With the AWARE EOGM (that’s too many acronyms, even for Singapore — the Association of Women for Action and Research’s Extraordinary General Meeting) a few days away, let me use this platform to share my experience as a young Singaporean woman who 1. is actively Christian 2. attended Christian schools 3. is more than ‘a little interested’ in civil society and local politics.
Notice I don’t say 4. as a gay woman, because what I am about to say would still hold true even if I wasn’t.
I seldom discuss religion here and this may surprise many, but I grew up in a Christian home. My family is moderately religious. We are all involved in church to some extent. I attended Christian schools for 8 out of 12 years of formal education. We had compulsory chapel and morning prayers (waived if you were Muslim). We sometimes host prayer meetings at our house and when we don’t, we attend them once a week somewhere in the neighbourhood. I do this out of my own free will and personal conviction. I was not forced into this religion. Like every Christian my walk with God has wavered, particularly through the murky periods of late adolescence, but I have found peace and renewed faith. My return to the religion, after a period away, was a happy one. My family can be considered religious but they are also some of the most wonderful, non-judgmental people I know. We — and the church we attend — have a problem with the idea of ‘religion’, and see the idea of ‘religion’ as a trap that distracts from what Christianity is about, i.e. our personal relationships with God.
All through the Christian schools I attended, we had prayers every morning followed by a short sermon. This, I can safely say, nobody minded. We always had a handful of teachers who were ‘religious’. They never once crossed the boundaries of our secular nation, only sharing the Word when asked, and never in an offensively evangelical manner. In these people, I — and other students, including many non-Christians — found tender, unjudging voices to turn to in our times of need. Occasionally non-Christian students would even ask for a prayer, out of class hours, and I saw for myself how these people unconditionally provided love, care, and guidance.
‘Sex education’ in my school days was still teethering on the brink ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. In our Anglican school the official line was that we should not have sex. By the time we talked about it we were 18. Half the people I knew in junior college were already sexually active. A good handful of us, and I think the teachers knew this too, identified as ‘homosexual’. Being fairly bright people, my schoolmates, I think most of us knew what to do. Condoms, et al. I even remember holding court with some girls once — we were trying to figure out what ’safe lesbian sex’ meant (condoms on toys, and water-based… stuff, if any). We were lucky. We had the internet. We then had one or two Civic Education lessons in which we filled in a ‘test’, and just about everybody found the questions silly and stupid for they toed the official line: that sex in any form should not be had before marriage, and it was to be abstinence all the way. There was uproarious laughter. We filled in the ‘right’ answers anyway so that we could go out and watch the football.
I never once watched a ‘lesbian-themed’ movie. There wasn’t “the L Word” or “Spider Lilies” back in the day. The first time I ever saw a ‘lesbian-themed’ anything was when I was 14 and I went to watch the Taiwanese movie “Tempting Hearts” with my first boyfriend (yes, I’m getting to that in a bit). I identified wholly with the falling for your best friend thing but could not, at that point, imagine being with one. I promptly forgot about it and went back to holding hands with the boy. Years later, another gay girl in junior college downloaded a Swedish movie called “F*cking Amal” (go Kazaa!!) and we watched it together. There were no subtitles. It was about two young Swedish girls who had fallen in love with each other. We didn’t make out after watching it. I highly doubt that I would have been prompted to think “I should try being gay” if I had gone to see “Spider Lilies” in a movie screening at the time. Most likely, as movie screenings go, I would have read the synopsis and known of the plot and I would have chosen to go.
(I know this is taking a while to get to what I’m trying to say, but be patient.)
Of my friends in school who are now openly gay — male or female — we had a tacit knowledge of each other’s sexualities. The only thing we had was each other, and furious searches on the internet. If nobody taught us that being gay is “OK”, how did we come around to that? I think we got pretty lucky because we had each other. There are plenty of young gay people who never come around to realising that they are not alone. Some even attempt suicide: from taunting, from furious questions about ourselves, from “what the fuck is wrong with me?”. Some succeed.
These are things that you cannot wish away. These are things that you cannot close an eye and say “they do not exist”. These are things that are real that some people pretend don’t exist, but the only thing they ever come close to establishing is that “this should not be”.
So what did 8 years in Christian schools do for us as young gay people? For the most part, it was a non-issue. The Higher Ups tacitly knew that we existed and that this is what we were, but they had no grounds for intervention: most of our relationships were off-campus, not with each other, and in our own time. We were well-balanced individuals. We didn’t go running off to toilets to make out with each other, the same way you don’t expect your average straight couple in school to do that. The only time it was ever an issue was when I went through a year-long period of turmoil — with myself, my sexuality, my head, my family, my schooling. I was a wreck and everybody knew it. I fell behind in my grades and instead of busying myself with scholarship and Ivy League university applications, I was sorting out my head and a heartbreak. I wrote an angsty email to a teacher and explained that I was having difficulties reconciling with my sexuality and that I needed time to get over a particularly wrecking relationship. She said: “OK. Let me know if you need to talk.” I got over it. Nobody ever said it’s okay to be gay. Nobody ever said it was wrong either. It helped.
Seven years on, I think I’ve finally reached a certain equilibrium and that has nothing to do with being gay, and everything to do with being a young adult, unsure and insecure about the future. From running this blog I know many young people are struggling with it too — I get several emails a week from it. And I think I may have unwittingly become some sort of figurehead that these young people look up to that you don’t have to be miserable — you can be quite fulfilled, accomplished, and you can have happy relationships. If people see that I’m a fairly well-balanced individual with some semblance of sanity, career and accomplishment, then so be it. There are many more like me out there. They include people in every sector of society. They are your brothers and sisters. They are your cousins. They are your classmates and they are the weird boys who sat around struggling to find the appropriate response to the collective ‘ogling at nude women’ activity that goes in our boys’ schools. They are girls like me who didn’t know what to say when they found themselves surrounded by swooning girls, swooning over some hot jock. Like them, I don’t actively go out and spread the message. I’m only doing what I know best: being myself. And I am happy to be not miserable, to lead a fulfilling life concentrating on all these other things that make up who I am. Things that have nothing to do with the fact that I am gay.
I am this way because I have been since I was four. I only “came of age” was a gay person at 17, when I dumped my boyfriends and decided to be true to myself. At no point in my life did anybody tell me “this is OK”. I simply figured it out for myself. For the most part, I think my friends and family, even the Christians among them, have never once treated me differently because of who I date (a very smart and beautiful girl, if I can say so myself). None of my friends treat this as a big deal. It is as negligible as the fact that I am Chinese and that I travel a ton — as negligible as the fact that I write and photograph for a living. They mostly find the other parts of me a lot more interesting: things like where I’m going next week, when I’m going to be back home, things like how I can possibly afford to travel as much as I do, and the latest gossip about our friends :P
I consider myself lucky to be surrounded by people like these. People who, regardless of their cultural backgrounds and political leanings, are very much accepting of others. This is important in a society like ours, one that is multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-everything. The Christian schools I went to accepted that. The Christians I live with and worship with accept that. My very Christian father is a big fan of AWARE and aspired that I might one day be president. My very Christian father is a big fan of a certain lawyer who once hosted a certain talkshow (and known lesbian and playwright) and used to sit me in front of the telly to ask me to learn from her, her skill, grace, eloquence, and most importantly her ’strength’ as a woman. I consider myself very lucky to have a father like that.
The fine line that I think is the breaking point in present day Christianity is the efforts of a few trying to split the religion by emphasizing overtly on just one topic: what other people are doing in bed. Brought up as a Christian child the most important lessons I ever took home from church were that we should strive to be Christ-like in all things, and that God loves us. Those of you who don’t know me here might jump on this as the chance to say if you want to be Christ-like, shouldn’t you not be homosexual? To this I only say this is my own cross to bear, and I myself am admissible to God in all things — just as you are. And that coming from a very Christian home (that works, is very well put together, and more functional than most families), I am surrounded by people in happy marriages who are good fathers and mothers, including my own very Christian brother. I don’t know if they see it yet, but I do not see my relationship to be any different from any of theirs. We have the same relationship milestones and the same struggles and triumphs. We are well-balanced individuals committed to our careers, and to each other. That includes everything you would expect of a committed relationship, including what we are going to do in the next year, five, or ten. One day they will have to come around to seeing that my choice of the person I want to grow old with is the best one, and that any other option (male, or another female) is not even up for questioning. (But then they read this blog… so…)
The Scriptures make mention of many issues: unbelievers, menstruating women, idols, other religions, theft, robbery, adultery. And occasionally, homosexuality (although if you read some leading Bible scholars on the topic they might tell you that the word used does not translate accurately to “homosexuals”, but rather to male prostitution). But I’m not here to argue Scripture. As a Christian I believe the Word is final. As a Christian I also believe that you are all entitled to your own interpretations of what it means, because if we didn’t have disagreement we wouldn’t have so many disparate schools of Christianity. There are some among us who believe that we should not marry unbelievers because we should “not be yoked with unbelievers”. There are some among us who believe wholly that women have to submit to their husbands. There are some among us who believe that all non-believers will go to hell. I think we all unequivocally, Christian or not, believe that adultery is not right. There is no joy in any of this debate. This debate distracts from the joy that is the worship of God.
But who are these modern day Crusaders, and who are they to say they have the last word on how other people should or should not live? Why take issue with just homosexuality? Isn’t divorce, adultery and pregnancy out of wedlock more startling issues for the family? Why focus just on this one topic? What is your stand on that, and what organisations are you starting to deal with these issues (other than the heinously evil Focus on the Family)?
Singapore, as a society, has made considerable progress. There was a time when interracial marriages were spoken of as the unthinkable, and now it is considered backward to do so. Despite all that, there is still outspoken opposition from some quarters to the idea of we can marry out of our race. But it is now fairly commonplace to stroll down Orchard Road and see the most unlikely combinations in dating couples, happily walking hand in hand. I grew up in a time where “family” isn’t always clear-cut, and I am happy that is so. I have friends of all races in many countries across the world. I have friends who are straight, gay, and transgendered. I have friends who are happily married — through arranged marriages. I have friends who are never going to marry. I love them for who they are.
Fresh from visiting the amazing Crusader’s castle (Qalat al’Hosn, or Kraks des Chevaliers) in Syria, I am reminded of one simple fact: as a religion our best bet, history has shown, is to do what we do best. Be Christ-like and to love. Not brandish swords and stir up hatred among people who don’t believe in the same things we do. I expect many readers to take issues with my sudden profession of faith and sexuality. Fine. But we would all do well to hold tightly to let he who has no sin cast the first stone. Because this culture war is underway, and religion should have nothing to do with it. That is my right, and yours, as a citizen of this secular nation. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
