Growing up gay in RI easier than it used was

Arziel C.B., Contributor, Jakarta

One of the most frequently asked questions I get when people find out I am gay is, "when did you come out?"

I usually shoot back with, "what is your definition of coming out?" In the technical sense of the phrase -- that is, the first time you tell another person about your sexual orientation -- my answer would be when I was 12, to which people usually gawk at me in disbelief.

It's not as perverse as it sounds, really. Long before I was aware of the concept of homosexuality, long before my mind was polluted with the academic debate of essentialism versus social construction as the answer to what causes homosexuality, I innocently told a friend that I had a crush on a boy classmate.

But I always think that I really came out at the age of 19. It was when I had fully acknowledged my sexuality, and gained the courage to tell my best friends.

So, what had I been doing in the seven years in between? The answer is a word I'm sure every gay man in the world has come to know only too well: conformity. When I graduated from elementary school, I moved to a junior high school that none of my grade schoolmates attended. There, I thought I could start a new life.

I dated girls, I pretended to have a favorite soccer team and I even thought I was in love with this girl only because I was so excited that she liked the same musicals as I did. My homosexual urge was buried deep under my desperate need to belong in this world.

It was hard to grow up as a gay man in Indonesia at a time when there were so many fallacies and confusions about homosexuality that shaped people's perceptions, when the definition of a homosexual act was narrowed down to the prostitution in Lapangan Banten, and when representations of homosexuals in the media were dwarfed as cases in consultation columns in women magazines.

The only role models you saw were effeminate characters in films or TV shows whose lone function was to be a laughing stock or object of pity. Parents would tell their children to stay away from "people like that" because they feared we were "contagious".

Thus, young boys who feel even the tiniest streak of attraction toward other boys cannot help thinking that they are destined to dress like women and work in beauty parlors; that everywhere they go they would have kids trailing behind them and calling them bencong (transvestite).

These labels and stereotypes are not exactly a healthy diet for our self-esteem. The impact of the gay liberation movement in Western cultures never reached us. The already-existing local gay organizations could not do much under the stifling power of the regime. In a nutshell, I, and many other young gay Indonesians, I'm sure, was totally alone.

However, I got lucky. When I was in high school, I stumbled onto two books by people whom I later discovered were two of America's renowned gay writers, Larry Kramer and Christopher Bram. The books changed the way I looked at homosexuality, and thus, at myself.

I came to realize that there were thousands of others like me in this world, and our sexual orientation does not make us bad people. I tried to find what harm my homosexuality would do to society, and could not find any. We are hated simply because we are different, just as African-Americans used to be ostracized because they were black.

Gradually I regained my self-confidence and learned to accept my sexuality. A few years later I told my friends, and the number of people who know about my being gay has increased.

My family was the last to know, of course. Not so much because I feared the impact their reactions would have on me, but rather because of what kind of impact my coming out would have on them. In Indonesia's close-knit society, where image can mean everything, having a gay son in a family means facing the music from relatives, neighbors, colleagues, you name it.

The myth that homosexuality means the failure of parents in bringing up their children still prevails. My family would have had to go through so much worse than I went through growing up as a gay man.

However, things are starting to brighten up in gay life in Indonesia, especially in big cities. The Internet has done a lot to increase the self-esteem of young, confused homosexuals. Local gay chatrooms help them find a community and see that they are not alone. The increasing visibility of the gay community has encouraged some nightclubs to have gay nights, during which we can see the world in reverse -- if just for one night -- where, for once, we are in the majority.

Nonetheless, homosexuals are still a long way from gaining recognition and respect from society. Still, it's so much better here than it used to be.