2004 was a year of rallying around the rainbow flag, from trying to get same sex marriage legalised to getting George Bush voted out. In Singapore, the gay community tried again to register gay advocacy group People Like Us as a society, to de-link gay sexual practices from the causes of AIDS and to stage yet another homo-themed party for Christmas… wait, we did not succeed in any of those efforts.

Okay, so 2004 was not that great a year for us. We wrapped ourselves around in rainbow flags and made a huge dance and show about things that we cared about. But, like gratuitous gay-themed bare-bodied plays, not many people from outside the community cared enough to attend.

For a people that carps endlessly about how society needs to broaden its horizons, the gay community is on the whole ironically anaemic to most other issues than their own advancement.

No wonder on issues that matter, the gay community finds itself short of friends. Where were the hets who allegedly attend gay parties when the police denied us a license to hold Snowball.04? Who spoke up for us when people were publicly accusing us of leading the nation into an AIDS explosion?

If the gay community appears to care only for itself, then why should society give a hoot about the gay community?

We need more friends.

If we want people to understand our cause and to join us in our effort to be treated equally, then we should seriously consider extending a hand of friendship to people who would accept our offer of friendship.

As Mama Streisand put it so eloquently, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.

Who, then, needs our friendship? Asia's tsunami victims? They are certainly the news-making cause of the moment, but not a group that the gay community can build a sustainable relationship with. After all, the victims will eventually get on with their lives, and the gay community surely cannot sit on its hands and wait for the next disaster to strike. Moreover, with so many organisations collecting money in aid of tsunami victims, the gay community will only seem like an opportunistic drop in the bucket of goodwill that is being passed around right now.

What we can do, however, is to take the year-end goodwill and sympathy for tsunami victims and channel them toward building sustainable relationships with other communities in search of friends: the poor, the sick, the old, the troubled and the underprivileged. There are so many avenues for community service wherever you are - children with cancer, teens from broken families, the mentally handicapped, and the terminally ill - just pick one.

If each of us can become an anecdotal do-gooder in service of the wider society, then collectively we can hope to raise the image of the gay community to one that is socially conscionable and worthy of engagement. And maybe, just maybe, we will make friends who will stand by us at the next social debate.

For the gay community to rebrand itself from a philandering people to a philanthropic people - that is my wish for 2005.

Happy new year!