Out in Indonesia
"Three Dollar Bill" by Richard Burnett <burnett@afterhour.com>
It's an exciting and dangerous time to be gay in Indonesia and no one knows more than Dédé Oetomo what it's like to be in the line of fire.
“I got death threats from army thugs when I [unsuccessfully] ran for parliament last June,” Oetomo tells me over the phone from his home in Surabaya on the Indonesian island of Java. “I still live in a society where homosexuality is not acceptable.”
As Canadian troops arrived in Australia this week en route to a still-smouldering East Timor, Indonesia finds itself sorting through the political debris of last June's post-Suharto election, the country's first free election in a generation. And, make no mistake, in the archipelago nation of 180 million people, the stakes remain high for all of Indonesia's gays and lesbians.
“There are 600 to 700 traditional cultures in Indonesia, but we also have a cosmopolitan pan-Indonesian culture [in urban centres] that is actually a mestizo culture,” Oetomo, 45, explains. “It's a hybrid of Western, pan-Asian and local culture that allows us to pick the best from each culture. But while [gay life flourishes in Bali, Jakarta and resort towns] in most of Indonesia there are really only two ways of entering gay life: First, if you're a sociable person, you'll veer towards a transgender person who owns a salon and hang out there and meet others. Those who aren't good at street life meet others in chat rooms on the internet.”
Oetomo – who graduated from Malang Teacher's College in Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city 800 kilometres east of Jakarta, before going to the United States to complete his post-graduate work at Cornell University – had the good fortune of growing up in a gay-positive family.
“I had feelings for other boys for as long as I can remember,” Oetomo, 45, says. “I did a lot of drag shows with my brothers – they were princes and I was the princess. But when I was 12 I remember reading about homosexuals in a magazine and having this awful gut feeling that I was different [too].”
How things change. After experiencing the Western queer rights movement first-hand during his studies at Cornell in the late '70s, Oetomo, in 1980, wrote his first story about gay life for another Indonesian magazine. That set the stage for Lambda Indonesia, the country's first-ever gay-rights group, which he co-founded in 1982. Today Oetomo is regularly quoted in Indonesia's Time-style Tempo magazine.
“Tempo has always portrayed the movement and myself in a very positive way,” Oetomo says, and though consensual homo sex is not a crime, he points out, things remain especially tough for lesbians in a country where traditional marriage and family are sancrosanct.
Women, for the most part, are expected to “be housewives and stand by their men. So lesbians, who tend to be more educated than gay men, must be extremely discrete. Last December's national women's conference in Yogyakarta welcomed lesbians for the first time, though my feminist colleagues say we should empower women first so that lesbians can organize [themselves later].”
That, for Oetomo, isn't good enough. Today he lectures at Universitas Airlangga, is a staff member of the education and propoganda department of the Democratic People's Party (the social-democratic PRD), and is coordinator of GAYa NUSANTARA, Indonesia's first-ever national gay rights group. GAYa, founded in 1987, publishes a magazine, runs a national hotline and coordinates a network of 20 lesbian and gay organizations.
Oetomo is also part of a delegation scheduled to discuss sexual orientation during anti-discrimination meetings at a National Commission of Human Rights consultive assembly later this month. “If you look at the example of Fiji [which enshrines gay and lesbian civil rights in its constitution], and if you have good lawyers,” Oetomo says, “I think we will see change in my lifetime. And Indonesia is changing so rapidly. All we must prove is we are a movement and not just one or two people.”
Oetomo, though, is proof change can happen one person at a time. GAYa events nationwide now draw anywhere from 300 to 600 people per party. You won't find the commercialism rampant in the Philippines and Thailand, to be sure. Instead, Oetomo says, you'll make friends and discover a maturing queer civil-rights movement still untouched by rainbow-themed trinkets, body fascism and prepackaged, prepubescent “sex” tours.
But do the public rallies that brought down dictator Suharto last year mean we'll soon see a Pride parade in the streets of Jakarta?
“Now it's very common for people to demonstrate whenever they want something,” Oetomo says, chuckling, “And [gay] people are now nervously asking themselves whether we should also demonstrate from time to time. So perhaps we'll [adopt a resolution] at GAYa's national conference in March.”