i am who i am

someone in facebook by the name of ethan lim wrote this. i can totally identify with what he wrote and i am publishing it here. he wrote:

I got a headache reading the Straits Times this morning, there was so much drama from AWARE. I was saddened at how the misguided passions of a few can fracture society so badly through hate and fear. Slowly the ugly truth behind the whole farce is showing. Its bewildering to think that anyone can disavow any agenda when your "mentor" has come forward to claim responsibility for a hijacking of a group (not of her own) due to concerns that the group has moved towards activities that she finds personally disagreeable. Somalian pirates hijack ships (not of their own) and demand ransom - that's piracy. Taliban and Al Qaeda groups hijack planes (not of their own) to drive their own agenda against governments that they disagree with. There is a term for this - terrorism. In our uniquely Singapore context, we have our own ideological terrorist battles right here for the hearts and minds of Singaporeans.

Reading the front-page news about how Dr Thio Su Mien fears for the health and state of well-being of AWARE kindled a sense of de javu. I remembered how her daughter former NMP Thio Li-ann feared for the health and state of our population not too long ago in Parliament and how she felt it was her personal duty to defend the innocent from "straw-sucking" homosexuals. And now the mother is in the limelight too, instead of taking the crusade at the forefront, she has groomed a series of younger women to be her champions. I think she must have felt it was easier to conquer civic groups through her proxies then to stage a coup in the Singapore Parliament.

Our PAP government did a commendable job valiantly battling against racial prejudice and religious and cultural discrimination. They managed to lessen the coloured perception that preoccupies so much of humanity. Today in Singapore, we are less concerned with whether our neighbours being Malays, Chinese or Indians per se and more with the realities of close-proximity urban living - Are they noisy? rowdy? Will they increase crime rates? Yet these pragmatic concerns are invariably coloured with some prejudices and it is these prejudices that will take a far longer time to erase through conscious civic education by all the share-holders of society - government, civic groups, parents, teachers, friends and loved ones. This battle is on-going and will be for some time to come, as our PM and SM has so recently attested to.

Unfortunately I think our government itself may have inadvertently sowed the seeds for this particular fault line of discrimination a long time ago when it tolerated the so-called "conservative masses" and continued the anachronistic laws enshrining discrimination in our social conscience and attitudes. Once you start cutting up and dividing society according to labels and lines, there will be no end to it. Eventually these lines will become fault lines of conflicts and eruption of violence. And that violence can spread and threaten all of our society.

There is however nothing "conservative" about intolerance, ignorance, fear and hate. I think the problem with Singapore policy-makers is to mistake ignorance and fear for conservatism and to perpetuate the inertia from moving out of our sterilised comfort zones and talk about things that are potentially upsetting yet enlightening. Every time there is a move to liberalise laws, guidelines and processes there is very often an appendem, almost apologetic, to the "conservative masses" who "are not ready". And therein lies the problem of using these unseen "conservatives" to sweep the problem under the carpet and not talk about it and wish the problem will just goes away. Unfortunately wishing ignorance and prejudice away and trying to pretend it doesn't exist very often only makes it worse. Letting sleeping dogs lie isn't always the best, very often you can't tell dead dogs from sleeping dogs until you prod them. Dead dogs rot and spread contagion and even healthy dogs can eventually fall ill. Not prodding and discussing openly about the things that matters only spreads ignorance, rumours and myths which are eventually twisted into misguided warnings and threats begetting fear and hate. It is a vicious cycle that our enlightened leaders had the foresight to deal with when it came to racism and religion but clearly live in the closet when it came to sex and sexual orientation.

Society matures when it can tolerate differing views aired in intellectual discourse and at the end of the day we agree to lead our different lives in the way that we do, free to celebrate our lives and our loves in the way we need to and want without being a danger to others. Unfortunately the call to arms is very often used by those who hold deep-seated prejudices to subvert society's self-preservation stance to their own machinations. The claim is a simple "they are a threat to our society/ our way of life" and this will be backed by various half-truths and pseudo-truths. Careful examination will reveal these fallacies held together by mis-applied facts for what they are. Truth is very often dry and boring and these fanciful claims are often more viscerally targeted and appealing, pricking our primal emotions of love and protection. And what can be more disturbing than threats to our children? So if someone shouts "Fire!", every parent's response will be to look for his child first and ensure their child's safety. Facts and truth take a lower priority and never mind if there is no fire. This is a natural response, but this reflex can often be perverted. What we needs is to guard against is perversion by the very person who shouts "Fire!"

Read deeper into what Dr Thio said and what she said is very dangerous because it is a message spawned of her own ignorance, prejudice and fear and it is a message that will divide our society. It is reported that she was "absolutely outraged" that a "group of women who just wanted to contribute to society" are now facing "ferocious attacks"? She has already launched her first offensive in the takeover of a peaceful civic group with such outrageous tactics and now she plays the part of a hurt martyr to win sympathy votes when the public turns on her? She is even better than Osama.

Those of you who are reading this and have children, have your children came back from school telling you they want to be frogs and bees or would like to marry a chimpanzee simply because they have been taught about animals and their sex life in school? Yet Dr Thio would have you believe that because homosexuality is regarded as a neutral word and not a negative word in schools that your sons and daughters will run home wanting to marry the same-sex. Dr Thio's simplistic arguments does her years as a lawyer a great injustice. If it was so simple to teach people who to marry and who to love and what to do, Singapore will not be facing such a dire problem of population replacement. And we all know how obedient Singaporeans can be.

If Dr Thio is to be believed, then gays and lesbians are nothing more than those children who have been abused and tortured by their families vis-a-vis abusive fathers and such. To her, homosexuals are "in pain" and come about as the "daughters revolt" and "rebel against society", I wonder if she has put the wheel before the cart. I agree that homosexuals are in pain, but we are in pain not because we are homosexuals but because of the homophobia and ignorance and fear instilled in our parents and who inflict this pain of discrimination on their own children. Her efforts to tie homosexuality to domestic abuse is flawed as there are an abundance of children who are homosexuals without a history of family/parental abuse and many who are heterosexuals who have been abused. Her arguments are aimed to raise pity and to spread the myth that homosexuality is merely a result of a disordered/ adolescent psyche and that it can be eradicated. She goes on to say "We understand this is what it's all about", I'm quite afraid she doesn't. She has only been privileged to see a segment of life of some troubled youths and proudly declare she is an expert on this subject and that she knows all about us. No, Dr Thio, you are seriously deluded. Even I as a medical doctor and a homosexual myself who have grappled with society's discrimination and still come to accept myself as a homosexual does not know everything there is to know about homosexuality and I have lived, breathed and spend more days with homosexuals than you can dare to imagine. And yet, I have not the hubris to declare that i know "what it's all about".

I am gay too, but that's not all that I am. It is a part of me but it doesn't define who I am. I am also chinese, a free-thinker, a doctor, a son, a lover, a volunteer, a brother, a nephew, cousin, someone loved by my family and friends, someone I would like to think who is looked up by his peers and colleagues, someone who has caught fighting spiders in bushes of 1980s and guppies in our longkangs of a bygone era. Someone who had a fairly normal childhood with fairly traditional parents not afraid to use the cane for discipline. Someone who has spend much of his childhood with books at the National Library in Stamford Road. Someone who has gone to primary school, secondary school, JC and university like thousands of other children in Singapore. Someone who has given tuition and waited at tables during his school days to earn some pocket money. Someone who laughs, crys and has dreams, hopes and aspirations too. I am in every conceivable way a working, normal, functional human male.. and I am also gay. And under Singapore law, I am also a criminal, albeit one who pays my taxes and works for the communal good.

Maybe I am pandering to fear as well, just as Dr Thio Li-Ann panders to the fears of many sexually conservative and naive parents to drive her own misconstrued agenda to prevent gays from "taking over the world". Who in the right mind wants to take over the world? All we want to do is live and and fall in love in our own way. But for all the discrimination, homosexuals might as well be outer space aliens, Afro-Americans or even Jews, for the same message was used in targetting these groups of people for inhuman acts of discrimination: "We will drive you out!". Hitler used fairly much the same language when he addressed the worried German people in the 1930s. Yes, I fear too, I fear that history will repeat itself and that the lessons of yesteryears of the tears, anguish, sorrow and horror will go un-heeded. Maybe the concentration camps of Aushwitz or the labour camps of Dachau will never materialise again in this world of internet and cyber-fanatics but no one could have imagined that a failed painter from Vienna would one day rise to be one of the world's most infamous dictator and fascist.

I fear, like Dr Thio Li-Ann, that what we hold dear to us will be destroyed by others. But i will not let this fear spur me to discriminate others or to call for their removal, their extinction, or termination or to "cure" them. Instead I will let it galvanise me to speak up for space and tolerance. To learn to love and let live. To respect each other and learn to appreciate each others for our differences and make us truly believe that every single one of us matters.

Evil is to have the power to change something for the better yet do nothing. I beseech the authorities and those who can to take a stand against hate, fear and prejudice and to act decisively in such a manner to leave no question of where our country is, that we will not be divided by race, religion and certainly not by gender, sex and sexual orientation. That we will neither judge a person from where he or she comes from nor by what he or she was born to be.

posted here with permission from ethan lim
(this is one of my very rare recent post where i use capital letters)