by Benjamin Law
Edmund recited the checklist, call-and-response style.
‘The befriendee admits to be struggling and desires help,’ he said.
(‘That’s me.’)
‘The befriendee is an individual who chooses recovery and freedom by going through the journey of recovery.’
(‘That’s me.’)
‘The befriendee partners with a befriender, who walks side by side in the journey of recovery.’
(‘That’s me.’)
‘The befriendee is completely honest and accountable to the befriender.’
(‘That’s me.’)
It was a long checklist. It felt as though they were new employees at a particularly uninspiring call centre, pledging their allegiance to a communications company whose slogan was, ‘That’s me.’
When Edmund finished, he told the rest of us to give them a clap. We offered encouraging applause, like parents cheering on a potty-training toddler.
‘We love you!’ Edmund said, smacking his hands together enthusiastically. ‘Everyone, look to a person who is a befriendee and say “I love you.” Come on!’
I turned to Lionel. ‘I love you,’ I said.
Lionel smiled sheepishly.
‘Mean it!’ Edmund said.
‘I love you,’ I said again.
The befriendee–befriender partners split off into corners to update each other on their progress. Lionel talked animatedly with his befriender while an Indian-Malaysian guy confided in his.
‘The befriender,’ Edmund explained, ‘is a counsellor and a friend, and commits to walking with the befriendee for one year.’
Despite the year-long commitment, three befrienders hadn’t shown up. One of the stranded befriendees was a spectacled Chinese guy who was one of the saddest-looking people I’d ever encountered. He looked completely, well, ‘broken’. He dressed like an IT guy: shirt checked like a spreadsheet; plain slacks the colour of old paperwork. His teeth were concertina crooked and he had a faint adolescent moustache. He looked despondent that his befriender hadn’t showed up, but not particularly surprised. His eyes gave off a medicated sheen.
When we re-gathered, we sat in a big circle as Edmund led us through conversational ice-breakers to foster trust among us.
‘Are you ready to SHARE?’ he said.
Edmund’s first sharing exercise involved each of us telling the group something no one knew about us.
‘For instance,’ he said, hands fluttering, ‘my favourite author is Enid Blyton! I still read her books to this day. Also, I wear earplugs to sleep every night!’
The Indian-Malaysian man to Edmund’s left, who had a bit of a belly protruding, tried to think of something.
‘I like food?’ he said.
‘You like food, I know that,’ Edmund said. Everyone laughed. The man chuckled, a little embarrassed.
Jerry offered that he had just joined a sixty-day program he had found on the internet to help him with his sexual brokenness. It was different to RLM, but also reinforced the work he was doing here.
When we got to the sad-looking Chinese guy, he just shrugged. He looked at the floor, unable to think of anything to share.
‘Hmm,’ Edmund said, trying to think of something for him. ‘Well, do you use deodorant?’
Everyone suppressed laughter. The Chinese guy shook his head.
‘You don’t?’ Edmund said, feigning surprise and catching everyone’s eye. It was clearly a private, long-standing joke. I wanted to pick up my chair and smash it into Edmund’s face.
Edmund then asked those of us who were sexually redeemed – who were no longer broken, or never had been – to share a joy of ‘living a sexually regular lifestyle’.
‘It could be heterosexuality or celibacy,’ he said. ‘Anyone?’
Silence. It seemed to genuinely surprise Edmund that no one was willing to discuss the intimate detail of their sex lives.
‘Okay, for me, I’ll start!’ Edmund said. ‘I’m sexually redeemed. And a joy of being sexually redeemed is I’m able to have my own children; my own flesh and blood. And not in a surrogate style, but by naturally having sex. The first time I saw my Angel in the womb, I cried. The scan! The joy of holding my baby in my arms! When Amanda called me and said “I’m pregnant”’ – here Edmund put his hands to his chest and gasped – ‘I ran to the jetty and I just praised God. And having a child without any guilt or any condemnation whatsoever, through a proper marriage, through a proper relationship, that’s one of the biggest joys of being a sexually regular person today!’
People forced smiles, unable to identify.
‘Anyone else? Are you all sexually broken? Are you all sexually different?’
The silence was unbearable.
‘Well, I’m sexually private!’ I offered.
Everyone laughed. Edmund shot me a sharp look but smiled.
‘Okay, that is his term! Anyone else? All the sexually non-private people?’
It was clear this wasn’t working. Edmund changed tack and asked us to share one major reason why we had moved from being ‘sexually different’ to becoming ‘sexually broken’. This was something I wanted to know too: Why did these people want to change?
Edmund threw the question to the Chinese guy. He moved his lips but could barely speak.
‘Excuse me?’ Edmund said.
‘Because it’s wrong,’ the guy said bleatingly, like a lamb. For a fleeting moment, I swore he was going to cry. Or maybe it was me who wanted to weep.
By the end of the two-hour V-Meet, everyone looked drained. Edmund must have noticed this too, because right before we left, he said something grand and dramatic to leave us on a high note, to give us hope. In case some of us didn’t know, he said, his former life didn’t stop at being gay. His sexual corruption had become so extreme that he’d even entertained the thought that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body.
‘Yes, I was a transgender!’ he said. ‘I thought of having a sex change. I would have gone for a sex change if a man would have wanted to marry me. And yet today, I just love my penis so much!’
Secret Recipe was a clean family-restaurant chain, which served diabetes-inducing-sized slices of cake. Jerry, Ally and Renik and I met there, listening as the PA hummed with pop classics and power ballads. Ally was the boyish-looking girl I’d met at lunch. She was twenty-four years old and looked thuggishly cool, as though the primary reason for her existence was to not give a fuck. As it turned out, she was just shy. Renik was forty-two, a broad-shouldered guy with dark skin and a ruggedness about him that was softened by a slight belly. With his spectacles, Renik looked like a handsome young professor.
Ally and Renik shared common ground. They had both been in and out of intensive psychiatric care over the years. Ally had first visited the psych ward after she was caught having an affair with her female cousin, who was married with five children.
‘I have ED-ing on her,’ Ally said.
‘ED-ing?’ I asked.
‘Emotional dependency,’ Jerry explained.
For three years, the women had met secretly, but when the woman’s husband found out about it, all hell broke loose. Ally’s parents were horrified. Her father demanded to know, ‘Why are you in love with this woman? Are you a lesbian?’
Ally couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words. Instead, she locked herself away and brooded, feeling as though she was going insane. She couldn’t stand being wrenched from her cousin. At weird hours, she would find herself walking to her house, as though possessed. The next time Ally was caught by the husband, the police got involved.
Ally was taken to a psych ward, where she was heavily medicated. For about a year after that, Ally was readmitted on and off, taking sedatives and antidepressants. In her spare time, she carefully considered the different ways to kill herself.
Though her parents were devout Catholics, they lived in Malaysia, a melting pot of religions. Desperate, they searched everywhere for a cure for Ally’s unnatural attraction to women, turning to
gurus at Hindu temples, pastors at the Catholic Church, godless psychologists and obscure organisations they had heard about on the grapevine.
Eventually, they found Edmund and RLM. Jerry and Renik were already members and still remembered the first day Ally joined the group.
Jerry started: ‘When I first saw you –’
‘I was totally not like now,’ Ally said. ‘I was –’
‘Like a zombie,’ Renik said, ‘that kind of thing.’
‘Like a zombie,’ Ally said, nodding.
It was at RLM, doped with medication, that Ally decided to hand her life over to God.
‘I cried out to him; I screamed to him,’ she said now, wide-eyed and beatific. ‘And that’s when I got the miracle in me.’
Renik had come to RLM in a similar way. Growing up in neighbouring Brunei, he spent his elementary school lunch-breaks with girls jumping rope double-dutch. He didn’t really get other boys. They were so rough and liked guns; Renik liked teddy bears. The girls, who adored having a boy in their midst, would paint Renik’s nails.
As an adult, he’d look back on all the time he’d spent with girls and feel it had rewired his brain. He started seeing other guys the same way his female friends did: they were cute. His same-sex attraction – ‘SSA’ – gnawed at him. And he was confused. Did he actually want to be a girl?
At home, Renik would cry himself to sleep. When he turned sixteen, he moved to the United Kingdom to study. He arrived in England by himself, and, away from family and without anyone looking over his shoulder, he felt the freedom everyone does alone in a foreign country. He could do whatever he wanted and be someone else entirely.
He’d landed in a hive of gay activity. The Midlands’ towns and cities were filled with beats, public toilets and parks where men cruised each other at all hours. Phone numbers were scrawled on walls by horny men, and all Renik had to do was call. It was easy. Renik caved.
Still, his belief in God never wavered. He came back from anonymous sexual encounters feeling sick and ashamed. He read his Christian magazines closely, paying particular attention to articles that said homosexuality was something that could be changed. ‘Such were some of you,’ the New Testament proclaimed, ‘were’ being the operative word. Renik turned to his local pastor in the Midlands for help.
Sensing Renik’s worry, his pastor said that on a scale of homosexuality and perversion, it sounded as though Renik was only a ‘four’ or a ‘five’, nowhere near a ‘ten’.
‘Just get back up and try again,’ his pastor said.
After Renik returned home to Brunei, something snapped. The low-lying static in his head finally brought on a storm of bad thoughts, and his nervous breakdown was so severe that he was hospitalised for a month. The medication he received gave him hallucinations.
‘As a spiritual person, I’d tell you that the Devil was attacking my mind. A doctor would say it’s a “chemical imbalance in the brain”, but I believe it’s a bit of both.’
The beta blockers Renik took reduced his anxiety, but heightened his depression. Concerned at his lack of progress, his doctor said that, from a psychiatric point of view, they didn’t believe there was anything wrong with same-sex attraction. He also suggested – gently – that perhaps Renik was a little too involved in religion.
‘I agreed with him to a certain extent,’ Renik said. ‘If you’re going to focus on something like religion a lot, you have to do it in the right way.’
But he didn’t accept his doctor’s statement that you couldn’t – or shouldn’t – get rid of homosexual thoughts. He had read countless stories about ex-homosexuals in America. Some years later, Renik moved to Malaysia’s capital. He met a girl at an HSBC call centre, got engaged and started going to RLM, making the ninety-minute journey from Kuala Lumpur to Melaka every month to hear Edmund preach and attend V-Meets.
‘Why RLM attracted me was because of Pastor Edmund’s own lifestyle,’ Renik said. ‘He was even worse than I was, but look at him now. His life has changed tremendously and I wanted that.’
It wasn’t long before Renik and his fiancée fought horribly, calling off the engagement before breaking up entirely. Depressed, Renik started going downhill. Living in Kuala Lumpur meant he was never far from a gay sauna, and he would spend all of his money and time on sex with handsome strangers, which left him light-headed and hollow with regret. On RLM and Pastor Edmund’s recommendation, he moved to Melaka to focus on his recovery.
Now, Ally and Renik spoke with the calm and dewy-eyed clarity of converts.
‘Do you feel you are cured?’
Ally nodded.
‘Do either of you feel attracted to the opposite sex?’
There was a heavy silence.
Ally laughed nervously. ‘Uh, yeah …’
‘Oh, it’s a personal question …’ I said apologetically.
‘Look, to be honest, sometimes I have same-sex attractions,’ Renik offered, ‘but not where I start fantasising that I want to have sex. A female person now … I’ll find her attractive. I like to see girls in miniskirts and boots.’
‘Does it compare to the attraction you felt towards guys? Or is it a different feeling?’
‘It’s a different feeling …’ Renik started to say. ‘And it’s a nice feeling. Something different.’
Jerry laughed and said, ‘It’s like a second puberty.’
‘Do you find yourself looking at guys, though?’ I asked Ally.
‘Before, I can’t sit with them, I can’t talk to them. I was afraid of them! I looked at them as though they were monsters. I was afraid. But now I’m trying to admire them, their looks. Slowly … I’m admiring that.’
For a while, Renik and Ally were even dating each other. Physically, it was an unexpected pairing. Renik was nearly twice Ally’s age, and although Renik was tall and well-built, Ally – with her slouchy shoulders and razored hair – looked more rough-edged and masculine than him.
‘It was a trial, basically,’ Renik said happily. ‘And it was good. Very good. It was good. The first few times we dated, it was … good.’
Good, I wrote in my notebook.
The restaurant’s PA system started to play the Céline Dion version of ‘All by Myself’. We drained our drinks as Secret Recipe’s staff packed up tables around us. I was relieved Renik and Ally weren’t detained in psych wards anymore, but I worried about their futures. All Renik knew was that in ten years’ time, he wanted to be married with kids. He had always wanted kids; it’s just that the option wasn’t available when he was with other men.
‘Well, without building a uterus,’ he said, chuckling softly. ‘Then when I was with my fiancée, I was sexually involved with her. So I have “tasted the other side” and I find it more satisfying.’
I nodded, thinking, Ew.
On the restaurant’s PA, Céline Dion hit a high note – ‘Don’t wanna be all by myself, any-moooooooorrrrrrrre’ – and suddenly everything felt more dramatic and urgent.
‘For me,’ Ally said, ‘it’s not five or ten years, but three years. I desire to have kids, because I love kids. I want to have my own kids.’
For weeks after we talked, I was conflicted about what Renik and Ally had told me. Part of me wanted to reach out to them, show photos of me and my boyfriend – of all my gay and lesbian friends back home who were in good relationships – and tell them there was nothing wrong with any of us, that long-term relationships were possible. Another part of me felt that was unfair. Here in Malaysia, maybe that couldn’t work. Renik and Ally weren’t unintelligent or closed-off from the world – Renik had even lived overseas – but they had made a personal decision that homosexuality was wrong. They were happier, they said, and who was I to tell them they weren’t?
Out of nowhere, Jerry had asked me: ‘So Benjamin, what do you think about homosexuality?’
They all stared at me, suddenly interested. I sipped my drink. There wasn’t anything left but ice, so I was sipping at air.
‘What do you mean?’
I asked.
‘Why do you think people are homosexual?’
I didn’t want to lie.
‘Can I be honest? I mean, I know a lot of gay and lesbian people. And a lot of them – the guys especially – really feel they were born that way.’
‘But do you believe they were?’ Jerry asked.
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘But you’re all telling me how you became homosexual, and I have to believe that too. It’s your story.’
Jerry looked down at his meal, disappointed. I’d spent all this time with them, at the church service and at the V-Meet. I’d heard Ally and Renik’s stories. Had I learned nothing? Evidence of their work, after all, was all around me. Look at Ally. Look at Renik. Look at Jerry. Look at Edmund.
What else did it take?
In Malaysia’s big cities, you didn’t have to look far to find an overwhelmingly beautiful house of worship or religious monument. Every few blocks there were heritage-listed Christian churches or Hindu temples with gods and goddesses spilling from their walls, but it was the mosques that were most impressive. The really outstanding ones were in the north-east oil-rich state of Terengganu, a region that produced most of Malaysia’s petroleum. Its capital, Kuala Terengganu, was a sleepy beachside city, lush with green forests and coastlines, and dotted with mansions. It boasted structures like the Crystal Mosque, encased in polished black glass. Another mosque appeared to float on water. Behind my hostel was a mosque so immaculately white, it was blinding in the midday sun. Five times a day, the calls to prayer were broadcast so loudly that the muezzins’ mournful acapella suffused every corner of every street.
Hasbullah Wahidul Wahid Mustafar had risen before dawn for prayers every single day of his life. A smooth-faced, broad-nosed and serious-looking man in his late twenties, Hasbullah’s clothes were a study in monochrome: white collared shirt, black vest and black mamah, a stretch of cloth tied neatly around his scalp to signify his advanced level of Islamic study. He was a man of tradition, but he wasn’t beyond wearing reflective aviator sunglasses and a chrome watch.
