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Some thoughts about sex, abuse and growing up gay and unsupervised in Singapore:
Recently, a Locally Known Person was accused of being a sexual predator who use money and other pressures to obtain sex from young men, some of whom were underaged.
I don’t know if the allegations are true, although there are convincing receipts. And I don’t know if the truth will come into the light. In cases of sexual abuse, it often doesn’t.
(Afternote: the LKP has issued an apology of sorts, which - surprise! - did not tempt truth out of hiding.)
It made me think about sex and consent and being gay (or MSM) in Singapore, and I found myself feeling a mix of rage, dread, resignation and shame. It’s an upsetting and difficult topic.
But here we are. And if we keep silent, here we will be again. So let’s talk.
As a guy who mostly sleeps with other guys, I think the worst thing about gay hookup culture is that I can’t separate the sex from the abuse.
When I was in an all-boys secondary school, the first person to touch me sexually did it against my will. He got me into a CCA room alone, and stuck his hand down my shorts. I froze.
Everything raced and smashed inside my head. I was fearful, aroused, repelled. It seemed awful, but maybe that was how it was supposed to feel. I didn’t know what I said or did. It still feels like it was something that happened to someone else, but it happened to me.
Then, he pulled my hand into his shorts and made me touch him, too. I don’t know if I resisted. I know one of us left the room eventually - I think it was him, because I don’t think I did anything with my body for a while, just waiting, as if it was still happening.
Later I found out that he had been doing the same thing to a few other people in the CCA. Even later I found out he was in a relationship with my best friend then, who knew about the touching but did nothing.
But I don’t think we did anything or said anything, definitely nothing to a teacher or adult.
Maybe it was the school culture - a combination of trendy homophobia and yet also a strong homoerotic culture (think taupoks, birthday stripping, dick punching), the touch of other boys always laced with violence.
Maybe it was the CCA subculture I was in, where these dynamics were intense but filtered through the unspoken fact that many of us were uncovering and re-covering our own horrifying gayness.
But my point is, under the already secretive discourses of sex and homosexuality, all these first times become automatic secrets we keep, from our putative caretakers, and for the most part from even our closest friends.
And if we were abused, how could we have known it was even abuse? And if our formative sexual experiences are secretive and untalked about, then how were we to know sex as anything other than what men did to relieve nameless “needs”?
Why tell anyone when it was a crime in this country, and no teacher was allowed to talk reasonably about it even when asked by a brave or clowning student? (Or a student substituting clownery for bravery?)
I got older. I read queer literature and learnt that queer people and thoughts were not uncommon, and recorded throughout history, and predated the oldest sources bigots can cite. I become indignant at discrimination. Still, no one taught me about how to be gay.
It’s a weird thing to say - “how to be gay”. What I mean is I accepted that I had instincts, thoughts and feelings which harmed nobody, but my society and my own family would nonetheless condemn me for having them. How was I to survive this?
For it was a matter of survival for me. I thought I would be disowned. Even as I depended on messages of hope and defiance (yes, “foreign influence”) from outside worlds because my own society could not deal with gay people, most of the time I was unhappy.
Dating was out of the question. Somehow in the late 2000s gay people still couldn’t been seen publicly, let alone gay relationships and affection.
What remained available was sex, if one didn’t mind the disconnected sort. There were places one could go to. I thought I was exercising sex positivity but men after men I slept with were at best as confused as I was, at worst manipulative or abusive.
But at the time I thought that was just what sex was. Something you got over and done with, then try not to think about later.
I thought I was young and strong and could hit an aggressor if he pushed me into doing something I didn’t want. I could bite. But the first time I was penetrated I went into the same kind of trance state sharks go to when you hit them on the nose.
It hurt a lot but I thought it would hurt less if I didn’t move. I could not suppress low moans of pain but he probably thought I was enjoying it. It didn’t occur to me that I could have told him to stop and walk away.
See: the intricacies of consent. I was 18 or 19 then - an “adult”. I said yes initially, not verbally, but with a kiss or touch. Surely that made it not rape. But I also didn’t want it earlier than halfway, but didn’t know to ask to stop.
Afterwards I still had to kiss him because it seemed correct, like some matter of fact. What did that mean?
Sex can be abusive, especially when consent is faltering or uninformed. If no one is taught what is enthusiastic consent and a healthy sexual relationship looks like, then how do we expect teens at 16 or 18 to say, “I consent” and know all its power and liabilities?
So I stumbled through my early 20s, being hurt and hurting others. I was cavalier sometimes. Occasionally I recognised the dissociated look on my partner’s face and wondered if they really wanted sex with me or if they wanted something else, something they would not get.
Even now, when I talk to my community of gay friends, sexual abuse and harassment are shockingly common. It doesn’t have to be rape, although rape does happen. It could be coercion or pic sharing without permission or stealthing or revenge porn or unsolicited rough sex.
It could be forced outing. It could be emotional manipulation. It could be bodyshaming. It could be blackmail. It could be an older person with some power over a younger person. It could be not disclosing your risk of STDs or HIV status.
I pause here to say, I am so tentative about speaking ill of sex. Because I do enjoy sex and I still believe in the idea of pleasure as an essential fact of life. I still think sex can be an intense expression of affection, connection and commitment.
I’m also hyperaware of bigots who would use sex against us, to say rubbish like how gay people misuse the gift of procreation, or characterise gay sex as destructive to body and mind and soul. These people have no interest in our wellbeing and shouldn’t be given airtime.
At the same time, it should be possible for gay people, gay men especially, to examine their sexual lives, and reflect on whether we have been responsible with our partners, and if there are ways we can reduce harm and reduce the risk of us harming others.
This might mean leaving that LINE chat group or unfollowing that Twitter account which aggregates and sexualises photos pulled from social media and private exchanges.
This might mean thinking about your fetishes which may be harmless as a fantasy but harmful when acted upon, like voyeurism or nonconsensual kinks or rough sex.
More importantly, what does good sex mean to you? In my experience, good sex is when everyone involved is comfortable and know that they and their needs will be taken care of, to the best of the other party’s ability.
It’s when my partner cares about my pleasure, even when indulging in his own. And this is only possible when there is honest communication.
Looking back, I am lucky that my boyfriend is as considerate, open, thoughtful and careful when it comes to bedroom matters. If I knew love like this was possible I would have been a lot more hopeful as a queer teenager.
But I know this is a function of our privilege (we hold good jobs and don’t rely on each other financially), experiences and over-communication. Not everyone has these things.
I also want to caveat that I don’t think hookups are inherently abusive. You don’t need to commit to someone for you to treat him with respect and decency.
But I think during hookups there is generally a lower expectation of responsibility towards your partner. I think we should strive for a minimum standard.
And if you are abused, I know how attractive it is to keep it to yourself, especially when reporting it may mean being a victim and also a criminal and pariah. It means coming out outside of your own terms.
When I was sexually harassed and touched at work, I also chose not to report it. I am not out at work yet. I was highly skeptical if I will be treated with compassion. I was afraid of being fired or passed over for opportunities for something that was not my fault.
I tried to talk to the perpetrator, knowing that he was also let down by our education and social systems. I wanted him to know that what he did was wrong, even under the influence of alcohol. I did try my best.
But in the end it was mentally exhausting, and I took the easy way out by minimising contact and eventually avoiding him altogether. I also stopped participating in the corporate binge-drinking culture.
I still think, in an ideal world, we should report all transgressions, but the fact that victims often do not point to a deep injustice vested in attitudes and a law which criminalise people for expressing a basic aspect of themselves.
Even if you are one of those gays who say “the law isn’t enforced anyway”, do you trust your employer, policemen, lawyers and judges to treat you with compassion when you say, This guy I went on a date with forced me to do X? Or might you have reservations?
I thought reporting a crime against myself would be a natural course of action. But my reservations won out. It marred my experience at work, which I enjoy, and it isolated me from my boss, whom I respect and whose advice I appreciate. I could not bring myself to “cause trouble”.
And I thought it would ruin the work I’ve done so far. I wanted to come out as someone who tried very hard to be a contributing member, who was helpful and valuable and reasonable. But because I was groped, that was no longer available to me if I reported the matter.
In any case. My stories are more common than you think. But my experiences also changed me. I no longer tolerated ambiguities I did before. I became more cautious in compromising situations. And it made me more determined to push some secrets into the light.
If you have a story you’ve kept to yourself, even a very lightweight one can drag you down over years. When I told my boyfriend of all my scrapes he told me his stories too. Fear, and grief, and fury, and also how can we let this go on? No one protected us when we were younger.
How do we protect the next generation? Because as sure as the tides come in, older men still take advantage of young impressionable kids today and the next day.
Nowadays I keep thinking about this: I have less and less time to change the world for the better.
