No doubt, in the years to come, Sieh will also be used as a poster boy by our various state-affiliated organisations in recruiting gay talent from abroad, while at home, the success in wooing him will be bandied about as proof of how wise the recent decision was to keep Section 377A (the law the criminalises sex between men) with only vague promises that it will not be "proactively" enforced.

The danger is that people will read "mission accomplished" into this: Singapore has done enough and we need make no further adjustments on the question of gay equality. We have fixed all that was needed to be fixed in order to reap the (long-lusted-for) economic benefits, and now we can sit back and never talk about "the damn gays" again.

The truth is, we are far from mission accomplished. It is one thing to do the minimum necessary to make short-term gay expatriates feel comfortable living here, it is quite another to live up to obligations to treat gay citizens with fairness and respect. It is one thing to operate a hotel and another to make a home.

To start with, a business can run a gay-friendly hotel – for guests – but still treat its gay employees like shit. Let's not kid ourselves. There are still so many things wrong with this place; let's not fall for the "we have arrived" razzmatazz.

Allow me to list, for illustrative purposes, three areas:

It is entirely human to fall in love and wish to form a family unit together. As Singapore law currently stands, gay people are denied many aspects of a genuine and happy family life. Opposite sex couples can get married and thereby gain social recognition and legitimacy as well as a plethora of benefits that flow from a marriage certificate (e.g. spousal benefits at various clubs) but a gay person cannot marry the one he loves.

Heterosexual couples can adopt children if they have none of their own, or if they simply wish to love and care for another child. Gay couples aren't even considered a stable family unit for the purposes of adoption assessment simply because they aren't even allowed to marry.

Legally married couples can use their Medisave to pay for each other's hospital expenses. A gay person cannot use it to pay for the treatment of someone he might have spent decades living with.

Then there are all sorts of tax allowances and subsidies that the state dishes out to legally married couples, who by law can only be opposite-sex couples. For example, an opposite-sex couple can get married and, waving a marriage certificate, avail themselves of tens of thousands of dollars in subsidies when they buy a flat from the Housing and Development Board. A gay couple cannot. How can this be fair?

Another issue that upsets me greatly is that of unequal treatment in the civil service. Kerry Sieh notwithstanding, the government's promises notwithstanding, the civil service continues to discriminate against gay employees. Every few months, I hear a new case of a teacher having his career choked off, simply because the Internal Security Department (ISD) has told the Education Ministry that so-and-so is gay.

Firstly, why is the ISD snooping around people's private lives? Don't they have detention escapees like Mas Selamat Kastari to catch?

Secondly, why can't gay people be allowed to teach? Does the Education Ministry think that gay teachers would (a) molest their pupils, (b) make them turn gay or (c) both? Why is this ministry, charged with educating our young, so ignorant themselves?

There are gay and lesbian Singaporeans who feel they have a calling to be an educator. It is completely unjust for the state to deny them this vocation on no rational grounds. This is unjust discrimination, pure and simple.

 
The right to free expression

Yawning Bread has documented many instances wherein the Singapore government exercised censorship over gay-affirmative expression. The practice continues: events and lectures are banned, film and TV shows are rated or censored more strictly once it contains gay-related content, sometimes banned too.

The effect is to sustain a climate of homophobia. The average Jane or Joe gets the idea from such paranoid policies, including the retained Section 377A that is meant to "signpost" moral norms, that gay people are some kind of a threat that has to be carefully contained. It perpetuates social stigma, which undermines the psychological wellbeing of many gay people, especially gay teenagers, who come to believe that they are somehow not worthy individuals, or inherently sick.

Not only is unequal censorship a violation of the right to equality for gay people, through the social effects of the resultant messaging, it is a tort inflicted by the state on a class of its own citizens.

 
The trouble with Singapore is that we too easily see ourselves as a hotel: The guests are treated royally, and all their predilections catered to. The citizens, however, cannot talk about their rights – such talk is immediately cast as a threat to national security – nor demand respect and justice. Instead we're fed a diet of "mission accomplished" stories, telling us we're a paradise.

© Yawning Bread