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On 27 August 2020, Marylyn Tan / 陈瑞琳 became the first woman poet to win the Singapore Literature Prize. Less than an hour after her victory, this news was broadcast online by the country’s leading English newspaper, The Straits Times. The article quoted the judges, who said, “Gaze Back is unlike any other poetry title this year – a clarion call for gender and linguistic reclamation”. It also praised the book for confronting “taboos from menstruation to sexuality”.(註1)
However, there was a major detail that The Straits Times chose not to mention. Tan is openly queer, as is her poetry: Gaze Back (2018)(註2) was actually a finalist for an international queer writing prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. In her acceptance speech, she described her pride in being “the first lesbian to win the Singapore Literature Prize for English poetry”, and thanked other LGBT poets—”CA Conrad, Tania De Rozario, Cyril Wong, for endlessly inspiring me, a gayby [gay baby], with your queer selves.”(註3)
This little episode encapsulates the paradox of queer literature in Singapore. We live in a homophobic nation: surveys show that 63.4% of citizens believe that gay sex is always or almost always wrong,(註4) and the government has preserved a colonial law that punishes gay male sex with a jail term of up to two years.(註5) Yet at the same time, queer writing is celebrated, even rewarded with prizes from state-funded authorities.
As a result, the literary community has become something of a refuge for young queer Singaporeans. They’re highly visible at poetry readings, in journals and on online writing challenges, especially those organized by newer literary groups like Sing Lit Station and Trend Lit / 新文潮. In poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction, queer writers and readers have found a place where their identities are recognised, respected and affirmed.
Early queer writing: 1970s-1990s
It’s hard to identify Singapore’s earliest work of queer literature. Some would point to the innovative poems of Arthur Yap (published 1971-1986), a gay man who was among the pioneer writers of English language literature in Singapore.(註6) However, none of his verses explicitly deal with queer romance or sexuality. Others might point to 《媚将》, a Chinese language novella by Wei Tongque / 韦铜雀 depicting gay life, serialized in the Shinmin Daily newspaper in 1987.(註7) However, the author was a straight man, and this work did not lead to a trend of queer Chinese fiction.
Nevertheless, the late 1980s marked an important turning point in Singapore queer history. The first HIV cases in Singapore were identified in 1985, sparking a widespread health panic, at the very point when we had begun to see ourselves as a developed nation. It led to a temporary ban on gay clubs, increased raids on transgender sex workers, and the creation of Action For AIDS, a non-governmental organisation created by gay men and allies to fight the pandemic. It also led to a new movement of LGBT-themed plays and fiction, exploring the difficult position of the queer minority in conformist Singaporean society.
The most famous work to come out of this period was the novel Peculiar Chris (1992) by Johann S. Lee, written when the author was just 19 years old.(註8) It tells the story of a young Singaporean man named Chris, going through high school and compulsory military service, as he experiences his first gay love, his first gay sex, his first gay relationship, and heartbreak when his boyfriend dies of AIDS. The work has its flaws: it is at times extremely sentimental, and its second half is extremely rushed. Nevertheless, it was an instant bestseller, relished by a generation of gay Singaporeans eager to see themselves represented in print.
Queer fiction at this time was almost entirely written in English. Queer plays, however, were extremely multilingual, with works staged in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. One of the earliest and most notable queer Chinese plays, The Next Generation (1992), was written by a straight woman, Lim Soon Lan: it traced the breakdown of a patriarchal Chinese family in Singapore over time, focusing on how the women cope the change when the last living male descendant of their clan is a gay man, diagnosed with HIV.
Among queer English plays, some of the most iconic were written by Eleanor Wong / 王少研. In 1993, she began writing a trio of plays about a young lesbian lawyer named Ellen Toh. In Mergers and Accusations, we see her entering into a relationship with a man, which breaks up when she falls in love with a woman; in Wills and Secessions, we see her reconciling with her conservative Christian sister when her lover dies of cancer; in Jointly and Severably, she deals with the fact that her new lover is cheating on her.(註9)
Perhaps the most groundbreaking of queer plays, however, was Haresh Sharma’s Completely With/Out Character (1999).(註10) This was a monologue, co-written and performed by Paddy Chew, a bisexual former club manager who was dying of AIDS. The work explored his thoughts on death and love, and even included a live online question and answer segment in the middle of the play, where people at home could ask the performer questions about living with his disease. Chew passed away only three months after the performance.
Clearly, there was a deep sense of grief and mourning that was central to the early queer literary scene. Some have criticised these works for being depressing, offering queer readers little hope for the future. However, their emotional power has endured: today, these works have been republished and restaged, honoured not just as queer classics, but Singaporean classics.
Writing for the community: 1990s-2000s
By the late 1990s, a new generation of queer authors had begun to emerge, with a subtly different focus in their writing. They were no longer eager to explain to straight audiences how LGBT people were victims of mainstream society; instead, their writings addressed the queer community directly, exploring the problems and complexities of queer life without self-censorship.
One of the most important writers to emerge in this period was Alfian Sa’at. In 1998, he published his short story collection Corridor, containing several tales about queer Singaporeans.(註11) These include “Pillow”, about a dysfunctional relationship between a middle-aged businessman and a schoolboy; “Cubicle”, about a butch-femme romance between teen girls; “Bugis”, about a straight, cisgender female student who is disturbed by a trans woman’s compliments; and “Disco”, about a 35 year-old divorced man who enters a gay club for the first time, only to experience deep loneliness.
In 1999, he self-published a collection of poems, titled The Invisible Manuscript, featuring extremely explicit descriptions of gay sex—though, for his own security, he only distributed the work privately among users of gay email groups. It was only picked up by a professional press thirteen years later.
Alfian’s most prolific output, however, is in drama. As a playwright, he remains active in both English and Malay theatre: he scripted one of the first Singaporean Malay plays to feature a gay character, Anak Bulan di Kampung Wa’Hassan / The New Moon at Wa’Hassan Village (1998), set in a traditional village which is about to be demolished.(註12) He even collaborated as a writer for a bilingual English-Chinese play, Fugitives (2002), about a family adapting to social changes in Singapore, including the development of a lesbian courtship.(註13) His most famous queer project would probably be The Asian Boys Trilogy (2000-2007), consisting of Dreamplay: Asian Boys Vol 1, a campy comedy about a goddess time-travelling through Singaporean history and meeting gay men; Landmarks: Asian Boys Vol 2, a series of short sketches about gay men across the island, and Happy Endings: Asian Boys Vol 3, an adaptation of the pioneering gay novel Peculiar Chris.(註14) As is evident, his oeuvre is incredibly diverse, not just in style and genre but in demographics. His writing features gay, lesbian and transgender characters from a much wider range of races and classes than any local author before him.
Also from this generation is Singapore’s most iconic gay writer: Cyril Wong / 黄益民. His early poetry collections, such as Below absence (2002) and Unmarked treasure (2004), are intensely confessional, describing his conflicts with his parents, the tenderness of his love for his boyfriend, and his thoughts of suicide and self-harm.(註15)
Later, he began to incorporate spirituality and fantasy into his writing. His poetry collection tilting our plates to catch the light (2007) uses the queer Hindu myth of Shiva and Mohini to parallel the story of a gay romance.(註16) His short story collection Let Me Tell You Something About That Night (2009) proposes miraculous queer scenarios: in “The Kissing Devas”, two lesbians in a lift transform into goddesses; in “The Dragon Prince’s Letter To His Father”, a dragon renounces his immortality to live with a human fisherman; in “The Queen and Her Eventual Knowledge of Love”, a queen dies and goes to heaven, where she finds happiness with another woman.(註17) Works like these acknowledge the pain of queer life, but also capture some of its transcendent joy.
Notably, by the mid-2000s, the Singapore queer community had become organised enough that it could hold its own festivals. In 2005, IndigNation: Singapore’s Pride Season was held. This annual queer event featured political and cultural talks, film screenings, literary evenings and performances—including one of Singapore’s most important lesbian plays, Hitting (on) Women (2007) by Ovidia Yu, which confronts the issue of domestic abuse among queer women.(註18)
It was at this festival that I launched my first book, SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century (2006), a non-fiction work profiling the lives of openly gay, lesbian and bisexual people.(註19) Later, we were informed that it was the first such book in Asia to print real names and real photographs. It was also through this festival that I was able to find enough contributors to publish GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose (2010), the nation’s very first anthology of work by queer writers.(註20)
Going global: 2010s onwards
Over the past decade, numerous works of queer Singaporean literature have been published and staged. Some have filled major gaps in the scene: following the publication of Tender Delirium (2013),(註21) Tania De Rozario developed a cult following as a lesbian feminist poet, a reputation further enhanced by the publication of her memoir, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down (2016).(註2) Other works have received major awards: notably, O Thiam Chin’s novel Now That It’s Over (2016), which won the first Epigram Books Fiction Prize for its interwoven tales of a straight and a gay couple amidst the devastating 2004 tsunami.(註23)
However, a new development of the 2010s is that an increasing number of queer works are being published internationally. A prime example of this would be The Tensorate Series (2017 onwards), a sequence of novellas by the nonbinary author Neon Yang (formerly JY Yang), published by the US-based press Tor.com. The stories take place in an Asian-inspired fantasy world ruled by a tyrannical empress, yet they also feature incredibly liberal attitudes towards gender and sex: homosexuality, bisexuality and polyamory are all widely routinely accepted in society, and all children independently choose their own genders when they approach puberty. The first of these books, The Black Tides of Heaven, was shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the Hugo Awards, the Locus Awards and the World Fantasy Awards.(註24) More recently, Amanda Lee Koe / 李婉婷 has published Delayed Rays of a Star (2019) with Penguin Random House: a grand historical novel that looks at the lives of three women, Leni Riefenstahl, Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich—the last two of whom have a passionate sexual affair.(註25)
Queer Singaporean writers have also been building international networks. Stephanie Chan, a nonbinary queer poet, may have published their book Roadkill for Beginners (2019) in Singapore, but they have also performed as a spoken word artist in the UK and France, and now use their contacts to invite foreign artists to perform for their literary night Spoke and Bird.(註26) Jee Leong Koh has used his position as a New York-based Singaporean gay poet to set up a foundation called Singapore Unbound, which holds a biennial Singapore-New York literary festival and publishes Asian writing. He has also won acclaim in the US for his newest book, Connor & Seal (2020), which uses poems tells the story of an interracial gay romance in Harlem.(註27)
Evidently, Singaporean queer literature is flourishing. Yet there are areas which are remain underdeveloped: we do not yet have a significant number of works by transgender writers, and the quantity of queer writing in Chinese, Malay and Tamil remains small. Nevertheless, writing in these categories does exist. I’ll soon be publishing some in my upcoming anthology, EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices (scheduled 2021).
I’m also hoping that our writing can have an influence on mainstream Singapore, shaping a society where we no longer face discrimination and prejudice. Occasionally, I see promising signs: I’ve had filmmakers approach me to adapt my LGBT-themed work into short movies; I’ve had professors teach my works in university, and teachers invite me to speak in secondary schools.
But for now, I’m grateful that the literary scene has been able to serve as a haven for our community. Our sunny island in the sea is by no means paradise. Writing helps us to swallow our bitterness, and to imagine a more fabulous future.
Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, playwright, fictionist, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short story collection Lion City and the poetry collection Last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the best-selling SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection A Book of Hims, Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience and Black Waters, Pink. He also co-edited GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose and co-organised the annual queer cultural festival IndigNation. He has written plays such as The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles and 251, and crafted lecture performances such as Painted Shadows: a Queer Haunting of the National Gallery, Ayer Hitam: a Black History of Singapore and Desert Blooms: the Dawn of Queer Singapore Theatre. He tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.