Gaysia

by Benjamin Law

  Azwar’s extended family saw newspaper clippings and called his immediate family to ask whether they knew he was gay. They hadn’t known, but they did now. Scared, Azwar sought legal advice to ensure he couldn’t be charged for sodomy under sharia or secular criminal law.

  In the months this was happening, Azwar’s own relationship to Islam was changing fast.

  ‘When I came out, I was still very religious. At that time, I was thinking, Maybe Islam isn’t fixed into one view. But after some time, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Deep inside, I told myself, If you want to be a Muslim, you don’t have to be a Muslim like those people. You have your own understanding of Islam. But whenever I go to the mosque, in the sermon they always talk about negative things. All this hatred. I can’t find the authentic Islam that I want, even though I know it exists. In some parts in Indonesia, they have mosques that are very liberal: liberal Muslims.’

  He paused, shoulders slumped. ‘We just don’t have that here.’

  What about liberal Christians? Was there a counter to RLM? Some gay Christians were trying their best. One Malaysian man told me he had reconciled being gay with Christianity by reading the Bible closely and concluding that being gay was okay, as long as he never had anal sex – ‘unholy penetration’, he called it – with another man. Another Christian – an ethnic Chinese pastor named Joe Pang – had started Malaysia’s first gay-friendly church in Kuala Lumpur. Joe still remembered seeing another man at a Christian gathering tell his story of being both Christian and gay.

  ‘Every night, I kneel down and ask for forgiveness,’ the man had told the crowd.

  Watching the man tell his story, Joe had wept openly, feeling the man’s pain as if it was his own.

  ‘Like him, I would kneel down in my room and cry,’ Joe said. ‘I’d say, “God, forgive me.” Every time I masturbated, I asked for forgiveness. It was a very terrible life.’

  Joe was thirty years old now and had the balloon-like face of a kid. His church – the Good Samaritan Metropolitan Community Church – wasn’t really a church, but a leased mezzanine of a café with high white walls and blond timber furniture. The lease was about to expire. I arrived for Sunday worship completely drenched from the bruising rain outside. Only a dozen or so gay men and a single lesbian had gathered for worship that day, and Joe looked sheepish. He told me there were weeks the congregation swelled to sixty; other times it went right down to ten. This was a particularly bad turnout.

  The service was pleasant enough – a man leading us through songs on acoustic guitar; the entire sermon typed and projected on a screen for a deaf member – but after the service, there was an urgent meeting about the church’s future. This was Good Samaritan’s last week in the café and they needed to find a new space. On paper slips, church members were told to write down how much they’d be willing to donate to the church each month, before they discussed the pros and cons of the different places they could rent.

  On the other side of town, the ex-gay organisation Pursuing Liberty Under Christ – which often taught schoolchildren about the perils of homosexuality – was flush with cash from Christian churches throughout Malaysia. Joe’s church was financially anaemic in comparison.

  Whenever stories about ex-gay organisations broke around the world, readers often assumed these were fringe groups, freakish, anachronistic relics surely receding in numbers and influence. But there was no stopping the movement. In the Christian world, what started as an American ex-gay movement in the late ’70s had given rise to a global network of ex-gay ministries called Exodus International. And although two of its most prominent members – co-founder Michael Bussee and church leader Gary Cooper – eventually renounced the movement altogether, infamously (and spectacularly) leaving their wives for each other, the movement had continued. It remained particularly huge in Asia, and it wasn’t just RLM and PLUC in Malaysia. There were Bagong Pag-Asa and the Pathway to Freedom Counselling Center (both in the Philippines), Rainbow 7 (Taiwan) and Choices (Singapore), as well as countless other independent organisations, some that were only just starting up. They were there to help, but you had to want to save yourself or nothing would ever change. They never advertised their services, but if you needed them, there they were. And wasn’t that comforting to know?

  Who can say ‘Amen’?

  MYANMAR

  In which four in five of the HIV-positive people we interview will probably die from lack of access to lifesaving medication. Key numbers: 65 (the minimum number of US cents you might pay for sex with a man in Yangon); 42 (how many times likelier homosexual men are to contract HIV in this country than their fellow citizens); 2008 (the year Myanmar’s biggest distributor of lifesaving HIV medication was forced to stop taking new clients).

  PEOPLE IN MYANMAR LAUGH at the strangest things. By strange, I mean horrific. Talk to locals long enough, and you’ll hear them grimly joke about their poverty, Cyclone Nargis, HIV rates, dying people and even – in hushed tones – the weird, unending nightmare of the Political Situation. In my first week in Yangon, I watched a toddler shit himself by the kerbside, giggling deliriously as liquid poo crawled down his legs and pooled on the cement, the entire time laughing and laughing and laughing and dear God why wasn’t anyone cleaning up after this child? Later, I passed an elderly woman who was forced to beg because both her hands had been sliced off clean at the wrists. After I gave her some money, almost in tears, she smiled gratefully and held up her stumps as if to say, Eh, what can you do?

  Death could be funny too. Local hospitals, when pushed beyond capacity, would sometimes dump the dying elsewhere, such as outside the downtown YMCA. I guessed the hospital had hoped the Christian organisation would take one particular man in, but instead he spent his last days by the YMCA entrance, sweating and moaning in the baking heat, shrivelled to bone from dehydration, his longyi barely tied around his waist and his balls exposed for the world to see. YMCA residents and strangers watched him die. Some walked around him and pretended not to notice, while others took pity and left a cupcake next to him. Maybe they thought the calories would help. Stories like these were so awful, so beyond the realm of decency, that people who told me them – locals, expatriates and foreign workers who had obviously been in this country too long – couldn’t help but laugh while shaking their heads at the hideousness of it all.

  If you were a dying person in Myanmar, it was most likely you had contracted one of the big three diseases there: malaria, tuberculosis or HIV. Kyaw Myint had worked in the HIV public health sector for the past decade, often representing Myanmar in high-level talks with UN agencies. At his new NGO’s headquarters, he led me through the basic maths of the situation: roughly 240,000 people in Myanmar were living with HIV right now and 30 to 40 per cent of them needed life-saving anti retrovirals (ARTs) urgently. Only one in five had any chance of getting them, he explained, and –

  ‘Hang on,’ I said.

  On my notepad, I drew a small circle and filled it in with black.

  ‘So if these are the number of antiretrovirals available in the entire country –’ I started.

  ‘Yes,’ Kyaw Myint said.

  ‘– but you’ve got this many people with HIV who need them …’

  I drew a much larger white circle around the black circle.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, nodding.

  ‘Then what happens to those people?’ I asked. I pointed to the empty space between the circles, all the HIV-positive people who needed ARTs and weren’t going to get them. Looking back now, I see the answer was obvious. Kyaw Myint stifled a laugh and leaned in close, like a dad sharing a conspiratorial joke with his kid.

  ‘They die,’ he whispered. ‘They’re going to die!’

  Kyaw Myint laughed, which I found unsettling. I didn’t want to be rude, so I awkwardly laughed with him.

  ‘Ha, ha?’ I said nervously.

  Between 15,000 and 25,000 people in Myanmar are dying from a lack of ARTs in any given year? In an epidemic described by UN agencies and
international NGOs as one of the worst in Asia? In a country that was estimated to have the worst government spending on health in the entire world? Hilarious.

  Clearly, I had a lot to learn.

  Myanmar had once been the largest rice supplier and richest country in South-East Asia. You wouldn’t know it now. At last count, Myanmar’s GDP per capita – a general measure of living standards – stood above Afghanistan’s but below North Korea’s and the former Sudan’s. On average, Burmese people could expect to live to the age of sixty-two.

  ‘Our country is a very poor country,’ Kyaw Myint said, shaking his head. ‘Sometimes the government calls it a “developing country”, but it’s not “developing”. It’s the least developed country. The lowest.’

  When it came to money in people’s pockets, Myanmar had become one of the poorest nations in Asia. We were talking about literal money in pockets here: paper notes were the only way to buy and sell things. When I arrived, ATMs and credit card facilities didn’t exist. Foreign-owned banks had jumped ship years ago, and state-owned banks were notorious for draining money out of people’s accounts without explanation, so most people hoarded money at home. As a result, Myanmar’s kyat paper currency had been through so many hands that the notes felt like used tissue paper and were held together with tape. Some notes had mould growing on them.

  You were rich if you owned a mobile phone, and most people made phone calls on landlines or improvised public booths – home landlines perched on plastic tables or taped to trees, with someone monitoring the cost of your call. Less than 1 per cent of the population had internet access. There would be no Burmese Spring here anytime soon.

  Yangon might have been displaced as the country’s official capital, but it was still its most populated city and commercial heart. It was a charming stinker, a grand hymn to bad civic maintenance and disintegrating basic amenities. Yangon’s garbage collection system was staffed by crooked-backed adults and crusty-footed kids, who should have been in school but who swept the cement with large brooms and picked up wet, rancid garbage from kerbsides with their bare hands.

  The place was full of rotting life: fruit-sellers and hawkers worked on footpaths that looked as smashed as a boxer’s mouth, the pavers sitting at odd angles, stained red from spat-out betel nut, Myanmar’s drug of choice. It was dangerously easy to fall into an open sewer.

  Still, if you could extend your gaze past the cement rubble and the open drains smelling of horror, there was evidence of Myanmar’s former glory everywhere. In Yangon and all over the country, golden pagodas – domes and spires sometimes plated with tonnes of solid gold, some encased with real rubies and emeralds – shone like beacons. They rose up in unexpected places, punching through Yangon’s urban mess or Mandalay’s stretching fields, like the highest towers of a long-buried city triumphantly pushing its way above ground.

  In Yangon, I stayed near a pagoda called the Sule Paya, a golden monument magnificently out of place in the middle of the city’s busiest traffic roundabout. On my first morning, I crossed the pedestrian overpass and noticed something interesting: men were cruising each other for sex everywhere around me. It was happening on the overpass itself, the public toilets on either side and the tea house downstairs. Later, I’d discover the cruisers were each drawn to different hotspots for specific types of trade. The cement roadside benches were for older men, while younger men used the pedestrian bridges. The ones after quick sex ventured into the foul-smelling public toilets.

  One afternoon, two volunteer staff members of a national organisation supporting men who have sex with men (MSMs) led me and my friend David – a young, ginger Australian academic who spoke Burmese – through the cruising spots. I won’t name the organisation for reasons that will become obvious. One of the volunteers, whom I’ll call KT, was gangly thin and flamingly camp. He wore white plastic glasses that highlighted his dark face, and a tight white V-neck t-shirt that clung to his ribby chest. His ears were pierced several times – one of the studs was a rainbow triangle – and he sported a rainbow wristband. KT said his family did not know he was gay. How they didn’t know would remain an enduring mystery to me. KT was also HIV-positive. His family didn’t know that either.

  KT’s superior was a man I’ll call Godfrey. Godfrey was a Burmese man who didn’t speak much English but was warm and lovable and physically humungous. Godfrey had a squareish double chin and the body of a retired steroid-fed quarterback who had gone soft around the edges. With a booming laugh, he told us about a hot man he’d recently been cruising whom he desperately wanted to fuck. Godfrey and KT joked with each other in Burmese, before showing photos of an attractive, smooth-faced man on Godfrey’s mobile phone.

  ‘He’s handsome,’ I said. ‘This is the man you’ve been cruising?’

  ‘No, no,’ KT explained. ‘This is Godfrey’s husband.’

  ‘Husband?’ I asked.

  Gay guys in Myanmar, KT explained, called their boyfriends their ‘husband’. Godfrey’s cruising was making his husband very unhappy, and I said I could understand why. We laughed, before Godfrey asked me bluntly whether I was interested in fucking Burmese men.

  ‘My husband wouldn’t be very happy about that,’ I said.

  Godfrey’s laugh filled the street. KT linked arms with me as if we were teenagers on a second date. When we crossed the overpass near Sule, guys who recognised KT and Godfrey came squealing up to us, asking me where I was from and what I was doing here, saying I was asin (handsome) and ‘cute-cute’. Before I could thank them for the compliment, they demanded in no uncertain terms to know the size of my cock. In Myanmar, no one was interested in length, instead asking about my penis width by putting their thumb and forefinger in increasingly bigger circles – This big? This big? – while continuing to stroke my arm. Was my cock ap (small), medium or cake (large): as wide as a can of Myanmar Beer? Everyone wanted to know.

  ‘My penis is okay?’ I said.

  ‘And are you queer?’ they asked in patchy English.

  ‘Am I queer?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m queer.’

  ‘No!’ they said. ‘Korean! Are you Korean?’

  Several blocks from the Sule overpass was a square pedestrian bridge growing out of the corner of an elevated restaurant whose name, Lion World, was spelled out in green neon. Yangon’s male prostitutes hustled for cash outside Lion World every night. One feminine sex worker shyly approached me and raspily said hello. She had the face of a pre-teen and the nicotine-scorched voice of a grandmother. When I said hello back, she smiled with betel-stained teeth.

  Another boy looked between twelve and fourteen years old, and that was a generous estimate. He wore a black t-shirt with a Union Jack screenprint and looked as if he’d only just gone through puberty. I refused to believe he was also working on the bridge. It was obscene that someone so young … Surely he was just loitering … No one that young could be …

  ‘He is also a sex worker,’ KT said, reading my mind.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said slowly.

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  The kid’s story was that he was seventeen, but no one seriously believed that. Along with the others, he scanned the passers-by for potential trade, trying to look cool.

  Sex work came cheap in these parts. Male sex workers in Yangon charged between 3000 and 7000 kyats (four to nine US dollars) per hour, with the client also paying the hourly rate for the guesthouse. If it was a particularly desperate night, the workers would sometimes go right down to 2000 kyats (2.5 US dollars) or even 500 kyats (sixty-five US cents).

  A lot of these boys came from the countryside, which was far poorer than the cities. Their families often had six, eight or even twelve children, with every new arrival making them poorer. Contraception, especially the pill, was a rarity, and basic sex education didn’t exist either in homes or schools.

  So these boys would take their chances and hitch bus rides to Yangon, some of them without even saying goodbye to their families. They found work in the city’s te
a houses, hokey snack restaurants that paid their workers criminally low rates but provided food and accommodation. Unused to the 24/7 pressure, a lot of the boys would lose their jobs quickly before realising they couldn’t go back home. Some didn’t want to return; others just didn’t know which bus could take them back to their family. Some would wander onto the pedestrian overpass and encounter the other boys selling themselves for sex. This was a potentially lucrative trade, they would realise. Because when you’ve lost everything else, you’ve always got one final asset to sell, especially if you’re young.

  As KT, Godfrey, David and I gossiped over tall glasses of Myanmar Beer, I watched boys disappear from the bridge. One guy in his twenties wasn’t having any luck, despite his teen-model good looks. The painfully young Union Jack–wearing kid had disappeared long ago. New talent was always in demand. Parent-like, I wondered whether they were carrying condoms.

  Meanwhile, KT talked animatedly about how he’d recently broken up with his husband and was feeling sad, but, to be honest, ‘also kind of horny!’ Outside on the overpass, KT had seen a new face he thought was cute: a kid who looked sweet and terrifyingly rough at the same time, like a Rottweiler puppy. The kid sported a mini-mohawk and two huge Gothic-script tattoos of English words on his forearms. One said ‘PUNK’; the other said ‘FUCK’. These were the kind of tattoos that made you wish his mother had run screaming into the tattoo parlour and pulled him out of there. Red-haired David later told me he’d met Punkfuck previously at the cruising tea house under the Sule overpass. When David asked why he’d chosen those words for his tattoos, Punkfuck said that they summed him up well. He was a punk who liked to fuck.