The Pitters' Place

Pink Dot is Singapore's largest LGBT event each year, sort of our version of Pride except a lot tamer and consisting mostly of LGBT people and allies gathering peacefully in a park to picnic and half-listen to music and speeches. It's grown from about 2k attendees in 2009 to slightly under 30,000 in recent years, which has been inspiring but also got the opposition heated up with the usual anti-LGBT protests, murder threats etc.

So for this year the government announced that foreign companies are no longer allowed to be sponsors, because other countries should stop trying to influence "controversial social issues" here. Sponsors had included Google, Facebook and other big names, all of which were thusly banned from sponsorship, and so Pink Dot lost almost all its financial support and people were freaking out.

But then this got a lot of people angry! And suddenly a whole wave of local companies started coming up and pledging their monetary support. About 50 joined the first wave, far up from the 15 or so big foreign sponsors each year, and then the numbers kept climbing past a hundred until they'd not just met but far exceeded their budget, and it was super heart-warming and everyone was very overwhelmed and moved and there were many emotions.

And then today the government announced a new rule that says only Singaporeans and permanent residents are allowed to attend:
http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/on ... organisers

which reeks of so much last-minute desperation that I'm actually happy. Because if they have to resort to fining foreigners $3000 just for observing a ~picnic~, it means we're winning.

Though it really sucks for people whose partners/friends/families aren't citizens or PRs; for some couples it's the only time each year they can be openly affectionate with each other in public, and if one of them is a foreigner, they can't do that any more. But it's always darkest before the dawn, and what would be really amazing now is if locals alone manage to break the past years' attendance records.

Sounds like y'all are making some major strides there. Keep fighting the good fight!

Thanks!

Sadly it's brought all the trolls (and non-trolls) out of the woodwork. The worry now is the growing influence of Christian fundamentalists here, which seems to be the result of the US figuring they've lost the cultural war in the West and are now focusing their efforts on Asia. A lot of the talking points are imported straight from the US Christian Right, even in a context where they don't make as much sense, and it's disturbing how fast it's spreading without an established progressive base to oppose them.

There's a storm coming.

I had heard the religious right wing from this country had been moving out into others, and its unfortunate to hear its true. I'm not really sure what the best way to deal with them is- in my experience they're the kind of types that thrive off of any attention, positive or negative.

Good luck with those guys. Truly an obnoxious bunch to deal with.

Thanks! I find that homophobic hate speech here is harder to deal with than that from the US, which usually falls within the same few arguments. Whereas there's so much ignorance here that the hatred is a lot more creative and easier to get blindsided by. Like: "I still don't understand why someone may turn to gay. Pussy is nice" or "I don't like gays. y the governments even make it legal?" or "I just don't think it's right for kids to grow up in a society where they see dudes kissing or trannies out there in the open. Just go along with reproduction, why stop what we are biologically meant to do?" or "The gays themselves are the ones that should be homophobic. If I engaged in anal sex,I would be fearful,actually terrified. Terrified that this disgusting behavior goes against what is right and good."

So that might be one unexpected benefit from the religious right spreading - at least theirs are arguments that I'm more used to seeing and that just becomes background noise after a while. Right now the toughest thing is dealing with how this intersects with racism; the news made it to international media and there are a bunch of Western commenters going on about how this proves we're a bunch of primitive savages and the Western world should "do something", which then got local people angry and ranting about white people trying to corrupt Asia with their sexual decadence and how they should deal with their own problems and stop trying to police the whole world with their gay imperialist agenda.

The sad irony being that our anti-gay laws originated with British colonialism in the first place, and likewise the surge in the religious right came from the West.