certain persons or groups are superior to others, and harmony in this world is achieved through various individuals or peoples reconciling themselves to their assigned places. Within such a scheme, a society may well see gay people as people, as a class, and may even have no particular distaste for homosexual sex, yet not see why they should be considered equals.

So while a perspectival shift is something gay and lesbian communities in Asia should work towards, in order to be accepted as people, not as miscreants and subversives, it is at the same time necessary to participate in the broader construction of justice and equality. There has to be another perspectival change: that people should be treated equally rather than that people should merely be given a place in an hierarchical cosmos.

Alex Au has been a gay activist for over 10 years and is the co-founder of People Like Us. Readers who have experience with applying for Dependent's Passes for their same-sex spouse to live together in Singapore could write to him so that that gay activists in Singapore can have some facts to go on. He can be contacted at yawning@geocities.com.