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20 Jul 2006

the gay archipelago

A new book gives a picture of Indonesia that sets the sprawling country apart from its Asian sisters. Are queer things actually simpler in complicated Indonesia? Douglas Sanders checks out Tom Boellstorff's The Gay Archipelago.

Indonesia - like China, India and the United States - is a large, complex country that can be very internally focused. A recent book suggests that it has developed its own terms and understandings on sexual variation - with some parallels to other Southeast Asian countries - but surprising differences. "Gay Indonesia" is a modern idea, but modern in a very Indonesian nationalist context.

Winner of the 2005 Ruth Benedict Prize, Society for Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association; The Gay Archipelago is the first book-length exploration of the lives of gay men in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country.
Tom Boellstorff, the author, is an American anthropologist now teaching in California. He hung around the Indonesian gay scene for 22 months in total, over a 12-year time span. He speaks Bahasa Indonesia. He is familiar with the cruising sites called, strangely enough, Texas, Pattaya, Los Angeles, Paris, Brazil and Manhattan.

The picture on the cover of his book The Gay Archipelago shows a transgender waria entertaining families and kids at a government-sponsored Independence Day fair. Where else in the world would the government pay for transgender performers at a national day event? Certainly nowhere I can think of.

Tom did AIDS work. Like the pioneering Western academics on GLBT/Queer stuff, he is both an activist and researcher.

He linked up with Dede Oetomo, and Dede's organisation Gaya Nusantara in eastern Java. Dede has been gay Indonesia for most of us outside the country, and, it seems, for most media inside the country. Who else would you connect with?

Tom's activism, even his AIDS work, should have made him see "gay" and "lesbian" as transnational identities - Western in origin - brought to Indonesia by globalisation. He would then write on these new 'identities' and LGBT identity politics. Or perhaps, wanting to be seen as a more traditional anthropologist in order to get a job, he might seek out some local traditional queer cultural patterns, and write about them.

Instead, in a new twist on Western academic writings on gay issues, he sees "gay" and "lesbi" as national identities in Indonesia - neither linked to local ethnic traditions nor Western models.

How can this be? It has a lot to do with language and media - and the peculiarities of nation-building in Indonesia.

Indonesia may take the prize for cultural diversity. 17,000 islands. 670 ethnic groups. Every religion except Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Islam sailed in with Arab traders, and is, of course, the majority religion. Bali remains Hindu - and there are a variety of religions, local or imported, through the archipelago.

Indonesia only makes sense as the successor to the colonial empire of the Dutch East Indies. Language played a key role in creating a new 'national' identity for Indonesians. The Dutch found that Malay was already established as an inter-island trading language, and renamed it Indonesian. They blessed it as the language of colonial administration. It is not Javanese, the language of the largest ethnic grouping.

Instead Malay, this language of economic globalisation, morphs through from a trade language, to a language of colonial administration, to becoming the nationalist language for the 17,000 islands. And it is neither a colonial language nor the language of the dominant ethnic group.

Links to the Netherlands continued, but that provided no gateway to the world. The Netherlands, once a great colonial power, had returned to being the size of an Indonesian island. Independent Indonesia was an oddity in the world - Muslim, Asian, and nobody spoke English or French. Foreign terms had to come in through translation into Indonesian, not through use in a colonial language.

Beginning around 1970, the terms "gay" and "lesbi" began appearing in Indonesian language magazines and newspapers. At first a few bits and pieces would appear - on Rock Hudson, on the Sydney Mardi Gras, on Indonesian celebrities.

The new words were not referring to waria, the well-known transgender grouping. They were not being used to describe local queer/transgender ethnic traditions - such as bissu among the Bugis or the waroks in Eastern Java. Instead, this was something new.

The words "gay" and "lesbi" were appearing in the Indonesian language and in national print media - two of the key parts of the new Indonesian identity that was being forged. This positioned the terms gay and lesbi as modern and national. They were neither traditional nor seen as foreign imports (though the words clearly had foreign origins).

The strong efforts of the Indonesian state to create a new national culture, superior to the myriad of local cultural groups for which Indonesia is famous, had, it seemed, unintentionally, included homosexuality in what was modern and national.

Naming is a major problem everywhere. Modern patterns of thinking about sexual variation are just over a hundred years old. The word homosexual was only invented in 1869. The terms 'gay' and 'lesbian' are very odd, but better, most people think, than the clinical sounding 'homosexual.'

Aditya Bondyopadhyay, an activist lawyer, explained to some westerners in an international conference in Canada that in India "Gay is having lots of money, going to parties and being able to travel to foreign countries. It's a class identity, not a sexual one." This version of 'gay' is nationally uniform in India. It has no connection to local cultural traditions or to transgender hijras. In Thailand as well, when 'gay' is seen as a category separate from (transgender) kathoey, it refers to middle-class, Westernised Thai men.

These usages from India and Thailand sound like Indonesia. Except that the category in India and Thailand is clearly an import. In Indonesia it is not seen in that way.

One of the striking examples of Indonesia language magazines covering a story of lesbians occurred in 1981. Two women, Jossie and Bonnie, were 'married' in Jakarta in April. The reception was special, "with invitations, guests, fine clothes, and members of both families present." Among the guests were several friends from the police.

The event was featured in two national Indonesian language magazines, Tempo and Liberty. Liberty called the event "unique." It said this was the first event of its kind in Jakarta, maybe in Indonesia, or even in the whole world. Jossie and Bonnie were not copying the West.

Just as stories emerge of women in rural India seeking marriage, no external model was being invoked. The logic is in the relationship, not in local culture, national patterns or globalised models.

I know of no public same-sex wedding in the West in the same period as the wedding of Jossie and Bonnie. Certainly none occurred that had the national impact that their wedding had in Indonesia. That impact would have sent a message to lesbians and gays - 'we exist,' 'you are not alone.'

In the end, Tom Boellstorff argues, "gay and lesbi Indonesians are neither imitating Western homosexualities nor utterly distant from them.

His clinching argument on Indonesian gay and lesbi identities being distinctively Indonesian, and not copies from the West, is the embrace of heterosexual marriage - "normative gay Indonesians marry and normative gay Westerners do not" he says. This, he maintains, is a pattern for gay men across the whole Indonesian archipelago. It is a modern, national, Indonesian idea - not the product of local traditional cultures in specific places like Java or Bali.

Boellstorff says that Indonesian men who already identify as 'gay' choose voluntarily to marry. It is seen as necessary and desirable. Marriage is not simply the result of family pressure (the story from Confucian lands). Instead marriage and children are seen as desirable - and not in conflict with continuing a gay erotic life. Sexual inequality means that heterosexual marriage can be pursued with the wife never knowing (or never asking about) the husband's other life.

The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia
Tom Boellstorff
Princeton University Press
Read a sample chapter here
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8103.html

Douglas Sanders is a retired Canadian law professor, living in Bangkok. He can be contacted at sanders_gwb@yahoo.ca.

Indonesia

Reader's Comments

1. 2006-07-21 00:06  
There is more to discover in China as well, only few publications on it
2. 2006-07-21 00:11  
hahahha.... theres another books and movies of a gay and lesbian stories.... you should read or watched it... too bad, they only made it on bahasa... but its really gud........

guess this books, explain enuf, its hard to be a gay in indo.. sigh
3. 2006-07-21 00:17  
OMG!! im sO Proud To Br a IndOnesIAn Gay. ;)
4. 2006-07-21 00:44  
i tot u r a bi..... NYIAHAHHAHA...
5. 2006-07-21 06:31  
was it detik terakhir ??
that movie was so scary
6. 2006-07-21 10:53  
Jimmie/29... as an Indonesian, I think that article is about right and as mostly my friends's says, " we are part of the population and got special feeling and way of sex. as human being Sex is just part of life, we have talent and ability as other poeple.
but in Indo, mostly people still intents on the religion, Catholic and Moslem is mostly hard to understand us, but in Java and Bali we can little bit more open and expressing our creativity.
Oh. The "Detik Terakhir" as the translation is "The last second" its short of sad story...
thanks and Hugs
Jim

7. 2006-07-21 14:27  
*oh well, all the indonsians speaks now. lolz

its not scary, if u were know the feeling and its like, ive been through it.. =]

love, sex, drugs, money... thats e meaning of all e stories end..
8. 2006-07-21 16:04  
Indonesia is as gay as you can get .
but no real stigma , just enjoy it. always
9. 2006-07-21 18:32  
Indonesia have a lot of gays and lesbians community for ur information ... and we proud to be gay in conservative country like indonesia ... sumtime can be gard ... so i need to get out from indonesia if i want to marry guy because being gay in indonesia can be sin for some people ... and that's make me feel so tired in indonesia ... but still indonesia have a great gays and lesbians ... hehe

Tazzmania
^^
10. 2006-07-21 20:45  
Indonesia is fab! absolutely fab!!!

the girls are hot and yummy and the guys even more so! :D

i shld really move there altogether...

tt :P
11. 2006-07-22 07:17  
i love indoo!!! and being out of indo has made me realise how much i took it for granted.
I hardly see any gays or lesbians in indo? maybe ive seen like a couple or two. But then again I dont really have friends when I go back.. :)

ohh btw, you should watch saving face and red doors.
i guess i could relate to the money and love bit, hehe..
xoxoxo
12. 2006-07-22 10:13  
the gay viet nam
13. 2006-07-28 02:56  
I have lived in Thailand for a number of years and speak Thai fluently and study Thai history and am a graduate of a Thai university. So what? I know a little bit about Thai culture and people and history.
What I do know for CERTAIN, is that "gay" Thai men is not a western import and not a middle class phenomena. Please...............................
For hundreds of years MSM has been a normal part of Thai sexuality and a number of highly prominent historical figures of the highest rank have been gay and this is not a western import. To wit, there are working class and farmer class gay men. Maybe the guys this one meets at some bars on Silom Road or the gay sex workers or places frequented by middle class Thai gays, some of them, can fit this category, but the author is very wrong in general.

I think its really silly to suppose that gayness need be or is a western import to Thailand. Ever been in a gay Thai bar on Songran Day? Honey, there ain't nothing about that and its bigger than PRIDE and all Thai. Enough said. Peace. Michael Asia
14. 2006-07-28 09:34  
I'm a proud gay indonesian and I must say that it's true that the terms has become more common. but indonesia has been adapting english terms and accept them to be part of the "bahasa" vocabulary for years. There has been rituals in certain tribes that i read once in a national magazine, where for rites of passage, or before marriage, a man must indulge in sex with the priest (dukun). may be just my ignorance but if anyone else aware of this, back me up.....Either way, I'm looking forward for more development in the gay human rights issues and gay establishments. we're still lacking much
15. 2006-08-02 01:58  
Dear Il_buy,
Yes, what you say is true about certain ethnic groups having "rights of passage" which involve same sex. I do not remember just now, but there are some peoples in Polynesia/South Pacific with this tradition and many others. There are a few 'gay' anthropology books which detail these types of habits now. And in ancient Rome and Greece it was considered necessary.
michaelasia
16. 2006-08-02 18:44  
Just thought I'd add my two cents worth...

I've only met five "gay" Indonesians, two were muslim one of whom was a muscular merchant marine guy totally in the closet but loved to fuck white arse (but not during Ramadan -go figure...) Broke up with his British BF who lived in Singapore because he saw a pic of him dressed in drag and this was totally unacceptable to him. Just seemed to me his lifestyled reeked of hypocracy: A gay moslem who loves to engage in anal sex must lead a closeted lifestyle due to family, social & religious "pressure" but less accepting of others who are out and open...

In Thailand, or more correctly Bangkok, the hosts of go-go-boy bars are mostly straight guys (source: my finely tuned gaydar!) who don't have the usual hangups as gay guys do over MSM. i.e. there isn't an "emotional factor". In fact these gay bars often advertise for hosts in Thai language soccer magazines which invariably has a large young, fit & straight readership. Anyway ask any of these guys you have just fucked if they are "gay" and they will say "pen man" (I'm a man"). Things can get confusing for those with the western definition of gay & straight. Things are not so "tidy" in Thailand. To add to the confusion terms used here like 'king' (i.e. top) can also be used by these straight male prostitutes.



17. 2006-08-10 02:20  
For Zack,

Sorry honey your gaydar is off a bit re those BKK bars. As an expert surveyor and Thai speaker, I can say that on average, 30% of those guys are gay in the sense they are gay or enjoy very much SMS. Personally I find the "straight" guys you mention to be boring, "oh come and adore me and pay me a lot for doing nothing much" to be boring.

Actually the term "gay" here also gets mixed up culturally because most Thais, I know I am generalizing, don't need these identity definitions to have fun. "it feels good, do it, its over"....

There are many gay places outside of those little fantasy worlds of the gay pay as you go bars which are very nice and very Thai and not defined as Western imports. The under 30's set also does not get stuck on labels like 'gay' and 'straight'. Its kind of a worldwide trend for this group, it seems.

Been There/Done That/Moved On

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